Links of the day

-> You thought China was scrambling through Africa? Think again: it's scrambling through Africa and the Middle East...

-> You feel like you've got a grudge against Robert Kagan, but are looking for arguments to support it? Here are a few...

-> But why isn't Myanmar's junta letting us help its population? Think about it: they don't want our shiny-looking aid workers reminding the Burmese of what it's like on the other side of those borders they can't cross...

-> Egypt is shaking. We need Egypt's autocratic rulers, but claim we want democratic regimes. It's not the first time we live this contradiction. But when you consider Saudi Arabia is Egypt redux (and vice-versa), you come to the conclusion that we're dangerously relying on shaky grounds. Sure, this is nothing new, but then again that's precisely the problem...

-> Amartya Sen is famous for having argued that the reason why China is sometimes prone to hunger while India never is, is that China's nontransparent socio-political structure prevents it from efficiently dealing with urgent catastrophes. Andrew Jacobs in the NYT suggests this paradigm might be changing...

Bonus: an excerpt from Sen's article "Democracy as a universal value":

I have discussed elsewhere the remarkable fact that, in the terrible history of famines in the world, no substantial famine has ever occurred [End Page 7] in any independent and democratic country with a relatively free press.4 We cannot find exceptions to this rule, no matter where we look: the recent famines of Ethiopia, Somalia, or other dictatorial regimes; famines in the Soviet Union in the 1930s; China's 1958-61 famine with the failure of the Great Leap Forward; or earlier still, the famines in Ireland or India under alien rule. China, although it was in many ways doing much better economically than India, still managed (unlike India) to have a famine, indeed the largest recorded famine in world history: Nearly 30 million people died in the famine of 1958-61, while faulty governmental policies remained uncorrected for three full years. The policies went uncriticized because there were no opposition parties in parliament, no free press, and no multiparty elections. Indeed, it is precisely this lack of challenge that allowed the deeply defective policies to continue even though they were killing millions each year. The same can be said about the world's two contemporary famines, occurring right now in North Korea and Sudan.

Famines are often associated with what look like natural disasters, and commentators often settle for the simplicity of explaining famines by pointing to these events: the floods in China during the failed Great Leap Forward, the droughts in Ethiopia, or crop failures in North Korea. Nevertheless, many countries with similar natural problems, or even worse ones, manage perfectly well, because a responsive government intervenes to help alleviate hunger. Since the primary victims of a famine are the indigent, deaths can be prevented by recreating incomes (for example, through employment programs), which makes food accessible to potential famine victims. Even the poorest democratic countries that have faced terrible droughts or floods or other natural disasters (such as India in 1973, or Zimbabwe and Botswana in the early 1980s) have been able to feed their people without experiencing a famine.

Famines are easy to prevent if there is a serious effort to do so, and a democratic government, facing elections and criticisms from opposition parties and independent newspapers, cannot help but make such an effort. Not surprisingly, while India continued to have famines under British rule right up to independence (the last famine, which I witnessed as a child, was in 1943, four years before independence), they disappeared suddenly with the establishment of a multiparty democracy and a free press.