Volume 6, Number 3
by Kristen Hessler, ISU Bioethics Outreach Coordinator
As I write, people are starving to death in Darfur, in western Sudan. Unless some kind of miracle occurs very soon, people will still be starving to death when you read this. Always the first victims of food insecurity, the children of Darfur will be the hardest to save.
The United Nations has called the situation in Sudan the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. Refugees, having fled the violence of civil war and genocide in Darfur, now face hunger, thirst, and disease in the harsh desert of western Sudan and across the border in Chad. People, especially children, are dying even after they reach aid stations or refugee camps, where some food, water, and medical attention are available.
On July 22, the United States Congress unanimously passed a resolution declaring genocide in Darfur. As a party to the international Genocide Convention, the U.S. is obligated under international law to prevent genocide and work to punish those responsible for genocide. The United States also led the effort behind the Security Council resolution of July 30, which gave Sudan’s government thirty days to disarm the Janjaweed militias who were carrying out the genocide. Humanitarian efforts are underway, including an airdrop of food supplies into remote areas in western Darfur by the World Food Programme.
This sounds like a lot of action. But is it enough? In a BBC report, Dr. Rowan Gillies, president of Medicins Sans Frontieres, estimated that the World Food Programme was currently providing only fifty percent of the food necessary to feed the refugees. Regarding the UN resolution, Philip McCrum of the Economist Intelligence Unit says, “There’s very little substance to the resolution as it stands. The U.N. is merely waving a stick around threateningly without actually beating Khartoum with it.”
You might agree that the situation in Sudan is a dire humanitarian emergency; but is it relevant to bioethics? I propose that it is. While the genocide has been portrayed as racially motivated, conflicts over water and other natural resources have also played a role in the conflict between Darfur’s nomadic people and the sedentary farmers who have been displaced. As human populations continue to put pressure on natural resources, their relative scarcity will increasingly become a source of human conflict. Environmental ethics and environmental justice are therefore more than arcane issues for tree-huggers; they are urgent humanitarian concerns that demand our attention.
Second, the humanitarian disaster currently unfolding in Sudan takes place against the backdrop of stark global inequality. A mind-boggling 2.8 billion people, out of a total of 6.3 billion in the entire world, live on less than two U.S. dollars per day. Eighteen million people each year die prematurely from poverty-related causes; this is a rate of fifty thousand people every day. Thirty-four thousand of these daily dead are children under the age of five. These facts are the setting in which many prominent bioethics questions arise: Are agricultural innovations the best way to address world hunger? What are the connections between poverty and population growth? What are the connections between affluence and use of natural resources? How are human actions changing the environment, and how are environmental changes influencing human societies?
These questions are part of what I call “everyday bioethics.” Answering these questions is important for understanding the bioethical dimension of global justice. Because of the pervasiveness and stability of global poverty, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that these everyday issues are as much a humanitarian emergency as the crisis in Sudan.
Appeals for action in Sudan are often directed to “the international community.” But individuals like you and I are not off the hook. Our representatives need to hear from us. They need to know that their constituents support U.S. help for the starving and the vulnerable in Sudan and Chad. Any number of aid agencies, from Amnesty International to Medecins Sans Frontieres to Catholic Relief Services, are working to help refugees and to document their stories. They are all asking for donations. Amnesty International is also coordinating letter-writing campaigns and other actions that individuals can take to make a difference.
It is long past time when the privileged world could have acted honorably to prevent so many deaths in Sudan. It is now a moral imperative that we do all we can to help the refugees fleeing the violence that no one prevented, to stop the genocide as soon as possible, and to help bring justice and peace to Sudan.
We can then get back to the urgent questions of everyday bioethics.
Amnesty International, Sudan:
http://www.amnestyusa.org/countries/sudan/activism.html
Catholic Relief Services:
http://www.catholicrelief.org/our_work/where_we_work/overseas/africa/sudan/dafur_crisis.cfm
Doctors Without Borders:
http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/pr/2004/07-26-2004.shtml
Saturday, November 6, 2004, ISU Bioethics Program, co-sponsored by the ISU Department of Agronomy
2:00 p.m., ISU Memorial Union Sun Room. "Coexistence of organic and biotech agricultural crops," Brad Brummond, Extension Agent, North Dakota State University. Panel discussion with panelists to include Manjit Misra, Director of Biosafetly, Institute for Genetically Modified Agricultural Products (BIGMAP); Ricardo Salvador, ISU Department of Agronomy and ISU Department of Sustainable Agriculture; and others.
Monday, November 29, 2004, ISU Bioethics Program
3:30 p.m., ISU Memorial Union Sun Room. "Introducing ethics into life science classrooms," Gary Comstock, Director of Ethics, Professor of Philosophy at North Carolina State University at Raleigh. Formerly ISU Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies.
Bioethics in Brief
September/October 2004
Volume 6, Issue 3
Published four times per year
by the ISU Office of Biotechnology
and the Bioethics Program.
To subscribe, call 515-294-7356.
Editor: Camie J. Stockhausen
Bioethics Outreach Coordinator: Kristen Hessler
Bioethics Program Coordinator: Clark Wolf
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