I was really hoping that the academic writing trend where you call everything “violent” had died around 2021, but apparently it’s still with us!
> In a violent act against the Haitian people, the US halts export of low cost rice, leading to mass starvation and food insecurity.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Giving people money for food raises the prices of food. Giving people free food ruins the people selling food.
A starving population is an economics problem, rarely is it a commodity shortage.
If you want to distort an economy you have to do it intentionally and with great care with an eye for helping it grow.
For example, look at what they already import from your country, buy it from your own producers and then sell it at a deep discount, but watch out for who else sells it and if you'll distort any other exporters markets.
Look at their needs for capital equipment, especially where efficiency is involved and sell it to them cheaply, again paying attention to not trample existing markets.
Many more examples but in essence pay attention to the consequences of your actions, don't just focus on one and ignore the rest.
The best ways to help countries and communities out of poverty is through quality education and eradicating the endemic corruption.
Throwing aid and free money at that corrupt and broken system, won't fix anything.
It just perpetuates a cycle of systemic addiction where the people/society depend on your aid to function and are therefore under your control.
In your case, yeah, eradicating corruption might solve the issue, but that’s something that has eluded the entire human race since time immemorial. So in the meantime while we work to solve the human equivalent of an NP Hard problem, let’s help people out.
...other than calling it "violence". If there's no use of force or threat thereof, it shouldn't be called "violence".
But the broader point is that whenever you have a strong and weak entity interacting, you can always find a way to frame anything the stronger entity does as "violence".
Not sharing your wealth and power? Violence by indirectly causing suffering with your hoarding.
Sharing your wealth and power? Violence by harming the weaker entity's ability to take care of themselves and be independent.
At the end of the day, some armchair critic is always going to accuse the stronger/wealthier party of violence, so accusations of such lose their meaning and people increasingly ignore the boy who cried wolf.
Correct. While it's a bit crude term than the historical "inquitable", it accurately describes trade surpluses being lost to the weaker party compared to a more equal exchange. This is why BATNA is an important principle.
From dict.org
2. Injury done to that which is entitled to respect, reverence, or observance; profanation; infringement; unjust force; outrage; assault. [1913 Webster]
Could you please cease doing violence and not think those thoughts?
(/s This is sarcasm - the second line obviously references Doublethink. The example is meant to point out how ridiculous it is that thought is being shut down by accusing people with an expanded/changed definition of violence)
'Paul O'Brien of Oxfam America says the lessons of the harm of flooding a country like Haiti with subsidized rice should have been learned a long time ago.
'"The days are gone when we can throw up our hands in terms of unintended consequences; we know now what these injections can do to markets," he said. "The question we want asked is what is being done to guarantee long-term food security for Haitians."'
'[...] there is plenty of malnutrition.
'Some 2.4 million Haitians — out of a population of nearly 10 million — cannot afford the minimum daily calories recommended by the World Health Organization.'
'But donors often sink more money into emergency aid than such long-term projects.'
'Before the 1970s, Haitians only ate rice once or twice a week, getting starch from other local staples like sorghum and manioc, Woolley said.
'Today, rice is a staple but often U.S.-subsidized rice costs less than locally grown crops. On Friday, a 55-pound bag of US rice cost about $36, compared with $60 for the same size sack of Haitian rice.'
'In the 1970s, fearing indigenous pigs could spread swine fever, the United States — in conjunction with USAID — moved to replace all of Haiti's hearty Creole pigs with pigs from Iowa. The end result was the fragile U.S. pigs often became sick, preferred expensive feed and had fewer litters.'
'[Haitians need] cheap credit, cheaper fertilizer and more government aid, he said.'
Is Fr*nce going to invade?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1804_Haitian_massacre
There aren't many instances in history where people are actually systematically exterminated on the grounds of their race, so Haiti is of historical significance.
Nobody bats an eye at the reprisals that follow when the slavers win.
In this case, free rice is having the effect of price dumping. You can't compete with free, so local agriculture and cuisine is being wrecked, and diets are changing for the worse.
Another example is the distribution of so-called mitumba, where, say, ragpickers from New Jersey ship tons of used and second hand clothing to Africa, destroying the local textile industry. This, and intentional Chinese tactics (and probably American, among others), is how, for example, Nigerian cotton and textiles were destroyed.
If you want a country to flourish, often it's a matter of fucking off and letting it develop. Investment is good, of course, as long as it's done on the basis of a partnership between labor and capital, not taking over and pumping and dumping competition so you can effectively colonize the country economically. Unregulated free trade is always promoted by the powerful, as they can easily swoop into developing economies and entrench themselves before the local industrial base even has a chance to establish itself.
But “destructive” and “violent “ aren’t synonymous. Its not nitpicking at all.
Tenebrism, from Italian tenebroso ("dark, gloomy, mysterious"), also occasionally called dramatic illumination, is a style of painting using especially pronounced chiaroscuro, where there are *violent contrasts of light and dark*, and where darkness becomes a dominating feature of the image.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tenebrism&oldid=8...
Everyone agrees, but Haiti is essentially in perpetual crisis.
If you have to pick between economic harm and starvation, people are going to pick economic harm.
Nearly any time a country that has figured out how to produce something in a scalable fashion for cheaper (including shipping), it will wipe out local alternatives.
It doesn’t matter to the local competitor if it’s being subsidized by a foreign government, it’s just as “violent”.
It’s stupid to replace “cant compete” with “violent” when there are a lot of actual examples of competition where real violence is involved (mafia).
Economic violence is a real thing.
And selling rice with internationally illegal levels of arsenic and other toxins is violent too.
Do you consider cheese exports from France to be economic violence against Wisconsin?
But if France was knowingly shipping arsenic-laden cheese to the US in a way that displaced the local economy to the degree that the only available cheese is poison? That'd, at least, cause some violent diarrhea.
You either don’t understand the meaning of “bike shedding” or you think one small portion of the economy struggling to compete on the price is “violent”. Either way, I think you’re confused about the definition of something pretty fundamentally.
If it was really the choice between, “you’ll get poisoned and have violent diarrhea if you eat this cheaper option” or “keep buying the previous local option”, both options would stay available.
So the point you tried to make really missed the mark. The way that arsenic rice could crush the local market is only if it had essentially no near to mid term side effects. If it was obvious people wouldn’t buy it.
What is complicated about that?
There are two things in discussion:
- the “economic violence” of food relief programs because it makes it hard for local farmers.
- high arsenic levels in US rice
Both are perfectly valid uses of the word violent.
Stunned that people are defending this tbh. American exceptionalism is a hell of a drug.
>Stunned that people are defending this tbh.
It’s frankly shocking that you think deriding the author for calling food programs “economic violence” is defending this scenario. Take a step back and realize that multiple things can be wrong at once.
You’d have to prove intent to call it violence. Seems more like negligence. Its also puzzling why someone would assume an intent to harm in this scenario .
Are we supposed to believe no one involved in selling this massive amount of rice knows what we learned in 2007 [0] ?!
> At one point during the reign of King Cotton, farmers in the south central United States controlled boll weevils with arsenic-based pesticides, and residual arsenic still contaminates the soil. Today, rice paddies cover fields where cotton once grew, and a large market basket survey published in the 1 April 2007 issue of Environmental Science & Technology now shows that rice grown in this area contains, on average, 1.76 times more arsenic than rice grown in California.
'Negligence' is not the word for this. It's violence, and it's inexcusable.