Of Butter and Moral Stains

In October 1932, at the height of both his first presidential campaign and the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt said that:

“modern society, acting through its Government, owes the definite obligation to prevent the starvation or the dire want of any of its fellow men and women who try to maintain themselves but cannot. To these unfortunate citizens aid must be extended by the Government — not as a matter of charity, but as a matter of social duty."

However, the fact is that governments routinely allow and create poverty, and at the extremes, allow some people to starve. 

This can look like setting pensions at a level that is manifestly inadequate to cover rent, electricity and food, forcing people to choose between eating or staying warm.

It can look like standing by while the price of essentials like butter or cheese skyrocket.

It can look like scrapping a successful programme that fed children who needed food at school in favour of a somewhat cheaper programme that delivers food containing burnt plastic.

It can look like a deep reluctance to use employment assistance and job creation programmes to relieve the dire poverty of the early 1930s - the contemporary reality against which Roosevelt was campaigning. Or the more modern equivalent of deliberately using structural unemployment to control inflation (the “non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment”).

It can even look like a policy of allowing the continued export of thousands of tonnes of grain from Ireland while millions starved during the Great Famine of the 1840s and 1850s. When it goes that far, we call it genocide. But really, we’re talking about a matter of degrees. Not whether the government is prepared to let people go hungry, but who and how many go hungry.

Just societies feed their people. Not some of them; not most of them most of the time: everyone, all the time. New Zealand produces many times more food than is required to feed our population. We have state institutions, iwi and NGOs with the organisational capacity to distribute food to anyone who needs it. There is no reason anyone should go hungry - this is a choice that successive governments have made on our behalf, and it is a stain on our nation’s soul.

So if you agree that the Government should act to feed children who need food and to ensure that no one in New Zealand starves, why are Palestinians any different? Right now, the better part of 2 million people are trapped in Gaza while the Government of Israel blocks food convoys, threatens to shoot anyone trying to get fish from the sea and murders people trying to access the limited food aid that is allowed through.

If you believe that children in New Zealand deserve to eat, why not children in Gaza?

Can we really pretend that we have no obligation towards our fellow human beings just because someone drew a line on a map and called the place they live a different country? They are just as human, and their deaths are just as real.

Everyone deserves to eat. And until we do something about it, this will be another stain on our soul.