Ebola already a First World crisis

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 24/10/2014 (3470 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Those who worry about the deadly Ebola virus becoming a First World problem received a blunt reality check from speakers at the recent World Food Prize/Borlaug Dialogue in Des Moines, Iowa, earlier this month.

It already is, and not only because of the isolated cases that have surfaced outside of the three West African countries most affected.

“It could lead to a hunger crisis of epic proportions,” Kanayo Nwanze, president of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) told delegates attending the annual event held in honour of the late Norman Borlaug, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning wheat breeder who fathered the Green Revolution.

Hunger fighters, defence experts and political leaders appealed to delegates to see Ebola as a symptom of the very issues they came to discuss — hunger and poverty.

Nwanze told delegates accomplishing what has been described as the “world’s greatest challenge” of feeding more than nine billion people by 2050 cannot be accomplished without unleashing the productive capacity of the very population that is currently being ravaged — poor farmers living in remote, hard-to-reach areas.

“We must look to the invisible in the forgotten world… it is easy to pretend that they don’t exist, but they do,” he said. “And their problems are our own; anyone who doubts this has only to look at Ebola.”

The virus that has so far killed thousands in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea has struck hardest in rural areas, driving 40 per cent of farmers from their fields, and causing the agricultural economy of the West African region to collapse. Entire populations now lack access to food, and farmers who do have crops have no access to markets.

“We need a rapid, collective response. We need to deal with the emergency swiftly, but we also need to invest in long-term resilience in the rural areas,” Nwanze said.

Countries that had been achieving double-digit growth have seen their economies crippled, with foreign investors fleeing the region and basic infrastructure such as rural road networks becoming impassable due to lack of maintenance.

“When Ebola is contained, our country will virtually be starting again,” said Florence Chenoweth, the minister of agriculture for Liberia.

The ties between famine, the Ebola crisis and escalating global conflicts, such as the rise of IS in the Middle East were powerful undercurrents rippling through the conference focused on the growing gap between yield gains and projected world food demand.

“We need to recognize that the link of food security to conflict and instability is a strong one,” said Daniel Speckhard, president of Lutheran World Relief and and former high level U.S. diplomat serving in Iraq.

“We shouldn’t forget that multi-year droughts in Syria betwen 2006 and 2010 are part and parcel of the spark that led to beginning of the crisis in that country,” he said.

“During that period one half of the country turned into desert, more than 80 per cent of the livestock had to be eliminated and that resulted in more than 800,000 people without livelihoods that started migrating to the city to survive.”

He joined John Hamre, president and CEO of the Center for Strategic and International Studies and former undersecretary of defence with the U.S. government, in calling for strong global leadership to address regional crises before they escalate, and that means stepping into the fray.

Hamre warned North Americans are deluding themselves if they think they can protect themselves within “no-fly zones.”

“We are living in an international age when good things and bad things can move at unprecedented speed,” he said. “We’ve known for six months that Ebola was going to become a global problem, we didn’t do anything as a nation. We thought of it as a remote problem, a tragic problem that affected West Africa, not us.”

“That’s not the case anymore. And I think what Norman Borlaug realized 50 years ago was that the human condition has now become seamless. We are not the beneficiaries if we try to hide.”

Laura Rance is editor of the Manitoba Co-operator. She can be reached at 204-792-4382 or by email: laura@fbcpublishing.com