This week I am teaching on how humanitarian crises are understood and seen, or more often, not seen. In a prior note, ‘the meaning grinder’, I considered the perverse dynamic in which conflict is flattened out and turned into content. It ended with gesturing towards the value of silence. Continuing with that thought: in 1982 Ivan Illich addressed a People’s Forum in Tokyo, and proposed that ‘it is imperative that some of us exercise nonviolent, defensive silence’. Illich advocated for ‘eloquent and rationally chosen silence’, partly explaining the rationale as follows:
… silence, framed by the scream of horror, transcends language. People from different countries and age groups who might not have a common language can speak with one voice in their silent scream.
It strikes me the value of ‘horrified silence’ becomes only more meaningful - if difficult to offer and hear - in a world that is so over-saturated in claims and content.
It is what is loudest and asserted most strongly that tends to be most heard and seen, especially when presented in English, through social media, and from North America / Western Europe. In recent days, the news cycle has been dominated by protests on US university campuses prompted by the Israel-Palestine conflict. Remarkable is the extent to which it has moved focus away from the actual violence, destruction and suffering occurring. Instead, attention is back on the US and its culture wars.
Elsewhere, the 2024 Global Report on Food Crises (GRFC) was released last week, introduced by the United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres as ‘a roll call of human failings.’ There is much in the report that is deeply troubling, with the most immediate being the number of people facing famine:
Over 705,000 people in five countries were projected to be in Catastrophe (IPC/CH Phase 5) in 2023 – the highest number in GRFC reporting and almost double that of 2022.
At the time of writing this note, it is now above 1 million people, according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) dashboard. The IPC explain:
Famine is the most severe phase of the IPC. It exists in areas where at least one in five households has or is most likely to experience an extreme deprivation of food. Starvation, death, destitution and extremely critical levels of acute malnutrition are or will likely be evident. Significant mortality, directly attributable to outright starvation or to the interaction of malnutrition and disease, is occurring or is likely to be occurring.
It is further noted:
From the IPC perspective, ‘famine’ is not a rhetorical, emotive term. Rather it is a scientific classification based on standards, evidence, and technical consensus.
In March, Alex de Waal - a leading scholar in the field - published a NYT op-ed entitled, ‘I said the era of famines might be ending. I was wrong’, in which he reflected:
I underestimated the cruel resolve of some war leaders to use starvation as a weapon. And I overestimated how much the world’s largest humanitarian donors cared about feeding the hungry in conflict zones, and giving them the necessary help to rise above the devastation when the fighting finally ended.
Famines do not simply happen, it is important to recognise ‘the critical role of politics and power in their causation and differential impacts’. The GRFC points to conflict as central in exacerbating conditions:
Acute food insecurity is rarely driven by a single shock or hazard, but rather by the interaction between shocks and underlying poverty, structural weaknesses and other vulnerability factors. Conflict is the major driver and amplifier of high levels of acute food insecurity, directly affecting food access and availability and the ability to cope with other shocks. Conflict also tends to reverse economic and development gains, limiting communities’ and countries’ capacity to withstand and recover from weather and economic shocks.
This is what the ‘geopolitical premium’ looks like on the ground. De Waal explains where it leads:
Without immediate aid, the overlapping food crises of today are almost certain to deepen month by month. Young children and the elderly will starve first. Then it will be women who save their last scraps of food to try to keep their children alive longer. Diseases like cholera will rampage through overcrowded camps. Families that are merely hungry today, but not starving, will leave their homes, abandon farms and sell their last possessions to eat.
Mass starvation isn’t just a stain on our conscience. It can be a global security threat. Famines can cause social collapse. They may push millions to migrate. Starvation fuels bitterness, hopelessness and protest. Food crises can bring down governments.
When hunger combines with war, that vortex of instability spins faster.
I could provide more charts and quotes, but the point should be clear. The directionality of all this is depressingly evident, as is the severity. To finish, an applicable observation from a book I’ve been using for my classes this week, Susie Linfield’s, The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence:
Photojournalists are responsible for the ethics of showing, but we are responsible for the ethics of seeing.
For more detail, I strongly recommend reading the 2024 Global Report on Food Crises.