The last thing you need when people are starving is a metaphor. Except this simple metaphor shows why decades of effort to tackle world hunger gets run down by the magnitude of the problem. And why pile-ups such as the famine in East Africa are happening more often and hitting more people. Current suffering is intolerable; without effective action future suffering will be unimaginable.
Systems thinkers sometimes talk about ‘wicked messes’ and ‘vicious cycles’ as if fate has got it in for us. Perhaps it has, since the feedback loop that directs our attention on famine and other pile-ups is pathological and self-reinforcing. On the other hand, healing this cycle is not particularly difficult so perhaps fate offers a challenge; can our responses begin to match the scale of the situation? Fate waits for us to take it in hand.
Pile-ups attract attention. Try getting past a motorway pile-up without looking. Famine pile-ups, the climate pile-up, the debt pile-up, violent pile-ups – they all demand attention. What happens when pile-ups happen more often and get bigger? They demand more attention. As they should when there are large numbers of people stuck in the wreckage, like in east Africa, and they can’t get free without help. So please donate now.
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Done? Thank you! Now get your friends to donate. Perhaps you can help in other ways? Please do that too. Now let’s look the other way towards prevention. In a crisis situation looking the other way can feel like neglecting those suffering. It’s not. Current suffering could have been prevented if enough people had looked the other way earlier. Future suffering can be prevented if we look the other way now.
Prevention has been tried. Pieces of pile-ups have been cleared up and piecemeal actions taken to reduce the impact of future pile-ups. Yet are we systematically preventing pile-ups and making it possible for people everywhere to make the crossing to live sustainably? No we’re not. What’s worse it seems we’ve barely begun to define the problem in ways that allow it to be solved.
Famine or any other symptomatic problem gets defined in terms of the symptom, or as close to the symptom as possible. In a famine crisis people talk about food security. In a climate crisis people talk about emissions. We try systems thinking with systems defined in pieces; food systems, forest systems, financial systems. In searching for the sources of our problems we keep looking back toward the symptoms.
This is like a lobotomy of our collective mind. Can we instead gain collective intelligence? Yes, if we look both ways before crossing. C West Churchman offered a systems approach in 1979, “…no problem can be solved simply on its own basis.” Standing on the boundary we define for any problem we must look both ways for solutions. To grow more food we must attend to the crop but also grow its environment of ecosystems, social capital and access to the world’s immense wealth.
Looking both ways gives a view of the whole scene. To one side numerous accelerating problems demanding immediate attention. To the other side, a view of all these problems being indivisible and solvable only as a whole system. If we look both ways we could ensure that everyone, the entire global community, can safely make the crossing to a world with increasing security of every kind. Let’s make famine a thing of the past.
James Greyson is Head of BlindSpot think tank, advising on global systems thinking and policy. See his paper for the NATO Science Programme, ‘Seven policy switches for global security’. Follow James on twitter @blindspotting If tweeting this article please add the tag #48forEastAfrica