Let's think about the sustainability agenda and goals such as eradicating hunger and poverty. Are they the right goals? By focusing on the effects, are we ignoring the causes and therefore the alternatives that we could be building?
An article in Nature (4 July 2023) has pulled together some of the evidence pointing to the need for a change in perspective. Hunger is not endogenous, it is imposed. Researchers have found that the primary cause of food insecurity is violence (of all kinds) and conflict. Even more disturbing is the finding that food inflation is persisting, despite interest rate hikes to defeat it, partly due to seller’s inflation, ie large food producers are using inflation to hide price jumps to increase profits, just as energy companies have been doing. They get away with this because food and energy are basic human needs that people must obtain for their wellbeing at whatever price. This is financial violence. Similarly, global inequality does not exist because some countries are ‘underdeveloped’, it exists because rich nations have relied on colonialism/imperialism in the past and now rely on unequal exchange that creates an annual net appropriation of US$10.8 trillion from global South nations.
So when we are thinking about setting new global sustainability goals to replace the SDGs in 2030, let’s redirect our focus onto the violence that disrupts the provisioning of wellbeing, whether it is gender-based, conflict-based or financially-based, and let’s set goals to build non violent alternative provisioning systems.
Heliocene 