BRITAIN

BRITAIN

The Times, London, June 4: Sixteen years ago, as the worst race riots in modern American history engulfed Los Angeles, a young black man stood blinking before a phalanx of television cameras and asked: “Can we all get along?”

Rodney King’s question was for his city, but more especially for his country. In that year, the United States saw ugly proof on every rolling news channel that its social fabric was still riven along racial lines despite the great sermons and legislative triumphs of the civil rights era; despite the subtler preaching of The Cosby Show and The Fresh Prince of Bel Air; despite decades of affirmative action in its armed forces and universities; and despite the yearnings and convictions of the most shamelessly optimistic electorate on Earth.

Tortured racial history

Since then, the failed presidential campaigns of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have dented some of that optimism. They forced voters to ask not only whether Americans could ever elect a black president, but whether a black candidate could ever sublimate his country’s tortured racial history and move beyond it, to offer a message of colour-blind progress rather than confrontation.

Such questions have been answered by Barack Obama in a way that has already rekindled America’s faith in its prodigious powers of reinvention — and the world’s admiration for America. He could still lose the White House to John McCain. It has been a bruising journey from the Iowa caucuses to Minneapolis, where he staked his claim last night to the Democratic nomination. But today at least the tide of history seems to be with him. Win or lose in November, he will have gone farther than anyone in history to bury the toxic enmity that fueled America’s civil war and has haunted it ever since.

UNITED ARAB EMIRATES

Khaleej Times, Dubai, June 4: The U.N. has rightly minced few words while warning of an unprecedented global food scarcity catastrophe if immediate short as well as long term measures are not undertaken to offset a crisis staring practically the whole world in the face.

Food prices have risen 71 per cent over the past two years to a 30-year high in real terms, 100 million people are estimated pushed into hunger worldwide, food production will need to double by 2050 to accommodate increasing demand and population numbers and food riots have erupted in Egypt, Bangladesh, Pakistan, besides collapsing the government in Haiti.

Agriculture production

There is little disagreement as regards the right route to take as the much trumpeted market delivery system has already been thoroughly refuted and developments mandate a return to the old ways when official development aid spending in agriculture amounted to an impressive 17 per cent in the 80s, as opposed to a dismal three per cent now. However, while the emphasis on increased agriculture production sinks in, particularly in poor countries, debate on a number of important issues needs final settlement.