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Al-Ahram Weekly 6 - 12 April 2000 Issue No. 476 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 6 - 12 April 2000 Issue No. 476
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Summit Features Focus Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters The economics of starvation
By Sameh NaguibFifteen years ago, a devastating famine left over one million people dead in the Horn of Africa. As ministers meet at the first Africa-Europe Summit here in Cairo, the region is faced yet again with the threat of famine. As in previous cases of famine, the direct causes are drought, war and the pressures of refugee movement across the region; however there are more fundamental causes for famines, hunger and malnutrition.
An estimated 24,000 people die every day from hunger or hunger-related causes; three-quarters of them are children under the age of five. The majority of hunger deaths are caused by chronic malnutrition. Families simply cannot get near enough to the minimum required daily calorie intake. Besides death, chronic malnutrition causes impaired vision, listlessness, stunted growth and greatly increased susceptibility to disease. Severely malnourished people are unable to function at the most basic level.
It is estimated that some 800 million people in the world suffer from hunger and malnutrition, and the situation is not improving. In the early '90s, only 37 developing countries achieved a reduction in the number of undernourished people. In the rest of the developing world, the number of hungry people actually increased by almost 60 million.
More than half the countries for which statistics are available do not have enough food to provide their entire population with the minimum daily requirement of calories. Across Africa the average household now consumes 25 per cent less than in the early 1970s. Between 1995 and 1997, only 21 out of 147 Third World countries recorded per capita growth of over three per cent a year, the level estimated necessary to reduce poverty.
The contrast between wealth and hunger in this "new world order" can only be described as obscene. The wealth of the world's 15 richest people now exceeds the combined gross domestic product (GDP) of the whole of sub-Saharan Africa. The wealth of the 84 richest individuals exceeds the GDP of China, which has 1.2 billion inhabitants. There are 1.2 billion people living on less than a dollar a day and nearly 3 billion people (half the world's population) live on less than $2, according to a UNDP Development Report in 1999.
The logic of the world food market is particularly conducive to starvation. Advanced countries in Europe and North America, as well as Japan, produce over three-quarters of the world's exports of foodstuffs. These countries maintain schemes to protect their agricultural production. In general, people in these countries pay vastly inflated prices so that high and stable prices can be guaranteed to the farm and food processing sectors. One of the first results of this system is a decline in imports, which translates as a loss to Third World countries that export foodstuffs.
To keep the prices up, governments create massive stocks of foodstuffs, which are then taken off the market. World grain stocks exceed 200 million tonnes, while the shortfall of grain in the Horn of Africa will not exceed 10 million tonnes. The cost of storing food in Europe alone runs in tens of billions of dollars, but the massive cost of storing vast quantities of food leads governments to the "logical" conclusion that they must either process it into something else or simply dump it.
The fragile integration into the world market means that any serious fall in the demand for Third World exports leads inevitably to hunger. Without export earnings, it is virtually impossible for governments to subsidise food for the poor. Moreover, the peasant farmers can ill afford to buy the fertilisers, pesticides, oil and machinery to keep up their own subsistence farming practices, let alone producing cash crops.
Famines are not caused by nature, they are part of the global business cycle; the boom and slump of world capital. And like slumps, famines always serve to strengthen the rich and weaken the poor. When an African country is stricken by famine, it is not the state that starves but the poor majority. The rich actually get richer as the prices of land and labour tumble and as the powerful monopolise the flow of food aid.
The power of food-exporting countries like the US and Europe is also greatly enhanced during famines. Washington has always used food relief -- in the words of a former US secretary of agriculture -- as "a tool in the kit of US diplomacy." Food supplies can be used to reverse the policy of a foreign government, to subordinate, subvert, punish and control.
Famine sums up the essence of a world order based on profits and state power. Political and business leaders in both industrialised and developing nations avoid doing anything that might jeopardise profits and their networks of vested interest. Anything that might encourage the absurd notion that food surpluses ought to be eaten -- rather than sold at the market price or else destroyed -- is hushed up. There is no shortage of food, yet scarcity is forced on those who have no money to buy it.
Today 10 per cent of children in developing countries die before the age of five. The world has an unprecedented capacity to produce -- to feed and cloth everyone -- but it is dominated by a system that produces waste and hunger instead.
In the words of the celebrated late Spanish playwright Frederico Garcia Lorca, "The day that hunger is eradicated from the earth will be the greatest spiritual explosion the world has ever known. Humanity cannot imagine the joy that will burst into the world."
Such a day will only come when production and distribution are determined by need rather than profit.
