Consider the tremendous catastrophe that occurred in Pakistan early yesterday. A speeding fuel carrier overturned and burst. People came from near and from afar with all kinds of receptacles to carry off some few litres of the oil that dribbled from the tanker. Against police instructions. The predictable result: a fireball which devastated the area and killed hundreds.

This sort of accident happened many times in other countries, such as Nigeria where people would not wait for an accident to fuel carriers but punctured the oil pipelines. With the same dramatic result.

The above may be accidents caused by people’s greed.

But now consider all kinds of nature disasters, from earthquakes to floods and all that sort of thing. It is always the poor who pay the highest price in terms of lives lost, people left without a house, etc. The rich, or rather those who are not poor, can afford decent houses built according to standards. They can afford cars to get away from coming storms. And they get to know a storm is coming from the radio or on the Internet. Which the poor cannot afford.

And of course, the rich can afford proper healthcare whereas the poor get what the government can afford to give them.

There is so much poverty in the world, so much hardship, so much injustice and inequality. We cannot go on and consider all this as natural and inevitable.  Nor can those who express these opinions be termed communists.

It is a fact that the dire situation of many of the poor can be improved substantially without breaking the bank. The impoverished people of eg Africa can get better food if only there was just distribution and if there was less corruption. In fact, there has been a substantial improvement across Africa these past years but many times civil war takes over and ruins the work of decades.

There have been invented hundreds of improvements that enable eg a better provision of water, better quality of seeds, improved and cheap methods for getting electricity from the sun and vastly improved telecommunication methods.

Will all this be in place over the coming years? Only a fool can say so. Will these improvements mean there will be no more disasters? Hardly.

But at the very least the people of the world, especially the peoples in the rich part of the world, should become far more sensitive to the plight of the poor and seek to help them in any way they can. On the contrary, what has happened is that funds for aid have been cut down and recently the President of the richest country in the world, the United States, went back on the commitment entered upon by his predecessor and banned new rules on the environment, the common heritage of humanity, because they ‘hurt’, he said, American businesses.

Disasters such as we mentioned at the beginning of this leader get a fleeing mention in the news media of the rich world, easily forgotten. We in this rich part of the world have become used to glossing over the news that does not suit our ears and quickly forgetting them. As we Maltese have become used to news about yet another shipwreck of a boatload of migrants in the seas around Malta.

We have so much to learn and reflect upon.