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

  Some readers like to know something of the background to the books they read, and here I don't mind giving it. Should they wonder why I wrote the essays in this collection, the honest answer would be, almost invariably, 'because someone asked me to'. With two short exceptions ('SNOB' and 'Ordering the World') none of these papers emerged from any particular need to communicate or to express myself; rather, they happened because someone convinced me I could make myself useful by writing them.

  Books like How the Other Half Dies or A Fate Worse than Debt reflect my own agenda; Ill Fares the Land corresponds on the whole to other people's. Naturally the two agendas mesh, or we wouldn't have cooperated in the first place. As far as my working life goes, however, the real difference between these three books is that the first two were written thanks to refusals, whereas this collection emerged from acceptances. Other writers may have a different experience; mine is that producing anything sustained means I must clear my calendar, say 'No' to everyone and everything and live a cloistered life. Writing a book is an activity so lonely, so frustrating and so basically unfair to one's entourage that I am wary of younger people who say gushingly to me, 'Oh, I just love writing!' Generally I restrain myself from replying, 'That must be because you haven't done very much.' What I like is to have written something.

  Although the subjects of the essays collected here are serious ones, I usually find writing shorter and self-contained pieces like these more enjoyable and certainly less lonely, particularly because they are often linked to the more sociable aspects of life. Many of these papers were the consequence - sometimes the cause - of friendships; most, too, were related to travelling somewhere for an event or a conference: to Washington, Bangladesh, Yugoslavia, Senegal, Geneva, Bruges, Canada. Mine is a full and fortunate life.

  I was paid something for the essays that comprise Chapters I, 2 and 7 (by UN agencies) and 12 (an endowed lecture), but nothing for the others. An author/speaker simply cannot write a paper for, and then attend without honorarium, several conferences a year unless someone provides a minimum material base. The Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) in Washington and the Transnational Institute (TNI), its sister in Amsterdam, have long provided this for me; both know how grateful I am. Un grand merci as well to the French Comite Catholique contre la Faim et pour le Developpement whose grant I spent on working expenses between 1979 and 1982, including the trip to Bangladesh. Most of all, my husband, Charles-Henry George, made it possible for me to embark on and then to stick with this indefinable career of mine (I mention these material aspects, burdened as I am at present with fund-raising for TNI. It is amazing how many organizations want, indeed expect, people like me to provide lectures, seminars, articles, etc., for their constituencies (usually free of charge) yet do not seem to recognize that our presentations do not fall from heaven but result from years of hard work. Somehow, someone has to pay for this work, before the books come out (assuming they do) and their authors are invited to hold forth. If organizations want the product, they should also contribute to the process)

  The first and shorter edition of Ill Fares the Land appeared when stories of starvation in Ethiopia and other African countries were filling the media. It seemed an important time to publish this work, for, as I said at the time in the Introduction:

  Visible famine is once again pushing the issues of hunger and underdevelopment into the forefront of public consciousness. It's not that hunger had ever gone away - it had merely receded from the television screen, due to the temporary absence of victims spectacular enough to photograph. Now, God help them, and us, the victims are back for all to see.

  Perhaps such needless suffering will at least compel serious discussion of their plight and what might - must - be done about it. Such a debate should be carried on by as many people as possible, and, I would submit, forced upon those who do not care to participate, either from bureaucratic inertia or because it is not in their economic or political interests to do so.

  With this book, I hope to contribute to such a debate. The pieces collected here all run along the lines of my previous work: they examine questions of power. Some fit into the ‘food systems and hunger’ category , others are more concerned with how we think about food systems and hunger; all deal with the means by which some groups gain authority and ascendancy over others. Control over the world food system ... the subject of much of my earlier writing and of some that appears here - implies control over technology and ideology, scholarship and culture as well. Such areas are not peripheral to the horrors of hunger.

  I still hope to contribute to such a debate, which is more needed today than ever: the new essays expand on these same themes. The first edition of this book contained two basic 'food system' essays; to these are now added, in Part I, a piece concerned specifically with famine (not the same thing as hunger) and how we could avoid it; another suggests what Europe could do to combat chronic hunger in Africa and why it would be in her interests to do so.

  If I had another life, I'd devote much of it to a better understanding of science. In Part II, I take one path open to the non- scientist, and make an attempt at least to examine the social conditions in which scientific and technological activity takes place. The 1982 essay on the 'transfer' of technology and its impact on Third World societies is now accompanied by one, written in 1984, on corporate control of biotechnology.

  Part III, on ideology, scholarship and culture, now contains more chapters than any other. Among the questions explored: What are the present conditions of the production of knowledge about hunger and poverty? Who actually benefits from research done on them? How do the laws of cultural imitation ensure that Third World societies will follow the mass consumption patterns of the West? What sort of a university do we need if we want it to contribute to authentic development? Where do the categories which we use to think about all these things come from - that is, what are our unstated prior assumptions? In the Introduction to the first edition I wrote that these issues are 'not peripheral to the horrors of hunger': I now believe they are absolutely central.

  The concluding chapter, from 1985, concerns food as a human right. It provides a bridge between the food and justice issues I began working on fifteen years ago (particularly in How the Other Half Dies), and the human consequences of Third World debt, the subject of the book I'd begun to work on in 1985 and which became A Fate Worse than Debt.

  Though the reader must be his or her own judge, on re-reading I found the pieces collected here - both the older and the more recent ones - nearly impervious to the passage of time. This is due not to my perspicacity but to the unchanging nature of power. The poor may always be with us but so, surely, will the powerful - ever seeking to expand their freedoms at the cost of ours; to deny justice unless it serves their ends; to persuade us that theirs is the natural and beneficent order of things. It is the consistency of their actions that keeps my words from seeming too dated. Timely or not, these essays are published here almost exactly as they first appeared. Though I've made some stylistic changes, I've not touched the texts themselves except when repetitions or excess detail required deletions. Remaining repetitions are intentional and useful to the arguments. The few textual additions appear in footnotes.

  The situation we face at the outset of the 1990s, though in many ways constant, is undeniably different from that of the previous decade. Five years after the great famines of the 1980s - and as many of us foresaw - 'compassion fatigue' has set in with a vengeance. Amid general indifference, chronic hunger - especially in Africa - has grown more severe with each passing year. Throughout the Third World, austerity measures designed to ensure repayment of crushing debts threaten the food security and the lives of millions. The power of the rich countries, and often that of Third World elites, has been entrenched by the debt phenomenon, as I have tried to show in detail elsewhere.

  In the past decade furthermore, the southern half of the globe has become less important to the northern half. If the poorest continents dropped off
the map, it is not certain that everyone in the rich countries would notice. Latin America now represents a mere 4.1 per cent of the value of world trade; Africa 2.4 per cent (with South Africa responsible for a fifth of that). Any two of the four Asian 'dragons' (Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong) account for a higher proportion of world trade value than all the countries of Africa taken together.

  Except for these dragons and a few apprentice dragons, the major industrial countries no longer look much to the Third World as a trading partner or a source of cheap labour - they've found an alternative. Though splendid developments in themselves, glasnost and perestroika in the USSR and Eastern Europe may have unforeseen consequences as the State socialist countries move closer to the parliamentary democracies.

  And yet, in the year 2000, the Third World, broadly defined, will contain nearly 90 per cent of humanity - much of it poor, hungry and young. For the rich, industrialized countries (North America, Eastern and Western Europe, perhaps Australia and a few others) the temptation may be overwhelming to unite along more or less racialist lines in order to keep this seething mass under control. The South will be perceived as dangerous, a threat to the power, the profits and (to some extent) the values of the North in general. The response from the said seething mass will most likely manifest itself in different sorts of fundamentalism and terrorism born of despair, though employing far more sophisticated methods and weapons than present-day ones.

  Just as hunger is likely to grow, so the rape and plunder of the planet will continue unless today's promising environmental movement grows exponentially and becomes the political context within which all leaders must work or perish. To escape the destructive logic of our century we must build stronger political coalitions, regrouping forces separate today: Greens, trade unionists, farmers, women, churches, youth, etc. Demands for democracy world wide must focus on the powerful - not just on States but also on corporations, banks, national and inter- national bureaucracies - and force them to change course. Most important, we must make new international alliances, from North to South, between democratic forces and dissident elites - those who have not sold out to greed.

  In the last analysis, I wrote the essays which follow because I believe (without sufficient proof, it is true) that the world is ultimately subject to rationality. Perhaps it isn't; perhaps we're up against not just the terrible logic of our century but the lunacy of our species as well. In that case there is no hope at all. But until proven irrevocably wrong, I intend to stand on the side of reason and in the hope of justice, with my countless comrades fighting innumerable battles; muttering occasionally under my breath, 'All that is required for evil to triumph is that good men and women do nothing.'

  Lardy Essonne

  September 1989

  PART I: FAMINES, FOOD SYSTEMS AND SOLUTIONS

  1

  OVERCOMING HUNGER: STRENGTHEN THE WEAK, WEAKEN THE STRONG

  The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations proclaimed 16 October 1981 the first World Food Day and has now made it an annual event. FAO's objective is to promote widespread public knowledge and concern about food and hunger problems throughout the world, and to this end the WFD Secretariat commissioned several papers which were to be published in five or six languages and sent as a kit to the dozens of national committees to aid them in their observance of World Food Day. I accepted the Secretariat's invitation to write one of these papers and revised it several times to conform as closely as possible to the needs and desires of FAO. Although I accepted changes suggested by the World Food Day staff and avoided unfavourable mention of specific countries, publication was ultimately refused. I was told off the record by the kind and somewhat embarrassed editor I'd been working with that the piece was still too polemical and political for FAO's taste.

  The Organization honoured its contractual obligations to me and has graciously consented to publication here. The article appears in its final version (with only minor stylistic changes) as it came back from the Secretariat just before the final refusal. The reader must judge whether the latter was warranted.

  Perhaps World Food Day calls for commemoration, but surely not celebration. How could one "celebrate" a day on which as many as 40,000 people will succumb to hunger? Moreover, barring an unforeseen, major overhaul of the world's political and economic system, there is every reason to suppose their numbers will be even greater on 16 October 1982, 1983, 1984 ...

  One hopes this observation may provoke first outrage, then inquiry and, finally, action. If 16 October is to differ from any other day, it will be because widespread observance of World Food Day helps significant numbers of people throughout the world to move from indignation (without which there is no motivation) towards accurate analyses of the issues (without which there can be no effective action) and from this anger and understanding onwards to organization and practical politics.

  Relatively Small Amounts of Food Are Needed

  Estimates of the number of severely malnourished people range from 450 million (FAO) to a billion (the World Bank). Experts agree that the relative and absolute numbers of hungry people have never been so high, and that they are increasing.

  The 15 million children who, according to Unicefs estimate, die prematurely each year from hunger or hunger-related illness could be saved by an infinitesimal portion of the food harvested in the world. Simple arithmetic demonstrates how this is so:

  • There are about 3,500 calories per kilo of grain, so a ton supplies an average 3,500,000 calories.

  • FAO says 2,300-2,400 calories a day are usually adequate for proper adult nutrition.

  • We shall be extra careful and assume that children should eat as much as adults.

  • At 2,300 calories x 365 days, each child would thus need 839,500 calories a year, which means each ton of grain could provide for over four children (4.17, to be precise).

  • A million tons would feed more than four million, and to provide all year long for all 15 million children who now die from hunger, we would need to count on just about 3.6 million tons of cereals altogether.

  Does this sound like a lot?

  It may, until you learn that world harvests in 1980 were 1,556 million tons of cereals. The share needed to

  15 million young lives is thus equal at most to a two-thousandth (0.002 per cent) of global crops - a figure as ludicrously small as it appears to be tragically unobtainable. Even this tiny figure exaggerates, because we have not only assumed a high daily ration, but we've also proceeded as if no other resources existed besides cereals - not even breast milk.

  We could apply the same sort of arithmetic in discussing food for the 450 million people FAO classifies as severely malnourished. Let's grant a very generous ration of 2,740 calories a day, or one ton of grain per 3.5 adults per year. We would arrive at 128 million tons of cereals required to wipe out serious hunger and malnutrition - 8 per cent of the world's most recent harvest, less than the United States feeds to its livestock.

  In practice, however, needs are much less, since we've assumed 100 per cent dependence on these cereals - that is, 450 million people with zero resources of their own, who have neither fish nor fowl, root crops nor oil seeds, fruits nor vegetables, milk nor meat. A World Bank economist wrote recently that a mere 2 per cent of world grain harvests would provide enough food for over a billion people who need it.1

  Victims, Resources, and Crucial Questions

  Showing how little food, proportionally, would be required to rid the world of hunger may help prompt indignation; unfortunately, it contributes very little to analysis. Numbers like the ones just given have three major drawbacks:

  1. They mask the fact that the needs of poor people with no purchasing power do not create what economists call 'effective demand'. The poor cannot express their needs in terms of money, the only language the market economy understands. Food ought to be a basic human right. However, this right cannot be exercised in a system which divides people into two categories: those w
ho can pay (called 'consumers') and those who cannot.

  2. These figures imply that the problem is 'to feed' people. If only we could manage to divert x per cent of our abundance, 'we' could feed 'them' and no one would go hungry. The problem, however, is to make sure people can feed themselves. Given the opportunity, they will do just that; they will not need 'us'. Unfortunately, through no fault of their own, fewer and fewer people can feed themselves.

  3. These numbers also concentrate on quantifying the victims (and the resources theoretically available to help them out). It's not that the victims are unimportant - but if we focus only on them, we shall lose sight of the really crucial questions:

  • Who controls food and food-producing resources, especially land?

  • Who decides what constitutes the agricultural 'surplus' and how it is distributed?

  • Who has the power to determine that some will eat while others will not?

  A question of relationships

  For a world so proud of its science, its technology and its management skills, eliminating hunger should be child's play. Since it still exists, one logical conclusion is that hunger is not primarily a scientific, technical or organizational problem.

  Suppose we change the angle of vision? What if we consider, not the poor and hungry themselves, but their relationships to society, particularly to its powerful members, locally, nationally and internationally? 'Conventional wisdom' focuses on the victims of hunger and always sees them as people lacking something - food and money, of course, but also technology, skills, knowledge (and, in the worst cases, even intelligence). What if, on the contrary, we regarded these millions of poor people as a rich national resource who lack only power, the power to control their own environments and the circumstances of their lives? By upending it, we shall discover that the problem of hunger is not one of technology or organization but of politics; morally, the issue is not charity, but justice.