Thomas Daschle: “several weeks ago the New York Times ran a story about what people all around the world do when they are starving. What…”

“several weeks ago the New York Times ran a story about what people all around the world do when they are starving. What they do, in effect, is to try to trick themselves into thinking that they do have food. According to the World Food Program, there are no more mukhet bushes near the refugee camps in eastern Chad, where more than 200,000 Sudanese refugees have fled. Refugees have extracted what little nutritional value they can from those bushes by eating the toxic berries that grow on them. In Haitian slums, poor families eat dough made of butter, salt, water, and dirt. In Malawi, roadside stands sell roasted mice, and in Mozambique the poor eat grasshoppers when they must, calling them 'flying shrimp.' In Angola in the early 1990's, a man boiled leather from a family chair and served his family 'lamb soup.' Women in Eritrea regularly strap flat stones to their stomachs to lessen hunger pangs, and, in a cruel turn of the fable of stone soup we all learned growing up, mothers in many countries boil water with stones, telling children the food is almost ready and hoping they will fall asleep waiting. The New York Times goes on to argue--rightly--that the famines these people suffer through are not caused by a lack of food alone. They are caused by drought, government neglect, or war. The opposite, of course, is also true. Governments that make good policy choices can ease suffering, even in the most brutal situations.”