Saturday August 30, 2008
Manufactured Famine
George Monbiot
Monbiot.com
A new wave of food colonialism is taking food from the mouths of the poor.
In his book Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis tells the story of the famines that sucked the guts out of India in the 1870s. The hunger began when a drought, caused by El Nino, killed the crops on the Deccan plateau. As starvation bit, the viceroy, Lord Lytton, oversaw the export to England of a record 6.4 million hundredweight of wheat. While Lytton lived in imperial splendour and commissioned, among other extravangances, "the most colossal and expensive meal in world history between 12 and 29 million people died. Only Stalin manufactured a comparable hunger.
Now a new Lord Lytton is seeking to engineer another brutal food grab. As Tony Blair's favoured courtier, Peter Mandelson often created the impression that he would do anything to please his master.
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