Adaptation

Did you know the world is experiencing a food shortage? The price of rice rose 60% this year. Countries like India and China and Vietnam – which account for 25% of International exports – are shutting their borders to foreign exports.

This means that one of the cheapest foods, consumed as a staple in billions of households, is straining the most strained budgets in the most impoverished countries. All over Africa, South America, and Asia people are experiencing the culminated impact of poor growing seasons and economic fragility.

I can picture a local lunch stand in Ghana. Business people in collared shirts line up as women with thick forearms spoon out hot fish stew into plastic take out bags. As word moves through the line that prices rose people start to complain. “Ach! It's too much” a woman says, shaking her head. The price raise – from 20 cents a scoop of sticky rice to 30 cents – causes grumbling and a scramble to find the extra change. It isn't just the rice and it isn't just this market.

An indigenous product to Ghana, the rice market previously suffered with the influx of cheap, bleached, American instant rice. Now the inflated costs affect those with the least resources to cope. All over the West African country fruit and vegetable vendors must adapt to new budgets. Rice, fuel, water, vegetables. It is all the same.

It is an International market crunch. Try telling that to people in rural villages where families eat from large pots, brewed over coal fires or refugee camps where thousands line up each month for bags of rice, maize, and iodized salt. Sellers must hike their prices. Portions decrease. The government in Haiti collapsed after extensive protests.

Me? I chop yellow peppers and garlic for a pasta sauce, strawberries for a salad. Snow is gradually melting outside but hothouse growth and affordable greens grown in Florida ensure my entrees are complete. I try not to remember the feel of the heat as I waited in that lunch line for eight months. I ignore the bargaining as I bought tomatoes by the bucket in a stand constructed across an open gutter. In Canada these sensations are easier to dismiss.

Gerald Caplan eloquently, and I would say accurately, states that the West is suffering from “compassion fatigue.” We are plagued by our inability to curb a global epidemic. Pandemics, outbreaks, droughts, massacres: they're all painted with the same brush of blurred faces and unattainable figures. We're weighed down by anxiety about our complicit role in future destruction. We want to help but we're simply unable, we're stuck within our own systems of privilege. Our houses are made not of glass but of concrete and brick and isolation. They don't fall down. We're padded with comforts and isolated in our excess.

I cut my finger mid-way through the salad. Unlike the Liberian girl I used to live with, I am not skilled in the art of peeling with one hand on the knife and the other on the lettuce. I like standing in my warm kitchen with stainless steal appliances that beep when they're left open . I'm listening to CBC radio and news is entertainment. I am part of the problem and I will continue to be. Organic foods and energy saving light bulbs aside, I will lead a lifestyle that many envy, others aspire to and the part of me that operated with one bucket of water a day abhors. Still, life, as I know it, continues. Happy Earth Day.