‘Leave poorest to starve’ argued

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33790, 12 March 1975, Page 17

‘Leave poorest to starve’ argued

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter— Copyright) NEW YORK, March 10.

Can Bangladesh and India ever manage to feed their starving, even with extensive aid?

Are the African nations south of the Sahara doomed to perpetual hunger and want because of geography?

. These are the questions which have prompted a chillling suggestion by some ! United States academics — , that the wealthy countries of the West should give up I trying to feed the poorest I countries and concentrate their aid instead on nations which can still be helped. The growing debate on the question centres on the word “triage” a term coined in World War I.

In the hard-pressed field hospitals then, the wounded were sometimes divided into three groups—those who would die even with extensive medical care, those likely to survive even if untreated, and those who might survive if given immediate medical treatment. Under the Triage concept, only those in the third group were treated and!

(the most severely wounded were left to die.

Similarly, some academics suggest, the needs of the 'poorest nations are so immense that aid given them lis wasted and should be | given instead to those countries where it might make a (significant difference. I “It’s like throwing sand in I the sea,” is the way one of I the advocates of food triage I described the aid sent to the | poorest countries. ' Some have likened the j problem to an overcrowded i lifeboat after a shipwreck in i which the survivors must i decide who goes overboard so lothers might live. In one (recent article, Dr Garrett Hardin, a biologist at the University of California, wrote: “In the ocean outside each lifeboat swim the poor of the world who would like to get in, or at least share some of the wealth. What should the lifeboat passengers do?

“If those aboard tried to take more people aboard, the boat would sink and all aboard would drown. This was the prospect the wealthy ' nations—those aboard the lifeboat—face in trying to decide how best to use their resources.”

He added, “For the foreseeable future, our survival demands that we govern our actions by the ethics of a lifeboat, harsh though they may be.” Common to the arguments of nearly all advocates of triage is that there is a definite limit of available resources and that aiding the fourth world would only encourage greater population growth and impose still fur- | ther demands on dwindling supplies. Giving aid to these nations, they say, would thus only add to their needs and (compound their misery, i Although the concept of triage, has gained considerable currency in United States academic and Government circles, it has come under sustained and bitter attack in recent months. The Indian Ambassador to the United States, Mr T. N. Kaul, said in a recent speech that the triage and lifeboat suggestions were “pernicious, inhuman doctrines which remind one of the law of the jungle.” Mr Robert McNamara, a former United States Defence Secretary and now president of the World Bank, also at-

tacked the triage proponents in a television interview.

After noting that in the original warfare triage concept the hopelessly wounded were left to die, Mr McNamara said: “You can’t deal with nations that way. They don’t die. You can’t bury them. They’re there.” He also rejected the lifeboat comparison as “morally repulsive and technically wrong” because the world was not as overcrowded as the analogy implied.

“The lifeboat is not full,” he said. “The world food capacity is not being utilised. We still have a capacity to expand production in the countries that need it.”

One of the strongest attacks on triage was made recently in a literary periodical, the “New York Review of Books,” by Dr Geoffrey Barraclough, professor of history at Brandeis University and a former president of the British Historical Association.

Dr Barraclough said that the triage proponents represented a “vociferous lunatic fringe” of the United States academic world.

“Two myths, in particular, have befogged the whole issue,” Dr Barraclough wrote.

“The first is the persistent legend that food shortages are the consequence of inexorable population pressure. The second is that there is an overall shortage of foodstuffs.” He suggested that the shortages are more likely to appear because of political pressures, which he identifies as “neo-capitalism,” and added if these pressures were removed there would be “ample land available to provide food for a burgeoning world population.” He added: “It is only necesI sary to look at France, a country with a population (density nine times that of i Brazil, one-third more than Nigeria and greater even than that of Indonesia and with a ratio of arable land to population not greatly different from that of India, to see the anomalies — for France not only satisfies the food needs of its population but also produces considerable surpluses for export.” For Dr Barraclough, the suggestion that some nations should be abandoned to famine is, “not to mince matters, unsavoury rubbish with about as much "theoretical justification as the Nazi ‘final solution’.”