Between the 5 and 14 of June, La Via Campesina, the global peasants union, held its 6th international conference in Jakarta, Indonesia. Alongside 500 delegates from member organisations around the world, two representatives from the recently affiliated ‘Landworkers’ Alliance’ in the UK joined the gathering.
La Via Campesina (literally ‘the peasants’ way’) is an international union of peasants and small farmers representing 188 member organisations in 88 counties. The total membership is in excess of 200 million and growing constantly as new organisations join. The international conferences are held every four years and are the highest forum for decision making within the organisation. This conference also marked the 20th birthday of the movement and was a place for the membership to celebrate as well as strategise.
The past 20 years have seen La Via Campesina grow to become the largest and most internationally respected farmers organisation in the world. Not only is it seen as the representative voice of peasant farmers in civil society and inter-governmental forums; it is also considered by many as offering the most legitimate critique of neoliberalism and the most convincing vision of alternatives. Its power in international forums is derived from its strict ‘producers only’ membership policy, and its democratic functioning which give it a grassroots and representative voice.
La Via Campesina was established in 1993 to unite the opposition of peasants movements to the World Trade Organisation’s agreement on agriculture, a free market trade agreement that has had disastrous implications for the livelihoods of small-scale producers. Since then they have been extremely successful in giving international visibility to the peasant movement. As Julia, a farmer from Germany said: ‘we have the dexterity of an organisation combined with the courage of a social movement’. They take every opportunity to remind the world that 75 per cent of our food is produced by peasants, but that rural areas are often the most deprived and exploited. La Via Campesina argues that peasants and peasant-led solutions must be seen and heard as protagonists in food and agricultural policy.
A primary aim of the conference was to build consensus in the organisation about the focus for the coming four years. Unlike the last conference, which focused on improving internal functioning, in Jakarta a lot of space was given to formulating strategy. A number of topics emerged and were passionately articulated but there was a remarkable consensus on the main challenges that peasants farmers face worldwide and the most effective ways to challenge these forces of oppression.
Land grabbing and agrarian reform emerged as a significant issue at the conference. It is clear that in the five years since the 2008 food crisis the enclosure and privatisation of land and common resources has increased significantly worldwide. Both state led and private sector land acquisitions are leading to higher and higher concentrations of ownership, taking previously common resources away from peasants and driving up the cost of land. The issue of land grabbing is set firmly in a wider critique of the corporate ‘green’ economy and the commodification of nature.
In response to the increase in land grabbing, La Via Campesina has amplified its discourse on agrarian reform. Redistribution of productive land to producers and public legislation to prevent land grabs are high on it’s agenda. This is happening at national levels through lobbying and direct actions and internationally through the UN’s Comittee on Food Security (CFS) where ‘voluntary guidelines for the responsible tenure of farms, fisheries and forests’ have recently been agreed, and ‘guidelines for responsible agricultural investment’ are being discussed. As always, these international forums have yielded vague results, with no binding mechanisms for implementation, but represent important steps in the slow path to public policy on tenure, land grabs and investment.
Closely linked to the opposition to land grabbing are increasing campaigns against public-private partnerships that use development rhetoric to open markets and create space for international investment in agriculture. The G8’s new alliance on food security and nutrition is one such example of a ‘development programme’ that seeks to facilitate access to land and markets for agribusiness at the expense of peasant livelihoods and traditions.
GM and the commodification of seed remained high on the agenda with a recent proposal from the European commission on the regulation of plant health and marketing taking up a lot of energy in the European regional meetings. The proposal seeks to streamline the European seed industry, creating better incentives for companies to invest in seeds. However the proposal would place fees and registration requirements on small scale seed breeders and growers that would threaten livelihoods and the development of peasant seeds. Internationally the anti GMO campaign has been growing in strength with large scale direct actions against GM in Spain, France, Mexico, India and Haiti. La Via Campesina’s position on GM is that it is an unnecessary technology that damages peasant livelihoods and food security by concentrating power in the food chain in the hands of a few companies and commodified crops. They argue that to end hunger we need to address the situations of those who already produce food, and those who want to. Seeking to build a diverse and resilient local food system rather than the export-focused business-led model that GM is designed for.
La Via Campesina’s struggle against agribusiness spreads far beyond the issue of GM. The conference saw the adoption of a global ‘campaign against agrotoxics’ (genres of chemical known in the UK as pesticides which includes herbicides, fungicides and insecticides) that was initiated by Latin American organisations in 2011. The campaign highlights that monopolies in the agrochemical market (just 6 control 67.9% of the market) force farmers into debt and dependence, but also that agrotoxics are dangerous to people and ecology and are responsible for a lot of death and disease among agricultural workers.
Repression of social movements was also high on the agenda and space was made in the conference to honour the hundreds of peasants who have been threatened, persecuted, imprisoned and murdered in their struggles. In a number of the regions where members are active state and paramilitary violence against peasant movements is extreme. A member of the delegation from Honduras described how many of his colleagues had been killed for speaking and organising to defend the rights of agricultural workers. The issue is linked closely to the campaign against violence against women which seeks to build the strength and solidarity in the movement by challenging prejudices. In recognition of the intense repression faced by many members, La Via Campesina works hard to build inclusion and solidarity within the movement. As practical steps towards this they set quotas on the participation of men, women and youth, ensuring equal space for different voices.
Food sovereignty and agroecology
To develop their proposals for an alternative agricultural policy framework, La Via Campesina came up with the concept of food sovereignty in 1996. Set upon the recognition that food and agriculture are a key element of struggles for social justice in both rural and urban areas, food sovereignty is the fundamental right for all peoples, nations and states to control food and agricultural systems and policies, ensuring everyone has adequate, affordable, nutritious and culturally appropriate food. This requires the right to define and control methods of production, transformation, and distribution at local, national and international levels. Most significantly it encompasses as socio-economic and political transformation. Food sovereignty was a huge part of the discourse at the conference and is used by all kinds of organisations to describe the alternatives that the La Via Campesina offers. While it sounds complicated when dressed in the language of policy, the fundamentals of food sovereignty are the basic demands of farmers around the world: fair prices for food and agricultural products, prioritisation to local and sustainable production and support for new entrants to agriculture alongside a curbing of the power of transnational corporations.
As the failures of the import dependant food security model become clearer, food sovereignty is getting a broader recognition in public policy. Some counties, including Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuela, Senegal, Mali and Nepal have written food sovereignty into their policy frameworks, and it is gaining recognition in the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and Committee on Food Security (CFS). The sharing of victories and strategies for taking food sovereignty to public policy was a big component of the conference and something that will be happening more in the coming years.
In the institutions
The work of La Via Campesina was described to me by an Italian farmer as 1 per cent institutional, 99 per cent mobilisation and mutual aid. At the institutional level, La Via Campesina have been working to create and hold a space for social movements in the UN’s intergovernmental forums for agricultural policy. They are actively lobbying in the FAO, the CFS and the European Union. The main focus here at the moment is twofold, first, following a successful attack on the World Bank’s attempts to write an ‘initiative on responsible investment’, La Via Campesina has been active in taking the issue to the more democratic forum of the CFS where it is working to build the ‘guidelines on responsible agricultural investment’ into an instrument that can be used to defend communities against land grabbing.
In addition La Via Campesina have drafted a bill for the rights of peasants that has been accepted by the UN human rights commission and is now being pushed for ratification by the general assembly.
In the institutions, La Via Campesina’s main aim is often just to give visibility to peasant issues and hold a channel open for farmers voices. As a farmer from Canada said at the conference, ‘often a victory in the institutions is just preventing a bad thing from happening’. Nevertheless, both the bill on the rights of peasants, and the guidelines for responsible agricultural investments hold huge potential for supporting la via campesinas work on the ground with internationally recognised frameworks.
Don’t forget you are a farmer
In the achievements of the organisation it is easy to forget that really this is a farmers movement, focussed on supporting the livelihoods of peasants around the world. It is in this realm that the movement is having its biggest impacts and it came through clearly in the feeling at the conference. The last 20 years have seen a huge quantity of visits and exchanges with innumerable ideas translated between producers in different contexts. The cumulative effect of all this is to build confidence and capacity among farmers organisations to take active and political roles in directing their futures.
In a time when protest seems to come and go it is inspiring to see an organisation build to this size without compromising its vision, its voice or its demographics. It is amazing that the organisation remains such a united, democratic and honest representation of the issues producers face.

Jonathan Safran Foer , Eating Animals, Penguin 2010
Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: The Search for a Perfect Meal in a Fast-food World, Bloomsbury 2006
Jonathan Safran Foer is the successful author of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) and Everything is Illuminated (2002). In his most recent book, Eating Animals, he turns to non-fiction. Michael Pollan’s, The Omnivore’s Dilemma is slightly older and was first published in 2006. Both give unflinching accounts of factory farming and the alternatives to it but in somewhat different ways. They discuss the United States and the specifics cannot necessarily be applied to Europe but the issues they raise are universally relevant – as Foer makes clear in his brief preface to the British edition: “A British reader who cares about the issues raised in this book should not find any peace in being British”.

Eating Animals isn’t simply an argument for not eating meat (though in the process of writing it Foer did become a committed vegetarian) it is instead a consideration of what it means to be human – and thus an argument against factory farming and all that that implies. And, in the American context, where 99.9% of chickens for meat, 97% of laying hens, 99% of turkeys, 95% of pigs and 78% of cattle are reared in in-your-face factory conditions, there is precious little else to eat if you want to eat meat.

Eating Animals once again finds Foer playing with form, as he interweaves horrific facts and figures with intimate dinner time memories. The first and the last chapters are both called “Storytelling”. “We are,” says Foer, “not only the teller of our stories, we are the stories themselves”.

The book is wide ranging: from an infatuation with a puppy called George to the cruelty of long-line fishing, from breaking into a poultry factory farm to the genetics of modern farm animals. There is an interview with a factory farmer and one with a vegan who designs slaughter houses. There are reflections on avian flu and a chapter on the meaning (or meaninglessness) of so many of the words central to the discussion: animal, bycatch, cruelty, free-range and fresh (both of which Foer dismisses simply as “bullshit”). Foer visits farms that try to do things differently; Frank Reeves’s poultry range, Paul Willis’s pig farm, Bill and Colette Niman’s cattle ranch nestle amongst the realities of the slaughterhouse and the dehumanisation of those who work there. All this is underpinned by Foer’s moral frame of reference, which constantly calls into question what it is to be human, asking why we allow the cruelties of factory farming, or how we can feel whole while deliberately forgetting.

The factory farm provides animal protein at a historically cheap price. But it only does so by externalising the real costs. For instance, animal agriculture makes a 40% greater contribution to global warming than all transportation in the world combined. The health costs are also severe: all kinds of pathogens (like new strains of salmonella and e coli) are spread in factory farm environments, and indeed affect much supermarket meat. It is not for nothing that the Centres for Disease Control estimates there are 76 million cases of food-borne disease in the US each year. As Foer comments: “Your friend didn’t “catch a bug” so much as eat a bug…in all likelihood… created by factory farming”.

Factory farms contribute to the growth of microbial-resistant pathogens simply because of the vast quantities of antimicrobials they consume: compare the three million pounds of antibiotics given to people in the US each year with the industry estimate of just under six times this amount fed to animals (the Union of Concerned Scientists thinks it is probably between eight and ten times as much). It happens because animals fed antibiotics put on weight faster than they otherwise would, and because animals in the overcrowded conditions of the factory farm get ill, so it’s better (for profit) to treat them prophylacticly.

There is every reason to believe that factory farms are creating the conditions for a new super pathogen. All flus have an avian origin, transmitted to humans either directly or via other animals, farm pigs being common. As recently as 2005 it was proven that the Spanish flu epidemic was avian in origin. The recent scares over SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) and ‘swine fever’ are harbingers of what is to come; 6 of the 8 genetic segments of the currently most feared virus in the world, reports Foer, have been traced directly to US factory farms. Due to factory farming another epidemic like the Spanish flu is waiting to happen.

Whilst slaughterhouses in the US are notionally inspected and controlled, Foer shows how little such controls mean. In the late 80s former inspector Temple Grandin witnessed “ ‘deliberate acts of cruelty occurring on a regular basis’ at 32 percent of the plants she surveyed during announced visits in the United States”. If this is observed during announced visits the mind-boggles to think what day to day practices are like. Drawing on Gail Eisnitz’s interviews with workers in her book Slaughterhouse, Foer argues it is impossible for people to remain human when working in a slaughterhouse.

The known horrors of intensive meat production ought to be enough to radically transform the practice of the factory farm. Instead there has been only a tinkering at the edges. As Foer summarises “the factory farm industry (in alliance with the pharmaceutical industry) currently has more power than public-health professionals”. Eating Animals give some insights into the political economy of the factory farm: how the mass producing monolith has almost eliminated the family farm, sometimes by outcompeting it, and sometimes by buying up and closing down the local hatcheries, slaughterhouses, grain-storage facilities and other services farmers require to survive outside the vertically integrated chains of the giant food corporations like Tyson, Smithfield, Monsanto and the handful of others that control the food industry in the States. Foer’s account would have been strengthened by giving these elements further attention.

Despite these omissions Eating Animals is an important and unique book but it has to be acknowledged that Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, is the more comprehensive. Pollan’s structure is simple: based on his own preparation of four meals that have their origins in radically different ways of raising food.

Pollan’s first section on the industrial food chain is hard to beat as he follows the triumphal march of government encouraged cheap corn (maize) from the field to the feedlot, to the mill and eventually to the supermarket – where more than a quarter of the forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket contain processed corn products. It’s fascinating stuff and the short account of cattle being fattened on the feedlots is not for the squeamish.

In looking at alternatives, Pollan’s analysis of what he calls ‘industrial organic’ is an eye-opener for anyone who is starry-eyed about pesticide free meat. Pollan critiques the use of the term organic when it is used to symbolise alternative in every sense – a diverse polyculture based on small-scale, local, non-exploitative social relations of production – as well as eschewing artificial fertilisers, pesticides, herbicides. A substantial section of the organic sector has been transformed into a capitalistically intensive, exploitative monoculture, often transporting its produce hundreds or even thousands of miles to its (super)markets. It is better (organic fertilisers, no pesticides), but it is very often not what you think it is.

Pollan then proceeds to look at the best of the alternatives he found, Polyface Farm, where Joel Salatin manages to produce a substantial output of chickens, turkeys and beef cattle on grass in “a food chain rooted in a perennial polyculture”. Grass is once again the basis of the farm (as it used to be before the age of the factory farm which incidentally barely existed anywhere before the Second World War). Animals are brought up out of doors and rotated on pastures, living a healthy and as “natural” a life as can be for any animal whose purpose in being raised is eventually to end up as food for others higher up the food chain. If there is animal food production which we can accept, it should look something like this.

Pollan’s writing is lucid, his storytelling rooted in a clear understanding of the economic underpinnings of the various choices farmers make, or are steered to make, in today’s agribusiness-dominated system. I found it is a more analytically coherent book than Foer’s fragmented and sometimes quirky form of presentation (though Pollan’s final odyssey, cooking a meal entirely of ingredients he had gathered or hunted for himself, including wild boar, has a quirkyness all of its own).

In many ways Foer and Pollan end in similar places. They both agree that the factory farm is the enemy. It simply has to be stopped. Support for any animal-centred farming philosophy is vastly preferable to the industrial factory where animals are treated as things (as are the people who have to work in these monstrous enterprises). But while Foer is now a committed vegetarian, Pollan is not. (Curiously, Foer never explicitly explores the vegetarian-vegan divide; but the logic of his argument would seem to place him firmly with the vegans.)

Foer goes where Pollan doesn’t really want to: asking why eat meat and what the real costs are to us, as human beings, of so doing. Of course Foer does express views – sentiments – but this is not, despite some reviewers’ criticisms, a ‘sentimental’ book. He provides plenty of countervailing arguments made by interviewees who are meat eaters and even the odd factory farmer. Pollan isn’t really troubled about eating meat in the abstract; Foer has become so. In a short, sharp snap at Pollan who claims that the moral clarity of the vegetarian depends on a denial of reality Foer asks simply which of them is denying the reality they both describe so graphically.

Pollan’s book made me very angry about the feedlot and the factory farm, but Foer’s sentiments got under my skin. I can no longer make sense of my own attitudes: an abhorrence of factory farming, a preference for organic meat which I eat occasionally, but a willingness, nonetheless, to eat factory-farmed produce, generally knowing-but-not-knowing that it is such – bacon and eggs, that stunning jerk chicken off a street stall at the Notting Hill carnival, food at friends where it wouldn’t occur to me to upset anyone by asking about the provenance of the fodder.

I was struck while reading Foer by the connexions to a book I’ve long admired: Stanley Cohen’s award-winning States of Denial (2002), a study about reactions to unwelcome knowledge, particularly the suffering that some people inflict on others – how people know but don’t know or at least don’t notice, process, digest, forget. Cohen was brought up in South Africa and lived for eighteen years in Israel so had plenty of primary material to underpin his enquiry. It ranges widely, but is focused on what people do to other people.

Foer (like Peter Singer, Tom Regan, J M Coetzee and many others) extends this enquiry to animals: “The secrecy that enabled factory farming is breaking down” he writes. “We can’t plead ignorance, only indifference. We have the burden and the opportunity of living in the moment when the critique of factory farming broke into the popular consciousness. We are the ones of whom it will be fairly asked, What did you do when you learned the truth about eating animals?”

What’s in the name?
In Mali there is a powerful symbol that could serve as the symbol of food sovereignty. It’s a woman who left her mark in the history of Mali, as a woman and as a great farmer. When you mention her name everyone knows what this name represents. She is the mother who brings food, the mother who farms, who fought for her recognition as a woman in an environment which wasn’t favourable to her. This woman was called Nyéléni. If we use this symbol everyone in Mali will know that it’s a struggle for food, a struggle for food sovereignty.
Ibrahim

Greece
The situation in Greece is that over the past few decades farmers have been paid to stop cultivating – to take out old trees, old vines, etc . . . So now there is a lot of uncultivated arable land left unused and seemingly abandoned. With the economic crisis these farmers are getting less money and now everyone is afraid because we have all this land but no food is being grown.
In a search for a proactive alternative some families are going back to trying to directly support their local farmers. They are getting together to form consumer collectives to buy produce to try and usurp the middle-man. People are also trying to create alternative currencies to keep economies local.
Jenny Gkiougki works with the Greek indignados

Belgium
In Belgium there is a lack of cohesion among agricultural groups because of the language barrier and all the politics that go along with it. Consequently there is very little collaboration between the grass-roots movements on either side of the Flanders and Walloon areas of Belgium. However, some of the recent developments in food movements are similar in the northern and southern parts of the country.
There is a strong, growing local food network in the Walloon part, the GASAP (Groupe d’Achat Solidaire de l’Agriculture Paysanne) based in Brussels, and the Voedselteams in Flanders. The latter is the better established with a staff of five half-time employees, over 120 local groups and 80 farmers engaged in the project. All the groups have a similar approach as they focus on the proximity of the food producers to consumers. They have developed their own screening systems for farmers because of the failure of the main organic labels to count distance and scale of farming as criteria for labelling.
There is a very new phenomenon of ‘community supported agriculture’ farms appearing in Flanders that have a self-harvesting approach. There are about seven at the moment, operating close to cities such as Leuven, Gent and Antwerp. Farmers’ markets have also grown in recent years and been embraced by local authorities.
Last year, a group of six short food supply chain projects appealed to the Flemish government for a strategic action plan on short chain agriculture. This will involve a recognition of short supply chains as a new innovation that increases contact between food producers and consumers, enables producers to set their own prices for their products and produces food for local markets and communities.’
Wim Merckx, Belgian delegate from Flanders

Spain
As in all Europe, peasants and small farmers are disappearing in Spain. Statistics show that over the last 20 years three farms have closed every hour. There are lots of different problems caused by the abandonment of agricultural activity. Among them, due to our arid climate, are soil erosion and the threat of desertification. Social problems are even worse; depopulation of the rural environment causes a territorial imbalance and a deep disconnection between cities and villages.
However, there is a growing movement that offers solutions and practices alternatives to the dominant system. For more than ten years now, farmers, urban consumers, environmental activists and others have been working together for food sovereignty, resisting the current rules, bringing consumers and farmers closer together and developing new and innovative ways of fighting commercialisation, GM foods and so on. We want and we need peasants to produce local and healthy food that both respects the environment and keeps villages alive. It is great to share problems and experiences with people from all Europe and to see that there is a strong European movement fighting for food sovereignty.
Blanca G Ruibal, Friends of the Earth Spain

Bulgaria
In Bulgaria, as elsewhere, the problem is that there are a lot of powerful supermarkets that are not obliged to sell local products. The population is generally very poor, so people are forced to look for the cheapest goods, which are normally imported. This is killing Bulgarian producers.
Local groups have set up internet consumer schemes that organise together to create a virtual cooperative for food. This is done mainly through Google groups, with people ordering what they want on the web and then sending a collective order to the local farmers. This enables the farmers to know how much of particular products are needed and what to concentrate on. It also gives them considerably better financial security.
Bulgarian community food organiser

Italy
In Italy, the main problem now is that we are treating food as a commodity and the financialisation of agriculture is the major example of that. Land has been abandoned all over the country, not because it was impossible to farm but because the industrialised farming system thought the local market wasn’t important any more. This has led to a huge loss of biodiversity because we thought that vegetables need only be produced in just two or three regions in the south.
However, there are more examples of food sovereignty projects in Italy than ever. These include farmers’ markets giving producers direct contact with consumers – they are no longer simply consumers because they ask about production and become part of the process. In Italy we now have one million meals per day made with organic products, almost all Italian. This local money is generating a lot of local development for organic farmers.
Andrea Ferrante, chair of the Italian association for organic farming

The Nyeleni Europe website is being developed as a resource for the food sovereignty movement. The forum agreed on Europe-wide actions, including supermarket occupations, marches and other forms of direct action on the ‘International Day of Peasant Struggle’, 17 April 2012

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is one of the international aid agencies struggling to respond in Somalia and refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya. We’re also struggling to define responsible fundraising within a discourse that relies on guilt and superficial messages. Fundraising experts warn us that offering a more complex picture of the difficulties of delivering aid will lead to cynicism and donor fatigue: It’s shock value that works.

At the risk of losing some donations, MSF believes we must realistically represent what Somalis are facing, and our limits in assisting them. Simplifying the message may boost revenue, but if it comes at the expense of presenting a realistic picture, then the cost is too high.

Aid is difficult. Things go wrong all the time. In war zones particularly, non-governmental organizations continually fall short as we face massive challenges in accessing people who need us most. It’s never enough, even in the most straightforward emergencies. Of all the places I’ve seen, Somalia is among the most complex emergencies. The food security crisis is caused by a combination of conflict, displacement, bureaucratic obstacles to aid provision, misguided policies and drought. It is, in essence, a man-made disaster, aggravated by a natural phenomenon.

Working in Somalia requires an understanding of local political players, a capacity to constantly negotiate with warlords, and the drive to keep projects running despite security threats. Movement across front lines is almost impossible, preventing aid organizations from getting staff and supplies to those suffering the most. Somalis who can make the journey come to aid delivery points inside the country, or across the border in neighbouring countries. Those who can’t make it perish. Families are forced to leave loved ones behind when they lack the strength to go on.

The current crisis is the product of 20 years of war. Even before the recent drought, it was estimated there were only four doctors for every 100,000 people. Most health workers were based in cities. One in 10 women died in childbirth, and as many as 25 per cent of children under 5 never saw their fifth birthday. The average lifespan was 47 years. Drought, of course, has exacerbated the crisis: Harvests have failed, livestock have died. But this is on top of war, and some of the worst health indicators in the world, as well as high food prices and transportation costs.

Ads and headlines that label this crisis ‘Famine in the Horn of Africa’ or ‘East Africa Drought’ reduce people’s plight to the simple need for food and water. In reality Somali people have struggled to survive decades of the harshest circumstances on Earth, brought about by political chaos and military agendas.

Giving to save the life of a starving child in a photo won’t take Somalia very far. That’s not to say that donations are not important; rather, that there’s more to the story. Let’s be honest in admitting that humanitarian aid won’t solve Somalia’s problems, beyond keeping people alive for better times in the distant future. Aid is a temporary measure until more permanent solutions can address root causes, and the downward spiral can be reversed.

Donors can handle this complexity. Aid organizations, all of us, need to confront the story behind the tragic, if successful, fundraising images. Yes, we will lose some donors. But I’m convinced that most will continue to support aid, and will do so from a much stronger foundation, one that makes room for error. If aid organizations were bolder about the realism of our communications, we could foster groundbreaking levels of transparency and accountability.

Delivering aid in Somalia is difficult and dangerous, but not impossible. Provided it is executed in an impartial, neutral and preferably independent way, it will reach those in need, as MSF’s 12 major projects throughout Somalia – which are currently treating approximately 35,000 malnourished children – prove on a daily basis. But humanitarian assistance is only a rough remedy, deployed when politics and economic development have failed. It prevents a situation from deteriorating even further, but is emphatically apolitical and can therefore offer no resolution to the root causes of crises.

McHarg is a trained nurse with twenty years’ experience of humanitarian relief. She is currently executive director of MSF in Toronto. A version of this article first appeared in Canada’s Globe and Mail. Visit MSF to see the latest on their work in Somalia.