My own (perhaps cynical) view is that the present American administration is wilfully allowing the demise of a huge fraction of the agricultural sector because it wants a much smaller number of farmers to deal with. Agricultural exports are vital to the US, just as they are to Canada; world market prices are low because production in relation to commercial demand has been too high and stocks are plentiful. The dream of US agricultural policy has always been to control supply more closely. This will become possible only when the government can negotiate with a more limited number of producers. Already just I per cent of US farmers receive over half of all the farm income. This top slice will be encouraged and nurtured; the other food producers will disappear because they have lost all control over their costs and revenues.
As farmers disappear, food output will be more closely controlled and food prices will rise. Meanwhile agribusiness corporations have also gained more control over consumers. The US Department of Agriculture itself says that consumers are being overcharged an average 10 per cent more for all food items than they would pay if real marketplace competition existed. Fewer than 8 per cent of the items available in US supermarkets are unprocessed - everything else has gone through the companies' shiny machines and been made more expensive.
Government also plays a role in denying the right to food to vast numbers of citizens. During the Reagan era, millions have seen their food-stamp benefits curtailed or totally cut off. So it is no surprise that the independent Physician Task Force on Hunger in America reported last month after a year-long investigation, 'Hunger is a problem of epidemic proportions across the nation ... Clearly lack of food is not the cause of hunger in America ... The recent and swift return of hunger can be traced in substantial measure to clear and conscious policies of the federal government.'
What of food producers and consumers in the Third World? The World Bank tells us that 90 per cent of the world's hungry live in the countryside. This percentage may change as more and more people lose their land and livelihood and migrate to cities; but at present, and strangely, the people most deprived of food are overwhelmingly rural. They are people who do produce or who could produce food. The industrialized nations have contributed to their dispossession. For example, we have encouraged the transfer of the Western food system model to these poor and radically different societies. Because our model (the one used in the US and Canada) seems to be marvellously productive, modern and efficient, many Third World countries have enthusiastically tried to copy it. What we have all forgotten is that this model is meant to function with a lot of expensive capital inputs and to give work to as few people as possible. This model is no longer logical even in North America with its vast expanse of land and small rural populations - as we can readily tell from the farm failures it spawns. In land-poor countries, where millions seek their livelihood in farming, this model is a recipe for disaster. So- called 'Green Revolution' techniques have displaced peasants beyond counting and have frequently made food more expensive in the bargain. In the Third World as in the United States, a combination of corporate interests and State policies has helped to create hunger and outmigration from the countryside.
Many of the same corporations that purvey expensive processed-food products in the rich countries are now also introducing the poor to the joys of commerciogenic malnutrition. Soft drinks, snack foods and chewing gum devour a big piece of many poor families' food budgets. They may even sell the few nutritionally valuable foods they have on hand, like fruit or eggs, in order to buy junk food. First came colonization, now coca- colanization. The baby foods scandal is too well known to bear repeating tonight, except that it should remind us that it's often the weakest - in this case, infants - whose human rights are most easily disregarded by the strong.
Other non-producers which have gained a tight grip over food supplies in poor countries are the big international financial institutions, both public and private. The crushing burden that international debt lays on peasants and urban workers has not yet been properly recognized. During the 1970s, Third World elites borrowed heavily from Western banks, which were going all out to recycle petro-dollars. Generally those elites used the money to buy Phantom jets and other costly toys, as well as so- called 'development' projects, which benefited only themselves or became white elephants. Sometimes they simply sent suitcases full of money north to private bank accounts. An officer of the Bank of International Settlements says that capital flight has been taking place on 'a massive scale': $55 billion left Latin America alone in this way between 1977 and 1983. That amounts to a third of all borrowing during the period, and the official in question admits this is a 'conservative estimate'.
Now the loans are coming due, the chickens are coming home to roost and the banks are afraid that some of their clients may renege on their loans. By common and tacit consent of banks and OECD governments, the International Monetary Fund has been called in to make sure the debtors pay up. The IMF's role is to devise what it calls 'adjustment' programmes; the recipients are more likely to call them 'austerity' programmes. In all cases, standards of living are drastically reduced and prices for basic goods rise, while wages are usually blocked and all consumption subsidies removed. Naturally it is the poorest and most vulnerable classes which are expected to do the belt- tightening, not the elites who squandered the original loans in the first place.
Here are just a few examples drawn from countries now under IMF tutelage:
• In Brazil, cancellation of subsidies has led to dramatic food price increases, especially for staples which the poor depend on most. In 1983, the price of beans went up 769 per cent and rice 188 per cent, while the minimum wage, for those lucky enough to have paid employment, was adjusted by only +142 per cent during the same period.
• In the Philippines, there have been three devaluations in a year and a half, each accompanied by increases in the cost of living. Inflation is still running at 40 per cent a year, the minimum wage is $2 a day, unemployment is now well over 20 per cent and malnourishment and infant mortality are on the rise.
• In the Dominican Republic, IMF-induced price-hikes of 40 per cent for bread and flour and 100 per cent for cooking oil brought thousands out on to the streets in demonstrations in April 1984. In the ensuing repression, 186 were killed and hundreds more wounded or arrested.
• In Peru, many people in the Lima slums now exist on a steady diet of a fish-meal-based chicken-feed called Nicovita, which is produced in unsanitary conditions and causes parasitical diseases. Infant mortality in some neighbourhoods is 50 per cent.
The IMF also insists that countries export more to earn hard currency. Frequently, all they have to export are agricultural products. Export crops are thus pushed at the expense of food crops, which receive little or no investment. Brazil, for example, is the second largest agro-exporter in the world, although three Brazilians in five suffer from some degree of malnutrition. Everywhere soils, waters and forests are 'mined' to increase exports. Wanton destruction of these resources will of course weigh heavily on future food production.
One could go on citing further violations to people's right to food perpetrated by an alliance of the banks, the IMF, the debtor elites and the OECD governments protecting their own banking networks. Perhaps the best summary is provided by an example of black humour currently circulating in Peru:
OFFICIAL: You'll have to tighten your belt.
CITIZEN: I can't. I ate it yesterday.
Most countries where large numbers of people suffer from serious hunger are in the market economy orbit, but not all. A smaller group of countries has chosen to imitate the Soviet model and its disastrous institution of collective farming with central planning. Here the non-producers ruining the prospects for producers are the obtuse State bureaucracies and the leaders so imbued with ideology that they cannot even see how their own peasants react.
Mozambique, after several years of disappointing agricultural development and lately a food crisis second only to Ethiopia's on th
e African continent today, has finally decided to stop putting its agricultural investment into State farms. The government has announced that from now on it will give greater incentives to independent peasant producers, and high time!
The case of Ethiopia is complex, hideously so, and made worse by war and drought. Even though the present Marxist military government (the Derg) carried out sweeping land reform ten years ago, it too chose to invest nearly all its agricultural development budget in collective agriculture. Of the 5,000 large estates which were turned into State farms a decade ago, not one is financially viable today. These farms buy more machinery than they can maintain and rely on other expensive capital inputs.
Ethiopia is nothing if not an agrarian society - almost nine- tenths of the population are peasants - yet the new party whose advent was celebrated with such expense and fanfare last autumn is called the 'Workers' Party'. This seems to be more than a symbolic choice of language. The present economic plan provides for only 12 per cent of the national budget to be spent on agriculture, and nearly all of that will go to the collectives, and to irrigated agriculture. State farms occupy only 4 per cent of the cultivated land but get most of the attention. Smallholders, the seven million peasants who work 94 per cent of the land, are the lowest priority of all. Further collectivization is still one of the main government objectives despite its proven inefficiency and unpopularity with the peasantry.
The Ethiopian peasantry might still have been able to cope in spite of drought, erosion, deforestation and government policy, had it not been for ceaseless wars. It is no accident that the worst horrors of the current famine began in the north where the central government is trying to stamp out revolts. Call them rebels or secessionists, call them freedom fighters or whatever you like: the fact remains that while the famine has now spread beyond the region, the victims are still overwhelmingly from the northern provinces, where 85 per cent of the territory is in the hands of liberation movements.
Ethiopia now boasts the largest army in Africa (over 300,000 men) on which it spends S440 million a year. To put down rebellions, the country has borrowed some $3 billion from the Soviet Union for arms purchases on which it reportedly must pay interest of $200 million a year. Just one or two per cent of this huge military budget could have prevented the famine from getting out of hand, if it had been spent in time and if the government had wanted to help victims in the rebellious provinces.3
You have all heard a hundred and one comparisons of armaments budgets and development spending, so I'll try not to bore you with the hundred and second. I would simply like to point out that it's not just in Ethiopia that the military violates the people's right to food. The Third World now imports about S25 billion annually in military hardware from the major industrialized countries. This of course prevents the same money from being spent on food production or other development, so one can say that arms kill, whether they are used directly against people or just grow old gracefully in depots.
As serious and less well known is the fact that an increasing proportion of the imported weaponry is designed to control hungry and angry citizens. Now that the poor in many countries are rising up against impossible living conditions, governments respond with riot weapons, crowd-monitoring devices, computerized intelligence networks, prison and torture equipment. Twenty-five countries, which have had to reschedule their foreign debts since 1981, spent $11 billion in the preceding five years on equipment like this to repress their own hungry citizens.4
Powerful and unholy alliances between the elites of capitalist or socialist countries and their Third World counterparts thus act in many ways to deprive people of the right to feed themselves. There is, however, a further dimension to violations of the right to food. The power to deprive also exists at the village level, even at the family level.
Alas, one group whose rights are the most systematically - almost automatically - ignored is the largest group of all. I am, of course, speaking of women. Women, according to UN figures, own just I per cent of the world's property. This means that women cultivators rarely control their means of subsistence, that they can't obtain credit for land or for farming inputs. Women receive only 10 per cent of the world's income. Men tend the export crops and take the proceeds. Women frequently take care of the food crops but get no reward - even though sixteen out of every twenty-four hours worked are worked by women. This means that women are working two hours for every one hour worked by a man - almost all these hours without pay. An ILO study published in 1979 showed that, in Africa, fourteen out of seventeen agricultural tasks fell entirely to women. Do you still wonder why African women want large families? How could they manage without them? Naturally, when scarcity or famine strikes, women - along with children - are the first to suffer. Even under supposedly 'normal' conditions, they fare less well than men. Studies of the household distribution of food in many countries show that girls are fed consistently less than boys. Even pregnant and nursing mothers do not get their fair share of the family food. Women are biologically hardier than men - the proof is that in the industrialized countries there are 1,066 women for every 1,000 men. As for members of the second sex in the Third World, constant deprivation and overwork result in a ratio of only 969 adult women for every 1,000 men.5
Women may be often written off when there is not enough food to feed the whole family adequately. So a poor woman or a poor female child is always at the bottom of the heap. However, the poor as a class, both women and men, throughout the Third World are engaged in a constant struggle with those in positions of power in their own villages and neighbourhoods. Landlords and usurers do not hesitate to deprive the poor of land or of food whenever such actions can increase their own power and privilege.
There's nothing new about this. The Finance Minister to Louis XVI, the former Geneva banker Jacques Necker, was constantly warning the king about the need to protect his poor subjects against the rapacity of the rich. The king, we must conclude, did not listen carefully. Necker, on the other hand, survived the Revolution and, a year before his death in 1804, was still reflecting on the vital subjects of food-prices and the poor's access to food. Let me quote him in his own elegant language:
Lorsque les proprietaires haussent le prix (du pain) et se defendent de hausser le prix de la main d'oeuvre des hommes industrieux, il s'etablit entre ces deux classes de la societe une sorte de combat obscur, mais terrible, ou l'on ne peut pas compter le nombre de malheureux, ou le fort opprime le faible a l'abri des lois, ou la propriete accable du poids de ses prerogatives l'homme qui vit du travail de ses mains.
[When the owners raise the price (of bread) yet refuse to raise the wages of working men, a kind of shadowy (obscure) yet terrible combat is established between these two classes of society in which one cannot count the numbers of the wretched: the strong oppress the weak under the protection of the law and property crushes under the weight of privilege the man who lives from his labour.]
Necker goes on to explain that when the price of bread goes up, poor people can no longer save. Sometimes they can barely eat enough to keep on working. The owner, on the other hand, grows richer and can force down wages because his workers have no food reserves. 'They must work today,' says Necker, 'so as not to die tomorrow.'6
Necker, though a man of means, was way ahead of Karl Marx in recognizing 'this shadowy yet terrible combat' between classes. He also saw through the method used by the property-owning class to get the better of the workers: to deprive them of bread by raising its price. When they lost their bread, they lost their bargaining power as well.
This shadowy and terrible combat goes on every day in thousands of villages, where the small peasantry is almost always on the losing side. Land is becoming concentrated in ever fewer hands, so large segments of this peasantry become landless or near-landless. Rural people also have fewer opportunities for earning some income - in cash or food - as landlords mechanize and produce less for local needs than for the market. Without land, without income, millions ar
e sinking into hunger.
This state of affairs is not only deeply shocking - it is a quite recent development. Third World societies used to have support systems which allowed the peasantry to survive in all but the most dire circumstances. So did Necker's pre-Revolutionary France, for that matter. I have friends in India who have told me how their fathers kept food in store for emergencies, which could be distributed to 'their' peasants. Poor people had gleaning or gathering or grazing rights, or rights to hunt or cut firewood. Revolutions could and did occur when these rights were rescinded. They had patrons, or extended families, or neighbourhood and community mutual-help networks. The Chinese had elaborate systems to combat famine involving the central government, provincial administrations and local rich families.7 African societies had rules for producing and consuming food in highly egalitarian ways.
I am not saying that no one ever died of hunger in so-called traditional societies, and I'm not trying to hold a brief for feudalism or paternalism. I simply want to point out that poor people's support systems are breaking down under outside pressures. Profits take precedence over human and village relationships. Nothing takes the place of the customary support networks; resiliency disappears, people become suddenly subject to a dog- eat-dog dependency on the market for work, for credit, for food and the other necessities of life. The so-called free market may provide them only with the freedom to starve.