A humanitarian commission must come out on the side of human beings, but this apparent tautology implies some formidable political hurdles. The first one is ideological - to alter the present dominant categories and to insist on new ones. Instead of a simplified 'North-South' view, one must recognize and explore the class relations in both central and peripheral countries and their international connections.
As was cogently pointed out at our meeting, neo-classical economics manages to divorce 'production' (agricultural or otherwise) from 'distribution', that is, people's access to food. Within this neo-classical framework, a certain gentleman (one of ICIHI's Commissioners from a northern country) can indeed claim that criticizing the Green Revolution for not having solved inequalities is like 'accusing a fork of being a poor knife'. (Actually critics of the GR usually say it has made such inequities worse, but this gentleman's response would be the same: those problems have to be solved by someone else, for example the State, which invariably governs with a view to social justice and equality, as we all know.)
In a humanitarian world-view, the categories of production and distribution, or access, would be interdependent, not separated, so that one would always be required to ask 'production by whom and for whom?'
Before making recommendations for improving the lot of ordinary people, one must first come to terms with the State. In the Brandt world-view as in the UN system, development is exclusively channelled through governments. Helping rural people to produce more food - and in particular helping them to hold on to enough of it for their own adequate consumption - means on the other hand strengthening popular organizations like peasant cooperatives, women's groups, etc., which the State may often see - correctly - as directly opposed to its own priorities, one of which is usually to extract as much wealth as possible from the countryside.
We also need a critique of the multilateral agencies, too timidly addressed by Brandt. The problem is to carry it out in such a way that it does not bring grist to the mill to the likes of Reagan!
If ICIHI decides to stick mainly to the gaps that exist in other (official or quasi-official) bodies' work on food security, then a quick list would further include:
• Food aid. To my knowledge, no respectable body has gone further than saying 'food aid can be harmful but doesn't need to be'. There is so much evidence that a lot of it has been harmful that official reports are now obliged to make this minimal admission, while never going so far as to explain how one avoids negative impacts. It would not be difficult to make specific recommendations in this area.
• 'National Food Strategies' (as proposed by the World Food Council and taken up by the EEC Development Commission inter alia). These so-called 'strategies' are the latest fashion, but are unlikely to do countries much good so long as they remain limited to their announced scope - i.e. national. All countries' food systems have become profoundly integrated into the world economy and it is fruitless to examine or try to improve them outside this context. This is a further example of the importance of the choice of categories.
• The international agricultural research network, including the CGIAR (Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research) and the major institutes. More support for alternative agricultural research is desperately needed - on polycultural, risk-reducing systems in particular, as well as on choices of agricultural technology appropriate to such systems, individual natural and social environments, etc.
• Transnational agribusinesses. My personal boredom with the subject notwithstanding, it's worth repeating that TNCs are not around to provide food or employment but to make profits, full stop. Nor, in my view, can they be 'harnessed', as Brandt would have it; they must rather be confronted and exposed, as the Nestle campaign proved. Some support from a respectable body for such campaigns would be most helpful - beyond the grudging recognition finally granted the Nestle campaign by WHO under strong NGO pressure.
Finally, I'll repeat my own plea for a two-way North-South people's research and monitoring system. Northern participants would provide the kind, of information to which they have the easiest access (on TNCs, contracts, State or multilateral agencies' policies and the like); southern participants would provide case-studies on what actually takes place when the Bank, the FAO or a TNC implements a project in a specific area. Such a system would not need to be limited to NGOs - many individual scholars would also want to participate if they were given expenses and minimum remuneration to do so. A North-South research network would allow southern entities to commission work directly useful to them. For example, I once did a study for Nicaragua on potential markets for basic grains in surplus. Though nominally a 'Nicaraguan' study and a contribution to their National Food Plan, most of the research was done in Washington and could not have been accomplished in Managua.
Above all, in order to make a strong impact on public opinion and to attain a higher intellectual standing than Brandt - the two are linked - ICIHI must think seriously about a new 'categorical imperative'. May the Commission seize the conceptual initiative and render the poor visible and audible!
PART IV
HUMAN RIGHTS
12
THE RIGHT TO FOOD AND THE POLITICS OF HUNGER
This is the text of the 1985 Yvon Beaulne Lecture on the International Protection of Human Rights, delivered in March 1985 at Ottawa University and sponsored by the Human Rights Centre there. This was not, I am pleased to say, a 'memorial lecture' and Mr Beaulne, former Canadian Ambassador to the United Nations and one of theframers of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, was in attendance with Mrs Beaulne.
Although not chronologically quite the last paper in this collection (both 'Food, Famine and Service Delivery' and 'Food Strategies for Tomorrow' were given later), I'm putting it at the end of this new edition of 111 Fares the Land because it links this book to A Fate Worse than Debt, which I had by then begun to work on. Since Fate appeared, I've pursued the human rights theme and written a paper dealing specifically with its links to Third World debt.
I happen to be writing this introduction on 22 August 1989. Two hundred years ago, between 20th and 26th August 1789, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen was elaborated and adopted by the French Constituent Assembly. Article 15 of this Declaration states, 'All public officers are accountable to society for their administration.' Two hundred years later, we have not made much progress in implementing Article 15, particularly at the international level. The public officers of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund who devise the 'stabilization' and 'structural adjustment programmes' to deal with Third World debt have an enormous negative impact on the lives of millions. No one elected them; they are not accountable to the societies of the North or of the South.
For understanding, for dramatizing, the human consequences of debt (including increased hunger), human rights criteria seem to me even more relevant than they were four years ago. We could start by trying to put Article 15 back on the political agenda.
No human right has been so consistently enshrined in international legal instruments as the right to food. This right figures specifically in Article 25 of the Universal Declaration. Both International Covenants (the one on Economic, Cultural and Social Rights as well as the one on Civil and Political Rights) declare that 'in no case may a people be deprived of its own means of subsistence'. Article 11 of the Economic, Social and Cultural Rights Covenant makes quite long and specific provisions intended to guarantee the 'fundamental right of everyone to be free from hunger' and to 'ensure an equitable distribution of world food supplies in relation to need'.1 Other articles declaring that 'everyone has a right to life' or proclaiming the 'inherent right to life' would be meaningless if they did not presuppose people's right to the food that sustains life.
Governments too have constantly reaffirmed this right. Ten years ago, governments represented at the World Food Conference again solemnly committed themselves to eradicating hunger. They promised that 'Within a decade, no chi
ld will go to bed hungry, no family will fear for its next day's bread'; a promise which rings very hollow indeed in this year of massive famine.
Universal Declarations, International Covenants and World Conference Resolutions notwithstanding, no human right has been so frequently and spectacularly violated in recent times as the right to food. Surely all of us vigorously oppose torture, disappearances, arbitrary imprisonment and other flagrant infringements of human rights, as we must do; but none of us could claim that all these combined deprive more people of life itself than the absence of food. Even war comes a poor second. The toll of hunger on human life is equal to a Hiroshima explosion every three days.
We are not, however, going to indulge in quantification tonight. Is Unicef right in claiming that 40,000 children die daily due to hunger or hunger-related illness? When FAO says that 500 million people suffer from hunger and malnutrition, is it being more or less accurate than the World Bank, which speaks of one billion people in those circumstances? In a sense, without being callous, we can answer, 'Who cares?', since even one death from hunger, even a single person suffering from malnutrition, is a scandal in a world which has vanquished food scarcity, where more than enough food exists for everyone. The most recent US Department of Agriculture estimate says that our 1984-5 global harvests will exceed 1.6 billion tons of cereals, up 8 per cent from last year.
I could prove to you with simple arithmetic that if 15 million children are now dying from hunger every year, they could be saved with less than a two-thousandth of the world's harvests (0.002 per cent), even assuming you gave them an adult ration and that there was absolutely no food available to them locally - not even breast milk. There may once have been people who took comfort in the Malthusian view, which assured us that the number of mouths to feed would inevitably and necessarily outstrip the supply of food. It may have been morally easier to look at the persistence of hunger as a natural law, since this automatically absolved human society and human organization of any responsibility. However convenient, this view is no longer tenable.
Even when they know that there is plenty of food available in global terms, the numbers' approach, the quantification of hunger, tends to make people numb. How can an individual contemplate doing anything at all about a scourge that strikes between half a billion and a billion people? Worse than that, the numbers' approach makes us focus on the victims. I did it myself a moment ago when I spoke of how little food proportionally would be needed to save 15 million children, as if it were up to some vaguely defined group called 'us' - in Canada, the United States, Europe and other rich countries - to feed another, quite different group called 'them' - the poor and famished in the Third World. It's not that the victims are unimportant - far from it - but if we focus only on them, we risk blinding ourselves to the true causes of hunger. Since faulty analysis leads to faulty action, we shall stray even further from a solution.
No: we must find another way forward. Here I believe that human rights can be an invaluable instrument. Well-meaning people sometimes claim that the human rights approach to hunger is not only wrong but positively harmful. What is the point, they ask, of proclaiming principles that are completely unenforceable? Such critics point out that every time these principles are undermined - and, in the case of hunger, this happens millions of times every day - the very concepts of international law and norms of behaviour are flouted. All you have accomplished with the human rights approach, they say, is to encourage disrespect for your own standards and create an un- bridgeable credibility gap.
I do not share this view for at least three reasons. The first is that the human rights stance reminds us of what we are in constant need of hearing: there is no group called 'us* and none called 'them'. We are all fragile, extraordinary human beings, with our dignity and our defects, our hopes and our struggles to attain them. Accidents of birth and geography have placed some of us in more favourable positions than others. We to whom such accidents have granted particular privilege should never confuse our duty to help alleviate suffering with some imaginary, inherent difference between ourselves as 'haves' and others as 'have-nots'. Taking human rights seriously helps to avoid a 'them' and 'us' mentality.
The second reason which makes the human rights approach valuable is precisely because it can be described as 'utopian'. We need Utopias. Today's seemingly unreachable goals are tomorrow's triumphs. One hundred and fifty years ago, it was Utopian to think of ridding the United States of slavery. Utopias mobilize people's energies. Which do you prefer: the cry of 'Liberte, Ugalite, Fraternite" or a sober analysis of the reasons why you will never be able to bring down the French monarchy and the established order? So it must and will be with ending hunger.2
The final reason for using the human rights approach is an eminently practical one and brings me to the heart of what I hope to say tonight. When we speak of rights, human rights, in the same breath we must speak of violations. When we speak of violations, we have in mind human institutions, human agents as violators. How does it sound to you if I say, 'Drought has violated several million Ethiopians' right to food'? Or, 'Floods have violated Bangladeshis' rights to food'? Or, 'Africans are presently violating their right to food by having too many children'? Such propositions are barely grammatical, much less intellectually convincing.
At this point you are entitled to ask whether every case of hunger truly implies a wilful violation of the right to food. It's true that acts of God like drought and flood or population pressures can aggravate hunger. But climatic extremes and environmental destruction can often be traced to human action or inaction. Pushing this statement to its limits, I will even say that there are no ecological problems, only the social and political problems that invariably underlie and cause ecological damage.
As for demographics, Third World parents know that having many children may be the only way to maximize gains for the family today and ensure some security for themselves tomorrow. Wherever and whenever hunger occurs, I'm convinced that human agencies and agents are at work; that hunger is basically a reflection of inequity at the local, national and international levels. This is why, ethically speaking, the correct response to hunger, and the cardinal virtue we need to respond to it, is justice, not charity. Again the relevance of the human rights approach is clear. The notions of rights and of justice are inseparable.
All this being said, if I were allowed to change the language of the Universal Declaration and the International Covenants, I would certainly speak of people's right to feed themselves rather than of the 'right to food'. After all, animals in zoos, patients in hospital and prisoners in jail have a right to food. Surely we need a less passive, more dynamic concept. If not properly qualified, the 'right to food' sounds almost like a right to hand-outs. I believe the framers of the basic human rights documents under-stood this perfectly when they declared that 'in no case may a people be deprived of its own means of subsistence'. What they surely meant was that human communities develop ways of coping with their environments in order to provide their members under normal circumstances with a decent livelihood, including food. Given a chance and a modicum of justice, people will feed themselves - they will not need 'us' and they will not ask for hand-outs. But when justice is absent, they can be and often are deprived of the right to their own means of subsistence.
Who then - what human institutions - are preventing people from feeding themselves? Why is it that late in the twentieth century more people are going hungry than ever before? Why is there a worldwide crisis in agriculture, stemming paradoxically from both over-production and under-production? These are all political questions. Let's start by reviewing a few recent headlines: 'Farms wither in Middle America' ... 'For millions of Africans, destiny is starvation'... 'Chicago becomes city of hunger'... 'In Ethiopia, the Dark Ages continue' ... etc. etc. - you could all supply your own additions from any perusal of this week's or last month's press. The newspapers no longer say much about hunger and malnutrition in Asia, or north-eastern Brazil or Ha
iti or so many other places, but this does not mean it has gone away. Can we make any sense out of these and other headlines? Can we find any connections between hunger in American cities and African savannahs, between massive farm failures in Iowa and the near- total collapse of the Ethiopian peasantry? Is it worth seeking any common explanations?
We all know it's rash to explain complex phenomena by simple causes and that no single factor is uniquely responsible for hunger. Still, I'd like to take a stab at a short explanation, even if it's inadequate. On the food production side, it is that non-producers are gaining greater and greater control over producers. Or, put in terms closer to our concerns this evening, non-producers are depriving producers of their means of subsistence, which is to say, depriving them of their human rights. This, of course, leads directly to more precarious food consumption. Every family that loses its land, every person unable to find work, becomes a candidate for hunger.
Non-producers come in a variety of shapes and guises. They may be absentee landlords and local usurers, or corporations and banks, or governments and State bureaucracies or even development aid agencies. In the United States where hundreds of farms are now failing every week, agribusiness corporations determine how much farmers must pay for their inputs and often what they will receive for their output. Farmers' costs of production now frequently exceed what they receive for their crops and animals. Banks decide whether farmers get loans, how much interest they will have to pay for them and when to foreclose on their mortgages. The government in turn judges which categories of farmers should receive help, if any.