Ill Fares the Land: Essays on Food, Hunger and Power Page 3

  From Development to Underdevelopment

  In former times, the least powerful people seem to have been better off than they are today, relative to the situation of the most powerful.

  They have wine and spices and fair bread, and we have oat cake and straw and water to drink. They have leisure and fine houses; we have pain and labour, the rain and wind in the fields. And yet it is of us and of our toil that these men hold their state.2

  This text, 600 years old, is taken from a sermon preached during an English peasant rebellion in 1381. Has anything much changed? Yes - today, the really poor are found in different areas, and they may not even have 'oat cake, straw and water to drink'. One area in Asia is reporting deaths from exposure for the first time. Why? Because straw, with which the very poorest people cover themselves during the cold nights, used to be free. Now it has a price, which they cannot afford. So they freeze.3 Pure water to drink is the exception rather than the rule for poor Third World people. And how many would be glad to have oat cake or any other grain, along with labour of any kind, even in the rain and wind in the fields? While tragic famines could and did strike with awful regularity in precolonial times, historical and anthropological evidence suggests that poor people in the now 'underdeveloped' countries once had far easier access to food than they have today.4

  Throughout history, ruling groups have tried to keep a great secret: they need the peasants - the producers of wealth - far more than the peasants need them. Patron/client relationships in most 'traditional' societies limit the exploitation to which peasants need submit and offer some security in times of hardship. Those who control land and other resources have responsibilities towards those who serve them. Self-interest opposes killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. As a result, in 'traditional' societies, the peasantry survives in all but the most dire circumstances.

  Today, however, patron/client arrangements nearly everywhere have broken down and have been replaced by capitalist relationships. Land, food, and human labour alike become nothing but commodities and sources of profit.5 As a result, hunger is increasing in both scope and severity. Deprivation on today's scale is a thoroughly modern phenomenon. Humanity has taken several thousand years to reach its present stage of underdevelopment.

  Candidates for Hunger

  In many countries with serious food problems, at least a third of the rural population is totally landless. An additional third may exist on holdings of less than a hectare.6 Both rural and urban unemployment are on the upswing, while the Third World labour force is likely to increase by nearly half a billion before the end of the century.7

  All these people are candidates for hunger. Instead of searching for the economic and political causes and implications of this drastic situation, many 'experts' focus our attention on the victims. We are told that people - the landless and the jobless - go hungry through their own fault, that they are pushing themselves off the farms and into unemployment; they are worsening their own plight because they have too many children.

  Any analysis should, however, not only ask why the poor have children (risk-spreading, security, etc.)8 - but also who decides how many is too many. Who determines what constitutes 'over' population? 'Over' in relation to what? In relation, no doubt, to some ideal level where available resources, including food, 'balance' with the number of people who want to consume them.

  In fact, where does the imbalance lie today? The rich countries (not quite 25 per cent of world population) consume between two-thirds and three-quarters of the world's production, including its food production. Their animals alone eat nearly a third of all cereal grains harvested.9

  While huge imbalances in consumption exist between rich and poor countries, the most perceptible gaps are those between the rich and poor citizens of developing countries. To predict levels of hunger and malnutrition in any country, one need look only at the degree of land concentration, the circumstances of tenancy, and the proportion of landless labourers. The more unequal the holdings, the more insecure the tenancies, the higher the proportion of landless people, the greater the incidence of hunger will be. When fewer than 5 per cent of the landholders control 70 per cent or more of the cropland (a commonplace occurrence); when tenants must pay exorbitant rents and are vulnerable to eviction at the landlords' pleasure; when large numbers of rural dwellers have only the off-chance of selling their labour power standing between them and starvation, then one need look no further for the immediate causes of hunger. If the first priority is to maintain this status quo, it is quite true that there are 'too many' people.

  Inequality Breeds Inefficiency

  Inequality also severely limits the amount of food that can be produced. A number of studies have shown that smaller holdings produce more food than large estates.10 When farmers have secure tenure and know the benefits of their labour will accrue to them and their families - not to a landlord, a money lender, or a middleman - then they will work very hard indeed.

  A more just society is a better-fed society. When the rich take the best, large numbers of peasants must make do with a tiny proportion of second-best land. 'Over' cultivation or 'over' grazing results. When development experts ascribe such sins to small peasants and herders, their vocabulary focuses on the supposed wrongdoings of the victims, deflecting attention from the meagre resources that the landholding minority allot to the poor majority.

  When even 'over' cultivation fails to ensure survival (for, of course, an environment limited both in size and in quality does deteriorate under population pressure), the alternative is migration to an already 'over' crowded city.11 Here the term 'over' populated describes very precisely the unliveable Third World shanty-towns inhabited by desperate, displaced ex-peasants.

  Development Games

  Today, it has been officially recognized that gross inequalities contribute to hunger. Even the bland recommendations of international conferences now call upon governments to display the 'political will necessary' to eliminate them. These resolutions do not, however, explain why governments whose supporters have a deep stake in the status quo would willingly destroy their own power base.

  Governments - if we assume that they are genuinely concerned for the poor and hungry - will find that some development policies are easier to carry out than others. An analogy from game theory illustrates why. In a zero-sum game, if A wins, B must lose: all the points won and lost cancel each other out. Health and education are not zero-sum development games. If A earns his first degree certificate, B need not give up his Ph.D.; when C receives prenatal care, this does not imply that D will have a heart attack (This is not to say there are no problems of budgetary allocations between primary, secondary and higher education, or between city hospital-based and decentralized health care). Indeed, when poor C risks catching a disease, then so does rich D. Dominant groups sometimes feel that environmental and health improvements are a necessity - and the poor benefit as a result. One Latin American country recently stamped out an epidemic by vaccinating 80 million people in ten months.12 An all-out attack on hunger is something else. Workable anti- hunger strategies strike landholding elites, and rightly so, as zero- sum games: if the landless and the small peasantry gain greater access to land, credit, and other food-producing resources this must almost always be at the expense of those who control them at present. Therefore, one finds dozens of historical and contemporary examples of the wealthy's refusal to play any game at all - until violence becomes the only recourse of the deprived. It is thus logical that as landlessness and hunger increase, repression must also increase and that a part of the arms trade - estimated at 1 to 2 billion dollars annually - is devoted to weapons designed to quell internal revolts.13 When uprisings succeed, hunger may decrease dramatically. In the single year following the victory of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, basic grain production went up by fully one-third, and was far more equally distributed.14

  Strategies to End Hunger

  Steps to alleviate hunger never take place in a social
vacuum. Inevitably, a power structure is already in place. Advantages of any anti-hunger project or strategy are likely to flow towards better-endowed groups (in both industrialized and developing countries), unless stringent precautions are taken to ensure that the benefits actually reach the poor. Donor agencies and governments, however well-meaning, would thus do well to keep the following propositions in mind:

  1. Development strategies benefiting the least favoured classes (or nations) will not be acceptable to the dominant classes or nations unless their interests are also substantially served.

  2. Development strategies which benefit only poor classes or nations will be ignored, sabotaged or otherwise suppressed by the powerful in so far as possible.

  3. Development strategies serving the interests of the elites, while doing positive harm to the poor, will still be put into practice and if necessary maintained by violence, so long as no basic change in the balance of political and social forces takes place.

  Currently many people claim that the Brandt Commission strategy15 - a massive transfer of resources from the industrialized to the developing countries - would end hunger and underdevelopment. They stress that this strategy is not a zero-sum game; that both rich and poor nations would ultimately benefit. Such reasoning is fine as far as it goes. It has the advantage of realism since it appeals to the self-interest of the rich nations - not to ethical principles. It stops short of asking how resources transferred will actually be shared with the worst-off. Three decades of failed 'trickle-down' development should have taught us some scepticism on this point. And even if equitable sharing were to take place, there is no guarantee that the Third World could achieve food self-sufficiency through resource transfer alone in the absence of major structural - even psychological - changes. Two formidable obstacles to ending hunger would remain: the 'cash-crop imperative' and the 'modernization syndrome'.

  Crops and Robbers

  Many Third World countries have opted for a development strategy encouraging cash crops for export at the expense of food production. While some privileged groups may profit handsomely from prolonging such colonial production patterns or from introducing such non-traditional crops as fresh fruits, vegetables, flowers (plus livestock) for off-season delivery to northern markets, overall these countries have been swindled. For them, participating in the world market is like playing Monopoly against partners who begin the game with all the most desirable properties.

  Tropical commodity prices fluctuate wildly and unforeseeably. The only predictable thing about them is that they decline constantly compared to the prices of manufactured goods poor countries must import. Of every $100 consumers spend on tropical products, in their final form, producer countries get only $15. The remaining 85 per cent lines the pockets of those in industrialized countries - mostly transnational corporations (TNCs) - which control shipping, processing, and merchandising.16

  Cash crops also hog scarce resources like fertilizers and credit; as a result food production inexorably declines. In turn, this must be compensated for by importing increasingly expensive foods from abroad: in 1979-80, developing countries imported about 85 million tons of cereals.17 (At the World Food Conference in 1974, FAO feared imports of 85 million tons in ... 1985.) The Third World is thus in the unenviable position of exporting greater and greater quantities of tropical agricultural products at (falling) prices it does not control in exchange for greater and greater quantities of vital foodstuffs at (rising) prices it does not control either. This is one manifestation of power relations at the international level. The victims are entire nations, particularly the poorest among them. Fairer and more stable prices for cash crops (as recommended by Brandt, UNCTAD, etc.) are necessary, though not sufficient, conditions for an effective anti-hunger strategy.

  Modernization: Remedy or Disease?

  Most countries, however, can't get off the trade treadmill even when they recognize the danger, because they must repay their crushing foreign debt, now estimated at $400 billion (It tripled to $1,200 billion in the seven years since this paper was written). Thus they continue to submit to unequal exchange in the marketplace. This is a fairly straightforward kind of exploitation. A more subtle aspect of the control that dominant countries exercise over their poor Southern neighbours can be described as the 'modernization syndrome'.

  Victims of this syndrome assume that the agricultural practices of industrialized countries (especially North America) are the most 'modern', the most efficient and consequently the most desirable. These techniques are, in fact, often seen as the only way to improve output in countries whose agriculture is considered, by comparison, backward.

  North American agriculture is of dubious 'modernity', even on its home ground, as a good many Western experts are beginning to recognize. It consumes enormous amounts of expensive, nonrenewable energy, much of it in the form of manufactured inputs. It depletes and pollutes the environment through poor conservation practices, land and water 'mining', overuse and run-offs of agricultural chemicals.18 Farmers have fallen under the control of non-producers - giant corporations that provide inputs and buy the produce, enormous banks that furnish costly financial credit. While this agriculture appears to be immensely powerful and productive, yields per hectare in the United States of all the major food grains have stabilized or fallen since the early 1970s.19 Most important of all, the North American system grew up under unique historical conditions which included a vast frontier and relatively few people to farm it. Consequently, the whole thrust of this agriculture has always been to obtain the greatest possible yields per person, not per unit of land.

  Conditions in most developing countries are exactly the opposite: they have relatively small amounts of arable land per person and vast numbers of rural people who need employment. What could be less 'modern' - if eliminating hunger is the goal - than to model development on a system expressly designed to substitute fossil fuels and industrial products for work done by people? No wonder Third World rural unemployment is on the rise.

  'Modernization' downgrades the potential contributions of peasants' practical knowledge to improving production. If Western recipes for development were abandoned, peasants, now perceived as 'obstacles' to development, could occupy their rightful place as intelligent farmers and sources of agricultural knowledge.20

  Because 'modernization' implies extensive use of very expensive inputs, wealthier farmers benefit most. They may indeed increase their production (just as the corporations which sell such agricultural inputs increase their profits), but this increase may contribute to hunger.

  That hunger will automatically diminish when food production increases is a common but naive assumption. Higher productivity - and higher profits - actually mean more hungry people when they bring evictions, foreclosures on debts so owners can control more land, more labour-saving machinery, higher rents, higher prices for land, lower wages for growing numbers of available labourers, etc.21 When governments neither subsidize nor protect smaller cultivators and market forces are left free play, the weak will lack access to the 'modernization package'. They will be eliminated when agriculture becomes more a way of making profits than of feeding people - as happens all too often in 'modernized' systems. The problem is not improved technology per se, but to whom it is available.

  Dependency is Undependable

  A country cannot be independent when it depends on the goodwill of rich consumers to keep on buying its coffee or its fresh strawberries even in periods of economic crisis and spending cutbacks. Nor can it be free when it depends on TNCs for pricing, processing and marketing its agricultural products; or on the wealthy countries for vital foodstuffs, or on food aid; or on foreign funds to finance these imports. Landless labourers and poor cultivators at the bottom of the Third World ladder cannot win when they depend on the diminishing goodwill of their richer, better- endowed local neighbours who hold literal life-and-death power over them and their families.

  When concerned citizens and those professionally
responsible for confronting problems of hunger and underdevelopment face up to a few unpalatable truths, we may then make some headway:

  1. That all governments are concerned for, and representative of, the majority of their people is patent nonsense. Plenty of governments are most concerned with enriching those who keep them in power. Human rights, including the right to food, run a poor second.

  2. Very little is to be expected from most industrialized countries (except that they will encourage dependency). Food aid decreases as need increases and prices rise. Socialist industrialized countries contribute a far smaller proportion of their GNP to development aid than capitalist countries whose own record is, for the most part, dismal. The only way to get more help from such bastions of national selfishness is to convince them it is in their interest to aid poor countries (as the Brandt Commission attempts to do).