Ill Fares the Land: Essays on Food, Hunger and Power Read online

ILL FARES THE LAND

  ESSAYS ON FOOD, HUNGER AND POWER

  Susan George

  First published by Penguin Books 1990

  Copyright © Susan George

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Preface to the E-book version

  About the Author

  Author's Foreword

  I FAMINES, FOOD SYSTEMS AND SOLUTIONS

  1. Overcoming Hunger: strengthen the weak, weaken the strong

  2. Dangerous Embrace: culture, economics, politics and food systems

  3. Food, Famine and Service Delivery in Times of Emergency

  4. Food Strategies for Tomorrow

  II SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

  5. Caveat emptor: the-'transfer' of technology

  6. Biobusiness: life for sale

  III RESEARCH, IDEOLOGY AND CULTURE

  7. Decolonizing Research

  8. The SNOB Theory of Underdevelopment

  9. The Knowledge of Hunger

  10 Utopia, the University and the Third World: an imaginary cooperation programme

  11.Ordering the World: from ICIDI to ICIHI

  IV HUMAN RIGHTS

  12The Right to Food and the Politics of Hunger

  Notes and References

  For my father and for Laura,

  His great-granddaughter, who may witness an end to hunger,

  With love

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates, and men decay; Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade; A breath can make them, as a breath has made. But a bold peasantry, their country's pride, When once destroyed, can never be supplied.

  Oliver Goldsmith, 'The Deserted Village', 1770

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Preface to the E-Book version

  Prepared for the launch of Transnational Institute's Susan George Classics Series: How the Other Half Dies, Fate Worse than Debt, Feeding the Few, Debt Boomerang, Faith and Credit (March 2012)

  Dear Reader,

  First of all, thank you for your interest in my work. If you are new to it, welcome! If you are filling in some gaps, I’m pleased as well because you may discover a certain logic to the development of my oeuvre which I sometimes find hard to explain. It is indeed a daunting task to try to tease out that logic in a preface that is intended to serve for all the newly available books online but I am about to try my best.

  Let me say first that these books would not have become available without the work of TNI interns Lenin Valencia and Ana Goerdt who cheerfully took on the boring task of formatting the books and Nick Buxton, TNI’s Publications Coordinator who conceived and oversaw the whole project and who gently pushed me, without making me feel any more guilty than usual, until I actually provided this preface. And I shall always owe an enormous debt to TNI itself to which I’ve been attached since it was founded and which has been ever since my intellectual incubator, support-system and home.

  For the purposes of this text, I’ve done some counting. Including my most recent book, titled in English Whose Crisis Whose Future? (in other languages with my preferred title Their Crises, Our Solutions) I’ve written 16 books, including four in French not translated into English. My languages of literary existence are, all told, 23. I’m putting them in a footnote because I’m proud of the list and that readers in so many countries may have found my work useful.1

  I was born in 1934 and published my first book, How the Other Half Dies, in 1976, thirty-five years ago, when I was 42. Everyone should by decree have the right to one enormous stroke of life-changing luck in the course of their existence and this was mine. I give details of how it came about in the preface to the 1986 reprint (the one reproduced in this series), but thirty-five years on, my astonishment at the thousand doors this book opened is undiminished. All that remained for me was to cross those inviting thresholds.

  I will now say something which sounds incredibly arrogant but ask you to bear with me for a moment. Looking back, I am confident that over these three and a half decades, I’ve been almost invariably right. Yes, I’ve made some minor mistakes but on the big-ticket items, I’ve made the correct call. Sometimes I’ve seen things coming that weren’t on the public or scholarly agenda at all. For example, to prepare for writing this preface, I skimmed some of my work on my TNI website and found a proposal for a book called Perfect Crimes. It couldn’t be carried out without funding, attracted no money and was therefore never written. The proposal, dated February 1995, contained a clear prognosis of growing financial power, incipient crisis and the attack on democracy which are salient features of the Western landscape in February 2012 when I am writing this.

  I got a good dose of déjà vu when I re-read bits of my first book on hunger, How the Other Half Dies, to see if it contained any wisdom that could help solve the early 21st century food crises. I found that aside from recommendations which would have been irrelevant at the time—such as to stop growing agrofuels on food-producing lands and to outlaw derivatives trading on commodities markets--all the recommendations of long years ago were the same as those I would propose now. They were, and remain, the only ones with a chance of arresting the increase in the numbers of hunger victims. And they seem to have no greater chance of being implemented now than then. I’ve been right on many other subjects as well but now I’ve finished bragging and you will see why I asked you to bear with me.

  Being right—even a continuous track record of being right—gives absolutely no guarantee of being heeded—I would almost say “quite the contrary”. Genuine solutions to the scourge of hunger or debt or the actions of financial and corporate capital are those that would not enrich anyone who matters—only the people who presently suffer from chronic hunger and malnutrition, the impact of debt, the fallout from financial crises and so on. I have not been alone in proposing reasonable, workable remedies—many others have had the same or better ideas. We know what needs doing and even how to do it—this isn’t the problem. The problem is always one configuration or another of power and money and making them do what they have no desire—or interest—to do.

  To take the single case of hunger, this configuration of power is why public policy supports “technological fixes” that allow (usually foreign) companies to sell machinery or fertilisers and pesticides as opposed to giving effective support to improve peasant agricultural methods which can demonstrably double or triple yields. It’s why the World Bank prefers to provide expensive foreign consultants rather than invest in infrastructure useful to small farmers. It’s why officialdom in general can encourage dependency on food imports rather than provide the political and financial space to local people to produce foods for local markets. “food sovereignty” is better than the officially sanctioned notion of “food security” because it attends to who produces and for whom. Today we can add to the hunger-generating mix the deregulation in the year 2000 of futures markets in food commodities so that rampant, price-swelling speculation could proceed without hindrance.

  But back to the inherent logic in the development of my work: After more than a decade of writing and campaigning on the food front, I moved to the subject of “third world” 2 debt because scholar-activist friends in the South all told me that debt was the biggest new contributing factor to hunger and that I should write about it. I demurred and told them the truth—I’m not an economist, did not deeply and truly understand money and did not feel at all competent to take on such an assignment. They insisted, promising they would help, and some did, leading to the publication of A Fate Worse than Debt.3

  After several years of campaigning on debt, things had only grown worse
, and southern countries were more indebted than ever. Human suffering under structural adjustment programmes devised by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank had led even Establishment authors to lament the “lost decade for development”. In other words, we were getting nowhere: debt was financially a good deal for the North and much better politically than colonialism. Creditor countries needed no army, sent no foreign administrators (except for the IMF-Bank missions) and got huge political leverage over the domestic and foreign affairs of the debt-ridden countries. The creditors’ actions in the south were largely invisible to their own citizens and these creditors and their banks even got paid for it. Why give it up?

  This recognition led me to a terrible truth I have since often had to confront: there is no degree of human suffering which, in and of itself, will cause policy to change.

  Policy only changes because people insist upon it. So it occurred to me that perhaps the citizens of the creditor countries might become more sensitive to the issue if they could see how debt of the South was also affecting them--for example through loss of exports and therefore jobs or because of environmental destruction that respected no borders. On this topic I did have help because the Debt Boomerang was a TNI project and I had some funds for people to do the requisite research on the different “boomerangs” the South catapulted back at the North.

  And since by then I had learned a good deal about structural adjustment and the so-called “Washington Consensus” that supplied the ideology behind these harsh austerity programmes, it was logical to go on from there to the World Bank in Faith and Credit (with Fabrizio Sabelli) and from there---well, those books aren’t yet ready to be downloaded because they are still in print or not legally mine to do what I like with them.

  Along the way, I’ve noted that there are two kinds of scholars. I’m not making a value judgment: one kind is just as good as the other. There are those who plough the same furrows year after year and reap a bountiful harvest of the same crop. There are those who follow their noses, let one thing lead to another and enjoy a change of scenery and a challenge, not knowing if anything really rewarding will grow in the new field.

  I’m the second type and there is a logical progression in my work, but also a sad constant. A great many people have told me that reading one or another of my books had caused them to change their activities, sometimes even their lives. This is of course immensely gratifying, but also a little scary because I have to admit that I cannot claim substantial victories for “our side”. Perhaps I’ve just led them into some sort of trap? Even a dead end?

  Sometimes I’ve seen marginal improvements and one must be grateful for small favours. But large, spectacular ones are a rare species indeed. We can’t of course know what the “tipping point” for genuine change will be, but we can be on the right side of history—and of justice. Still, the reader has a right to know that over 35 years of fairly unremitting work - of writing, speaking and campaigning on these issues - I can think of only three instances where my work has had an identifiable, direct impact.

  The first was rather esoteric—I had a large part in getting rid of the “Industry Cooperative Programme”, the transnational corporation haven inside the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). Only a few food activists noticed, but I felt satisfied. Second, I learned after the fact from an official source that my actions and testimony had been directly linked to the French government decision to withdraw from the MAI, or Multilateral Agreement on Investment, a treaty which would have given corporations huge powers, including the right to sue governments if they believed that any official regulation was harming their present or future profits. This Agreement, devoutly desired by the companies and negotiated in secret at the OECD in Paris, was killed by the French withdrawal. Finally, I learned of a limited success against the GATS—the General Agreement on Trade in Services, part of the World Trade Organisation’s huge catalogue of measures, whose goal was to make a commodity out of every human activity that could conceivably be construed as a service—thereby excepting only the army, the judiciary and the priesthood.

  The counter-GATS campaign, which I more or less invented and doggedly pursued with the indispensable support and enthusiasm of virtually all the 200 ATTAC local committees throughout France, resulted in 800 local or regional governments declaring themselves “GATS-free Zones”. The campaign spread to other countries and eventually we had 1500 such (symbolic) zones across Europe. I learned later from the then-Commissioner of the EU Trade Directorate, Pascal Lamy, that because of our campaign, the European Union had refrained from “requesting” services liberalisation and access for EU transnational corporations to health, education and cultural services in the South.4

  This, in my view, is an honourable but still a pretty slim catalogue. Perhaps if you win too soon, you haven’t tackled a big enough issue but it does get discouraging to see that hunger has increased, debt hasn’t yet been vanquished in Africa, the corporate sector is still pursuing the same agenda under different names, finance is ever-more powerful, democracy constantly under threat, that nothing is ever “over” and that even if one could work 24/7, there would always be more vitally necessary work one should do.

  However, on reflection, I don’t believe that I’ve led anyone into traps or dead-ends, least of all myself. I can guarantee a few things to people who want to take the same road of “let’s go out there and change the world”. You may not win (then again you might) but

  --you will meet smarter, more interesting people than if you stay in the conventional mainstream whose business it is to remain unfailingly boring;

  --you will be ahead of the curve and where history is made, when and if it is made;

  --you will live an honourable life.

  In 2007, the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia based in Madrid saw fit to award me an honorary doctorate in political science and sociology. In my brief acceptance speech, I said the following:

  I believe that the forces of wealth, power and control are invariably at the root of any problem of social and political economy. The job of the responsible social scientist is first to uncover these forces, second to write about them clearly, without jargon, in order to give ordinary people the right tools for action; and finally--recognising that scholarly neutrality is an illusion--to take an advocacy position in favour of the disadvantaged, the underdogs, the victims of injustice. This is what I think the tools of scholarship are for and this is how I have tried in my own work to use them."

  I hope that this is what I have done in the book you have chosen to download.

  About the Author

  SUSAN GEORGE is the author of fifteen books written in French and English and widely translated. She is president of the Board of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam, a decentralised fellowship of scholars living throughout the world whose work is intended to contribute to social justice and who are active in civil society in their own countries. She is also honorary president of ATTAC-France [Association for Taxation of Financial Transaction to Aid Citizens] where she also served as vice-president between 1999 and mid-2006 and remains a member of the scientific council.

  Her most recent books are Whose Crisis, Whose Future [Polity Press 2010]; Hijacking America: How the Religious and Secular Right Changed What Americans Think [Polity Press 2008]; We the Peoples of Europe [Pluto Press 2008]. Other recent books are Another World is Possible if... [Verso, New York and London, 2004] and The Lugano Report: On preserving capitalism in the 21st century [Pluto Press 1999], both available in many other languages.

  She has received honorary doctorates from the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and the Universidad Nacional de Educacion a Distancia of Madrid as well as the first “Outstanding Public Scholar Award” of the International Political Economy section of the International Studies Association.

  For a full biography and list of publications, please visit https://www.tni.org/users/susan-george.

  AUTHOR'S FOREWORD

/>   The publication by Penguin Books of this new and expanded edition of Ill Fares the Land gives me the greatest pleasure. I'm particularly attached to this book. Before introducing the essays it contains, however, a word about its publishing history and a short explanation of how the pieces came to be written are perhaps in order.

  Half of these essays, the six written from 1979 to 1982, appeared initially under this same title with the Institute for Policy Studies (Washington, DC, 1984) and Writers & Readers (London, 1985). Shortly thereafter, Writers & Readers declared bankruptcy, leaving in its wake a wretched legal mess and legions of unpaid authors. For this author at least, going unpaid is disagreeable; going unread - so long as people want to read you - is intolerable.

  Writers & Readers had also published my Food for Beginners. The hapless publishers who attempted to retrieve the 'Beginners' series from the ruins eventually informed me that, for reasons too boring to explain here, Food, like other titles in the series, would never see the light of day again. I long feared a similar fate for Ill Fares the Land. Before its demise, Writers & Readers had somehow contrived to sell out the first printing and had managed to get the book reviewed sufficiently often for most publishers to turn down the risk of reissuing a title not entirely new and not wholly their own.

  Not so Penguin. Penguin are both reissuing the older pieces and letting me add a half-dozen others written between 1983 and 1985, the year I started working full time on A Fate Worse than Debt. My deep gratitude goes to my previous Penguin editor for Fate, Andrew Franklin, who made the decision to reissue Ill Fares the Land (and then got promoted - I like to think the two events are causally linked!) and to my present one, Jon Riley, who saw it through to publication.