Monday, April 14, 2008

Food price on the rise

Perhaps everyone that will read this post will not suffer directly from the lack of food on your table. If you can read this, you can probably afford a couple of slices of bread and a glass of milk every day. But almost half of the population of the world struggles to obtain one decent ration of food per day.

In the last three years, according to World Bank statistics, the price of wheat -an essential commodity to billions of people- has risen 181%. Those hundreds of millions who used to stretch their incomes at the end of the month, simply cannot afford bread any longer.

Economics, as all human phenomena, are interlinked circumstances with realities. In some occasions, even future predictions plan a role in modern, globalized Economics. What happens here certainly has an effect over there. A subsidy for agricultural production to increase biofuels here, makes the prices of agricultural food to increase over there.

The conflict we are facing, as most global conflicts today, also follows the typical conflict dynamics of growing in spiral. This means, it is bigger and bigger every day. It also follows the pattern of most global conflicts today, that intervention has to be a decisive set of measures to counter the spiral from growing further. Every day these measures are not taken, or every day they are not taken effectively but superficially, the conflict keeps getting bigger.

To make it all worse, with food prices, as well as with climate change, we are talking about human lives at risk of death.

Perhaps you reading this post will never even meet anyone that will struggle so much for their food or for dramatic changes in global climatic tendencies. As of me, living in China, I coexist every day with people that do struggle, that do feel the impact on food prices.

Global conflicts put a strain on humankind as the leading species on the planet. Our civilization's failure is a failure to all of us. We are in it together.

Por la recuperación de la paz

Nos unimos a la campaña de recuperación de la paz en Costa Rica. Aunado al esfuerzo político para recuperar la dirección y la estrategia, es fundamental identificar las causas de la violencia que agobia al país para ser más consecuentes proponiendo las transformaciones de esos conflictos.

Es cierto además que "la paz es cosa de todos", como solía decir un anuncio publicitario de un gobierno anterior en el país.

También es cierto que la violencia no se reprime con violencia.

Busquemos los ejemplos de paz, proactiva, constructiva, sostenible, y recordemos a Johan Galtung, gran académico noruego en temas de paz: "Paz es la capacidad de transformar conflictos de manera creativa, empática y no violenta."