Making it Official: Famine Strikes Gaza City |
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
History shows that famines are, for the most part, engineered. Be it through carelessness, selfishness or plain malice on the part of officialdom, creating the circumstances under which a population expires to hunger is a matter of construction. As the economist and Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen so powerfully showed in Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (1981), the focus on the cause of famines should be less on the food supply and more on the economic, social and political factors surrounding them. Food prices might severely spike. Food distribution systems can fail. Certain groups in society may lose their means of employment, thereby preventing them from purchasing essential foodstuffs.
In Gaza, the conditions of famine have been in the making for months. From March, when the Netanyahu government purposely halted all food from entering Gaza, only to ease the blockade in May through a handful of food distribution points murderously overseen by the Israeli Defense Forces and the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the only question was when that ghastly outcome would be realised. “As was the case for the UK government in Ireland in the 1840s and Bengal in the 1940s, Israel is responsible for this famine because it controls almost all the Gaza strip and its borders,” writes Ilan Noy, an expert on the economics of disasters and climate change. “But Israel has also created the conditions for the famine.”
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