As people's reserves dwindle and their means of subsistence become more precarious, the tiniest change in their level of resources may spell disaster. A distinguished member of the Indian Administrative Service told me some years ago that, for the first time in Bihar, people were beginning to die of exposure. I asked how this was possible. Very simple, he said. The poorest people used to cover themselves with straw at night, and straw was free. Now straw has a price - a very small one, but a price just the same - which the poor cannot afford. So they die. Why has straw become a commodity? Partly because Green Revolution cereal varieties are short-straw plants, so there's less available. Partly because the forests that used to provide woodpulp for paper have been cut down, and straw is now used in papermaking. One can always find excellent economic reasons for other people's deaths.
What is true for the individual's slim survival margin is also true for whole communities. When they have already been brought close to the brink, the smallest push can send them over the edge. In Northern Ethiopia today, agriculture has for the most part simply stopped. The story told by Kiros Gebre Mikael, a refugee at Makalle camp, is typical: 'How can I go back? I have nothing to go back to. Once I had a good store of seed grain, but there was no rain, the crop did not grow and the seeds rotted in the ground. Once I had four oxen for ploughing, and of these, when there was no food left to eat, I sold two and slaughtered two for meat. So you see, I cannot go back. I have eaten my future.'8
Another bizarre shift has occurred. States and communities often used to define themselves and their members according to those they would feed and care for and those they wouldn't. 'Bread and circuses' were due to real Romans, though not to outsiders. I recently saw a document from Shakespeare's town, Stratford-upon-Avon, dating from 1598, just after the serious food scarcities of the 1590s. A man is called before the local council and upbraided for harbouring a strange woman in his house. The town fathers seem to care very little about his morals - what worries them is that the lady in question is pregnant and that, if the baby is born within the town's precincts, Stratford will be responsible for seeing it fed until it comes of age.
Today the State more often than not protects not the right to food but those who violate the right to food. This is the case in countries in the First or Third Worlds which are governed on behalf of banks, corporations or the landholding classes; where the rights of property always supersede the right to eat.
What paths might we follow towards the Utopia where food rights will at last be respected, protected and cherished? Let me recommend several. Food aid in emergencies is absolutely vital, but when it becomes entrenched and institutionalized it undermines people's right to feed themselves. It does this by competing with local producers, by creating tastes for foods such as wheat that can't be grown locally, by absolving recipient governments of the responsibility to devise coherent food policies. Every developed country without exception needs to review thoroughly its food aid policies.
In the case of Ethiopia, most Western governments have been pushed by their own citizens into delivering emergency relief, but they refuse to envisage longer-term development aid in order to help millions of peasants like Kiros Gebre Mikael find a future. The West must also push for a negotiated solution between the Ethiopian government and the liberation movements, without which no development can ever take place and the tragedy will be compounded.
We must protect those rare successful experiments where a government does undertake to guarantee its citizens the right to feed themselves. This is true of Nicaragua today, and I am extremely pleased to note that Canadians have continued to support the Nicaraguans despite unrelenting propaganda, hostility and pressure from their powerful neighbour to the south. Canada should try to do more and bring other, like-minded governments along with it. To Ronald Reagan and his contras we must say No Pasaran.
Because traditional support systems have broken down, because the State affords no protection and often makes things worse, because the conditions of life are becoming intolerable, poor people everywhere are inventing new ways of organizing themselves to ensure their right to food. Many Third World producer and consumer groups are being helped by nongovernmental organizations in the industrialized countries; but many others are being severely repressed in their search for justice.
If we take seriously the right to food for everyone, we must ask ourselves equally serious questions about justice. Are we prepared to accept that the first right of those deprived of food is to organize resistance against those forces which violate their rights? Do we recognize that the right to food for all cannot be ensured without political conflict? Would we support the Bishop of Fortaleza in Brazil, who approved a starving mob that stormed a full granary, saying that the right to food supersedes the rights of property? Are we ready to stand up to the forces in our own societies that deprive people of food, even indirectly? The right to food and the freedom to resist injustice are inseparable. There is no freedom without bread, and no bread without freedom.
NOTES AND REFERENCES
Preface to the E-book version
1. Arabic, Catalan, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish Back
2. The usage I think originated with the French demographer Alfred Sauvy (“tiers monde”) to distinguish the vast majority of Southern countries from the “first world”, the rich Western ones, and the “second”, the Soviet Union and its satellites. Today the expression makes no sense at all. Back
3. I’m not sure this pun will still be understood. In the Victorian era, “A fate worse than death” for a woman was to lose her virginity or worse, give birth to an illegitimate child, thereby becoming totally unmarriageable and destined for destitution or whoredom. The expression was euphemistically used in weepy, melodramatic novels but by my time could only be used in a satirical way. Back
4. Pascal Lamy is now the Director of the WTO itself. The GATS has never been ratified as such, because the WTO principle holds that nothing is agreed until everything is agreed and in this case, agriculture and some other differences over tariffs stand in the way of completing the “Doha Round” of negotiations, now entering their eleventh year, and considered moribund by virtually everyone. Back
1 OVERCOMING HUNGER: STRENGTHEN THE WEAK, WEAKEN THE STRONG
1.World Bank, World Development Report 1980, Washington, DC, August 1980, p. 61. See also Marcelo Selowsky, The economic dimensions of malnutrition in young children. World Bank Working Paper 294, 1978, Table 1. Selowsky assumes, as we have done, 3,500 calories per kilo of grain. Back
2.John Ball, The Sermon at Blackheath, 1381, cited in Leonard Silk, The Economists, New York, Discus Books (Avon), 1978, pp. 230-31. Back
3.Personal communication from a member of the Indian Administrative Service, New Delhi. Back
4.See, for example, Dr Moises Behar (WHO), 'Nutrition of Mayan children before the Conquest and now', Clinical Pediatrics, Vol. 9, 1970, pp. 187-8, as well as contemporary testimony cited in Nicole Ball, 'Understanding the causes of African famine', Journal of Modern African Studies, Vol. 14, No. 3, 1976; Pierre Spitz, 'Silent Violence: Famine and Inequality', in Violence and its Causes, Unesco, 1980; Fray Bartolomeo de las Casas, Tres Breve Relation de la Destruction des Indes, Paris, Maspero, 1979 (original 1552). Back
5.For some aspects of the breakdown of 'patron/client' relations, see Prof. Shigeru Ishikawa, Labour Absorption in Asian Agriculture, Bangkok, ILO (ARTEP), July 1978, sp. p. 96 f. and Appendix 3. Many instances of this breakdown are described in the series of volumes published by the UN Research Institute for Social Development under the general title 'Social and economic implications of the large-scale introduction of new varieties of foodgrains' but more simply described as the 'Green Revolution' series. The director of the project, the late Andrew Pearse, published an overview volume containing many details on the 'crisis of livelihood': Se
eds of Plenty, Seeds of Want, UNRISD and Oxford University Press, 1980. Back
6.World Bank, Land Reform, Rural Development Series, July 1974, sp. Tables 6, p. 55, and 11, p. 60. The Bank's figures are old; landlessness and rural dispossession have grown much worse during the past decade. One should also consult the collective volume Poverty and Landlessness in Rural Asia, ILO, 1977. Back
7.World Bank, World Development Report 1979, Ch. 4, 'Employment Trends and Issues', and the same report for 1980, p. 40. See also Poverty and Landlessness, op. cit. Back
8.For details on the population issue, see Susan George, How the Other Half Dies, Penguin, 1976, and Montclair, NJ, Allanheld, Osmun, 1977, Ch. 2. Back
9.National Research Council, World Food and Nutrition Study, Washington, DC, National Academy of Sciences, 1977, Table 1, p. 157. Back
10.World Bank, 1980, op. cit., p. 42 ('Small is productive'); also World Bank, 1974, op. cit., Table 2.2, p. 32. Back
11.In the 1960s between 30 and 70 per cent of the additions to urban population were migrants from rural areas. World Bank, 1979, op. cit., p. 55. Rural out-migration has accelerated since the 1960s under 'Green Revolution' and 'modernization' pressures: see the UNRISD series and the Pearse overview, op. cit. Back
12.World Bank, 1980, op. cit., p. 72. Back
13.Michael T. Klare, 'The international repression trade', The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, November 1979, and with Cynthia Arnson, Supplying Repression, Washington, DC and Amsterdam, Institute for Policy Studies, 1981. Back
14.The increase in Nicaraguan basic grain production is clear from figures the author consulted in January 1981 in Managua at the research centre attached to the Ministry of Agriculture (INRA- CIERA). Small peasants had, for the first time, access to land, credit, fertilizer, etc., and massively improved their food production. There is a drawback: since people are well fed for the first time in decades, they are much less anxious to earn wages by harvesting cash crops - this has posed a problem for the government. Back
15.Report of the Independent Commission on International Development Issues - commonly referred to as the Brandt Commission: North-South: A Programme for Survival, London, Pan, 1980. Back
16.FAO, World Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development, INF. 3, 'Examen et analyse de la reforme agraire et du developpement rural dans les pays en voie de developpement...' 1979, Ch. 11, pp. 112-13. Back
17.FAO, The State of Food and Agriculture 1979, FAO, 1980, pp. 1-54. Back
18.A growing literature on the environmental/energy impact of the North American food system includes Robert van den Bosch, The Pesticide Conspiracy, Garden City, NY, Doubleday, 1978; Farmers' Use of Pesticides (in 1964, 1971, 1976), US Department of Agriculture Economic Reports Nos. 145, 268, 418; David and Marcia Pimentel, Food, Energy and Society, Resource and Environmental Science Series, London, Edward Arnold, 1979; Gerald Leach, Energy and Food Production, Guildford, Surrey, IPC Science and Technology Press, 1976; Nicole Ball, 'Deserts bloom ... and wither', Ecologist Quarterly, Spring 1978. The impact poor conservation practices may have on US exports (and vice versa) is examined in Lauren Soth, 'The Grain Export Boom: Should It Be Tamed?', Foreign Affairs, Spring 1981. Back
19.See Sylvan Wittwer, 'Food Production Resources: land, water, energy, fertilizer, capital and manpower', in Plant and Animal Products in the US Food System, Washington, DC, National Research Council, National Academy of Sciences, 1978, sp. PP- 23-5. Back
20.Pierre Spitz has frequently insisted on the importance of peasants' contributions to agricultural knowledge and 'scientific' neglect thereof: see, inter alia, 'La recherche agronomique au service des paysans pauvres du Tiers Monde', in Revue Tiers Monde (IEDES- PUF), Vol. XX, No. 78, April-June 1979, and 'livelihood and the Food Squeeze', Ceres, FAO, May-June 1981. Back
21.See the UNRISD 'Green Revolution' series, op. cit.; and K. C. Abercrombie, 'Agricultural employment in Latin America', International Labour Organisation, Review, July 1972. Back
22.It is instructive to note that China has consistently added agricultural labour at a rate of about 2 per cent per annum since 1952, while the growth rates of net output per worker have climbed from 2.6 in 1952-7 to 8.3 in 1977-9- See World Bank, China: Socialist Economic Development, a 'Grey Cover', i.e., restricted report. No. 3391-CHA, Annex C, pp. 72-3,1 June 1981. Back
2 DANGEROUS EMBRACE: CULTURE, ECONOMICS, POLITICS AND FOOD SYSTEMS
1.Ljubljana ECE-UNEP Seminar preparatory document: ECOSCOC/- ECE/SEM.n/PM/R.i, October 1978, para. 10, mimeograph. Back
2.An example of culture and ethics setting dietary practice is to be found in the Jewish dietary laws. They particularly serve to distinguish categories which are, and must remain, separate: through food, man is distinguished from God, one people from another, the clean from the unclean, etc. For the Hebrews, anything mixed or partaking of two natures is unclean and thus inedible - be it a wingless bird, a water creature without scales and fins, or an animal both herbivorous and carnivorous like the pig. The principle of separateness also applies to processes of food production, as in this passage from Leviticus: 'Thou shalt not let thy cattle gender with a diverse kind, thou shalt not sow thy field with mingled seed' (XIX: 19). See Jean Soler, 'The dietary prohibitions of the Hebrews', The New York Review of Books, 14 June 1979, pp. 24-30; and Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966, Ch. 3. Back
3.Philip Stewart, 'Human Ecology: a new kind of knowledge?', paper presented at the colloquy, 'Homme biologique et homme social', Centre Royaumont pour une Science de l'Homme, December 1978, mimeograph. An obvious example is the impact of Hindu beliefs on the Indian environment (the famous 'sacred cow'). Back
4.Lesley Gordon, Green Magic, London, Ebury Press, 1977, p. 87; and for the connection between cotton and the Civil War, Gavin Wright, The Political Economy of the Cotton South, New York, W. W. Norton, 1978, Ch. 5. Back
5.Pierre Spitz, 'Notes sur l'histoire des transferts de techniques dans le domaine de la production vegetale', paper presented at the OECD seminar 'Science, Technology and Development in a Changing World', DSTI/SPR 74.75, April 1975. Back
6.Centre Frangais du Commerce Exterieur, Le De'veloppement de la Production du Soja au Bre'sil, Collection 'finquetes a l'fitranger', November 1973, p. 49 f. See also UPI dispatches 'Rio beans shortage causes disorders' and 'Black beans the write-in choice of thousands who voted in Rio', in The International Herald Tribune, 13 October 1976 and 22 November 1976. Back
7.World Bank, World Tables 1976, Table 8, 'Foreign Trade Structures: Export Composition', and Economic Data Sheet No. 1, 'National Accounts and Prices'. Back
8.Pierre Spitz has discussed this question at length in 'Silent Violence: Famine and Inequality', International Social Science Journal, Vol. XXX, No. 4,1978. Back
9.Dr Moises Behar, 'Nutrition of Mayan children before the Conquest and now', Clinical Pediatrics, Vol. 9,1970, pp. 187-8. Back
10.Addis Hiwet, 'Ethiopia: from autocracy to revolution', Occasional Paper No. 1, Review of African Political Economy (London), 1975, cited in Nicole Ball, 'Understanding the causes of African famine', Journal of Modern African Studies, Vol. 14, No. 3,1976, p. 522. Back
11.From French colonial archives in Laurence Wilhelm, 'Le role et la dynamique de l'fitat a travers les crises de subsistence', unpublished Memoire de These, cited in Spitz, 'Silent Violence ...', op. cit. Back
12.Andrew Pearse, The Latin American Peasant, London, Frank Cass, 1975. P- 9- Back
13.M. Merlier, Le Congo de la colonisation Beige a 1'Inde'pendence, Paris, Maspero, 1963, cited in M. K. K. Kabala Kabunda, 'Multinational corporations and the installation of externally oriented economic structures in Africa', in Carl Widstrand, ed., Multinational Firms in Africa, Uppsala, 1975, pp. 305-6. Back
14.Le Gouverneur Blacher to the Administrateur du Cercle de Dosso, Niger, 16 June 1931, cited in J. Egg et al., Analyse descriptive de la famine des annees 1931 au Niger et implications me'thodologiques, Paris, Institut National de la Recherche Agronomiq
ue, July 1975, mimeograph, p. 37. Jean Suret-Canale in Afrique Noire, Vol. II, L'Ere Coloniale, discusses the use of taxation in detail. Back
15.Various aspects of the development of the US model will be found in Alan Olmstead, 'The mechanisation of reaping and mowing in American agriculture 1833-1870', The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 35, June 1975, pp. 327-52; and in this same Journal,
Vol. xxn, No. 4, 1962: a special issue on the 100th anniversary of the founding of the US Department of Agriculture. See especially Wayne D. Rasmussen (chief historian of the USDA), "The impact of technological change on American agriculture 1862-1962', PP- 578-91; and Martin Primack, 'Land clearing under 19th-century techniques', pp. 489-97. A visit to the Smithsonian Institution permanent exhibition of agricultural technology is also highly recommended. Back
16.US General Accounting Office, The changing character and structure of American agriculture: an overview (Report CED-7-178), Washington, DC, December 1978, p. ill; and John E. Lee, 'Agricultural finance: situation and issues', USDA 1978 Food and Agricultural Outlook Conference, Proceedings, Washington, DC, November 1977. Back
17.USDA, Alternative Futures for US agriculture: a progress report, prepared for the Committee on Agriculture and Forestry of the US Senate, by USDA Office of Planning and Evaluation, Washington, DC, September 1975. Back
18.On the environmental impact of the high technology system, see Robert van den Bosch, The Pesticide Conspiracy (and the preface to it by Paul Ehrlich), Garden City, NY, Doubleday, 1978; Farmers' use of pesticides (in 1964, 1971 and 1976), USDA Agricultural Economics Reports Nos. 145, 268,418; David and Marcia Pimentel, Food Energy and Society, Resource, and Environmental Science Series, London, Edward Arnold, 1979 (sp. pp. 137-9); Gerald Leach, Energy and Food Production, Guildford, Surrey, IPC Science and Technology Press, 1976; Nicole Ball, 'Deserts bloom... and wither', Ecologist Quarterly, Spring 1978. Back