Famine is no secret, but far too many pretend that it is nothing to do with them, while deliberately fomenting it and profiting from it, or using it as a genocidal weapon of war. Betting on Famine, by Jean Ziegler, dissects this shameful history for us, starting with the point that global hunger was nearly eliminated, and then was allowed to explode around the world again. Ziegler was the first UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food.
Deprived of adequate means to fight against hunger, the FAO [Food and Agriculture Organization] and WFP [World Food Program] survive today only under highly adverse conditions. The FAO lies in ruins.
As in the case of slavery in the 19th century,
The destruction, every year, of tens of millions of men, women, and children from hunger is the greatest scandal of our era. Every five seconds, a child under the age of ten dies of hunger—on a planet abounding in wealth and rich in natural resources. In its current state, the global agricultural system would in fact, without any difficulty, be capable of feeding 12 billion people, or twice the world’s current population [in 2014]. Hunger is thus in no way inevitable. Every child who starves to death is murdered.
I must pass over the harrowing tales of hunger from many particular places, and the multitude of indigenous organizations combating it. What we are looking for is who causes that.
Colonization, monopolization of the soil, and monoculture are hunger’s primary causes.
We have looked at Market Fundamentalism and the “Washington consensus” in previous posts in this series. The World Bank and IMF used to be in the lead in imposing austerity on developing countries, but that has changed. Nevertheless many austerity programs continue. Agribusiness is the other main culprit, but the global fallout from the Bush housing bubble’s collapse includes vast increases in poverty, undernutrition, and severe malnutrition.
The $8-9 trillion that governments of the industrialized nations spent in 2008–9 to bail out their respective banks would equal seventy-five years of government development aid.
Have you ever heard of NOMA/facial gangrene?
There are countries where it is epidemic, but the national authorities deny that it exists. WHO and the World Bank also used to ignore it, and developed countries refused to discuss it, claiming that it was somebody else’s problem.
The Malthusian notion that starvation is a law of nature and God, and a positive good for humanity, held sway until the horrors of starvation policies among the Nazis became widely known.
Almost half of the 56 million combined civilian and military deaths during World War II were caused by hunger and its immediate consequences.
This was official policy. All of Europe that came under Nazi control was divided into
- The well fed, useful to the Nazi war machine
- The underfed, limited to 1,000 calories/day
- The hungry, meant to be reduced in numbers
- The starving, to be exterminated
enforced by systematic government looting of agriculture. Then they made it much, much worse, with effects lasting for years after the war.
The FAO was created in 1946. The right to food was affirmed in 1948 in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Arrayed against this was Cold War US foreign policy, the IMF, the WTO, and the World Bank, and agribusiness.
Today [2014] the top 200 companies in the agri-food industry control about a quarter of the world’s food production resources. Just 10 corporations control one-third of the market in seed.
And so on for pesticides, fertilizer, crop insurance, and much more.
For more than two decades, privatization and the liberalization of trade, financial services, capital flow, and patents have proceeded at a stupefying pace. As a result, the poor countries of the South have found themselves largely stripped of the prerogatives of sovereignty. Borders have disappeared, and the public sector—even hospitals and schools—has been privatized. And all over the world the number of victims of undernutrition and hunger grows.
And water, too.
When Free Trade Kills
In 2005 the WTO attacked free food aid. The WTO declared that it was unacceptable that the WFP and other organizations distribute surplus agricultural products provided by donor nations. According to the WTO this practice corrupts the market. Any commercial transfer of a good must have a price.
Fortunately this proposal to tax food aid was soundly rejected by countries of the Southern Hemisphere.
We don’t have anywhere near room for all of the examples of murderous blinkered delusion laid out in the book, so I will stop here, and invite you to rejoice that the IMF, World Bank, and WTO have been significantly reformed since then with the decline of Market Fundamentalism and other such bogosity.
Ziegler could not have foreseen the bogosity of Trumpianism when he was writing in 2014, much less its complete rejection with Bidenomics, which has accomplished so much without yet coming to full flower. But we can make it happen, and then our best minds can be set to the thorniest of problems.
Better still, while we rescue the starving, we can help them set up functioning education for all, health care, infrastructure, all-renewable energy systems, and the rest of what they need so that in the next generation they can find their own solutions adapted to their own needs. Among the results will be tens of trillions of dollars of new economic development, which the megacorporations are willing to stomp on because those profits don’t come to them.
Historical Famines
Famine
According to the United Nations World Food Programme, famine is declared when malnutrition is widespread, and when people have started dying of starvation through lack of access to sufficient, nutritious food.[3] The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification criteria define Phase 5 famine of acute food insecurity as occurring when:[4][5]
- At least 20% of households in an area face extreme food shortages with a limited ability to cope; and
- The prevalence of acute malnutrition in children exceeds 30%; and
- The death rate exceeds two people per 10,000 people per day.
Partial List of famines in the last 4,000 years.
Recent Famines and Protracted Crises
Currently twenty-seven countries fulfill the FAO’s criteria for protracted crisis.
These are major disasters sometimes lasting for decades, but not full-scale famines.
Deaths from malnutrition on a large scale have continued across India into modern times. In Maharashtra alone, for example, there were around 45,000 childhood deaths due to mild or severe malnutrition in 2009, according to the Times of India.[150] Another Times of India report in 2010 has stated that 50% of childhood deaths in India are attributable to malnutrition.[151]
On March 3, 2008 TV2 Norway aired the documentary "Sultbløffen" (The Famine Scam) which voiced the view that there was no famine in Niger in 2005– 06, but rather chronic malnutrition no different from the previous years. BBC's Hilary Andersson, UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland as well as international media and aid organizations in general were accused of severely overstating and lying about the food situation in the country by misrepresenting the situation. The sources, among them a Norwegian-Swedish foundation of agricultural development and their local assistants, gave a version picturing western media and relief agencies as ignorant towards local agriculture and flora and common dietary habits. They cited so-called "food-racism": the perception that local, traditional food and food plants are useless and poisonous, even though locals have eaten them for millennia. They also denounced the perception that the people of Niger are incapable of living without support from the west, and argued that large food donations overwhelmed the local supply, making it harder for local agriculture to compete.[15]The film was awarded 3rd prize in the Monte Carlo TV festival of 2008, and won Den Store Journalistprisen in Norway in 2009. The BBC claimed to have refuted TV2's allegations unequivocally,[16] and attempted to block the international release of the documentary by withdrawing TV2's license to news footage from the summer of 2005.[17]
The Bangladesh famine of 1974 began in March 1974 and ended in about December of the same year. The famine is considered one of the worst in the 20th century; it was characterised by massive flooding along the Brahmaputra River as well as high mortality.
Further Reading
- Josué de Castro, Documentario do Nordeste/Documentary of the Northwest
- Josué de Castro, Geographia da Fome/The Geography of Hunger
- Josué de Castro, Geopolítica da Fome/The Geopolitics of Hunger
- UNICEF and the Micronutrient Initiative, Vitamin and Mineral Deficiency: A Global Damage Assessment Report
- Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principal of Population
- Thomas Malthus, Principles of Political Economy
- Tibor Mende, China and Her Shadow
- Max Nord, Amsterdam in the Hunger Winter
- Gerald Gold, Modern Commodities Futures Trading
Closing Music
Mercedes Sosa - Solo le Pido a Dios
I only ask of God
That I not be indifferent to human suffering
That parched death will not find me
Empty and alone, without having done enough.