Sunday, February 07, 2010

Haiti tries to starve the men

AP reports:
Aid groups offer special shelters for women and provide women-only food distribution points to deter men from bullying them. But challenges are rife more than three weeks after a 7.0-magnitude earthquake killed an estimated 200,000 people and left as many as 3 million in need of food, shelter and medicine.

Women who lined up for food before dawn Saturday said they were attacked by knife-wielding men who stole their coupons.
No, they are not deterring the men. By depriving the men of food, they encouraging this so-called bullying.
"We've targeted the women because we think it's the best way to get to families," said Jacques Montouroy, a Catholic Relief Services worker helping out Saturday. "In other distributions when we've opened it up to men, we found that only half of the men would do what they were supposed to with the food."
Huhh? What are the men supposed to be doing with the food? Is the food getting eaten or not?
"It's discrimination!" said Thomas Louis, 40. "We've all lost mothers, sisters, wives. Without women we can't get coupons. They're treating men like we are animals."
No, animals get fed. The men are treated worse.

This is all unnecessary, as I've noted below. It appears that the relief efforts are more interested in maintaining their crazy rationing schemes than to actually prevent starvation.

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