Can a renewed European projet be born in the shadow of the superpowers and the transnational corporations (TNCs) that now make many of the decisions affecting the continent? The answer to this question will decide the future of Europe. Yet on the face of things, the odds are against a positive reply. The systems that dominate the world are increasingly global, and the degree of European control over them is not encouraging. Consider, for example:
• The food system. Though now self-sufficient in the major cereals thanks to the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP),2 Europe is still heavily dependent on protein inputs from the US; the European Economic Community (EEC) is still the United States' major agricultural customer ($7.4 billion worth of imports in 1983, or 20 per cent of total US agricultural export receipts). Meanwhile, the CAP is under assault from within (unrealistically high costs, dissension on price levels) and from without (the US offensive). Many agricultural input, manufacturing and food-processing activities are also dominated by the US.
•The energy system. European countries depend for much of their energy supply on decisions made by others (for example, oil transnationals, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries [OPEC]) and must adjust their diplomacy in consequence. Little has been done with regard to serious energy conservation or development of new sources (except nuclear power - against the will of a growing number of citizens).
•The monetary/financial system. The European Currency Unit (ECU) was a definite step forward, but the world financial system is still dominated by the dollar and institutions wholly or largely controlled by the US (the Federal Reserve, the International Monetary Fund [IMF]). Interest rates in the US have a seriously debilitating effect on Europe's economic health and growth (capital flight, financing the US deficit), and the value of the dollar determines the price of oil and other vital commodities.
•The military system. The system is determined by the superpowers. 'Defence' of Europe under the US nuclear shield is regarded by greater and greater numbers of EEC citizens as a sinister farce. Even so, in most quarters, the idea of developing alternatives to the Nato/Warsaw Pact dichotomy seems the ultimate heresy (I am correcting proofs in late December 1989 in the wake of the Romanian revolution and a year which has changed this perspective radically)
•The information system. Information dissemination is dominated by the US both in terms of satellites and computerized networks and in terms of 'cultural products'. Public opinion is conditioned by television and by advertising, both increasingly globalized (which is to say, Americanized).
• Scientific, technical and manufacturing systems. These systems are again largely dominated by the superpowers (for military technology) and on the civilian side by the US and Japan. Data bases and scientific publishing are overwhelmingly located in the US - and in English. Of the top 200 transnational corporations, 80 are American, 35 Japanese and 60 European. US and Japanese corporations account for over 64 per cent of total revenues accruing to these 200 TNCs; European TNCs account for 27 per cent.3
All these systems are by nature integrating and, for those who do not control them, dependency-creating. Naturally, Europe has more to say about some than about others, but on the whole must accept many decisions made elsewhere.
These remarks may seem a rather long way round to a discussion of Europe's relationship with the Third World and particularly its cooperation in food strategies. I hope to show, however, that this apparent detour is in reality one of the most direct routes towards a new civilizational project for Europe. Overcoming present dependency will require conscious policies of unity, renewal and non-alignment, in which relations with the Third World could become a vital component. With enough political - and moral - courage, Europe could provide an alternative to the less and less attractive models offered by both superpowers.
The once-prestigious United States model is losing ground in the Third World. The Vietnam war badly tarnished America's image; the current Central American crisis is completing the job, especially in Latin America. President Reagan's visible contempt for any semblance of 'North-South dialogue', the adamant stance of US commercial banks and the US government on Third World debt, the assault on international development agencies like Unesco and tragedies like Bhopal do not help to project the image of a nation that cares for anything beyond its own power and profits.
The Soviet model, which for a time attracted the sympathetic adherence of some newly independent Third World nations, is also discredited both economically and politically.4 Centralized planning in agriculture (as in other areas) has been demonstrated not to work - even hard-line governments like Mozambique's are backing off. Repression in Poland and the war of attrition in Afghanistan have further served to make the USSR model a repulsive one.
In this moral and political vacuum lies a historic opportunity for Europe. General de Gaulle once said, 'States do not have friends, only interests.' While this is doubtless true as well for the group of States that make up the European Community, the pursuit of its interests in the Third World should not be interpreted narrowly as an opportunity to impose its own technologies, corporations and values on poor countries. Europe could, however, try to break the present US/USSR strategic deadlock, which reduces all North-South problems to East-West confrontations. If it succeeded, the EEC would assert its political independence and enhance its prestige in the process. By espousing the cause of three-quarters of humanity, Europe would also, in the fullness of time, reap the more traditional commercial and financial benefits.
Assuming Europe recognizes the political importance of proposing and nurturing an alternative development model, then surely devising food strategies capable of alleviating hunger should be the cornerstone of such a policy. The chronic hunger of hundreds of millions is not just morally indefensible; it is one of the most politically destabilizing forces in the world today. Several Third World countries have recently experienced food riots. Up to now, these riots have been brutally put down; there are, however, no guarantees that repression will save these governments for ever.5
Furthermore, even the most casual observers - including those in the poor countries - can now see that hunger is unnecessary. Ten years ago, some national leaders and international bureaucrats still took the Malthusian line and claimed absolute world food scarcity; their fears were echoed in the calling of the World Food Conference in 1974. Such arguments were never adequate and are clearly implausible today in a context of price-depressing grain surpluses in the US and Europe and another global bumper harvest of some 1.63 billion tons of cereals expected for 1985.6 EEC surplus commodities in storage are valued at $4 billion;7 the sums rich countries now spend on storing food surpluses are far greater than those they devote to development aid.
In other words, the injustices of hunger are becoming daily more visible - and more dangerous. If Europe is to help eliminate them, she will need to make difficult political decisions. For the purposes of this report, I shall not try to determine the feasibility of various political strategies - this is up to the politicians themselves. My own limited usefulness here, as I see it, is to suggest strategies that would contribute to eradicating hunger. These may be considered Utopian: so were proposals to overthrow the French monarchy or to eliminate slavery in centuries before our own.
Strategies reflect analysis, and food strategies are no exception. The ways in which one explains the causes of hunger will determine the ways by which one seeks to do away with it. Until recently, most official actors on the hunger and development scene have not called into question their own performance over the past thirty years or so. They seem, implicitly at least, to believe that without the decades of the development projects and food aid policies they designed, the present hunger crisis would be even worse. If this view is correct, then there is no reason to alter present food and development strategies - one must simply spend a lot more money on them. This is basically the position of the Brandt Commission (which calls for 'massive transfers' from North to South, in a face-
lifted version of the worn-out 'trickle-down' theory) and of the Group of 77, which wants more of everything, including more aid.8
This position is not entirely indefensible. Basic economic injustices obviously exist between North and South, and the Lome Convention is one European effort to remedy this, however marginally.9 On a global scale, however, rigor mortis has overtaken the New International Economic Order. The Group of 77 is too disorganized and dispersed; so long as it does not choose to use the political instruments theoretically at its disposal (for example, a united front on the debt issue) the North as a whole is under no pressure to make concessions.
Traditional food and development strategies have a fatal flaw: their assumption that the world is a harmonious place. Countries are encouraged to trade according to the principles of 'comparative advantage', which supposedly will result in a fair deal for all. Third World elites, whose wealth and power are invariably increased by aid programmes, are assumed ready to share these benefits with their less privileged compatriots. Accumulated failures show that these assumptions are untenable. Harmony does not yet seem to reign, either at the international or at the national level.
One obstacle to reaching the poor and hungry is the ability of elites to corner most of the benefits of aid. Another is that the people most at risk live in the countryside. According to the World Bank, the overwhelming majority (90 per cent) of the 'absolute poor' are rural. This proportion may change as Third World countries undergo rapid urbanization, but, for the moment, food strategies, to be effective, must somehow bypass both the rich and the city dwellers. This is no simple task, given that most Third World governments are kept in power by just those groups. Resources devoted to the peasantry are notoriously meagre, whereas this peasantry generally supplies much of the country's wealth. It is the most numerous group that has the least influence.
One goal of any donor whose objective is to reduce hunger should be to help increase the bargaining power of this poor and politically marginalized peasantry. This is admittedly difficult when donors must deal with governments whose priorities do not include strengthening the poor rural majority.
There are, however, ways to help the worst-off and thus to improve food security for the population as a whole. The first is the judicious use of food aid. Since two sessions of Working Group II deal with this question,10 I shall merely note the points most worth bearing in mind.
In recent years, no aspect of aid to the Third World has come under more fire than food aid. Its damaging effects in a wide variety of situations and countries have been so amply documented that all statements on aid now seem to contain a compulsory self-exculpating sentence or two. Donors declare that while food aid can indeed discourage or ruin local production, increase dependency, alter food habits, encourage corruption and not reach the people who need it, none of this need happen under proper surveillance. The new watchword seems to be that food aid, when used for development purposes, will have none of the former drawbacks.
Unfortunately, awareness of such problems does not necessarily guarantee their avoidance. Individual European donor countries and the Community as a whole, under pressure from their farmers, live with the permanent temptation to equate food aid with surplus-dumping - a temptation to which they often succumb. The leader of the most powerful agricultural federation in France says, for example: 'Food aid can be increased, it's a question of political will; a European Marshall Plan for the Third World could be set up which would ultimately be an investment and which would allow disposal of surplus production.'11
These temptations for the EEC can only increase as the US steps up its subsidteed grain-export war against the Community. Europe will retaliate, and the chief losers in this war will be unsubsidized Third World smallholders who cannot possibly compete with wildly underpriced cereals from abroad. In contrast, direct farm subsidies in 1984 totalled $19 billion in the US and $17 billion in Europe.12
Nevertheless, the EEC should be congratulated for commissioning and publishing critical reports on its food aid practices and for being the only important donor in the world to carry out a real institutional debate on the subject.13Many of the strategies one would like to see the Community follow have already been mooted in this debate.
First comes the obvious need to reduce the number of decisions required for each allocation of aid (up to 18) and exorbitant time- lags between initial requests and final delivery (an average 3 77 days for cereals and 535 for dairy products in the early 1980s). Even 'emergency' aid takes about six months to arrive.14 An audit of 31 December 1984 speaks of delays of up to 419 days for cereals and 578 for butter oil; but these figures, says Director General of Development Dieter Frisch, are 'absurd', because the Court assumes 1 January as the effective arrival date for the whole year, whereas supplies are programmed to arrive throughout the year.15 It is therefore impossible for an outsider to give an accurate assessment of true delays; but, to say the least, this problem does not appear to have been eliminated.
Reducing these delays would also allow the Community to better tailor food aid to real needs and actual harvests in the recipient countries, which is rarely the case today. 'In practice,' a team of specialists reports, 'European food aid policy works on a kind of "subscription" basis both for cereals and for dairy products. Once a country has received food aid, it generally renews its request and is practically assured of a favourable reply ...'16
Untimely delivery may trigger some of the most harmful consequences of food aid. When foreign cereals appear suddenly and massively on relatively limited Third World markets, and when their appearance coincides with the country's own harvest, many local producers will be ruined. (This happened, for example, in the late 1970s when US food aid to Bangladesh drove producer prices down to a quarter of their normal levels.) If the EEC cannot fine-tune its grain arrivals to coincide with the 'hungry season', it would do better to wait even longer before delivering, rather than wipe out local farmers. Every ruined peasant who migrates to a city makes one less producer and one more consumer (not counting family members), thus perpetuating the need for future food aid.
Even the severest critics of food aid do not deny the need for intervention in cases of natural or man-made disasters, provided it is of short duration. If food aid were not automatically renewed regardless of need, the EEC might find it easier to devote greater attention (and greater quantities) to real emergencies. It is relatively difficult to estimate what proportion of total aid currently serves emergency purposes. The World Food Program's figure of 20 per cent (for 1983) is almost surely inflated, whereas the critics' estimate of 7 per cent may be too low.17 Ten per cent may be closest to the truth; but whatever figure one adopts, too little aid goes to emergency situations, and the little that is allocated takes far too long to arrive.
Aside from helping to palliate the worst effects of some disasters,18 food aid could make a tremendous contribution to development in the rare cases where countries make genuine efforts to transfer power and resources to the poorer bottom half of the population. Take the case of Chile in 1972: redistribution of income resulted in a 12 per cent jump in food demand in the space of a single year - proving that malnourished people spend incremental income first on food. Chile's own agriculture was unable to respond to the challenge, food-price inflation ensued, and the Allende government made desperate attempts to import wheat. The United States (and its commercial banks) meanwhile cut off all financial credits, without which commercial wheat purchases were impossible. These actions contributed in no small measure to the economic destabilization and eventual overthrow of the socialist government and to the bloody dictatorship that still holds sway over Chile. Timely food aid for a transitional period might have helped avoid both. Nicaragua is in similar straits today. But in order to help such national experiments encouraging greater social justice, Europe would have to risk the displeasure of the US and underwrite a truly non-aligned foreign policy.
However much one might like to see all other kinds of f
ood aid abolished (aside from emergency and transitional help as described above), this is not at present a realistic proposition. Structural, institutionalized, 'subscription' food aid will be with us for a while, and we must make the best of it. Since about two-thirds of all food aid is sold locally, for local currency, 'making the best' means making the best possible use of counterpart funds. An additional 15 to 16 per cent of food aid is devoted to Food for Work projects, so we must also see how these could be made to serve the whole society.
US Public Law 480 (the 'Food for Peace' law) makes elaborate provisions for the uses of counterpart funds - all of them destined to serve American interests in one way or another.19 Europeans have taken the line up to now that the recipient country should be allowed to use counterpart funds generated by the sale of food aid as it sees fit. At the same time, the EEC (during Edgard Pisani's term as development commissioner) has lately tried to use food aid to enhance food security and self-sufficiency in Third World countries. Unfortunately, the EEC's concern for national sovereignty on the one hand and for rural development on the other are not necessarily compatible, since recipient governments may not, as noted above, put their own peasantries high on their list of priorities.