An interesting debate
Amartya Sen asserts that famine doesn't happen in a democracy; Vandana
Shiva says "Nosense" Two items from the Observer.
MichaelP
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The Observer (London) Sunday June 16, 2002
WHY HALF THE PLANET IS HUNGRY
AMARTYA SEN,
* Amartya Sen, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1998, is Master of
Trinity College, Cambridge. This is a longer version of an article,
expanded by the author, that appeared last week in Le Monde.
The world's leading expert on the causes of famine, Nobel prize-winning
economist answers crucial questions on why people starve when democracy
falters.
Q: Why, in the twenty-first century, are 800 million people living in the
shadow of hunger?
Widespread hunger in the world is primarily related to poverty. It is not
principally connected with food production at all. Indeed, over the course
of the last quarter of a century, the prices of the principal staple foods
(such as rice, wheat etc) have fallen by much more than half in 'real'
terms. If there is more demand for food, in the present state of world
technology and availability of resources, the production will
correspondingly increase.
The demand for food is restrained mainly by lack of income. And the same
factor explains the large number of people who are hungry across the
world. Given their income levels, they are not able to buy enough food,
and as a consequence these people (including their family members) live
with hunger.
But it is not adequate to look only at incomes. There is need to look also
at the political circumstances that allow famine and hunger. If the
survival of a government is threatened by the prevalence of hunger, the
government has an incentive to deal with the situation. Incomes can be
expanded both by policies that raise overall income and also by
redistributive policies which provide employment, and thus tackle one of
the principal reasons for hunger (to wit, unemployment in a country
without an adequate social security system).
In democratic countries, even very poor ones, the survival of the ruling
government would be threatened by famine, since elections are not easy to
win after famines; nor is it easy to withstand criticism of opposition
parties and newspapers. That is why famine does not occur in democratic
countries. Unfortunately, there are a great many countries in the world
which do not yet have democratic systems.
Indeed, as a country like Zimbabwe ceases to be a functioning democracy,
its earlier ability to avoid famines in very adverse food situations (for
which Zimbabwe had an excellent record in the 1970s and 1980s) becomes
weakened. A more authoritarian Zimbabwe is now facing considerable danger
of famine.
Alas, hunger in the non-acute form of endemic under-nourishment often
turns out to be not particularly politically explosive. Even democratic
governments can survive with a good deal of regular under-nourishment. For
example, while famines have been eliminated in democratic India (they
disappeared immediately in 1947, with Independence and multi-party
elections), there is a remarkable continuation of endemic
under-nourishment in a non-acute form.
Deprivation of this kind can reduce life expectancy, increase the rate of
morbidity, and even lead to under-development of mental capacities of
children. If the political parties do not succeed in making endemic hunger
into a politically active issue, hunger in this non-acute form can go on
even in democratic countries.
Q: What should rich countries do, and is trade liberalisation the answer?
The rich countries can do a great deal to reduce hunger in the world.
First, the displacement of democracies in poor countries,
particularly in Africa, often occurred during the Cold War with the
connivance of the great powers. Whenever a military strongman displaced a
democratic government, the new military dictatorship tended to get support
from the Soviet Union (if the new military rulers were pro-Soviet) or from
the United States and its allies (if the new rulers were anti-Soviet and
pro-West). So there is culpability on the part of the dominant powers in
the world, given past history, and there is some responsibility now for
rich countries to help facilitate the expansion of democratic governance
in the world.
Second, hunger is related to low income and often to unemployment.
Poverty could be very substantially reduced if the richer countries were
more welcoming to imports from poorer countries, rather than shutting them
out by tariff barriers and other exclusions. Fairer trade can reduce
poverty in the poor countries (as the recent Oxfam report Rigged Rules,
Double Standards discusses in detail).
Third, there is a need for a global alliance not just to combat
terrorism in the world, but also for positive goals, such as combating
illiteracy and reducing preventable illnesses that so disrupt economic and
social lives in the poorer countries.
Trade liberalisation on the part of the richer countries could certainly
make a difference to employment and income prospects of poorer countries.
The situation is a little more complex in the case of liberalisation of
the poorer countries. Even those countries which have greatly benefited
from the expansion of world trade (such as South Korea or China) often
went through a phase of protecting industries before vigorous expansion of
exports and trade. So, trade liberalisation is partly an answer, but the
economic steps involved have to be carefully assessed: the policies cannot
be driven by simple slogans.
Q: What is the solution?
There is no 'magic bullet' to deal with the entrenched problem of hunger
in the world. It requires political leadership in encouraging democratic
governments in the world, including support for multi-party elections,
open public discussions, elimination of press censorship, and also
economic support for independent news media and rapid dissemination of
information and analysis. It also requires visionary economic policies
which both encourage trade (especially allowing exports from poorer
countries into the markets of the rich), but also reforms (involving
patent laws, technology transfer etc.) to dramatically reduce deprivation
in the poorer countries.
The problem of hunger has to be seen as being embedded in larger issues of
global poverty and deprivation.
Countries of the South increasingly seek food self-sufficiency. Could this
solve the problem of hunger and starvation?
Food self-sufficiency is a peculiarly obtuse way of thinking about food
security. There is no particular problem, even without self-sufficiency,
in achieving nutritional security through the elimination of poverty (so
that people can buy food) and through the availability of food in the
world market (so that countries can import food if there is not an
adequate stock at home).
The two problems get confused, because many countries which are
desperately poor also happen to earn most of their income from food
production. This is the case, for example, for many countries in Africa.
But if these countries were able to produce a good deal of income (for
example through diversification of production, including
industrialisation), they can become free of hunger even without producing
all the food that is needed for domestic consumption. The focus has to be
on income and entitlement, and the ability to command food rather than on
any fetishist concern about food self-sufficiency.
There are situations in which self-sufficiency is important, such as
during wars. At one stage in the Second World War, there was a real danger
of Britain not being able to get enough food into the country. But that is
a very peculiar situation, and we are not in one like that now, nor are we
likely to be in the near future. The real issue is whether a country can
provide enough food for its citizens - either from domestic production or
imports or both - and that is a very different issue from
self-sufficiency. We have to look at ways and means of eliminating
poverty, and to undertake the economic, social and political processes
that can achieve that.
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Observer (London), Sunday June 23, 2002
THE REAL REASONS FOR HUNGER
Vandana Shiva *
* Vandana Shiva is Director, Research Foundation for Science, Technology &
Ecology, India. See www.vshiva.net for more information.
Leading Indian ecological activist Vandana Shiva disagrees with Amartya
Sen's analysis of global hunger and argues that famine has returned to
democratic India.
Amartya Sen is the world's leading expert on the causes of famine. But he
is wrong in his analysis of contemporary famine. His analysis ignores
trade liberalization and globalization as a cause for why people are
hungry today. In offering free trade solutions to hunger, he is offering
the disease as a cure.
Amartya Sen's article in last week's Observer - Why half the planet is
hungry (see below)- argues that no famine can occur in a democracy, and
cites India as an example of the elimination of famines. It is true that
famines disappeared immediately in 1947, with independence and multiparty
elections. But famine is making a comeback in India. As Mulayam Singh
Yada, the leader of a major political party, stated in Parliament:
"There is famine in Orissa, Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh,
Maharashtra and Bihar, Gujarat. This is a serious matter. The tragedy is
that while people starve, the godowns are overflowing. 300 to 400 million
Rupees are being spent daily to stock food of which 35% is rotting. What
was the reason that the government under pressure of rich countries,
decided to let the people starve merely in order to reduce the budget?
Eight hundred tribal children have died of starvation in Maharashtra. Four
starving women from Orissa tried to sell her child for 300 Rupees in
Calcutta. In the famine stricken regions of Orissa, children are being
sold for a few thousand rupees because of starvation. Wives are being sold
into bondage".
People are starving because the policy structures that defended rural
livelihoods, and access to resources and markets, and hence entitlements
and incomes, are being systematically dismantled by structural adjustment
programmes, driven by the World Bank, and by WTO rules imposing trade
liberalization.
After the Great Bengal Famine of 1942 which killed more than 2 million
people, India's policies after independence put livelihoods and food
security first, rather than trade and commerce. Land reform put land back
in the hands of the peasants and cultivators, thus removing a root cause
of poverty. The economic "reforms" under globalization reverse these
reforms by corporatizing agriculture, displacing small peasants, and
removing limits on land ownership. Displaced peasants cannot have incomes
or entitlements. They are among those who go hungry. Amartya Sen does not
refer anywhere to issues of land reform as central to the issue of hunger
and poverty, or to the high costs of seeds and chemicals which are pushing
Indian peasants to suicide. Without people's rights to resources, there is
no lasting solution to hunger.
WHEN "DEMOCRACY" FAILS TO PREVENT FAMINE
Sen's assumption that democracy can prevent famines in our times is also
conceptually flawed because it fails to address the fact that trade
liberalization and globalization policies empty democracy of economic
content, and remove basic decisions from the democratic influence of a
country's people.
Political democracy divorced from economic democracy allows governments to
bid for votes on the basis of hate, fear and exclusion. The failure of the
ruling party in India in recent regional elections was due to the
destitution of farmers - caused by the implementation of trade
liberalization policies for seeds, subsidies and imports under WTO rules.
Instead of addressing the issue of rural poverty and hunger, the
government pulled out the card of communal frenzy in Gujarat and war
hysteria over Kashmir to divert the public and create new fundamentalist
agendas to electioneer with. Governments can survive famines of they can
inflame fundamentalist forces as a diversion. People die of both hunger
and wars. Strengthening food sovereignty, food rights and food security
requires changes in trade rules. We should understand that this is also a
condition for peace in our violent and brutal times.
DEREGULATED IMPORTS MEAN IMPORTING HUNGER AND UNEMPLOYMENT
Sen describes food sovereignty and self sufficiency as "obtuse" and
"fetishist", and recommends dependence on imports. However, deregulated
imports are a major cause of poverty and famine in countries like India.
Globalization has dismantled the systems which guaranteed domestic market
access for farmers, a system which brought food security to the poor.
Meanwhile rich countries subsidise their agricultural production by $1
billion every day, making it inevitable that exports will be dumped on the
poor.
The only way to protect incomes and entitlements in poor countries is to
bring back controls on imports. As India has opened trade, its
agricultural imports have quadrupled, rising from $1 billion (50,000
million Rupees) in 1995 to over $4 billion (200,000 million Rupees) by
2000. Many of these imports come from rich countries such as the United
States and Europe. The United States is now planning to spend more than
130 billion over the next ten years to support 2 million farmers: more
than two-thirds of this money which will go the largest 10 per cent of
farmers. This process results in huge surpluses which are dumped on the
global market. They bring down prices worldwide and destroy the
livelihoods of millions of peasants. Prices of coconuts have fallen 80 per
cent, coffee prices have collapsed by over 60 percent, pepper prices have
fallen 45 percent in India since the WTO declared, in 2000, that India
must reduce import barriers.
The most dramatic effect has been on edible oil. India's domestic
production has been effectively wiped out as highly subsidized soya from
the U.S. and palm oil from Malaysia flood the market, due to lack of
adequate import controls. Imports now account for 70 per cent of the
domestic consumption of edible oil. This has resulted in coconut farmers
in Kerala blockading their local harbor to protest against such imports.
Groundnut farmers and soya bean farmers in a number of areas mounted
demonstrations against this attack on their livelihood. As a result, they
were shot at.
It is little wonder that Indian activists, peoples movements and some
politicians are calling for the reintroduction of import controls. More
than 100,000 peasants and workers attended a rally ahead of last year's
Doha meeting of the WTO. This democratic demand would prevent famine. Yet
nowhere in his article does Amartya Sen identify the destruction of
livelihoods and incomes of the small rural producers as the reason for
increased endemic hunger, and indeed famine, in India.
DEREGULATED EXPORTS: A RECIPE FOR HUNGER
On the contrary, Sen recommends further trade liberalization and increased
exports as the solution to hunger in the Third World. Yet export-oriented
agriculture robs the poor of their land, their water and their
livelihoods. There is an inverse relation between increasing agricultural
exports and declining food consumption locally and nationally. When
countries grow flowers and vegetables for exports, they also sow the seeds
of hunger.
Yet India promotes exports of flowers and meat. Yet India spent $27
million (1.37 billion Rupees) as foreign exchange for promoting
floriculture exports earning a mere $6.4 million (0.32 billion Rupees) as
a result. India can buy only a quarter of the food it could otherwise have
grown with the export earnings from floriculture.
In the case of meat exports, for every dollar earned, our research has
shown that India is destroying fifteen dollars worth of ecological
functions preformed by farm animals for sustainable agriculture. Thus, as
a society, India is paying more in terms of food insecurity and ecological
destruction than it is earning through exports of luxury crops such as
flowers and meat. Putting resources in people's hands, and guaranteeing
small producers access to local markets is a far more secure, sustainable
and inclusive way to remove poverty.
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