This is not a permanent link. Will delete the draft and make a permanent post when done writing this.
A headline from Bloomberg reads, “World Hunger Could Double as Coronavirus Disrupts Food Supplies”. The Bloomberg article links to “A Call to Action for World Leaders” signed by a variety of organizations, who, so far as I can tell, have little in common other than a shared desire to avoid mass starvation.
The call to action warns, “COVID-19-related transport and labour disruptions are already starting to impact food security in many locations and food prices in some. Some food surplus nations have already imposed export restrictions. New restrictive rules at ports of entry and borders impede the free flow of food products and compromise the timely supply of essential agricultural inputs. Restrictions on the movement of people — while needed for public health purposes — risk shortages of farm labour at key moments in the farming cycle. The risk of major interruptions to food supplies over the coming months is growing, especially for low-income, net food-importing countries, many of which are in Sub-Saharan Africa.”
The claim that restrictions on the movement of people is “needed for public health purposes” and yet “risks shortages of farm labour at key moments in the farming cycle” comes across as a bit of a double entendre. Agriculture is also essential for public health purposes. A famine can kill far more people than any virus I can think of. But then, with people subject to censorship on platforms like Twitter for claiming that “social distancing is not effective”, saying outright that “social distancing may do more harm than good if you don’t let the food flow” would verge on possibly being viewed as improper.
The call to action further warns that with household incomes falling around the world, “it would not be hard to envisage scenarios in which the number of people suffering from hunger on a daily basis, already estimated at over 800 million, doubles over the coming months with a huge risk of increased malnutrition and child stunting.”
An estimated 9 million people die per year from hunger, so doubling that would give another 9 million people, for a total of 18 million people.
For comparison, Good Judgement Superforecaster Analytics estimates a 71% chance that, as of 31 March 2021, more than 800,000 but less than 8 million deaths attributed to COVID-19 will be reported/estimated, worldwide. I am seeing this forecast on April 9, 2020. According to 80,000 Hours, The Good Judgement project aggregates data from “superforecasters” who have a track record of having made good predictions in the past about other difficult to predict events. I am unsure what assumptions this forecast, or aggregate of forecasts, is based on, but I do not feel qualified to make my own forecast. However, there are “superforecaster commentary highlights” available on the website.
Many of the world’s poor more worried about hunger than about COVID-19
In Zimbabwe, where President Emmerson Mnangagwa has announced, “All citizens are required to stay at home, with the exception of those seeking health services, buying food, medicine and vital supplies, and those manning our essential services,” a citizen complains, “We know there is corona[virus] in the country, but we will die of hunger first if we don’t get mealie meal.” Zimbabwe’s unemployment rate, officially at least, is over 90%, with millions depending on informal jobs to put food on the table.
In Zambia, President Edgar Lungu is aware that some of his people have been saying, “We would rather die from COVID-19 than from hunger.” He asks his people to, “Please choose life,” although it is unclear from the New York Times quotation whether he believes choosing life means focusing more on the problem of hunger, or more on COVID-19. Perhaps the ambiguity was deliberate, and he meant for people to weigh the risks of COVID-19 versus hunger on an individual basis.
In Uganda, women trying to sell fruit have been beaten by police and military for defying orders to stay home. Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni has threatened that those attempting to distribute food to the vulnerable would be arrested, because such congregations would spread the virus. The opposition has warned that the urban poor may die of hunger if not given some form of relief.
In Nigeria, a mother tells the BBC, “It is hunger I am worried about, not a virus.” The BBC warns that Nigerians can transmit the virus if they do not act responsibly, but I am unclear how feeding one’s children under such circumstances qualifies as irresponsible, even though it would probably increase chances of virus transmission. Perhaps the apparent double entendre is simply the BBC’s way of getting around the UK’s harsh censorship policies with respect to COVID-19.
In Columbia, a school administrator of the indigenous Wayuu says her people fear, “that if we don’t die of the virus, we will die of hunger.” Apparently, school meals stopped being shipped at the same time the schools were closed. For some of the children, those meals were, at least until recently, their only meal of the day.
In Delhi, India, a yogurt-based drink seller, feels helpless and fears that, “hunger may kill many like us before coronavirus.” A day laborer, also in Delhi, said that his family would run out of food in a few days if he couldn’t get work. Some of India’s poor are fleeing the cities, by foot if they have to, to reach their home villages, not for fear of the virus, but for fear of starvation. One, who faced a 530 kilometer walk home if she and her family could not catch a bus, stated, “Let me tell you one thing: More people will die of hunger than from this disease.”
In Mexico, Ricardo Salinas Pliego, speaking probably more for his countryfolk than for himself, said, “We won’t die from coronavirus but from hunger.” He continues, “In Mexico, the vast majority don’t live on a salary, they don’t live from their savings nor from the government; the vast majority live day to day. … If the majority of the population stops earning income today, they simply won’t have anything to eat tomorrow.” We must understand that when he says COVID-19 is not “highly lethal”, he’s not comparing it to the flu, he’s comparing it to the possibility of widespread starvation.
Charities in the UK warn that about a million undocumented migrants, included some asylum seekers whose claims have been denied, are at risk of hunger and starvation due to the closures of charities who used to provide food to them.
Remittances, money sent by migrants working in wealthier countries to their families back home in poorer countries, have been plummeting. Arkansas Democrat Gazette reports that, “One money-transfer company in Europe sending funds to Africa saw an 80% drop in volume in a single week.” The drop in remittances is likely to leave many unable to pay for rent, water, electricity, and food, and to some extent, this already seems to be happening.
When people say that not “that many” people will die of COVID-19, that it isn’t “that dangerous”, it isn’t necessarily callousness for old people and people with pre-existing conditions. (Although it could be that.) But more likely, it’s a warning: a warning that more people could potentially die of other things, like starvation.
Food in danger of rotting in the fields or otherwise failing to reach consumers
Near Wuhan, China, some crops deemed “essential” were allowed through the quarantine. Others, such as lotus roots, not arbitrarily classified as “essential”, have been left to rot for lack of transportation out.
A headline on Marketplace.org reads, “Jobless Brits urged to ‘pick for Britain’ as COVID-19 blocks foreign farmworkers.” Evidently, about 80,000 migrants usually pick Britain’s crops this season. For a variety of reasons, including COVID-19 related travel restrictions, that number is expected to be far less this year. John Bragg of Bryants Salads Ltd. warns that if the fields are not staffed, “All this crop in our fields here will be left to rot, and it won’t be able to feed the U.K. nation at this difficult time.” The jobless and students of Britain have been asked to take the challenge of picking the crops. As of the time the article was published, only 18,000 had applied, and it remains to be seen if so many people without farm labor experience will be up to the task.
In Australia, “The fruit and vegetable industry has warned that crops may be left to rot in fields because of a major shortage of accommodation for backpackers who pick the produce.” Apparently, a number of hostels and caravan parks, who normally house these traveling workers, have closed in response to COVID-19. On top of the housing shortage, the Commonwealth has announced that they will also have to self-isolate for 14 days before beginning work — time the crops may not be able to wait.
In New Zealand, closures of restaurants and grocers leaves vegetable farmers worried their crops will go to waste unless alternative buyers can be found.
In Florida, United States, there are winter crops like squash, spinach, and lettuce rotting in the fields because the restaurants that normally buy them are either closed or operating at reduced capacity. Dairy producers in Wisconsin and Vermont have been pouring milk down drains or flooding the fields with the milk for lack of buyers. The United States response to COVID-19 has lead to a spike in some people being unable to afford groceries, and glut in food elsewhere. According to the Guardian, about half of food grown in the United States was, before the COVID-19 response, destined for restaurants, schools, stadiums, theme parks and cruise ships — all industries heavily hit by the COVID-19 response. The food supply chain seems to be mostly failing to find alternative ways to deliver these foods to consumers
Other ridiculousness
In Uganda, doctors are saying their government’s anti-coronavirus measures could cause deaths. Apparently, in a country without a functioning public ambulance system, the government has banned private cars from the road, telling expectant mothers and others with medical emergencies to “seek permission” for transportation to hospitals. Ekwaro Obuku, who formerly headed Uganda’s national association of physicians, pointed out that, “Other medical emergencies like maternal have not stopped because coronavirus has come.”
New York doctor suggests severe social distancing may actually increase the number of deaths in the long run by delaying herd immunity
Human rights issues
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-51362772
https://onezero.medium.com/the-pandemic-is-a-trojan-horse-for-surveillance-programs-around-the-world-887fa6f12ec9
https://onezero.medium.com/the-pandemic-is-a-trojan-horse-for-surveillance-programs-around-the-world-887fa6f12ec9
Domestic violence and child abuse
Throwing money at problems, while ignoring difficult moral questions, is likely to lead to bad results
We can’t grow food by throwing money at the ground. We can’t harvest crops by throwing money at them. We can’t transport the crops to the people who want to eat them by throwing money in the air. It is true we can use money to pay people to do these things, but that still won’t solve all our problems. Money won’t make it so everyone can just stay at home and avoid doing all the work that can’t be done from home. Throwing money around won’t address the injustices that can be exacerbated by disasters.
example of refugee crisis in Congo after Rwandan genocide from Jason Stearns’ “Dancing in the Glory of Monsters.”
Civillian refugees were not separated from genocidaire refugees.
Condense following into summary rather than series of quotes.
Jason Stearns writes, “For the humanitarian organizations, the dilemma was excruciating. The former government officials had set up administrative structures in the camps through which aid workers were forced to operate. With 5,000 people dying a day, they had to act, but unless the innocent civilians were separated from the soldiers and ex-government officials, aid groups were left little option other than to work with people guilty of genocide, bolstering and financing them in the process. Aid groups launched one of the largest humanitarian operations the continent had seen, bringing forty-five organizations and over 1,600 relief workers to Goma alone. In late 1994, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) spent $1 million each day on operations in the camps. Its effort was effective: Within weeks of deployment, mortality dropped steeply, saving thousands of lives. At the same time, however, it became obvious that the aid was also sustaining the perpetrators of the genocide. As Alain Destexhe, the secretary-general of Doctors Without Borders, put it: “How can physicians continue to assist Rwandan refugees when by doing so they are also supporting killers?”
“And they were supporting killers. Camp leaders refused to allow UNHCR to count the refugees for over half a year, inflating their numbers so as to pocket the surplus food, blankets, and clothes for themselves. In Ngara, Tanzania, food for 120,000 “ghost refugees” was being skimmed off the top, while in Bukavu leaders pocketed aid for 50,000 refugees over six months.10 Even after censuses were carried out, leaders stole the food of those most in need, pushing thousands of children into severe malnutrition. “We never had to worry about food,” Rwarakabije told me. “The United Nations supplied us with plenty.” As families starved, desperate mothers abandoned their infants at night at camp orphanages, where they were sure to get fed.”
…
“Finally, in October 1996, the Rwandan army invaded in force under the guise of a homegrown Congolese rebellion in order to stave off criticism.”
…
“Humanitarian officials were alarmed as the sickly refugees they had been feeding for the past two years fled into the inhospitable hinterlands. Emma Bonino, European Commissioner for Humanitarian Aid, warned that, “500,000 to a million people are in danger of dying.”
…
“Laurent Kabila’s improvised army, the AFDL, arrived in Tingi-Tingi on February 28, 1997. Many sick or weak refugees did not manage to flee. Dozens were crushed to death or drowned following a stampede on a nearby bridge. Some 2,000 survived the attacks and were airlifted back to Rwanda by aid organizations.”
“Others were killed. A worker for the local Red Cross, who, ten years later, was still too afraid to tell me his name, said he had returned several days afterward to find bodies bludgeoned to death in the camp’s tented health centers. Others had fallen, intravenous needles still in their arms, in the forests nearby. A local truck driver, who had been commandeered by the AFDL to help clean up the town after the attack, told me there were dead bodies everywhere, refugees who had been too weak to flee and had then been bayoneted by the soldiers. “They didn’t use bullets on the refugees — they used knives,” he told me. His eyes glazed over as he remembered the image of an infant sucking on his dead mother’s breast, trying in vain to get some sustenance from her cold body. Reverend Kapala, who had fled into the forest for one night and then returned, told me, “They killed any male refugee over the age of twelve. They slit their throats. Not the women or children. Just the men.”
A significant part of the problem was that, following the Rwandan genocide, and refugees fleeing to the Congo, there was a lack of any serious effort to separate civilian refugees from genocidaires. Rather than grapple with the moral aftermath of the genocide, aid organizations focused on feeding the refugees and keeping them alive. When this wasn’t sorted out, certain Rwandans who were unsatisfied with this state of affairs decided they’d rather kill all the refugees, included those who weren't genocidaires, rather than have a continued presence of armed genocidaires near their border. I don’t favor the death penalty. But if one is going to have a death penalty, one should at least have some form of a trial system to make sure that it is only the guilty who are executed. Or at least attempt to make sure, considering that judges and juries, like all human beings, are not infallible. I don’t really feel like merely attempting to make sure you don’t kill innocents by mistake is enough, hence my disapproval of the death penalty, but it is at least a step up from massacring people en masse.
This likely could have been averted if aid organizations had, rather than simply throwing money at the problem, taken some time to at least try to sort out the question of justice. Even if they shared my discomfort with the death penalty, it is possible to avoid participating in enforcement of the death penalty but still take other actions, like, say, coming up with a plan to disarm genocidaires, and performing an investigation to figure out who the genocidaires are to begin with. It is possible, that, if such an investigation were performed, but the investigators declined to enforce the death penalty, someone else might take the matter of executing the genocidaires into their own hands. I do not feel like the investigators, supposing that they are against the death penalty like me, should feel bad about such an eventuality if it were to occur. It would not be their duty to protect genocidaires from the consequences of their actions. And ultimately, it would still be a better outcome if people who did wish to impose the death penalty had records showing who was found guilty, and who wasn’t, than for them to just kill everyone they could.
While a virus is far less dramatic or disturbing than a genocide or a massacre, we should not forget that throwing money at a problem is no substitute for actual justice.
Instead of (or in addition to) throwing money around, ask questions about justice
There could be justice in asking why so many people face such high costs of living that they can’t afford to take a vacation and stay home in response to a crisis. There are problem many answers to this question. Some are questions less of justice than of the demands of nature, including, in particular, agriculture. Some injustices probably cannot be solved quickly or easily, but perhaps events like these should serve as a reminder.
One injustice, in the United States at least, that I think the current crisis highlights is the cost of housing. The Atlantic has an article which compares how families in the China, India, Russia, Egypt, Brazil and the United States spend money, and in the United States, a huge proportion of income is spent on housing relative to the other countries analyzed.
Being that the people of the United States spend so much on housing, it shouldn’t be a surprise that what many Americans fear from a COVID-19 lockdown is eviction. The fastest remedy for this problem would be for those in power to acknowledge that demanding people who aren’t classified as as essential workers stay home (aside from what is considered “essential” activity) until they get evicted defeats the whole point of social distancing.
A popular suggestion of late is eviction freezes. Essentially, many local governments are saying they will stop enforcing evictions. This seems like it would at best delay the problem of an increase in homelessness. Homelessness can also kill. Just because COVID-19 has come, doesn’t mean that homeless people will now be immune from dying from a number of causes including hypothermia. I’ve heard some people saying that rents and mortgages should be completely forgiven during the crisis, i.e. not required to be paid back later.
These suggestions seem to forget why we pay rent and mortgage to begin with. Let me start by stating that this is only a partial defense of the institutions of rent and mortgage. But, at least, part of rent and mortgage has to do with the labor costs of building homes. There is labor that goes into making and transporting the materials for the home, labor that goes into designing the home, and labor that goes into constructing it from the materials based on the design. Unless we consider forced labor acceptable, this labor will usually require some form of compensation. There are exceptions. I heard, orally, of one cultural tradition, which I believe went out of fashion, where people would make a gift of adobe bricks to a wedding couple and build an adobe home for them as a sort of wedding gift. Gift-based cultural systems aside, conducting ethical homebuilding means paying workers enough that they will voluntarily agree to build the home. In many cases, in American culture, the family who wishes to move into the home can’t afford to pay all these labor costs up front. So, the tradition in America, and in a number of other parts of the world, is for someone else (or some organization) to pay the labor costs up front, and for the family living in the home to pay off the labor costs over time in the form of either rent or mortgage. The process may involve a number of middlepeople, who also expect to earn some profit.
However, not all of rent or mortgage goes towards paying labor costs, nor even the profit for the middlepeople. In some times and places, like Ireland after the Cromwellian conquest, rent may have more to do with past conquest than anything to do with legitimate billing of labor costs. In the United States, some portion of rent and mortgage goes towards property taxes, aka land taxes. Unless the local government played some part in building the home, these taxes don’t have anything to do the labor costs in building the home. One elderly protestor shown on Youtube complained that although he built and paid for his home by the time he was 25, he now has to pay property taxes equivalent to the original cost of his home every 3 years. Average property taxes for a single-family home, in the United States, were $3,561 in 2019. The idea of property taxes, in the United States, seems to have something to do with the peculiar idea that people ought to be required to pay for local schools, police, fire stations, and streets as part of their housing bill.
There seems to be a disconnect in saying that it’s immoral, from some people’s perspective, for landlords and banks to evict/foreclose on people during this period, but we should all still pay our property taxes (or have our landlords pay the property taxes for us). If convincing people to stay home is such a high priority, then I should think that enabling people to do so should begin with abolishing property taxes for the duration of the emergency. Abolishing them more permanently could also help people save up in preparation for future emergencies. Stopping property taxes should allow rents and mortgages to lower, and reduced financial pressures on landlords and lenders should hopefully give them the breathing space necessary to be more forgiving of people who can’t pay for a time. A cessation of property taxes should also help small businesses such as restaurants become less likely to go out of business.
See example of the Bengal famine of 1770.
While abolishing taxes in general could leave people with more income to save for emergencies, taxes on homes and other basic necessities are particularly bad since they raise the cost of living and increase the number of people who are homeless (or aren’t able to afford whatever basic necessity is being taxes). Additionally, while a person’s income tax might automatically fall when they experience an income-reducing crisis, property taxes do not automatically fall during such a crisis and are thus more likely to impair a person’s ability to make it through the crisis.
In spite of what is called “preferential treatment”, property taxes still put pressure on farmers, and, therefore, on food prices, another necessity.
Note that head taxes are even worse than property taxes, see books about Belgian Congo by Jules Marchal. Rubber taxes (where people were forced to go out and gather rubber) in the so-called “Congo Free State” were also very very evil. See King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild and Red Rubber by Edmund Dene Morel.
Another issue that unjustly raises housing costs in the United States is the illegalization, in many places, of low cost housing such as tiny homes.
Quarantines have an uninspiring historical track record
While not totally ineffective, quarantines tend to have low compliance, inspire cover-ups, distract people from finding better solutions, and raise serious human rights concerns.
Yellow fever — mosquitoes sometimes flew past quarantines, strong correlation to African slave trade.
1878 person escapes quarantine and starts Memphis epidemic. In “The American Plague”, Molly Caldwell Crosby writes, “That very problem had arisen during the 1878 epidemic: New Orleans officials like Samuel Choppin believed strongly in a quarantine against infected ships arriving in New Orleans; but, once yellow fever was present, city officials refused to tell the rest of the country for fear of being quarantined themselves.”
Also, “A few days earlier, Kean had learned that a friend and neighbor was down with yellow fever. Kean had been ordered to stay out of the infected district, but early one morning, he decided to make a visit to his sick friend. He took every precaution, never entering the infected house, and instead sat outside on the porch where the air was clear. “I obeyed the letter but not the spirit of the order,” Kean would later write. He spoke to a nurse through the iron bars of the open window. He never came in contact with any of the infected items, nor with his friend. Kean was shocked, five days later, when he fell feverish and was admitted to hut number 118 in the yellow fever ward of Camp Columbia.”
Archibald “Archie” S. Miller died of yellow fever in 1898 after being on a ship which docked outside a yellow fever hotspot, not letting passengers off due to the risk of yellow fever, but presumably unaware that the disease was spread by mosquitoes who could just fly to the ship.
Forced labor and a harsh regime in general lead to drastic increase in sleeping sickness in the colonial Congo. See “The colonial disease: a social history of sleeping sickness in northern Zaire, 1900–1940” by Maryinez Lyons. Isolation at Ibembo lead to two serious riots in 1909 and 1910.
p32 “Another area of administration which severely affected the populations of the region and which was directly connected to the increase of sleeping sickness was the demand for tax. As already explained, a principal function of the state posts was the collection of ‘tax’ which, in the northern district of Uele until July 1912, consisted almost entirely of wild rubber. After July 1912, although tax was ostensibly collected in the form of currency, the main source of cash for most Africans remained for many years rubber. As with labour, an examination of the ‘rubber tax’ would take far too long to seriously discuss in this book, but as this facet of colonialism was so directly related to the whole issue of sleeping sickness and public health legislation, some details must be presented here. As soon as a region was conquered and submission obtained from some of the inhabitants, state agents were expected to begin the collection of tax. Conquest was inseparable from tax because conquest was for tax.”
p35 “By April 1917, Bertrand was commenting that the collection of rubber had become, perhaps, the principal factor in the spread of the disease. 23 As with gold production, people were forced to move long distances, travelling to tsetse areas to seek rubber for the obligatory tax. Here again, the administration directly contradicted its own public health policy of a cordon sanitaire.”
p125 “Furthermore, this doctor said, the sporadic surveys for victims in African villages were viewed as ‘little more than manhunts’ and the result was that ‘people fled the doctors more quickly than they did the tax collectors!”
Doctors Without Borders, “It has been our experience that lockdowns and quarantines do not help control Ebola as they end up driving people underground and jeopardizing the trust between people and health providers.”
Censorship pandemic
An article from Medpage Today warns, “Journalists are officially prohibited from communicating with anyone in the CDC and other federal agencies without the oversight of censors — much to our discredit, we go along with their official title of “public information officer” or PIO. Reporters also usually can’t walk into their buildings, and there are often no systems for obtaining any sort of press credential.”
Science does not equal omniscience, why shouldn’t we ask questions?
Something about Louis-Daniel Beauperthuy and his hypothesis that yellow fever was transmitted by mosquito. A theory not taken particularly seriously by his contemporaries. He turned out to be mostly right.
People used to think a lot of really weird stuff and were wrong. Many modern day assumptions we assume are common sense may later be viewed as ridiculous by our descendants.
Other stuff to note
