1115.org

While we’ve been busy with other things, a huge food crisis has been developing in the rest of the world:

Finance ministers gathered this weekend to grapple with the global financial crisis also struggled with a problem that has plagued the world periodically since before the time of the Pharaohs: food shortages.

Surging commodity prices have pushed up global food prices 83% in the past three years, according to the World Bank — putting huge stress on some of the world’s poorest nations. Even as the ministers met, Haiti’s Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis was resigning after a week in which that tiny country’s capital was racked by rioting over higher prices for staples like rice and beans.

Rioting in response to soaring food prices recently has broken out in Egypt, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Senegal and Ethiopia. In Pakistan and Thailand, army troops have been deployed to deter food theft from fields and warehouses. World Bank President Robert Zoellick warned in a recent speech that 33 countries are at risk of social upheaval because of rising food prices. Those could include Indonesia, Yemen, Ghana, Uzbekistan and the Philippines. In countries where buying food requires half to three-quarters of a poor person’s income, “there is no margin for survival,” he said.

We are, of course, pretty good at noticing stuff like this when it’s brought to our attention. And Bush, with his enormous pent-up compassion (“pent-up” since it has not been able to find expression in any other way, shape or form over the last 7 years) has responded:

U.S. President George W. Bush has ordered the release of $200 million in emergency aid to help countries where the soaring cost of basic food has spurred riots and instability.

Let’s see, we are now spending $12 billion per month on George and Dick’s Iraq Adventure. That’s $400 million per day. So in response to this developing humanitarian crisis, George Bush has reached deep into America’s heart, and generously agreed to donate an amount equal to half a day’s expenditure on the Iraq war?

I don’t know about you, but what I’m reminded of is our initial contribution when the Indian Ocean tsunami devastated so many countries in December 2004. The U.S. initially announced it was contributing the grand sum of $400,000 to relief efforts. And here’s what slowly unfolded after that:

In a bizarre series of pledges resembling no-limit poker bets to help tsunami victims, the Bush administration first promised $400,000 in aid before raising that to $4 million almost instantly, only to increase that to $15 million a day later. When other nations complained of American stinginess, $35 million was pledged before the final total of $350 million was reached.