Question

write a short note on working of NGO in the context of food security

Answer 1

In 1996, leaders came together at the World Food Summit in Rome to address the rising level of malnutrition throughout the world. They feared that if no action were taken, the amount of hungry people in the world in 2010 would reach 680 million, and set a commitment to halve the amount of undernourished people by 2015. Yet ten years after the summit, the World Food Program reported[1] the amount of hungry people has surpassed the 2010 estimate of 680 million and is already at 842 million. NGOs and other activists seeking the access to food face the surreal challenge that while there is a ‘right to food’ contained in the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural (ESC) Rights, this right imposes a negative obligation upon the state to respect the right to food, not apositive obligation to provide nutrition for its citizens. This has caused NGOs to increasingly focus on ESC rights, in addition to traditional political and civil (PC) rights, and campaign for the right to nutrition. But to combat hunger, they must also confront neoliberalism and the commodification of food as just another market good.

Answer 2

It would be premature to dismiss 9/11 and the events of the 1990s as a cyclical crackdown in Xinjiang with the customary détente to soon follow. Of greater certainty, is the role of 9/11 as a paradisiacal event in vindicating China’s increasingly repressive policies in Xinjiang before the international community. 9/11 has allowed Beijingto repackage its neo-Imperial conquest of the Uighurs as an indispensable component of the ‘War on Terror’ and the fight of the ‘civilised’ world against the ‘barbarity’ of terrorism. Beijinghas capitalised on the Islamophobic sentiment in the West and the anxious ‘War on Terror’ atmosphere to create its own ‘War of Terror’ in Xinjiang with international approval. In such a climate, Tolstoy’s foreword, written over a century ago in condemnation of Tsarist Russia’s colonial conquest of the Chechens, appears just as pertinent today in describing the brutality of the Chinese state and its abuse of sovereignty in Xinjiang. The PRC has used 9/11 as a catalyst to usher in more intrusive and repressive policies in Xinjiang, particularly toward religion and individual freedom, whilst adopting increasingly brutal military measures to suppress Uighur separatism. To a significant extent, we have also witnessed the increased politicisation of the Uighur issue, as more bellicose policies, both at home and abroad, begin to overshadow the ‘carrots’ offered by comparatively benign economic campaigns such as ‘Develop the West’. Previous policies intended to integrate the Uighur population into Chinese society seem a distant reverie, asBeijing pursues a relentless and indiscriminate campaign post 9/11 further to isolate and to ‘other’ the Uighurs. This has focused to a large extent on accentuating the ‘orientalist’ and Islamic discourse and popularising the contention, through manipulative rhetoric and reportage, that all Uighurs are ‘terrorists’. Indeed Haider (2005: 544) forewarns that “China’s draconian policies to combat these ‘terrorists’ may well polarise moderate Uighurs and create the very problem they are aimed at “solving”. In a more profound abstraction, the increasingly violent subjugation of the Uighurs following 9/11 brings to the fore Buruma’s apocalyptic vision that as Chinese dynasties approach their end “corrupt officials, whose authority can no longer rely on the assumption of superior virtue, exercise their power with anxious and arbitrary brutality”.


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