A return to "hunger politics"?

Well, the PM looks like he's on his way out and Preval (the Haitian President) has at last announced some measure to reduce the cost of rice by 15%, so at least things are moving in the right direction. However, there's some question as to if that's enough - just heard that a UN peacekeeper has been shot dead in Port au Prince, circumstances unclear. My colleagues tell me that the test will come over the next couple of days as we see reaction, or hopefully non-reaction, to the news. Anyway, here's a vid from BBC:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/player/nol/newsid_7340000/newsid_7344800/7344826.stm?bw=nb&mp=rm&asb=1&news=1&bbcws=1

Have had an especialy lazy day of it apart from this morning where we redefined the meaning of "shop until you drop". In terms of food, at any rate. Apart from needing to get more reserves of water and more cooking gas (which we'll do on Monday insha'allah), I feel confident that we can withstand a bloody siege from the amount of food we bought. It's difficult to know how much is too much in a situation like this - by stocking up so much, are we being prudent or ridiculous. Who knows... Apparently, most of the expat community seemed to feel the same way as the supermarket was completely packed to the seems even at 9am. The large laugh was from seeing huge UN guys doing their grocery shopping in bullet proof vests. Those cashiers can be murder when haggling over change.

Just also wanted to share a really interesting article I read in Time magazine about the possible return to government interventions along the socialist model and so-called "hunger politics":
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1730107,00.html

Are we indeed on the brink of such a shift in global politics - a return to hunger sparking "revolutionary violence"? I just want to quote a paragraph from this article:

The sociology of the food riot is pretty straightforward: The usually impoverished majority of citizens may acquiesce to the rule of detested corrupt and repressive regimes when they are preoccupied with the daily struggle to feed their children and themselves, but when circumstances render it impossible to feed their hungry children, normally passive citizens can very quickly become militants with nothing to lose. That's especially true when the source of their hunger is not the absence of food supplies but their inability to afford to buy the available food supplies. And that's precisely what we're seeing in the current wave of global food-price inflation. As Josette Sheeran of the U.N. World Food Program put it last month, "We are seeing food on the shelves but people being unable to afford it."

I think it's the last statement that cuts so close - seeing food there but not being able to touch it and then seeing foreigners, such as the UN and us expats living it up. Thinking about the situation in Haiti where a cup of rice costs more than the average daily wage for the minority who are working and where most of the food is imported - the situation is just not sustainable. Something has to give - especially if global food prices are not projected to decrease for the next couple of years. Unless we have another "green revolution" on our hands very soon, this could have the potential of eclipsing or subverting the current "War on Terror".

Here's another article about the crisis from a Christian Aid rep:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7341467.stm

Anyway, off to try out my "Yogalates" DVD ahead of a Kenyan evening...