http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,742149,00.html
The real reasons for hunger
Leading Indian ecological activist Vandana
Shiva disagrees with Amartya Sen's analysis of global hunger and
argues that famine has returned to democratic India.
Observer Worldview
Sunday June 23, 2002
Amartya Sen is the world's leading expert on the causes
of famine.
But he is wrong in his analysis of contemporary famine. His
analysis ignores trade liberalization and globalization as a
cause for why people are hungry today. In offering free trade
solutions to hunger, he is offering the disease as a cure.
Amartya Sen's article in last week's Observer -
Why half the planet is hungry - argues that no famine can
occur in a democracy, and cites India as an example of the
elimination of famines. It is true that famines disappeared
immediately in 1947, with independence and multiparty elections.
But famine is making a comeback in India. As
Mulayam Singh Yada,
the leader of a major political party, stated in Parliament:
"There is famine in Orissa, Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh,
Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Bihar, Gujarat. This is a
serious matter. The tragedy is that while people starve,
the godowns are overflowing. 300 to 400 million Rupees are
being spent daily to stock food of which 35% is rotting.
What was the reason that the government under pressure of
rich countries, decided to let the people starve merely
in order to reduce the budget?
Eight hundred tribal children have died of starvation in
Maharashtra. Four starving women from Orissa tried to sell
her child for 300 Rupees in Calcutta. In the famine stricken
regions of Orissa, children are being sold for a few
thousand rupees because of starvation. Wives are being
sold into bondage".
People are starving because the policy structures that
defended rural livelihoods, and access to resources and
markets, and hence entitlements and incomes, are being
systematically dismantled by structural adjustment
programmes, driven by the World Bank, and by WTO rules
imposing trade liberalization.
After the Great Bengal Famine of 1942 which killed more
than 2 million people, India's policies after independence
put livelihoods and food security first, rather than trade
and commerce. Land reform put land back in the hands
of
the peasants and cultivators, thus removing a root cause
of poverty. The economic "reforms" under globalization
reverse these reforms by corporatizing agriculture,
displacing small peasants, and removing limits on land
ownership. Displaced peasants cannot have incomes or
entitlements. They are among those who go hungry.
Amartya Sen does not refer anywhere to issues of
land reform as central to the issue of hunger and
poverty, or to the high costs of seeds and chemicals
which are pushing Indian peasants to suicide.
Without people's rights to resources, there is
no lasting solution to hunger.
When "democracy" fails to prevent famine
Sen's assumption that democracy can prevent famines in
our
times is also conceptually flawed because it fails to address
the fact that trade liberalization and globalization policies
empty democracy of economic content, and remove basic
decisions from the democratic influence of a country's people.
Political democracy divorced from economic democracy allows
governments to bid for votes on the basis of hate, fear and
exclusion. The failure of the ruling party in India in recent
regional elections was due to the destitution of farmers -
caused by the implementation of trade liberalization policies
for seeds, subsidies and imports under WTO rules. Instead of
addressing the issue of rural poverty and hunger, the
government pulled out the card of communal frenzy in
Gujarat and war hysteria over Kashmir to divert the
public and create new fundamentalist agendas to electioneer
with. Governments can survive famines of they can inflame
fundamentalist forces as a diversion. People die of both
hunger and wars. Strengthening food sovereignty, food rights
and food security requires changes in trade rules.
We should understand that this is also a condition
for peace in our violent and brutal times.
Deregulated imports mean importing hunger and
unemployment Sen describes food sovereignty and self
sufficiency as "obtuse" and "fetishist", and
recommends
dependence on imports. However, deregulated imports are
a major cause of poverty and famine in countries like India.
Globalization has dismantled the systems which guaranteed
domestic market access for farmers, a system which brought
food security to the poor. Meanwhile rich countries subsidise
their agricultural production by $1 billion every day, making
it inevitable that exports will be dumped on the poor.
The only way to protect incomes and entitlements in poor
countries is to bring back controls on imports. As India
has opened trade, its agricultural imports have quadrupled,
rising from $1 billion (50,000 million Rupees) in 1995 to
over $4 billion (200,000 million Rupees) by 2000. Many of
these imports come from rich countries such as the United
States and Europe. The United States is now planning to
spend more than £130 billion over the next ten years to
support 2 million farmers: more than two-thirds of this
money which will go the largest 10 per cent of farmers.
This process results in huge surpluses which are dumped
on the global market. They bring down prices worldwide
and destroy the livelihoods of millions of peasants.
Prices of coconuts have fallen 80 per cent, coffee prices
have collapsed by over 60 percent, pepper prices have
fallen 45 percent in India since the WTO declared,
in 2000, that India must reduce import barriers.
The most dramatic effect has been on edible oil. India's
domestic production has been effectively wiped out as
highly subsidized soya from the U.S. and palm oil from
Malaysia flood the market, due to lack of adequate import
controls. Imports now account for 70 per cent of the
domestic consumption of edible oil. This has resulted
in coconut farmers in Kerala blockading their local harbor
to protest against such imports. Groundnut farmers and
soya bean farmers in a number of areas mounted demonstrations
against this attack on their livelihood. As a result,
they were shot at.
It is little wonder that Indian activists, peoples movements
and some politicians are calling for the reintroduction of
import controls. More than 100,000 peasants and workers
attended a rally ahead of last year's Doha meeting of
the WTO. This democratic demand would prevent famine.
Yet nowhere in his article does Amartya Sen identify
the destruction of livelihoods and incomes of the small
rural producers as the reason for increased endemic
hunger, and indeed famine, in India.
Deregulated exports: a recipe for hunger
On the contrary, Sen recommends further trade liberalization
and increased exports as the solution to hunger in the
Third World. Yet export-oriented agriculture robs the
poor of their land, their water and their livelihoods.
There is an inverse relation between increasing agricultural
exports and declining food consumption locally and nationally.
When countries grow flowers and vegetables for exports,
they also sow the seeds of hunger.
Yet India promotes exports of flowers and meat. Yet India
spent $27 million (1.37 billion Rupees) as foreign exchange
for promoting floriculture exports earning a mere $6.4 million
(0.32 billion Rupees) as a result. India can buy only a
quarter of the food it could otherwise have grown with
the export earnings from floriculture.
In the case of meat exports, for every dollar earned,
our research has shown that India is destroying fifteen
dollars worth of ecological functions preformed by farm
animals for sustainable agriculture. Thus, as a society,
India is paying more in terms of food insecurity and
ecological destruction than it is earning through exports
of luxury crops such as flowers and meat. Putting resources
in people's hands, and guaranteeing small producers
access to local markets is a far more secure, sustainable
and inclusive way to remove poverty.
· Vandana Shiva is Director, Research Foundation for Science,
Technology & Ecology, India. See www.vshiva.net
for more information.
