Fact 4: China has 44 million missing women.

Nathania Aritao, charcoal, June 2010

“Parents anxious not to have a baby girl may have scans to determine the unborn child’s sex, and if the fetus is shown to be female, they will seek an abortion. Many baby girls are killed in the first few days or weeks of their life, parents finding ways to outfox police and health workers by making the deaths seem like natural events. If the girl is lucky enough to survive babyhood, her birth may never be registered - leading to a life on the margins, where education, healthcare and even getting enough food to eat will be denied her.

Even though birth rates in India, china and Taiwan are falling steadily and are now coming close to those in the Western world, the ong-standign bias against baby girls is not disappearing. The increasingly wide availability of ultrasound tecnology is making it easier for parents to choose not to give birth to a female child. Dr. V. Parameshvara, a former president of the Indian Medical Association, estimated that 2 million sex-selective abortions are performed in India every year and a UNICEF study published in December 2006 said 7,000 fewer girls were born in India every day. In an effor to stem the tide, both India and China have made sex-selective abortions illegal. Doctors in both countries who perform routine scans on pregnant women are not allowed to tell them the sex of the baby. But some clinics don’t always obey the rules. The Shanghai Star reported that illegal ultrasound scans can be obtained for around $60-120, while doctors in India will find other ways to communicate the result: giving families a pink-wrapped candy if a fetus is a girl, blue if it’s a boy. 

In India, as post-mortem techniques become more sophisticated, parents are resorting to more gruesome ways to kill their daughters. Fadha Venkatesar in the Hindu newspaper detailed some of the techniques described to her by mothers in the Salem district of Tamil Nadu.

One such “novel” method is feeding hot, spicy chicken soup to the babies. “They writhe and scream in pain for a few hours then die” [according to one woman]. When NGO activists get wind of infanticide, the villagers promptly counter that “the child was suffering from bloated tummy and had to be given chicken soup.” Another ruthless elimination method catching up in Salem villages is to over-feed babies and tightly wrap them in wet cloth. After an hour of breathless agony they die… but the latest technique of asphyxiating the baby by placing beneath a pedestal fan at full blast has stumped the police who have managed to register just five cases of female infanticide in Salem in the past year” (20-21, Williams).

Fact 3: If you stand at the junction of Oxford Street and Regent Street in central London, there are 161 branches of Starbucks within a five-mile radius.

“Growing up in New Zealand, I don’t think I tasted an espresso until I was in my late teens. Coffee was either instant or (at best) drip-filtered, and it almost universally wasn’t great. Now, every shopping street in Britain (and in New Zealand, and much of the rest of the world) will have at least one chain coffee shop, complete with “baristas” and staggeringly complex menus. No longer will you only coffee options be black or white, with sugar or without – you can order a drink as complicated as you like, in the style of 90s supermodel Linda Evangelista, whose coffee order became legendary: a half-caf, double tall, non-fat, whole-milk foam, bone-dry, half-pump mocha, half sugar in the raw, double cup, no lid, capp to go.

But there is another side to this blossoming of choice. Chain coffee shops, chain restaurants, chain boutiques are all leading to a strange new phenomenon the Clone Town. The term was invented by think tank the New Economics Foundation (NEF) to describe a phenomenon it saw happening in Britain. Smaller commercial centers, among them many ancient market towns, have started to lose many of the features that made them representative of the areas they served. The NEF pointed out that between 1997 and 2002, specialist stores like butchers, bakers and fishmongers were shutting up shop at the rate of 50 stores a week. Twenty traditional pubs closed their doors every month. In their place: supermarkets, catalogue stores, chain pubs. The commentator Nick Foulkes paints the picture: “The homegenization of our high streets is a crime against our culture. The smart ones get the international clones – Ralph Lauren, DKNY, Starbucks and Gap; while those lower down the socio-economic hierarchy end up with Nando’s, McDonald’s, Blockbuster and Ladbrokes.

When yet another national or international chain comes to our high street, we get the illusion that we have more choice. In fact, we get no choice. Smaller, independent retailers get pushed out and are replaced by national and multi-national operators whose huge economies of scale mean they wield enormous power over us” (18-19, Williams).

Fact 2: A third of the world’s obese people live in the developing world.

Nathania Aritao. Pencil. June 2010.

“Never in the history of the world have we had so much to eat, but it seems that in a culture of plenty, the choices we make become even more important. As the world’s population becomes increasingly urban, eating habits across the globe are changing substantially. Public health experts refer to this as “nutrition transition.” Farmers who once grew a range of crops on a subsistence basis begin to concentrate on single cash crops. Countries begin to import more food from the industrialised world. Rather than eating fresh fruit and vegetables, people opt for highly processed, energy-dense foods, heavy in fat, sugar and salt. Combine this with increasingly sedentary lifestyles - where people drive rather than walk, work in offices rather than fields, watch sports rather than play them - and it’s a lethal prescription” (11, Williams).

“Nutritional education is part of the solution, but it’s clear that economics have a major role to play. In Tonga, a WHO report suggested that development of sustainable farming and fishing industries would help to make healthier traditional foods available at a reduced cost. Banning the importation of unhealthy food, as Fiji did, is another possibility. But option like this may incense the wealthier countries, who have much to gain from exporting cheap food to developing countries, and the consequence could be a complaint to the WTO. As the Tonga report concludes, “it behoves national policy-makers to be aware of the health impact of ‘commodities of doubtful benefit,’” and of the role of trade in health of the population.”

In the developed world, newspaper articles and television reports constantly discuss the merits of one miracle diet after another. But as most dieters know, the answers to overweight are seldom found in a glass of diet soda. And in the developing world, where obesity is as much to do with trade and globalization as anything else, it’s a bitter draught indeed” (14, Williams).

Fact 1: The Average Japanese woman can expect to live to be 84. The average Botswanan will reach just 39.

                                                                       Nathania Aritao, charcoal, June 2010

“Aids is the starkest reason for the lower life expectancies in the developing world, but there are many others. Infant mortality rates in many countries remain high. In Sierra Leone, 157 babies out of every thousand will die before their first birthday. Contrast that with Iceland’s 2.6 babies, and it’s easy to see why the infant mortality rate is considered such a sensitive measure of a country’s public health. Access to clean water, nutrition and healthcare are crucial during pregnancy. In the West, those are a given - but that’s still not the case in many countries. Young children who don’t et enough food are far more likely to die from diseases like flu and diarrhea, and around the world UNICEF estimates that 150 million children are malnourished.

Poverty also greatly reduces life expectancy. Lack of access to safe drinking water is still a major cause of death in many countries. Polluted air or soil can cause disease, and it also makes food production more difficult. As rapidly growing populations put the land and natural resources under increasing strain, more and more land is turning to desert as local ecosystems are destroyed.

It’s clear, then, that life expectancy poses very different challenges to the developed and developing worlds” (8-9, Jessica Williams)

The Idea

While going through the library shelves looking for inspiration for my photography  last semester, I chanced upon a book called 50 Facts That Should Change the World (Edition 2.0. The first edition came out in 2004). I took it off the shelves and borrowed it. But like too many of the books I take out of the library mid-semester, I flipped through its pages a couple of times but never had the time to sit down and really eat it up.

However, though it sad idly on my desk for pretty much the rest of the semester, an idea was brewing in my head. So before leaving Boston for summer in Manila, I bought my own copy and began to read it on the way home. Author Jessica Williams shares 50 facts about our world from 2007, at the time of the books publishing, with a short essay explaining and contextualizing each one. 

My idea was to create art - not crazy good art, but art nonetheless - in response to each one of these facts. It is to serve as one of my summer art projects (finally producing art outside of the classroom!) as well as a simple opportunity to reflect on what’s going on in the world.

Initially, I had hoped to publish a new piece every day, getting through all fifty facts in just fifty days. However, as my first couple weeks at home have proved, even though it is summer, life is full and busy. My sporadic schedule has yet to settle down. So, I’m just going to keep truckin’ my way through this project at my own pace and without a watch. I’ll finish whenever I finish. Who knows? Maybe I’ll be so inspired, it’ll take me less than fifty days!

P.S. I’m also going to enable photo replies to my posts so that if you begin to follow the blog, you can reflect with your own art too! 

NIGHTNIGHT by DEDDY