Susan George
in Peuples/Popoli/Peoples/Pueblos No 9 (April 1987)
Governments have constantly reaffirmed this right as well. Just twelve years ago this month, governments represented at the World Food Conference in Rome again solemnly committed themselves to eradicating hunger. They promised that “Within a decade, no child will go to bed hungry, no family will fear for its next day’s bread”; a promise which rings very hollow indeed in these times of massive famine.
Universal Declaration, International Covenants and World Conference Resolutions notwithstanding, no human right has been so frequently and spectacularly violated in recent times as the right to food. Surely all of us here vigorously oppose torture, disappearances, arbitrary imprisonments and other flagrant infringements of human rights, as we must do; but none of us could claim that all these combined deprive more people of life itself than the absence of food. Even war is a poor second. The toll of hunger on human life is equal to a Hiroshima explosion every three days.
I do not, however, wish to indulge in quantification today. Is UNICEF right in claiming that 40.000 children die daily due to hunger or hunger-related illness? When FAO says 500 million people suffer from hunger and malnutrition, is it more or less accurate than the World Bank which speaks of 800 million to one billion people in these circumstances? In a sense, without being callous, we can answer “Who cares?”, since even one death from hunger, even a single person suffering from malnutrition, is a scandal in a world which has vanquished food scarcity, where more than enough food exists for everyone. The most recent US Department of Agriculture estimate says our 1986-87 global harvests will exceed 1.6 billion tons of cereals, with carryover stocks at close to 350 million tons. Never before in history has there been so much apparently unwanted grain in the world – nor so many people who need it.
I could prove to you with simple arithmetic that if 15 million children are not dying from hunger every year, they could be saved with less than one-two-thousandths of the world’s harvests (0.002%), even if we assumed they should receive an adult ration and that there was absolutely no food available to them locally – not even breast milk. There may still be people who take comfort in the Malthusian view, which assures us that the number of mouths to feed will inevitably and necessarily outstrip the supply of food. It may be morally easier to look at the persistence of hunger as a natural law, since this automatically absolves human society and human organization of any responsibility. However convenient, this view is no longer tenable.
Even when people know there is plenty of food available in global terms, the number approach, the qualification of hunger, tends to make them numb. How can an individual contemplate doing anything at all about a scourge that strikes half a billion to a billion people? Worse than that, the numbers approach makes us focus on the victims. I just did it myself when I spoke of how little food proportionally would be needed to save 15 million children, as if it were up to some vaguely defined group called “us” -in the rich countries- to feed another, quite different, group called “them” -the poor and famished in the third world.
It is not that the victims are unimportant, far from it, but if we focus only on them, we risk blinding ourselves to the true causes of hunger. Since faulty analysis leads to faulty action, we shall stray even further from a solution.
No: we must definitely find another way forward. And it is here that human rights can be an invaluable instrument. Well-meaning peoples sometimes claim that the human rights approach to hunger is not only wrong but positively harmful. What is the point, they ask, of proclaiming principles that are completely unenforceable? Such critics point out that every time these principles are undermined -and in the case of hunger this happens millions of times everyday- the very concepts of international law and norms of behaviour are flouted. All you have accomplished with the human rights approach, they say, is to encourage disrespect for your own standards and to create an unbridgeable credibility gap.
I do not share this view for at least three reasons: the first is that the human rights stance reminds us of what we are in constant need of hearing: there is no “us”; and no “them”. We are the same fragile yet extraordinary creatures, all of us with our dignity and our defects, our hopes for today and for the future, and our struggles to attain them. Accidents of birth and geography have placed some of us in more favorable positions than others. We to whom such accidents have granted particular privilege should never confuse our duty to help alleviate suffering with some imaginary, inherent difference between ourselves as “haves” and others as “have-nots”. Taking human rights seriously helps to avoid a “them” and “us” mentality.
The second reason which makes the human rights approach valuable is precisely because it can be described as “utopian”. We need utopias. Today’s seemingly unreachable goals are tomorrow’s triumphs. One hundred and fifty years ago, it was utopian to think of ridding the United States of slavery. Which do you prefere: the cry of “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité”, or a sober analysis of the reason you will never be able to bring down the french monarchy and the established order? So it must and will be with ending hunger. Those we have been trained to call “realists” are often nothing but people who defend the status quo.
The final reason for using the human rights approach is eminently practical, and brings us to the hearth of what I would like to say today. When we speak of rights, human rights, in the same breath we must speak of violations. When we speak of violations, we have in mind human institutions, human agents as violators. How does it sound to you if I say “Drought has violated several million Ethiopians’ right to food”? Or, “Floods have often violated Bangladeshi’s rights to food”? Or even, “Africans are presently violating their own right to food by having too many children”? Such propositions are barely grammatical, much less intellectually convincing.
Here you are entitled to ask if every case of hunger truly implies a violation of the human right to food. It’s true that acts of God like drought and flood or population pressures can aggrave hunger. But climatic and environmental hazards can usually be traced to human intervention. If you cut down all the forests so that timber companies can make short-term profits, you disturb rainfall patterns. If you exhaust soils in order to produce export crops -groundnuts, cotton and the like- food crops will be neglected and yields reduced. Pursuing this line of reasoning to the extreme, I would even go so far as to say that there are no ecological problems, only the social, economic and political ones that underly them.
As for demographics, third world parents know that having many children may be the only way to maximise gains for the family today and to ensure some security for themselves tomorrow. Wherever and whenever hunger occurs, we may be sure that human agencies and agents are at work; that hunger is basically a reflection of inequity at the local, national and international levels.
This is why the correct response to hunger and the cardinal virtue we need to respond to it is justice, not charity. Again, the relevance of the human rights approach is clear, the notions of rights and of justice are inseparable.
All this being said, if I were able to change the language of the Universal Declaration and the International Covenants, I would much rather speak of “peoples right to feed themselves” rather than of “the right to food”. After all, animals in zoos, patients in hospitals and prisoners in jail all have a right to food. Surely we need a less passive, more dynamic concept. If not properly qualified, the “right to food” sounds almost like a right to handouts.
I believe the framers of the basic human rights documents understood this perfectly when they declared that “in no case may a people be deprived of its own means of subsistence”. What they meant, among other things, is that every human community has developed ways of coping with its environment in order to provide its members, under normal circumstances, with a decent livelihood, including food. Given a chance and a measure of justice, people will feed themselves: they will not ask for handouts and they will not need “us”. But they can be and often are deprived of the right to their own means of subsistence.
Why are people throughout Africa going hungry? Why is there still chronic malnutrition in Asia and Latin-America -though the press rarely tells us about it? Why, for that matter, are there 20 millions hungry people in the United States? Are there any common explanations for these phenomena?
Even though it’s clear no single factor is responsible for hunger, and with the certainty of oversimplifying, I’d like to try a one-line explanation. My explanatory sentence is: “Non-food-procedures are taking greater control over procedures”. Or, put in terms closer to our concerns here, “Non-producers are depriving producers of their means of subsistence”; which is to say non-producers are violating producers’ human rights.
Non-producers come in a variety of guises. They may be absentee landlords and local usurers, or corporations and banks, or governments and State bureaucracies or even development aid agencies. They are to found in capitalist and in socialist countries, and in those in between.
In the United States, for example, where hundreds of farms are now failing every week, agribusiness corporations determine how much farmers must pay for their inputs and often what they will receive for their output. Costs of production now routinely exceed farm revenues. Banks decide if farmers are to receive further loans and at what interest rates, while the government in turn judges which categories of farmers should receive help, if any. Because of the agricultural crisis, in many U.S. States farmers now account for more cases of suicide, wife-beating, child abuse, alcoholism etc. than any other population category.
Under the Reagan administration, millions of people have seen their food stamp benefits cut off. This is why the physicians Task Force Report, published in 1985, could announce, “Hunger is a problem of epidemic proportions across the nation… Clearly, lack of food is not the cause of hunger in America. The recent and swift return of hunger can be traced in substantial measure to clear and conscious polices of the federal government”.
In the third world, those who are most massively deprived of their right to subsistence are, paradoxically, peasants. The world bank says that 90% of all hungry people lay in the countryside. This proportion may change as people are obliged to migrate to cities -precisely because they cannot find a livelihood in the rural areas- but we should nonetheless reflect on the fact that those who do produce, or who could produce food are the first to go hungry. People almost never starve in cities, because governments know that hungry mobs have overthrown more than their share of regimes. Peasants, by contrast, are usually dispersed and poorly organised, so it is easier to violate their right to food.
Many of the causes of third world hunger derive from the exercise and abuse of power locally, but outside influences also contribute. Agribusiness corporations and banks help to introduce in suitable end wasteful development models and often make food too expensive for the poor to afford it. The rich world also underpays third world exports and thus prevents the poor countries from feeding themselves in at least two ways. First, their revenues are too low to purchase adequate food from abroad. Second, they devote more and more space, investment and energy to produce cash crops, at the expense of food crops, in a desperate effort to keep their incomes stable.
In recent times, new violators of the right to food have come upon the scene. These non-producers are the big financial institutions public and private. The crashing burden of international debt on poor people has not yet be fully recognized; and I am pleased that this subject is being discussed here today by prof. Tello. I could give you many examples of the way IMF “adjustment” programs, better labeled “austerity” programs, have reduced the living standards of the poor, and created widespread hunger and malnutrition. But I shall limit myself here to a joke circulated in Latin-America. An official says to a citizen, “we have an IMF program and you are going to have to tighten your belt”. The citizen replies, “I would if I could, but I ate it yesterday”.
Most countries where large numbers of people suffer from serious hunger are in the market economy orbit, but not all of them. A smaller group of countries has chosen to imitate the soviet model and to adopt its disastrous institutions of collective farming with centralised agricultural planning. In these cases the non-producers who are ruining the prospects for producers are state bureaucracies and leaders who are so imbued with ideology that they neither know nor care how their own peasantries live and react.
For example, Mozambique, after several years of disappointing agricultural development and finally a food crisis second only to Ethiopia’s on the African continent, has finally decided to stop putting its agricultural investment into State farms. The government has announced that from now on it will give greater incentives to independent peasant producers, and high time!
The case of Ethiopia is complex, hideously so and made worse by war and drought. Even though the present marxist military government, the Dergue, carried out sweeping land reform ten years ago, it too chose to invest nearly all its agricultural development budget in collectivised agriculture. Of the 5.000 large estates that were turned into State farms a decade ago, one reliable expert estimates that not a single one is financially viable today. These farms buy more machinery than they can maintain and rely on other expensive capital inputs.
Ethiopia is a truly agrarian society, almost 90% of the people are peasants, yet the only party is called the “Workers Party”. This seems to be more than a symbolic choice of language. The present economic plan provides for just 12% of the national budget to be spent on agriculture, and nearly all of that will go to the collectives, and to irrigated land. State farms occupy only 4% of the cultivate land but get most of the attention. Smallholders, the 7 millions peasants who work 94% of the land, are the lowest priority of all. Further collectivisation is still one of the main government objectives despite its proven inefficiency and unpopularity with the peasants.
The Ethiopian peasantry might still have been able to cope in spite of drought, erosion, deforestation and government policy, if it had not been for ceaseless wars. It is no accident that the worst horrors of the famine began in the North where the central government is trying to stamp out revolts. Call them rebels or secessionists, call them freedom fighters or whatever other name you like. The fact remains that although the famine spread beyond the region, the victims were overhelmingly from the Northern provinces where 85% of the territory is in the hands of liberation’s movements.
Ethiopia now boasts the largest army in Africa over 300.000 men -on which it spends $440 million a year. To put down rebellions, the country has borrowed some $3 billion from the Soviet Union for arms purchases on which it must pay interest of $200 million a year. Just one or two percent of this huge military budget could have prevented the famine from getting out of hand if it had been spent in time and if the government had wanted to help victims in the rebellious provinces.
Of course, it’s not just in Ethiopia that the military violates the people’s right to food. Twenty five countries which have had to reschedule their foreign debts since 1981 spent eleven billion dollars in the preceding five years on equipment like this to repress their own hungry citizens. Most of this equipment is sold by the US, with European countries second.
Clearly, governments, whatever their politics, can violate their own peoples’ right to feed themselves. Just as clearly, powerful outside institutions may do so as well.
There is, alas, a further dimension to the violation of the human right to food. Those whose rights are most consistently and systematically violated, wherever they may live, are the weakest and least able to defend themselves. I am speaking, as you may have guessed, of women and children.
According to UN figures, women own a mere 1% of the world’s property. This means that they can rarely control their means of subsistence or hold title to land. Men usually get the revenues from export crops. Sixteen out of every 24 hours worked are worked by women, but for scant reward, since they receive only 10% of the world’s income. An ILO study on Africa singled out 17 different agricultural tasks -and 14 of them fell entirely to women. Yet women, and their children, suffer from famine and food shortages. Statistics show that women in the rich countries live longer than men -the opposite is the case of the third world. One of the best indicators that the right to food is no longer being massively violated is that a society reaches the point when women start to live longer than men.
Though hunger now stalks the world on unprecedented scale, there is nothing new about the mechanisms of oppression that prevent people from feeding themselves. Louis XVI’s Minister, the banker Jacques Necker, often tried to call the King’s attention to these injustices. Although Louis did not listen, and was consequently beheaded, we would do well to listen to Necker:
“Lorsque les propriétaires haussent le prix (du blé) et se défendent de hausser le prix de la main d’œuvre des hommes industrieux, il s’établit entre ces deux classes de la société une sorte de combat obscure mais terrible, où l’on ne peut pas compter le nombre de malhereux, où le fort opprime le faible à l’abri des lois, où la propriété accable du poids de ses prérogatives l’homme qui vit du travail de ses mains”.
This obscure and terrible combat goes on every day in thousands of villages where the small peasantry is almost always on the losing side. Land is becoming concentrated in everfewer hands, so large segments of this peasantry become landless. Rural people also have fewer opportunities for earning some income -in cash or food- as landlords mechanise and produce less for local needs than for the market. Without land, without income, millions are sinking into hunger.
This scale of hunger is not only deeply shocking -it is a quite recent development. Third world societies used to have support systems which allowed the peasantry to survive in all but the most dire circumstances. So did Necker’s pre-Revolutionary France, for that matter. I have friends in India who have told me how theirs fathers kept food in store for emergencies which could be distributed to “their” peasants. Poor people had gleaning or gathering, or grazing rights, or rights to hunt or cut firewood. They had patrons, or extended families or neighbourhood and community mutual help network. African societies had rules for producing, consuming and stocking food in highly equalitarian ways.
I am not saying that no one ever died of hunger in traditional societies, and I am not trying to make a feudalism or paternalism. I simply want to point out people’s support systems are breaking down under outside.
Profit take precedence over human and village relationships. Nothing takes the place of the customary support networks; resiliency disappears, peoples become suddenly a subject to a dog-eat-dog dependency on the market for work, for credit, for food and other necessities of life. The so-called free market may provide them only with the freedom to starve.
Another historical shift has occurred in our own lifetimes. States and communities used to define themselves and their members by who had a right to eat and who didn’t. “Bread and circuses” were intended for Romans, but not for outsiders. The State actually set its boundaries and established its legitimacy by guaranteeing the right of food for its own citizens. Now, as we have seen, States may not only be themselves the prime violators of human rights -but they may also protect not their own people, but those who violate the rights of their own people to food. This is the case of countries in the first or third world where governments rule on behalf of agribusiness, banks and the landholding classes; where the rights of property always supersede the right to eat and to stay alive. Socialist States that refuse to allow any initiatives to their own peasantries are also depriving them of their right to subsistence.
A consensus view is beginning to emerge on the duties of States with respect to the right to food. It may be summarised in three words: respect, protect, fulfill. A government must respect, i.e must not interfere with people who are taking care of their own food needs. It must respect freedom to work and the resource base that ensures their livelihood. It must further protect this freedom and this resource base from internal or external attack and encroachment. Finally, it must fulfill the right to food not just by ensuring it for those who are unable to do so for themselves, but by improving all aspects of the food system, by redistributing resources and/or food itself when necessary.
Such are the goals we must aim for, however far away we may be from such an ideal world. Because traditional support systems have broken down, because the State affords little protections and can often make thing worse, because conditions of life are becoming intolerable, poor people everywhere are inventing new ways of organizing themselves to ensure their right to food. As the human rights scholar Philip Alston has put it.
“In the final analysis, appropriate policies will be adopted not as a result of technocratic altruism, but only in response to widespread and insistent popular outrage. For that reason, an emphasis on the role of law must not be permitted to obscure the importance of viewing the concept of the right to food essentially as a mobilizing force, as a rallying point, through which people themselves are encouraged to assert their rights by making use of all appropriate legal and extralegal means”.
Note that Alston specifically cites extralegal means. 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 organise resistance against those who violate their rights? Do will recognize that the right to food for all cannot be ensured without political conflict? Would we stand with 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? Will we confront 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.
George, Susan
in: Peuples/Popoli/Peoples/Pueblos No 9 (April 1987)