The adjectives of the crisis

© Franco Pagetti/VII

(ES)

The media abound with adjectives when talking about a crisis. Financial crisis, alimentary crisis, foreign policy crisis ...

All seasoned with macro-figures that overwhelm us with just reading them: 44 million people in the world in situation of extreme poverty due to rising food prices since June 2010, which is qualified as global food crisis.

These aseptic chronics supported by brainy reports by World Bank, FAO and various organizations, about which they are derived other dense articles written by respected economists who analyze with accuracy different factors that influence the development of the crisis and predict their potential consequences.

So far, opinion and debate.

If we focus on the definition of the word crisis, the first entry that appears in the dictionary is:
"The turning point for better or worse in an acute disease or fever ."

Our patient is the global world we inhabit, in which different crisis is spreading to all countries, and some of them are more exposed about its pernicious effects. Like a virus that attacks viciously and kills the weakest.

The global crisis we are experiencing in recent years are not situations in which nobody, in this case sick ones, is responsible for, although they are spreading like an infectious disease across the planet.

The only element that we are not able to control in a food crisis, although it's possible to contribute to the improving and stabilization of it by humans at a long-term, is the climate factor, which has a direct impact on crops.

Besides that, we all face to governments with dire economic policies as an election issue, and that benefit the lobbyists who finance their campaigns. Governments that increase the tax burden to rescue indebted countries that threaten other Central Banks. Governments that accumulate food stocks on a purely speculative basis. Corrupt governments capable of maintaining the famine in their countries to maintain the profits of producers they control at the local markets. Regulators who for years have applied a policy of "laissez-faire" to investment banks with the consequences we all know. Banks bailed out with public funds that distribute generous dividends to its shareholders, and obscene bonuses to its senior management. Free trade agreements that only suffocate the poorest countries.

It is a perverted system that only increases the gap in the redistribution of wealth.

I am encouraged that the definition of crisis provides an abrupt change for better in the course of a disease.

I understand any crisis as an opportunity for improvement, but this change will not come from the hand of the powerful who control the system, as their interests are above the rest of humanity, but by all of us who have resources enough to encourage a change, those who suffer knowing that 44 million people are in extreme poverty.

I do not need to count 44 million people to act, is a number too large for me. It is enough just knowing that a child dies at this moment because their nutrition is insufficient.

Click this link and sign the petition to change the history of child malnutrition.

Article 24.2.c) of the Convention on the Rights of the Child ¹:

States Parties shall take appropriate measures:

c) To combat disease and malnutrition within the framework of primary health care through, inter alia, the application of available technology and the provision of adequate nutritious foods and clean drinking water, taking into consideration the dangers and risks environmental pollution;

¹ This Convention has been ratified by all UN members except Somalia and the USA.