Posted onApril 22, 2022byBhikkhu Bodhi|Comments Off on War in Ukraine, the Tipping Point for a Global Food Catastrophe
By David Braughton
The war in Ukraine entails not only death, injury, and destitution for millions of people, but is also precipitating a major food crisis with global ramifications.
Refugees leaving Ukraine. Photo by Mirek Pruchnicki, from Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.
The scenes of widespread destruction and devastation coming out of Ukraine remind one of the kind of post-apocalyptical world depicted in graphic novels where the unthinkable has happened. Bodies littering the street, entire residential neighborhoods decimated, safe havens—hospitals, bomb shelters, daycare centers—bombed, and hastily dug mass graves scarring the landscape. One photo shows a woman mourning over her young child who was killed in a missile strike. Another shows an elderly woman desperately clawing at the rubble of what was once her home, hoping to find her loved ones still alive beneath the broken bricks and shredded timbers. In still another, men look futilely at an apartment building with flames pouring out of rooms that, until yesterday, people called home.
Over 4 million Ukrainians have fled their homeland to neighboring countries. They are the lucky ones. Another 7.1 million Ukrainians have been dislocated and thousands have perished. What these images do not show is the starvation that many Ukrainians now face, while at the same time warehouses stand filled with thousands of metric tons of wheat, corn, and sunflower oil. Farms, which once grew enough grain to feed 400 million people, have become battlegrounds just as the growing season begins. All these are portents of an even more widespread catastrophe for people around the globe who depend on Ukrainian grain and oil for their daily diet.
Even before the war broke out, an estimated 881 million people, approximately 10% of the world’s population, experienced chronic food insecurity. Local conflicts, climate change, supply chain disruptions, rising fuel prices, and chronic unemployment caused by COVID, had already pushed many of these individuals to the brink of starvation. As a result of the war, the World Food Programme (WFP) estimates that as many as 250 million more of the world’s poor will become food insecure.
According to the International Monetary Fund, the cost of wheat rose by 80% between April 2020 and December 2021. Recently, a UN report said that food prices across the globe rose by 34% this past year. For people in poor countries such as Egypt, who might spend as much as 50% or 60% of their income on food, this increase has put many essentials, such as bread and other staples, out of their reach. Four months ago, five Egyptian pounds (roughly 30 cents in U.S. currency) would have bought ten loaves of bread, but now they can buy only seven.
The WFP reports that the countries most dependent upon Ukrainian exports include Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia, and Sudan. But the effects are being felt globally, even in places as remote as Peru and Sri Lanka, where the ever-increasing cost of food is contributing to political unrest and instability. In both countries, people have turned out for mass demonstrations and, in some cases, have rioted to protest the scarcity and cost of staples such as wheat and corn and gasoline.
Western nations have responded to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by imposing harsh economic sanctions and supplying Ukraine with primarily defensive weapons. The result has been even more costly fuel, the loss of another important source of basic foodstuffs, and a drastic reduction in the export of fertilizer, which many farmers depend on to grow their crops. Add to this the drought that has reduced wheat yields in the western United States and elsewhere, and the situation looks even more dire.
The World Food Programme, which feeds approximately 250 million people daily, reports that prior to the war, it purchased 50% of all its grain from Ukraine. Now it must spend $71 million more each month due to shortages and rising shipping and operating costs. David Beasley, the program’s Executive Director, has stated that the WFP may have to cut rations in half as they turn their attention to also feeding the millions of Ukrainians who have been displaced and the millions more people elsewhere around the world who now face food insecurity and the threat of starvation. This means taking food from undernourished infants in Africa to ensure that people whose homes and lives have been destroyed, along with those who live far from the conflict, do not starve to death. Beasley goes on to say that “we’ve got now 45 million people in 38 countries that are knocking on famine’s door.” And the price increase in places like Syria will be 100% or 200%. In Yemen, the WFP has already cut rations to 8 million people and about 50% to people in Chad, Niger, and Mali.
The terrible irony, according to Beasley, is that there is $430 trillion in wealth around the world today, so there is no reason any child should be dying from hunger. Without immediate action, he predicts that in addition to civil unrest and political instability, the world will witness mass migrations unprecedented in human history.
For its part, Buddhist Global Relief has decided to make one-time supplemental allocations to twenty-two of the direct food relief projects that it currently sponsors. These projects are located in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Cameroon, Kenya, Haiti, India, Malawi, Mongolia, Peru, Uganda, Vietnam, and the United States. BGR is also intending to expand its emergency relief assistance in anticipation of more urgent requests in the coming months. If you would like to support these efforts, please consider contributing now. Our website is buddhistglobalrelief.org.
David Braughton is the vice-chair of Buddhist Global Relief.
Posted onFebruary 7, 2022byBhikkhu Bodhi|Comments Off on Technology Is Not the Answer to Our Many Human and Ecological Crises
By Steven Gorelick
As people are being pushed into deepening dependence on large-scale, technological systems, a reaction has set in that sees increased respect for indigenous wisdom, for women and for the feminine, and a growing appreciation for wild nature and for all things vernacular, handmade, artisanal, and local.
A traditional woman farmer in India (Photo: Oxfam India)
The most recent topic explored by the thinkers and activists who make up the Great Transition Network was “Technology and the Future.” As writer after writer posted their thoughts, it was heartening to see that almost all recognize that technology cannot provide real solutions to the many crises we face. I was also happy that Professor William Robinson, author of a number of books on the global economy, highlighted the clear connection between computer technologies and the further entrenchment of globalization today.
As anyone who has followed my work will know, globalization is of particular interest to me: for more than 40 years I’ve been studying its impacts on different cultures and societies around the world. From Ladakh and Bhutan to Sweden and Australia, a clear pattern has emerged: as people are pushed into deepening dependence on large-scale, technological systems, ecological and social crises escalate.
I’m not the only one to have seen this. In the International Forum on Globalization—a network I co-founded in 1992—I worked with forty writers, journalists, academics, and social and environmental leaders from around the world to inform the public about the ways in which “free-trade” treaties, the principal drivers of globalization, have eroded democracy, destroyed livelihoods, and accelerated resource extraction. In countries as disparate as Sweden and India, I have seen how globalization intensifies competition for jobs and resources, leading to dramatic social breakdown—including not only ethnic and religious conflict, but also depression, alcoholism and suicide.
Professor Robinson wrote that we are “at the brink of another round of restructuring and transformation based on a much more advanced digitalization of the entire global economy.” This is true, but the link between globalization and technological expansion began well before the computer era. Large-scale, technological apparatuses can be understood as the arms and legs of centralized profit-making. And while 5G networks, satellites, mass data-harvesting, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality will allow the colonization of still more physical, economic, and mental space by multinational corporations, technologies like fossil fuels, global trading infrastructures, and television have already helped to impose a corporate-run consumer-based economy in almost every corner of the globe.
For reasons that are increasingly evident, an acceleration of this process is the last thing we need in a time of serious social and environmental crises. What’s more, the technologies themselves—from the sensors to the satellites—all rely heavily on scarce resources, not least rare earth minerals. Some of the world’s richest corporations are now racing each other to extract these minerals from the deepest seabeds and from the surface of Mars. It has been estimated that the internet alone—with its largely invisible data warehouses (much of it manned by exploited labor in the “developing” world)—will use up a fifth of global electricity consumption by 2025.
And for what? So that we can all spend more time immersed in and addicted to virtual worlds? So that we can automate agriculture, and drive more communities off the land into swelling urban slums? So that drones can deliver our online purchases without an iota of face-to-face contact?
When thinking about technology from within an already high-tech, urban context, we can easily forget that nearly half the global population still lives in villages, still connected to the land. This is not to say that their way of life is not under threat—far from it. Ladakh, the Himalayan region where I lived and worked for several decades, was unconnected to the outside world by even a road until the 1960s. But today you can find processed corporate food, smartphones, mountains of plastic waste, traffic jams and other signs of ‘modernity’ in the capital, Leh.
The first steps on this path were taken in the mid-1970s when, in the name of ‘development,’ massive resources went into building up the energy, communications, and transport infrastructures needed to tie Ladakh to the global economy. Another step involved pulling Ladakhi children out of their villages into western-style schools, where they learned none of the place-based skills that supported Ladakh’s culture for centuries, and instead were trained into the technological-modernist paradigm. Together, these forces are pushing the traditional way of life to the brink of extinction.
While that process began relatively recently in Ladakh, in the west it has been going on far longer, with deeper impacts. But even here, more and more people are becoming aware that the technologization of their personal lives has led to increasing stress, isolation, and mental health struggles. During the pandemic people have been forced to do more online than ever before—from classes to conversations with friends and family—and most have discovered how limited and empty online life can be. There is a clear cultural turning, visible now even in the mainstream, that goes beyond a desire to spend less time on screens. People are also beginning to reject the posturing of the consumer culture and its work-and-spend treadmill, wanting instead to slow down, to cultivate deeper relationships, and to engage in more community-oriented and nature-based activities.
I see young people all over the world choosing to leave their screen-based jobs to become farmers. (This return to the land is happening in Ladakh, as well, which I find truly inspiring.) Informal networks of mutual aid are arising. Friends are gardening, cooking, and baking bread together; families are choosing to live on the land and developing relationships with the animals and plants around them. We are seeing increased respect for indigenous wisdom, for women and for the feminine, and a growing appreciation for wild nature and for all things vernacular, handmade, artisanal, and local.
There is also an emergence of alternative, ecological practices in every discipline: from natural medicine to natural building, from eco-psychology to ecological agriculture. Although these disciplines have often been the target of corporate co-optation and greenwashing, they have invariably emerged from bottom-up efforts to restore a healthier relationship with the Earth.
All of these are positive, meaningful trends that have been largely ignored by the media, and given no support by policymakers. At the moment, they are running uphill in a system that favors corporate-led technological development at every turn. They testify to enduring goodwill, to a deep human desire for connection.
When viewed from a big-picture perspective, the expansion of digital technologies—which are inherently centralized and centralizing – runs contrary to the emergence of a more humane, sustainable, and genuinely connected future. Why should we accept an energy-and mineral-intensive technological infrastructure that is fundamentally about speeding life up, increasing our screen-time, automating our jobs, and tightening the grip of the 1%?
For a better future, we need to put technology back in its place and favor democratically determined, diverse forms of development that are shaped by human and ecological priorities—not by the gimmicky fetishes of a handful of billionaires.
Steven Gorelick is Managing Programs Director at Local Futures (International Society for Ecology and Culture). He is the author of Small is Beautiful, Big is Subsidized (pdf), co-author of Bringing the Food Economy Home, and co-director of The Economics of Happiness. His writings have been published in The Ecologist and Resurgence magazines. He frequently teaches and speaks on local economics around the U.S.
Originally published on Common Dreams on February 2, 2022. Reprinted here under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
King speaking to an anti-Vietnam war rally at the University of Minnesota in St. Paul, April 27, 1967. (Photo: Wikipedia)
King saw his commitment to racial justice and his opposition to the war in Vietnam as integrally connected aspects of a single moral and spiritual demand: “to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy.” He joined the dots to see the triple evil of racism, poverty, and militarism as three manifestations of a pernicious scheme of values that prizes wealth above people.
The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. is best known as the civil rights leader who, in the late 1950s and 1960s, led his fellow African Americans in their nonviolent struggle to end the oppressive Jim Crow policies that reigned throughout the South. His crowning achievement, in this period of his life, was the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965. In recognition of his role in leading these campaigns, King was honored with the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.
King’s victory in the fight for civil rights did not bring an end to his commitment to social justice. The same inner calling that drew him to the struggle for civil rights now beckoned him into new arenas that called for a conscientious response. One cause to which King devoted himself was opposition to the U.S. war in Vietnam, which had surged in the late 1960s, with a devastating rise in casualties. The other was the persistence of crippling poverty, which was particularly endemic among African Americans but also beset people of all races throughout the U.S. and around the world.
King saw these manifestations of human suffering—racism, militarism, and poverty—not as isolated and disconnected phenomena, but as overlapping, interconnected violations of inherent human dignity. In his view, they all sprang from a fundamental distortion in values that infected the depths of the soul. Thus the remedy for them—for all three at once—was not merely a change in political and economic policies but a far-reaching moral transformation of human consciousness that extended down to its base.
King is best remembered for his poignant “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial at the famous March on Washington in August 1963. The speech envisioned a future when people would embrace each other without regard for the color of their skin, when even in Alabama, “little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.” Despite its popular appeal, however, in my view “I Have a Dream” was not King’s most potent and incisive speech. That distinction belongs, rather, to the speech he gave at the Riverside Church in New York on April 4, 1967, exactly a year before his assassination.
It was in the Riverside speech that he publicly announced his opposition to the U.S. war in Vietnam. For a long time, he had inwardly opposed the war but had never previously spoken against it in public. Now he felt his conscience demanded he speak out, and he thus titled the speech “A Time to Break Silence.”
King’s decision to declare his opposition to the war drew pointed criticism. Many of the American political leaders who supported him on civil rights turned against him; some even tried to smear him as a communist agent. But criticism also came from his fellow leaders in the civil rights struggle. They pleaded with him to reverse his decision, asking him not to risk jeopardizing their cause by stepping outside his proper domain. In their view, further progress in securing civil rights required that, with regard to the war, King continue to remain silent.
King, however, had a different view about his responsibilities. He saw his commitment to the cause of racial justice and his opposition to the war as integrally connected aspects of a single moral and spiritual demand, a demand that swelled up from the depths of his being as if by divine decree. In the speech he offers seven reasons for his decision to speak out against the war. Of these, the one he felt most pressing was his conviction that as a preacher and a man of God, he was obliged “to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy” (p. 234).[1] Whether it was Black Americans denied their civil and political rights or Vietnamese peasants decimated by U.S. bombing raids, it was the need to defend the full humanity of the victims that pricked King’s conscience and brought forth words of eloquence from his mouth and pen.
After explaining in detail his reasons for opposing the war, he next offers a sharp but salutary diagnosis of the underlying forces that drive American policy. This diagnosis takes us beyond politics into the spiritual domain, into “the soul of America,” which makes King’s critique even more cogent in relation to our own time. He decries the war, not only for the violence it inflicts on innocent lives, but because it is “a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit.” He identifies this malady as a pernicious scheme of values that gives priority to “things” over people; specifically, a code of values that endorses the quest for wealth, profits, and property rights even when these pursuits lead to the oppression, death, and devastation of millions of our fellow human beings.
King locates, at the root of our cultural pathologies, “the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism.” The unity of these three evil forces figures prominently in King’s thought throughout his later years. He declares, in his Vietnam speech, that “this business of burning human beings with napalm … of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love.” Then he delivers a stark warning: “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death” (p. 241) This message is especially crucial for us to heed today. Here in America we falter over a bill that would provide urgently needed programs of social assistance to poor and low-wage families, on the grounds that they are “too expensive”; yet we gladly heap close to $800 billion annually on our bloated military machine. Such a disparity is surely an offense to the moral consciousness and a betrayal of our constitutional obligation to provide for the common welfare.
In the final portion of his speech, King lifts his gaze from its focus on the immediate crisis of the Vietnam war and extends it to the broader dimensions of the human situation as he viewed it under the conditions of his own time; these conditions are still very much with us today. He speaks of how, all over the globe, people are turning against old systems of exploitation and oppression and are aspiring for new models of governance marked by justice and equality. He denounces the role of the Western nations, whose leading philosophers first envisaged the ideals of revolutionary justice, but which have now become the defenders of oppression, the foes of systemic transformation. He declares, with a provocative flourish, that “our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism” (p. 242).
King goes on to sound the call for “a genuine revolution of values,” which entails that “our loyalties must become ecumenical [that is, universal] rather than sectional.” To preserve the best in our societies, he contends, “every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind [that is, humankind] as a whole.” And that means we must heed the call “for an all-embracing and unconditional love” for all people everywhere. King clarifies that what he means by the often-diluted word “love” is not “some sentimental and weak response,” but “that force which all the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life, the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality” (p. 242).
Despite the passage of 56 years since King delivered his speech at the Riverside Church, the message he conveys still rings true, indeed with astonishing prescience. Particularly astute was his insight into the deep, hidden, inextricable connections that unify the multiple crises we face in today’s world, even right here in our own country. King’s triple scourge of systemic racism, poverty, and militarism has to be extended to include ecological devastation (especially climate change), the drift toward authoritarian forms of government around the world (even here in the U.S.), and the rise of repressive, reactionary religious sects that encourage violence and seek domination through political alliances.
Even the supreme triumph of the civil rights era—the gain of voting rights by Black Americans—is now in grave danger. These gains were already weakened by the Supreme Court decision of 2013, which removed the need for “preclearance” of changes to voting rules in states with a history of racial discrimination. Over the past few months, the right to vote is being seriously eroded by new laws that permit voter suppression, election subversion, and partisan redistricting in ways that diminish the impact of voters from Black and other minority communities.
Another major Supreme Court decision, the Citizens United ruling of 2010, also delivered a blow to genuine democracy. The ruling lets corporations and wealthy individuals spend unlimited amounts of money on elections, thereby giving disproportionate weight to the interests of the ultra-wealthy over the concerns of ordinary citizens. The result has been to hand control over our political system to giant corporations and moneyed groups, with a corresponding reduction in the role the people have in determining who represents them and what kinds of programs are enacted. This has allowed vast disparities in wealth to grow still wider, such that here in the U.S. roughly 40% of the population is poor or low income, while just six men possess between them over $900 billion.
With the increasing rise of autocratic tendencies in American politics, the replacement of the rule of law by the rule of wealth, and the persistence of poverty and new manifestations of racism, our situation becomes increasingly dire, the future of American democracy ever more fragile. Since currents in American politics do not remain confined within our own borders, the impact of an autocratic takeover of the U.S. would inevitably spread across the globe, encouraging other aspiring autocrats to take control of their countries. Already strange partnerships are emerging among autocrats in distant lands.
All these worrisome developments call for a determined moral response, a response ultimately grounded in compassion and the affirmation of human solidarity. Delay is not an option. Here King’s words, toward the end of his Vietnam speech, become especially piquant: “We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time” (p. 243).
The question we face here in the U.S.—as we flounder in our struggle against poverty, racism, devastating climate change, the erosion of voting rights, and the drift toward authoritarianism in politics and religion—is this: “Will we act in time, or will we look back, as King put it, ‘naked and dejected with a lost opportunity,’ forced to admit that we let the chance slip by and now it’s simply too late?”
[1] All references are to the text of the speech in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., edited by James M. Washington (HarperSanFrancisco, 1986).
This month our Chairperson, Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi, and Executive Director, Kim Behan jointly received the prestigious Dr. Ambedkar Prabuddha Bharata Peace Award, granted by a Buddhist organization in India called the Nagarjuna Training Institute. The institute, based at Nagaloka in Nagpur, continues the heritage of Engaged Buddhism started by the Dalit leader, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar (1891-1956).
For those who do not know of him, Dr. Ambedkar was an Indian jurist, economist, and social reformer who rose up from poverty to become one of the foremost leaders of independent India. He was born into a poor family of the Dalit community, the people previously referred to by caste Hindus as “Untouchables”—those whose very shadow was considered inauspicious and whose touch was thought to pollute. In his youth, Ambedkar suffered the indignities inflicted upon Dalits by reason of their birth, but he was a bright and diligent student who overcame the obstacles he faced in pursuit of his education. He excelled in his studies and went on to earn two doctorate degrees, from Columbia Univerity and the London School of Economics. After independence, he became India’s first Minister of Law and Justice and the principal author of the Indian Constitution.
Dr. Ambedkar deeply opposed the Hindu caste system, with its degrading treatment of the Dalits, and he vowed that though he was born a Hindu, he would not die one. He embarked on a thorough study of the world’s major religions and in the end decided that Buddhism best met his aspirations. On October 15, 1956, at a large ceremony in Nagpur, he formally undertook the Three Refuges and Five Precepts, the twin gateway to the Dharma. Immediately afterward he led 500,000 Dalits in renouncing their Hindu heritage and adopting Buddhism.
Sadly, just two months after his conversion, Ambedkar died due to chronic poor health. But the revolution he started continued to roll on. In the years and decades following the initial mass conversion ceremony, millions of Dalits have followed Dr. Ambedkar in embracing Buddhism, and thus in India today there is a large Buddhist population drawn mainly from the Dalit community. Nagaloka in Nagpur is one of their primary religious and educational centers.
The Nagarjuna Training Institute (NTI) was established at Nagaloka to provide training in Buddhist teachings to young Buddhists from all over India. After completing the training program, the trainees return to their home communities to help in propagating Buddhism. Through its programs the institute strives to promote the ideal of Prabuddha Bharat—an Enlightened India—and to play a part in the global Buddhist family.
Every year the institute confers the Dr. Ambedkar Prabuddha Bharata Peace Award, which it presents on October 15, the anniversary of Dr. Ambedkar’s embrace of Buddhism. This date is also considered the anniversary of King Ashoka’s conversion to Buddhism. The Peace Award is presented “to those who have made significant contributions to the development of Buddhism and the welfare of humanity, not only in India, but throughout the world.” This year the award committee saw fit to confer the award on Bhante and Kim Behan—to Bhante for his scholarship and contributions to human welfare through BGR and to Kim for her role as executive director of BGR.
The time that the celebration of the mass conversion ceremony took place in India was too late for Bhante to join online, so he recorded an acceptance speech, which was played at the ceremony. But Kim, in Colorado, participated online and submitted a short address, which will soon be published on the BGR blog. In accepting the award, Kim writes: “I would like to share the Dr. Ambedkar Peace Award with the entire team at Buddhist Global Relief in recognition of our work together in the Dharma.”
Carla Prater is Assistant Director of Buddhist Global Relief.
Posted onApril 13, 2021byBhikkhu Bodhi|Comments Off on Global Health and Development Orgs: Biden Must Launch A Global Vaccine Program to End Covid Pandemic
News release from Public Citizen
Sixty-six global health and development organizations have appealed to President Biden to launch a global vaccine manufacturing program to end the pandemic. U.S. leadership of such a program would provide billions of additional Covid-19 vaccine doses to the world. Buddhist Global Relief was one of the signatories to this appeal.
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Public Citizen and 65 other global health, development and humanitarian organizations today called on President Joe Biden to announce and implement a global vaccine manufacturing program to end the pandemic and build a globally-distributed vaccine infrastructure for future pandemics.
“Much more ambitious U.S. leadership is needed to end to the global pandemic,” said Public Citizen’s Access to Medicines Director Peter Maybarduk. “The U.S. government should establish, urgently, a manufacturing operation for the world, that would share vaccine recipes and work with the World Health Organization to alleviate suffering and bring billions of additional vaccine doses to humanity.”
The People’s Vaccine Alliance, a movement of health and humanitarian organizations, has endorsed the letter. Some of the largest U.S.-based international groups, FHI360, International Rescue Committee, Helen Keller International and International Medical Corps, as well as advocacy organizations including RESULTS and PrEP4All, have also signed onto the letter.
The letter noted the only way to get the pandemic under control is to immediately ramp up vaccine production across the world. The group requests Biden announce a new manufacturing program in his fiscal year 2022 budget and help produce billions more vaccine doses within one year. The U.S. can do so for about $3 a dose, a fraction of the cost of inaction, according to the coalition. Without a global manufacturing plan, the economic costs to the U.S. alone could be between $800 billion to $1.4 trillion in 2021 alone.
The letter comes ahead of a fundraising conference this Thursday, hosted by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, for the COVAX facility, dedicated to increasing equitable global access to COVID-19 vaccines.
“Given the increasingly connected nature of today’s world and the risks that we consequently share, it is vital that we act proactively and decisively to address those risks,” said Nancy Aossey, president and CEO of International Medical Corps. “The U.S. has the intellectual and financial resources necessary to help lead this initiative, working across borders with other governments, and with international health agencies, to end this and future pandemics.”
“Vaccine donations alone won’t end the pandemic,” said Abby Maxman, Oxfam America CEO, a signatory to the Biden letter. “The commitments planned for COVAX are critically important, and yet entirely inadequate to meet global need. Without urgent new manufacturing commitments, billions of people may wait years for a vaccine.”
The groups said the U.S. government should not only expand production in the U.S. and abroad, but also work with the World Health Organization (WHO) to set up production hubs in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. These hubs would democratize production and improve global health security, particularly if they are accountable to the public and equipped with adaptable technologies, such as mRNA platforms, that could help defeat the next pandemic.
“The U.S. government has helped produce hundreds of millions of vaccine doses for people living in the U.S., on a relatively short timeline. The same is needed—and within reach—for all countries,” Maybarduk added. The key missing ingredient is ambitious political leadership, to end the pandemic for everyone, everywhere.”
Here is the text of the letter, along with a list of the signatories:
April 13, 2021
President Joseph R. Biden 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, D.C. 20500
Dear President Biden,
Thank you for your leadership strengthening the U.S. response to the coronavirus pandemic. We appreciate your administration’s commitment to COVAX and the recently announced Quad partnership, to support vaccine access abroad. Yet without much more ambitious leadership, the scale of global vaccine need will not be met.
Even as our country expands access to Covid-19 vaccines through the broadest vaccination campaign in U.S. history, for most of the world, there is no relief in sight. Few of the billions of people living in low- and middle-income countries will be vaccinated against Covid-19 this year. Many may not be vaccinated until 2024, if ever. Virus variants threaten to deepen and prolong the crisis.
The only way to get the pandemic under control is to accelerate global vaccine manufacturing. The United States has capabilities to help the world make billions more doses of Covid-19 vaccine for about $3 a dose, a fraction of the cost of inaction, and shorten the pandemic.
We urge your administration to announce in your fiscal year 2022 budget an ambitious global vaccine manufacturing program to end the pandemic and build vaccine infrastructure for the future.
Proposal
The United States should help the world produce billions more vaccine doses within approximately one year.
For example, modest capital investments (about $2 billion) can retrofit vaccine manufacturing facilities and install additional mRNA production lines. Doses can then be manufactured for less than $3 each. U.S. leadership is likely to inspire co-funding by other governments and international organizations. A total investment of less than $25 billion, including whole-ofgovernment efforts to source raw materials and provide technical assistance, can support the rapid production of 8 billion doses of mRNA vaccine, enough for more than half the world’s population.
The U.S. should support a massive expansion of manufacturing and establish hubs for vaccine production with the World Health Organization, including hubs located in Africa, Asia and Latin America. These hubs will democratize production and improve global health security, particularly if they are accountable to the public and equipped with adaptable technologies, such as mRNA platforms, believed critical to defeating the next pandemic.
The United States should ensure that technology is shared openly, including via the WHO Covid-19 Technology Access Pool, so that scientists and manufacturers worldwide can support vaccine delivery and development. Where necessary, the U.S. government should use its power under existing law to license technology, ensuring its availability and affordability now and for the future. Notably, taxpayers made substantial investments in Covid-19 vaccine research and development, and the U.S. government owns a key patent relied on by the major vaccine makers.
Without a vaccine manufacturing plan of global ambition, millions more people may die, with tens of millions pushed into extreme poverty. Black and Brown communities will bear the brunt of this preventable suffering. The progress achieved through decades of U.S. overseas development assistance will be reversed. People living in the United States may feel the ripple effects with ongoing threats of virus mutations. The economic costs to the United States are estimated at $800 billion to $1.4 trillion.
U.S. history demonstrates that by mobilizing extraordinary resources and the country’s full capabilities, while working closely with global partners, the country can solve complex technical challenges and support humanity in times of great need. This is one such moment, and there is no time to lose. We urge you to launch an ambitious vaccine manufacturing program in your FY22 budget to help end the global pandemic.
Public Citizen Access Challenge Action Against Hunger American Jewish World Service American Medical Student Association American Medical Women’s Association American Society of Tropical Medicine & Hygiene Amnesty USA AVAC Be a Hero Fund BRAC USA Buddhist Global Relief (USA) Center for Popular Democracy Center for Policy Analysis on Trade and Health (CPATH) ChildFund USA Chinese-American Planning Council Christian Connections for International Health (USA) CORE Group Doctors for America Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative, North America Episcopal Relief & Development Families USA FHI 360 Foundation for Integrative AIDS Research (FIAR) Friends Committee on National Legislation FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, Harvard University GOAL USA Health GAP Helen Keller International HelpAge USA Human Rights Watch USA Incentives for Global Health International Medical Corps International Rescue Committee International Treatment Preparedness Coalition Islamic Relief USA Jesuit Refugee Service John Snow, Inc. JustActions Last Mile Health Management Sciences for Health Marie Stopes International Médecins Sans Frontières, USA / Doctors Without Borders National Council of Churches USA Network Lobby for Catholic Social Justice Oxfam America Partners In Health Pathfinder International People’s Action Physicians for Human Rights Planned Parenthood Federation of America PrEP4All Prescription Justice RESULTS Right to Health Action Salud y Farmacos Social Security Works Sojourners SumOfUs USA The Borgen Project Treatment Action Group (TAG) Union for Reform Judaism Universities Allied for Essential Medicines (UAEM) Yale Global Health Justice Partnership
Posted onJune 17, 2020byBhikkhu Bodhi|Comments Off on From Tragedy Springs Hope: Reflections on the Killing of George Floyd
By Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi
The police killing of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, in Minneapolis, ignited protests and marches around the country under the banner of Black Lives Matter. To fulfill this aspiration will require extensive changes both in our institutions and in our ways of thought.
Photo: Samuel Wagner, Flickr
The police killing of George Floyd this past Memorial Day has set off a stream of protests in cities and towns across the U.S., and even around the world, united under the banner of “Black Lives Matter.” The murder, captured on video by a passing pedestrian, reveals the horror of racism in its terrible immediacy. Floyd’s dying words, “I can’t breathe,” followed by his silence, leave us shocked at witnessing such a naked display of cruelty taking place in broad daylight in a major American city, committed by an officer of the law.
Anyone who attends to the news knows that such killings are not rare. The names of the victims repeatedly flash across the media, each time setting off a wave of public revulsion. Where the murder of Mr. Floyd stood out was in the rawness of the visual imagery that revealed the slow agony of his death. Continue reading →
Even though Covid-19 has been taking a heavy toll on workers in the meat industry, late last month President Trump issued an executive order demanding that meat-processing plants must resume operations. The effect of this order is to confront workers with a horrendouschoice: either risk losing their jobs or risk losing their lives. With meat-processing plants becoming hot spots for Covid-19, many workers are terrified about going back to work.
The Priority of Profit
The well-known saying of Jesus, “The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath,” might be reformulated with regard to the economy: “The economy should serve the needs of people; people should not be made to serve the economy.” Yet the logic of modern corporate capitalism often dictates just the opposite, that people be subordinated to the demands of the economy, an omnivorous giant that feeds off a steady stream of human sweat, blood, and tears.
With the profit motive as its driving vector, the mammoth corporation directs all the components of its complex operational system toward profit maximization. When profits stagnate or decline, the company may freely adopt whatever measures are needed to change course and push earnings back on an upward curve, often without regard for the physical well-being of its employees. While labor unions earlier formed a bulwark against corporate abuse, the decline of unions has given corporations license to get their way without fear of resistance.
A particularly egregious example of this inversion of ethical priorities came to light at the end of April when President Trump invoked the Defense Production Act to compel meat-processing facilities to resume operations. In March and April, these plants had become hot spots for Covid-19. By the end of April, at least twenty workers had died from the disease and over 5,000 were infected. Since then even more workers have been infected and died, but a shortage of testing equipment prevents us from knowing the exact numbers.
As infections spread, state and local authorities used their power to order some of the most badly contaminated plants to close, a measure considered necessary to protect public health. In sum, during those two months, thirteen meatpacking and food-processing plants shut down, including some of the nation’s biggest. In response, the executives of the giant meat corporations mounted a campaign of opposition, claiming that the closing of the meat plants would endanger the national food supply. John Tyson, chairman of the board of Tyson Foods, the world’s second largest meat processor, published a full-page ad in major newspapers, including the New York Times, warning that “the food supply chain is breaking.” Continue reading →
Posted onMay 5, 2020byBhikkhu Bodhi|Comments Off on BGR Projects Meeting Awards $600,000 in Grants
By Tricia Brick
Buddhist Global Relief’s annual projects meeting, typically held over the last weekend in April, usually brings all of BGR’s board members and staff together for an in-person gathering at Chuang Yen Monastery, in Carmel, New York. Members fly in from as far away as Washington State, California, and Florida, to put their minds and hearts together in the joyful task of approving the projects to sponsor over the next fiscal year. This year, however, because of the restrictions on travel imposed by the national lockdown, BGR held its projects meeting via Zoom. The meeting was divided into three sessions over the weekend of April 24–26. By the time the meeting was over, the BGR board had approved funding for 41 projects, offering more than $600,000 in grants to sponsor projects with our partners around the world.
These projects cover the four areas of our mission. They provide direct food aid to people afflicted by hunger and malnutrition; promote ecologically sustainable agriculture; support the education of children, with an emphasis on education for girls; and give women the opportunity to start right livelihood projects to support their families. The approved funding also included a $5,000 donation to support the construction of a new distribution center for the Sahuarita Food Bank in southeastern Arizona.
A new BGR partner this year is Shraddha Charity Organization, whose project in Sri Lanka will provide food, nutritional supplements, and hygienic supplies to women in need through their pregnancies and postpartum period.
New projects with existing partners include our first projects in Tanzania and Senegal. In Tanzania, BGR partner Action Against Hunger has created a nutrition program for the Dodoma region to address child malnutrition through a combined women’s livelihood and climate-resilient agriculture project. The project will provide agricultural training for smallholder women farmers to increase production of nutrient rich crops such as peppers, kale, cabbage, carrots, spinach, pumpkin, okra, eggplant, and papaya. The project also provides nutrition education for families and health screenings for at-risk children.
In Senegal, a project with Helen Keller International will construct boreholes and wells to supply clean water for drinking and agricultural irrigation. The project also provides seeds and agricultural inputs to improve the nutrition of approximately 900 people in need.
Other projects, renewals or extensions of existing projects, will be implemented in Bangladesh, Brazil, Cambodia, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Haiti, India, Kenya, Mongolia, Nicaragua, Peru, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Thailand (for Burmese refugees), Uganda, and Vietnam, as well as U.S. projects in Detroit and Easton, Pennsylvania.
At this year’s meeting, BGR was delighted to welcome Raimund Hopf and Karl Wirtz of Mitgefühl in Aktion (MIA), a new Buddhist aid organization based in Germany. MIA, whose German name means “compassion in action,” was established as a “sister” to BGR, with the aim of working alongside us in funding life-saving projects around the world. This year, its first year of operation, MIA will be co-funding three projects with BGR in the current grant cycle.
BGR would like to express our deepest gratitude to all our supporters wherever they might be. It is through your generosity that these projects will relieve the suffering of thousands of people in need in the U.S. and around the world.
The coronavirus has exposed the flaws of our food-supply system in at least two ways. One is by compelling retail food staff–grocery workers and delivery “shoppers”–to put their health at risk. The other is the widespread destruction of fresh food.
Next to the fragility of the medical industry, the coronavirus has exposed the flaws of our food-supply system—especially the vulnerability of the people who make it possible. Grocery-store workers and delivery “shoppers” in particular have found themselves taking on the first-responder risks of doctors, nurses, and EMTs. Dozens have died of COVID-19, and thousands have gotten sick. Understandably, they’re afraid to go to work. But they have to, because in order for the rest of us to eat, someone must deliver food to grocery stores, and someone must stock the shelves.
Many grocery stores have automated checkouts, but most still have clerks. And so while many of us can work from home and observe physical distancing guidelines, grocery-store workers are forced to come in proximity with hundreds of people a day. Due to this sudden and dramatic uptick in risk, the lack of safety and security that grocery companies provide their workers has become starkly apparent. Continue reading →
The swift and devastating spread of the coronavirus in the US is dealing a staggering blow to our public health systems and our economy. It is also exposing how working families have been struggling for decades. As Americans grasp the enormous and long-term impact, they support policies that will deliver to those most affected and pave the road to an equitable recovery.
The groundswell is crystal clear: A new Oxfam-Data for Progress national poll, conducted days ago, indicates overwhelming support (greater than 70 percent) for measures that directly help working people, including: paid sick leave for all workers, emergency funding for food supplies for those affected by the crisis, free testing for the virus, and moratoriums on evictions, foreclosures, and utility shutoffs.
Even “very conservative” voters indicate majority support for emergency cash payments, waiving copays for coronavirus treatment, and increasing federal funding for Medicaid. On the flip side, support drops noticeably for policies that prop up large businesses. Continue reading →
Bhikkhu Bodhi
Charles W. Elliott
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BGR Staff
Buddhist Global Relief 