hunger management

Catching up with J last night (it's been some months since he left town), I tell him I'm busy and scattered of late. "Busy making zines and going for drinks with people like me," he says. Yes, good point. I shouldn't complain about my somewhat bourgeois life. I have bosses and supervisors who let me work at my own leisure. I have flexible working times. I have income. Many people don't.

I read this article while eating breakfast, and it was sobering. I'm not good at understanding economics, but hunger and poverty I can grasp. In a tutorial some weeks ago we talked about the global economy as a space of neo-colonialism. As always, some students argue that people from developing countries employed in multi-national off-shore factories are actually doing better off than they ever were/could, so the global market isn't such an evil, destructive, neo-colonialist force. But (I say now, in hindsight), what happens when the economy turns sour? Who's first to lose jobs/income? Is this not a colonialist narrative, where labour (or another sacrifice of time/energy/belief/custom) is traded for 'a better life', but when the political/economic climate changes, the coloniser backs away, goes home, and doesn't look back at the ruin and disruption caused?

Is it just me, or is this statement from a Unicef report (reported on in the article) really fucked up?

"The limited window of intervention for foetal development and for growth among infants and young children means that deprivation today, if not addressed properly, can have irreversible impacts on their physical and intellectual capacities, which will, in turn, lower their productivity in adulthood; this is an extraordinary price for a country to pay."

The price is paid by the country, and the cost is lower productivity. I get that they're talking to economists, governments and policy-makers, but surely those bodies (and the people in them) can grasp the idea of hunger too. Do they really need a nationalist spin in order to address the problem?

Closer to home, 'Income Management' is going to be introduced in Bankstown (and other places in other states). I guess the NT Intervention was such a raging success that it's being rolled out to Western Sydney (and other 'problem' populations). It's as if some people/governments believe that poverty, malnutrition, child abuse, and unemployment are self-generated problems that arise in 'disadvantaged communities'. Might disadvantage be a product of something larger than 'bad parents' or 'uneducated people'? Might we all be turning the knobs of that particular machine?