Unfolding tragedies
Buddy, can you spare a dime? If so, this might have been seen as a generous gift to a hungry stranger at the height of the Great Depression when the phrase was popular and when, before the ravages of inflation, 10 cents could buy almost as a much as a toonie today.
In 2012, however, I think it’s a chintzy cheap response.
In this I differ a bit from Canada’s newly minted minister of international co-operation, Julian Fantino. He has a kinder view of Canadians’ response to the acute food crisis in the Sahel region of Africa, which is leaving 18 million at serious risk of starving in a vast swath of land extending from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea.
Fantino expresses mild disappointment that Canadians have contributed an average of just under 10 cents each for a total of $3.3 million, according to the government’s latest estimate. But he excuses this on the grounds that citizens here are understandably preoccupied with financial pressures of their own.
On the other hand, I think Canadians’ woes are trivial compared to those whose families are at risk of death, and the amount involved in this aid campaign is so small most of us wouldn’t notice if it was doubled, tripled, quadrupled or more.
For once, I don’t blame Ottawa for the shortfall of Canadian aid. Our government has frozen the aid budget and it is shifting priority from the neediest countries to more politically attractive ones, yet it reacted faster than most in the developed world when the Sahel food crisis began to unfold late last year.
Then, scarcely a month after his appointment as aid minister, Fantino announced his department would, until the end of September, match Canadians’ donations to non-profit agencies’ campaigns for the Sahel. This is a way for donors to leverage more effectiveness from their gifts, and it usually attracts more donations than it has this year.
Fantino also shows more signs of being engaged with his portfolio than did his predecessor, the imperious Bev Oda.
Barely two months after he took over the portfolio he travelled to Burkina Faso in the heart of the hunger belt — the 199th poorest country in the world where the limousines and classy hotels favoured by Oda are nowhere to be found. And when he got there, he kept on going, well off the beaten path, to the poorest and most rustic areas where a swig of clean water — never mind orange juice at any price — is what passes for a treat.
It was his first trip to Africa, and he was struck by the harsh realities — which everybody knows about in general terms, but which rarely fully sink in until people see them firsthand.
The country and the whole western Sahel region, where millions of people were already hungry, have been hit first by a drought and then a flood. And the issue is greatly complicated by an influx of refugees — 110,000 in Burkina Faso alone — who are fleeing an al-Qaida rebellion in Mali.
The short-term priority is to sustain life and keep the people healthy, Fantino said. Beyond that, it’s to find a way to bring about the peace and stability that will let the refugees go home. Of course, an even greater challenge lies ahead — to transform the dysfunctional economies in Burkina Faso and places like it, and to give their people the tools they need to feed and care for themselves.
But Fantino appears to have solid initial priorities for the region — though I fear it will take stronger public support for aid agencies to follow through properly.