Does Nepal face an impossible decision between famine and pandemic?

Originally published on March 31st, 2020 on Medium

This article comes with a health warning: please don’t read it unless you’re feeling strong.

I’ve started putting a red, amber or green squares at the start of my social media posts to warn people of how tough, or otherwise an article is going to be to read.

Without being overly melodramatic, this one very much gets a red.

Police in Kathmandu enforce the Government’s lockdown

Whilst the Coronavirus pandemic rages in Europe and North America, nations across South Asia seem to be headed towards an impossible and awful decision. Do you (a) continue with strict lockdown policies lasting months?; or (b) ease restrictions on movement and economic activity and let the Coronavirus spread?

From a western perspective, it seems like a simple decision, you pick option ‘a’; lockdown for as long as it takes. However, lockdown India style, or Nepal style — the country I’m most familiar with — likely means depriving millions of people of food and water. To put it bluntly, a three month lockdown could mean mass famine. That is the worst case scenario, but sometimes we need to stare that possibility in the face to work out what needs to be done.

The alternative to lockdown is to let Coronavirus loose. In countries, like Nepal, with extremely limited hospitals and healthcare infrastructure, this means incalculable suffering and per capita mortality rates that will dwarf what we’ll likely see in Europe and North America.

The Nepal Government has to make a decision; it is an appalling dilemma.

A third option I’m sure they’d love to have is to go hard and early with a nationwide policy of ‘test, test, test’ combined with rigorous contact tracing. Doing this would give them a chance of containing the virus and avoiding or lifting lockdown — the much heralded South Korean approach that was either deemed not possible, not preferable, or simply ignored by the U.K. and others.

Sadly, ‘test, test, test’ it is a false hope, it is almost cruel to suggest it is even an option for Nepal. Due to costs, logistics, availability of testing equipment, labs, phone apps, etc, the chances of ‘test, test, test’ scaling across the 1 billion plus population of South Asia seem very remote. Nepal has so far tested just 993 of its thirty million people.

Further challenges come to mind when we look at where we currently are on the calendar. In the U.K. we are finding solace in the emergence of spring; the lengthening days and blossoming of nature make looking out the window slightly more bearable. Spring is a different story in Nepal, subsistence farmers are entering into the last months of the dry season. This crisis is hitting at the most challenging time of the year for subsistence farmers.

This is the time of year where stocks from last year’s harvest are starting to run low, farmers have to buy food from local markets to supplement their homegrown staples. The monsoon rains won’t start falling until June or July, so ‘growing your own’ is a while away.

Already, after just one week of lockdown, Nepalis are already reporting increases in the cost of food (at this time of year much of it is imported from India; today’s border restrictions mean that less of food is arriving), prices are only going to go up.

So, the price of food is going up, there is limited work (agricultural, business or tourist), there is no money coming in, there isn’t much food growing in the fields, how will the people of Nepal eat over the coming months?

It might not just be food that is in short supply. In June last year in India, water shortages — made worse by climate change — led to violent outbursts as desperate people fought for access to mobile tankers that supply water to towns and villages. There is no reason to expect the same won’t happen this year and in more parts of India and possibly Nepal.

Over several decades, rural-urban migration has steadily grown in Nepal. Around 20% of the population now live in towns and cities, some 6 million people. Very few of these people have savings large enough to ride out a three month lockdown; most have to work to earn money, or rely on money sent home to them from relatives working abroad.

The Government of Nepal does not have the resources to provide loans to businesses or payouts to workers. Working from home isn’t an option for most, work has stopped in the Middle East and elsewhere too, so ex-pat Nepalis aren’t earning any money to send home. So in the cities too, if there is no money, there is no food. To impose a lengthy lockdown could be akin to imposing a famine.

This perhaps explains why the Government of Nepal initially announced the lockdown as being for just a week and on Sunday announced an extension of just one more week. Is it more politically expedient to increase it in small increments like this, giving people [false] hope that it is a very temporary measure, thus mitigating against widespread rebellion and the sort of desperate mass migration we’re seeing in India?

If that is the strategy, the initial signs aren’t great, there is a rapid re-ruralisation going on in Nepal, thousands of young men and women are returning from the cities, as well as from India and the Middle East. Worryingly too, not everyone can get home, The Himalayan Times is reporting that over 500 Nepalis are currently stranded on the Indian side of the border, that number may well swell as more Nepalis head north from New Dehli.

Nepal will have to start looking outwards for help; it won’t be able to cope with the pandemic itself. In global terms, this is an unprecedented situation, it is the worst possible moment in history to have a pandemic, or a famine. Famines and pandemics are usually localised to a region within a continent, or even one nation. They are always awful, but because they are geographically contained and separated from a global economy that is otherwise operating as normal, it is possible for the rest of the world to step in and help with enormous emergency relief efforts.

Right now, and understandably, the wealthiest nations on earth are looking inwards. They are struggling to cope with the pandemic on their own doorstep. Thousands are dying everyday from the virus, and there is a faint spectre of food shortages and hunger on the horizon, especially if stretched national Governments don’t sure up food supply chains.

Billions of pounds and Euros are being spent, trillions of dollars in the US. The rest of the global economy is very far from operating as normal, which leaves us asking: what will be leftover for those in lockdown induced hunger, or for those suffering and dying from the Coronavirus in Nepal, India, Bangladesh and elsewhere?

My only hope is this: When a sense of the pandemic being finally under control in Europe, when the peak has passed, a new sense of relative calm (as opposed to today’s collective panic) might emerge in the U.K. and its neighbours. It is then that ordinary citizens might have the cognitive and emotional bandwidth to start looking outwards, to start taking notice of articles like this one by Supriya Nair or this one by Joydeep Gupta.

The question is, will they read these articles and watch the news coverage coming from distant impoverished places and respond by demanding a huge transfer of wealth from rich to poor? I very much hope they will and have enormous faith in the generosity and humanity of British people. But, I have to accept that many will be feeling financially insecure both as individuals and as a citizen of a broke country.

Somehow though, we are going to have to find the money. Larry Elliott is already calling on our leaders to dig deep; how deep will we go?

When the time feels right (and that is by no means an easy thing to judge), my organisation, The Glacier Trust, will launch a crowdfunding campaign to send money to the communities we support across the Himalayan foothills. What we raise will be a drop in the ocean, but it will reach thousands of people who might otherwise be left to suffer alone.

As a charity we have to make this effort, it is a moral responsibility and we will; but I can’t help feeling that we’ll once again be putting a plaster over the structural, systemic problems which cause Nepal to be so vulnerable to external shocks in the first place.

As Jason Hickel and others have noted, countries like Nepal and India are poor because of the past and present policies of colonising countries like Britain. If the world wasn’t so desperately unequal, the Government’s of Nepal, India and many other nations wouldn’t be faced with an impossible choice of lockdown induced famine versus wildfire spread of deadly Coronavirus.

But they are, both the Coronavirus and the Lockdown are ticking time bombs, the bomb that goes off will be decided by which fuse the politicians choose to light. Either way could lead to millions of casualties. Indeed, given how difficult it is to run a successful lockdown in a country like Nepal, there’s no guarantee both bombs won’t go off.

There is no easy answer; and thinking about, researching and then writing this piece has been horrible. All I can ask is please save whatever money you can now and be prepared to send whatever you can to help when help is needed in Nepal, in India, in Bangladesh, in Africa or in central and south America, at least one continent is going to be hit very very badly by the pandemic. Impossible as it is to imagine this right now, but in years to come we might look back on Coronavirus and view Europe as having got off comparatively lightly.

Finally, once this pandemic eventually passes, please demand systemic change at a scale we’ve never seen before. Debts need to be cancelled, structural adjustment programmes need to be torn up and the rules of international trade need to be re-written. If this pandemic teaches us anything, it is that we need to rid the world of disastrous inequality once and for all.

Graffiti reads: “We can’t return to normal, because the normal that we had was precisely the problem.” @hardmaru