ABSTRACT
Before we review international efforts to reduce people’s vulnerability and make some of our own suggestions, let us engage with some pessimistic views about their efficacy, some of them radical and others post-modern. The story runs something like this. Conferences and the airing of statements of concern, declarations, objectives and principles therein are simply a waste of time. They may stabilise the expectations of international bureaucrats in times of uncertainty, threatened guilt and blame but merely represent manoeuvrings in corridor politics far from the site and sight of death, destruction and destitution (Bellamy Foster 2003; Sachs et al. 2002). Disasters are discursively ‘produced’ by the well-paid and well-fed in rich countries who indulge in essentialising cultural discourses which denigrate large parts of the world as disease-ridden, poverty stricken and disaster prone (see an example of the deconstruction of famine by Bankoff 2001, mentioned in Chapter 1, and a critique similar to ours in Adams 2001; Broch-Due 2000; Leach and Mearns 1996; Hoben 1995).
