3. The present world capitalist order sanctions private ownership while taking no responsibility for those who own nothing. It has been incapable of setting upper limits for accumulation of riches by an individual, a corporation or, for that matter, a nation. By contrast, the lower limit - death by hunger - is very clearly defined. For a world economy ruled by competition and the profit motive, millions of people are utterly useless. From capital's viewpoint, they are not needed for food production - machines and chemicals will do as well - and they are not even needed for consumption so long as enough consumers with purchasing power will reliably upgrade their diets in value (more animal products, more off-season, expensive perishables), thus ensuring continued profits. In food systems dedicated to eliminating labour, poor people are a drag on the economy, not the asset they would be if labour-intensive food systems were designed.22 World capitalism would prefer that such 'useless' people disappear - at present, starvation is one avenue towards this end.
Conclusion: Some Suggestions for Action
For international organizations and governments to become more effective in acting against hunger, they must receive considerable help - some of it in the form of criticism and pressure - from concerned citizens all over the world working through their own non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Here are some major goals. The first two are politically the most difficult to achieve, the others more immediately feasible.
• Wipe out Third World debt. Without relief, countries can't even make a choice between food crops and cash crops. This would, among other things, mean that rich countries would have to pay off their own banks.
• Limit development aid and projects to countries whose leaders have demonstrated their concern for their own poor through real land reform, income redistribution policies and the like. No rewards for those countries where aid reinforces the repressive capacity of an already dominant, and rapacious, class.
• Increase food aid - but only for emergency purposes. Institutionalized food aid has consistently discouraged local production and side-tracked governments from undertaking serious reforms and cereals policies.
•Insist on more socio-economic research about the effects of past, present and future development projects and strategies on the worst-off. Few agencies welcome independent evaluation of their work - an indication that such is needed.
•Continue to push for the basket of measures summed up in the 'New International Economic Order'. The NIEO wouldn't eliminate hunger, but it would at least allow governments to plan more rationally.
•Help NGOs that sponsor small projects directly beneficial to peasant communities aimed at increasing local self- reliance and greater popular control over resources.
•Support alternative agronomic and ecological research that rejects conventional 'modernization' in favour of improving local systems in the context of local environments. Treat the peasantry as a source of knowledge, not as an obstacle to progress.
•Accept new technology selectively, and only when it enhances local solutions, ultimately reducing dependency.
We should encourage whatever measures help local or regional food systems protect peasant self-sufficiency and reduce their vulnerability to outside pressures. Conversely, we should reject incorporation of local food systems into larger, more powerful ones directed by the richest countries for their own purposes. To do this, we must find available political spaces and work in them, and we must create new ones. Hunger will never be vanquished unless we can strengthen the weak and weaken the strong.
2
DANGEROUS EMBRACE: CULTURE, ECONOMICS, POLITICS AND FOOD SYSTEMS
In late 1979, the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (ECE) - including both Western and Eastern Europe - held a joint seminar with the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) on 'Alternative Patterns of Development and Lifestyles' (Ljubljana, Yugoslavia, 3-8 December 1979). The seminar was attended, inter alia, by 'senior advisors to ECE governments on environmental problems' and part of the discussion was devoted to relationships between ECE countries and the Third World. The UNEP and ECE Secretariats commissioned a certain number of background papers, including this one. My editor for this contribution was (quite properly) demanding: this resulted in an unusually high proportion of endnotes to text, and it's possibly the most closely argued paper in this collection. The language is not UNese, but it is as neutral as my language ever becomes. The paper is reproduced here with the kind permission of the Secretariats of the ECE and of UNEP.
Every food system - defined as the totality of tangible and intangible means employed by a given human community for the production, conservation, distribution and consumption of food - has profound effects on the environment. There is no such thing as a 'natural' ecosystem; each one is shaped by the cultural perceptions, economic arrangements and political confrontations of human beings in their efforts to assure themselves of this most basic human necessity. It is, furthermore, impossible to look at food systems as closed, static entities. Not only are dynamic historical processes occurring within each society to transform them (and, with them, the environment) but interactions between food systems in different parts of the globe are taking place with increasing frequency and intensity. The result is that these systems, in most parts of the world, are today wide open. As the secretariat of this seminar has noted:
Countries of the world are closely linked through the mechanisms of international economy, political, scientific-technological and cultural relations and exchange, as well as through the environment. Events and actions by one country ... have repercussions and impacts on others, on the international community as a whole and on the biosphere.1
This is nowhere more true than in the realm of food, but in order to understand the full magnitude of the impact of changes in food systems today, we would do well to examine first some of the processes which have shaped our food systems and environment in the past. It is not merely physical factors but culture, economics and politics that are the prime determinants of food systems and the environment in which they exist.
Cultural Impact on the Environment
Ecologists study patterns of plant/animal species development; some take into account the impact of human farming techniques on these patterns, but few note that the way in which people use their environment for subsistence is dictated not only by the physical capacity of that environment to sustain certain kinds of plants or animals but also by the view the community has of its own nature and its relationship to the rest of the universe. Diets in fact represent a cultural - even ethical - choice among the range of foods that are physically feasible in a given environment.2
It is impossible to account for the ecological differences between southern Spain and northern Morocco without contrasting Catholicism and Islam. The original ecosystems of these areas were virtually identical from a 'natural' point of view, and yet were utterly transformed by people who, if they were Muslims, needed large numbers of sacrificial sheep, but did not eat - and therefore hunt - wild boar any more than they drank wine. Catholics, on the other hand, terraced their hillsides with vineyards and raised a variety of animals (eating a variety of plants) and hunted the wild boar to near extinction.3 Quite evidently flora and fauna are not the whole story.
Our physical surroundings, the aspect of our landscapes can thus be 'decoded' as incarnations of culture. But the above examples of the impact of food/cultural systems on the environment are still relatively simple because they have been confined to specific geographic areas and self-contained human communities where the pace of historical transformation and conflict was relatively slow.
Economic and Political Pressures on Food Systems
In contrast, prolonged or intense interaction with outside food systems will accelerate the processes of history; changes wrought in a community's original food system may have unforeseeable consequences to the point where that community may lose control over its own environment. These changes may involve the use of superior force to oblige one g
roup to devote its land and labour to satisfying the needs of another (agricultural tribute, colonization); or they may be introduced peacefully and yet have violent consequences.
The effects of introducing a single hitherto-unknown plant or animal species into a new environment can be immeasurable. Could Philip Miller, Curator of London's Chelsea Physic Garden in the eighteenth century, know that he would lay the foundations for a whole new mode of life (and, as has been submitted, for a Civil War) when he sent the first packet of cotton seeds to the recently founded American colony of Georgia?4 When Christopher Columbus took the first specimens of sugar cane to the Antilles in 1495, who would have predicted that great maritime and commercial empires would be based on the sugar trade and that Africa would be ravaged to provide slaves for Caribbean plan-tations? Ships carrying slaves out to provide labour for sugar or cotton economies, furthermore, brought back new plants from the Americas on the return voyage - among them groundnuts, corn, sweet potatoes and manioc - all still mainstays of African diets.5
In our time, the introduction of large-scale commercial soya bean cultivation in Brazil since the 1960s has, in a remarkably short period, altered land-use patterns over vast areas. This has reduced the availability and raised the prices of staple foods for the average Brazilian and had important, generally negative, consequences not only for nutrition but for small business and levels of employment. Black beans, once the staple protein source for poor Brazilians, have recently been in such short supply due to preferential land use for soya cultivation that riots have occurred at city supermarkets; municipal elections in Rio de Janeiro produced a huge write-in vote for feijaos.6
The use of superior force to alter food systems to one's own advantage is a more straightforward case, whether such force is exercised by the dominant class in a particular society or by outsiders over another country. Recurrent problems for govern-ments everywhere are feeding the populations of the cities (if they are not fed, mobs may riot and sometimes overthrow the rulers) and, secondly, acquiring enough cash for national treasuries to maintain civil and military bureaucracies (as well as provide some luxuries for the elite that form their power base). The countryside must therefore be controlled and the peasantry kept in line lest it refuse to provide the surplus necessary to these ends. Needless to say, this 'surplus' is rarely perceived as such by peasants themselves, who are always the first to go hungry. Thus it is not surprising that food was routinely exported from pre- revolutionary France, even in times of famine, nor that agricultural exports from the Sahel actually increased during the recent severe drought and food crisis.7 Economic, political and, where necessary, military pressures brought to bear on one class by another are thus vital determinants of food production and distribution.8
Colonization: From Abundance to Scarcity
Superior force is also exercised at the international level; the most obvious case is that of colonialism. Empires throughout history have commandeered another people's food supplies (for example, the Roman use, and eventual exhaustion, of North Africa as a granary). The colonial empires of modern times ushered in a new phase, however, by using colonies to furnish the cash crops that fuelled their own industrial development; they thus became architects of radically different food systems and environmental transformers on a huge scale.
Societies that now suffer endemic food shortages were, on the whole, food-abundant societies in precolonial times. Dr Moises Behar has, for example, shown that the Mayans, prior to the Spanish Conquest, had no serious nutritional problems. They ate corn, beans, fruits, vegetables, and game meat; they cleared land, farmed it briefly, then let it revert to jungle, thus preserving the ecological balance and soil fertility.9 With the Conquest came malnutrition - not only because the Spaniards took over the crops and sold them back to the Indians for gold, but also because they forced them to clear land for cotton, sugar and coffee.
European travellers to Africa in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries often noted the prosperous agrarian life. One of them recorded the response of an Ethiopian peasant to his amazement at the food abundance: 'Honoured guest, do not be amazed... if it were not for the multitude of locusts and hail... we should not sow the half of what we sow, because so much remains that it cannot be believed ... (Even if all these plagues came at once, there would still be food reserves)... We have no scarcity.'10
Closer to our own time, we have the word of a French colonial inspector who wrote to his government in 1932 on his mission to famine-stricken Upper Volta:
One can only wonder how it happens that populations ... who always had on hand three harvests in reserve and to whom it was socially unacceptable to eat grain that had spent less than three years in the granary have suddenly become improvident. They managed to get through the terrible drought-induced famine of 1914 without hardship. (Although their stocks were depleted, they were soon able to reconstitute them, at least until 1926, a good year for cotton but a bad one for millet) Since then, these people, once accustomed to food abundance, are now living from hand to mouth ... I feel morally bound to point out that the intensification of the policy giving priority to industrial products has coincided with an increase in the frequency of food shortages.11
The inspector has here put his finger on the causes of hunger: not drought, hail or locusts - environmental hazards which peasants took into account and had learned to cope with - but enforced cash crop production for metropolitan countries. Just as the early Spanish colonizers in search of cash crop products pushed American Indians on to soil-poor and easily eroded hillsides where their descendants still live, so was much subsequent dislocation in previously efficient food systems directly induced by commercial interests backed by national ones - the ancestors, one might say, of today's transnational corporations (TNCs). A few examples of such dislocations follow.
In the first decade of this century, the Anglo-Peruvian Amazon Company recruited hundreds of employees to 'organize the collection and portage of rubber to river stations by thousands of natives ... The means of coercion used against them included the withholding of food by driving them from their subsistence plots and thus rendering them dependent upon foodstuffs imported by the Company ... possibly thousands lost their lives from hunger and murder.'12
Similar events occurred in the Belgian Congo on a larger scale:
'Since the conquest, difficulties in recruiting workers hampered colonization: it was necessary ... violently to expropriate the peasants from their collective landholdings ... Mercilessly crushing the old African agrarian system, the finance companies proceeded to make gigantic expropriations, seizing millions of hectares, burning villages ... forcing [the people] to gather plantation crops at gunpoint.'13
French methods were sometimes more subtle but had the same destructive results for local food systems. Taxation was the chief coercive instrument employed; it gave peasants no choice but to produce groundnuts or cotton for sale to French companies. Taxes were demanded even in periods of acute famine (itself engendered by cash crops, as seen above). As the French governor of Niger said to a subordinate who had informed him that there was neither money nor food in his district in the famine year 1931: 'I wish you to be less lenient and, on the contrary, expect you to hasten the collection of taxes owed by those under your jurisdiction.'14
This is the framework created by the earlier interventions of industrialized countries in Third World food systems. It is the setting in which today's development efforts must take place. An analysis of the contemporary situation requires that a further dimension be added, as it is now recognized that our planet is a global system and that there is no chance of Third World food systems reverting to relative autarchy. They must try to evolve towards a new, different, yet viable, equilibrium starting from a historical situation basically unfavourable to them.
Authentic Food Systems versus the Dominant Model
One goal of any national development policy should be to arrive at a food system which (a) is environment enhancing and
ecologically sustainable, (b) provides enough foodstuffs at reasonable cost to the entire population, including the poorest strata, for a nutritionally balanced diet while remaining consonant with its cultural preferences, and (c) provides great enough quantities to ensure national food self-sufficiency, as a guarantee against outside political manipulation through food aid or exports.
Let us call such an ideal food system 'authentic', drawing etymologically on authente's/authentikos as Greek for 'one who does anything by his own hand'. An 'inauthentic' system would, therefore, be one directed by outside hands; usually, such a system cannot satisfactorily feed its own people (though it may be efficient at feeding outsiders). In the contemporary world, there is competition between food systems; the model of the industrialized countries is now dominant and this model is being exported as a solution to development problems in the Third World. However, food system models are in fact non-exportable: any successful development of authentic food systems will have to be based on local bioregions and local solutions, on a cultural renaissance and a scientific upgrading and enrichment of locally accumulated knowledge and techniques.
There are naturally many gradations along a continuum of authenticity/inauthenticity. One system can remain authentic while incorporating elements from another, but only when it does so on its own terms. Unfortunately, there are few historical or contemporary examples where both systems profit through mutual, beneficial incorporation. Note that the authentic food system has been defined as one serving the entire population. It is, of course, quite possible that the dominant class of a system may have something to gain from either self-reliance or inauthenticity. The physical resources of all but the smallest Third World countries (and perhaps even theirs) are sufficient for attaining authenticity. The obstacle is, rather, the permeable nature of their food systems and their vulnerability to outside pressures.