Context, please

I hope that Graeme Smith wrote more than appeared in this Globe & Mail article on Afghan hunger:

Afghanistan's food crisis may turn into a festering problem as prices remain stubbornly high, a United Nations official says, and local authorities are already complaining that emergency measures are not enough to handle the rising hunger.

The World Food Program has launched a $77-million program to provide extra food for Afghans who found themselves shut out of the market as prices climbed sharply in recent months.

But during a tour of food distribution points in Kandahar yesterday, the WFP's top official in the region said he's hearing complaints that the new help is not enough, and expressed concerns about what will happen if the crisis continues.

Because the piece lacks a critical bit of context:

The United Nations' top brass gathered in Switzerland on Monday to chart a solution to the dramatic food price increases that have caused hunger, riots and hoarding in poor countries around the world.

***

The Food and Agriculture Organisation's (FAO) Food Price Index, which measures the market prices of cereals, dairy, meat, sugar and oils, was 57 percent higher in March 2008 than the same month last year.

Anger over those increases -- which have squeezed the world's poorest people hardest -- have sparked protests, strikes and riots in countries including Cameroon, Mozambique, Senegal, Haiti, Peru, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Afghanistan.

This isn't just an Afghan crisis, it's a worldwide crisis, and it's hitting the poorest people in the world first and hardest:

Famine traditionally means mass starvation. The measures of today's crisis are misery and malnutrition. The middle classes in poor countries are giving up health care and cutting out meat so they can eat three meals a day. The middling poor, those on $2 a day, are pulling children from school and cutting back on vegetables so they can still afford rice. Those on $1 a day are cutting back on meat, vegetables and one or two meals, so they can afford one bowl. The desperate—those on 50 cents a day—face disaster.

Roughly a billion people live on $1 a day. If, on a conservative estimate, the cost of their food rises 20% (and in some places, it has risen a lot more), 100m people could be forced back to this level, the common measure of absolute poverty. In some countries, that would undo all the gains in poverty reduction they have made during the past decade of growth. Because food markets are in turmoil, civil strife is growing; and because trade and openness itself could be undermined, the food crisis of 2008 may become a challenge to globalisation.

Here's a question for you: if September 11th, 2001 had come and gone without thousands of people in New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington getting incinerated in a fireball of jet fuel and crushed under tons of concrete, steel, and rubble; if the nations of the West hadn't helped the Northern Alliance overthrow the Taliban; if Afghanistan was still under the rule of Mullah Omar and his cabal, would this crisis be hitting the average Afghan any less hard?

I don't think so.

Conclusion? Either Smith or his editors at the G&M want us to think this is an Afghan problem, another failure of Canada's policy toward that nation, when it is not.

I fail to see how that qualifies as responsible journalism.