Keeping Your Eye on the Ball: Burma

Harn Lay (2010). Photograph © Platon, for Human Rights Watch.

It has been roughly a week since the military junta in Burma released Aung San Suu Kyi from house arrest. At the time I noted here that while this was a welcome turn of events, it represented a quite minimal step by the authorities. There are many prisoners being held and many others who have been driven into exile. Cartoonist Harn Lay is among the latter group. He has been in exile in Thailand since 1988. Human Rights Watch has commissioned photographer Platon to portray some of the many others who have born (and continue to bear) the brunt of military rule in Burma. You can find the results of his work on this project here.

The upshot? It is important that we outside of Burma continue to speak out against the junta and its authoritarian policies. And it is more important still to devise policies that might bring pressure to bear on the junta. Many observers think that is impossible given their intransigence. For example, here are remarks (part 1, part 2) made by Amartya Sen at this conference coordinated by Human Rights Watch last month. What is called for is not just moralizing, but concerted political action.

International Food Politics

Among the things for which Amartya Sen won the Nobel Prize in Economics was research demonstrating that famine is a political-economic not a "natural" phenomenon. In his research he shows that famines typically occur not because there is an absolute lack of food (hence the seeming paradox that sometimes countries experiencing famine actually also are exporting foodstuffs) but of access to food where access is determined by institutions (e.g., markets, property rights, and so forth). In The Guardian today is this report on what looks to me like what will turn out sooner rather than later to be a disastrous situation in various African nations as food becomes an export while domestic populations confront severe food insecurity in one or another form. The underlying problem is that markets - for land or water or labor - don't work in attractive ways in the face of extreme resource asymmetries.