antarchia | ordered disorder

blessed britons

at the same time as the Jewish Holocaust was happening in Europe, another Holocaust was happening in the world, namely the 1943/44 man-made Bengal Famine in British-ruled India. This atrocity took as many as 4 million lives and was associated with a 1940s demographic deficit of 10 million in Bengal. Satyajit Ray in his outstanding film “Distant Thunder” asserts that 5 million died. According to Amartya Sen, food was actually available there but cashed-up Calcutta, prosperous because of a war-time manufacturing boom, sucked food out of the rice-producing countryside. The price of rice increased 4-fold for a variety of reasons and in a free market, colonial economy and with a heartless, racist British administration, those who could not afford to buy rice simply starved.

— Gideon Polya

Blair, Science and History Repeated

mad world

...if the whole world wished to consume at the level of the United States - a consumption pattern which has been fuelled, incidentally, by the credit binge which led to the current economic crisis - we would need, conservatively, over 5 planets like earth to support them. But, under the current pattern of unequally distributed benefits from growth, to lift everyone in the world onto a modest $3 per day, would require the resources of around 15 planets like ours. Where, you might ask, will the other 14 come from?

— Andrew Simms

Ending poverty in a carbon constrained world

DFID fighting extreme poverty

Submitted by antarchi on August 24, 2007 - 02:44.

'The Department for International Development (DFID) is the part of the UK Government that manages Britain's aid to poor countries and works to get rid of extreme poverty.'

DFID works directly in over 150 countries worldwide, with a budget of nearly £4 billion in 2004.

But just to give us an idea of how most of that 'aid' is really spent, the (previous) Secretary of State has broken down¹ some of the figures for Iraq:

Between April 2003 and December 2005, DFID spent £210,000 preparing DFID civil servants and consultants for deployment to Iraq. This covers pre-deployment hostile environment training, plus necessary equipment such as satellite phones, body armour, flak jackets and helmets...

DFID civil servants working on the Iraq programme in this period have cost £4.4 million. This includes salaries, overseas allowances, transfer costs and travel. Of this amount, £3 million was disbursed on salaries...

The total cost to DFID of all consultancy contracts in Iraq during this period was £31.4 million... Consultants receive fees rather than salaries, so it may be helpful to know that the average fees paid for a consultant working for DFID in Iraq are between £700 to £1,250 a day.

* * *

Helpful indeed: selfless souls, those international aiders.

How could anyone, let alone British citizens, take a fee of any sort, let alone £1,200 a day, from funds (paltry as they are) intended to assist - if that were ever possible - those millions of Iraqis (not yet dead) now suffering from the entirely foreseeable consequences of an unprovoked war of aggression; a war prepared, launched and carried through with the utmost guile, duplicity, and callousness by this British Government - the very government that now pretends to compensate the victims who have not yet had their lives cut short by the invading powers. How could you take their money with a clear conscience to 'help' Iraqis, of all people?

The mind absolutely boggles.

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1. 1. From questions to Parliament, March 2006

blessed britons

mad world

DFID fighting extreme poverty

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