[Reader-list] article on food from The Dawn

[Bijoyini]

Here is a very well written article that was
cross-posted on The Guardian weblog on the Food
Crisis. I do apologise if it was already posted on
this list. 

Is there a way one can look at archived postings to
prevent 're-posting' of articles?

--Bijoyini

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Why food can't be a human right? 
By Ashfak Bokhari 


The second World Food Summit held in Rome from June 10
to 13 has failed, as was generally expected, to
address the real issues that hunger causes in the
Third World simply because the international community
(meaning industrialised West) lacks the will and
commitment to see an end to the world hunger. 

The summit participants of 180 countries merely
professed to pursue the goal set in the first summit
held in 1996 to halve the number of the hungry - from
800 million to 400 million - by 2015. 

Most of the speeches were based on hypocrisy to show
sympathy for the hungry who, to most of the speakers
and their community, are as good as dead. The summit,
attended by 4,000 delegates and 35 heads of state or
government, heard Kofi Annan, the UN chief and the
chief guest, saying: "In a world of plenty, ending
hunger is within our grasp. Failure to reach this goal
should fill everyone of us with shame." An interesting
aspect of Annan's remarks is that the UN itself admits
that it will take at least 60 years to reach even a
modest target. 

The hard fact is that hunger, like poverty, is
essentially a man-made problem, not even dependent on
vagaries of weather. Incredible though it may look, it
is abundance not scarcity that describes world's food
supply situation. Enough wheat, rice and other grains
are available each year to easily feed every human
being with 3,500 calories a day. 

The US grows 40% more food every year than it needs.
But it would not rush surplus food to famine areas
simply because it won't bring profits. Providing food
to the hungry is not a humanitarian act; it is an
ideological issue which demands that a sizable
population in the impoverished countries must remain
hungry, poor and malnourished. So, it is the big
powers, the multinational corporations and the
institutions run by them such as the IMF and the World
Bank that collectively decide as to who should eat and
who should starve. 

The politics of hunger became evident from the fact
that on the opening day of the summit the United
States stood alone among all nations of the world in
blocking discussion on the draft text of a declaration
that participating governments were to sign at the end
of the summit. First, the US wanted all references to
"food as a human right" to be deleted, and second, it
wanted strong language to convey that genetically
modified (GM) crops are a key way to end hunger. And
for the purpose delegates and ministers from other
nations were subjected to "immense" pressure to back
the US stance. 

The Third World nations organized in the Group of 77
wanted mandatory language on the "Right to Food",
while Europe and Canada held out for the compromise of
a voluntary Code of Conduct. No other nation felt
strongly that GM crops should receive prominence.
Canada was too harsh in attacking the United States
saying Washington's farm subsidies posed an obstacle
to the fight against global hunger. Later in the day,
the US negotiators backed off from their harsh stance,
accepting "with reservations" watered-down language on
the right to food. 

As pointed out by John Vidal of The Guardian, the
current food scenario is characterized by two
paradoxes. First, the world has never grown so much
food before; there is no overall scarcity; and food
has seldom been so cheap. The simple equation in the
politics of food today is that hunger equals poverty.
What we see today is the relatively new phenomenon of
increasing hunger amid ever-greater plenty. 

The second paradox is that the farmers in the poor
countries are, in this time of global plenty,
abandoning agriculture because they just cannot
compete with the heavily-subsidized foods which are
flooding in on the back of the WTO rules. In Pakistan,
many farmers, according to John Vidal, have reportedly
burnt their harvests in desperation because the prices
they can fetch are too low. In Indonesia, as the
farmers bring their rice to the market, the government
imports it from Vietnam. 

If one looks at the problem intrinsically, one finds
hunger is a form of torture that takes away one's
ability to think, to perform normal physical actions,
and to be a rational human being. It is a social
disease linked to poverty. But the corporate sector in
food business seeks to ensure that hunger persists
throughout the world because only then they are able
to market their products and earn huge profits. 

Of the 830 million hungry people worldwide, a third of
them live in India. Yet in 1999, the Indian government
had 10 million tons of surplus food grains. In the
year 2000, that surplus increased to almost 60 million
tons - most of it left in the granaries to rot.
Instead of giving the surplus food to the hungry, the
Indian government was hoping to export it to make
money. It also stopped buying grain from its own
farmers, leaving them destitute. The farmers, who had
gone into debt to purchase expensive chemical
fertilizers and pesticides on the advice of the
government, were now forced to burn their crops in
their fields. 

At the same time, the government of India was buying
grain from Cargill and other US corporations, because
the aid India receives from the World Bank stipulates
that the government must do so. As a result, today
India is the largest importer of the same grain that
it exports. Similarly, in 1985, Indonesia received the
gold medal from the UN Food and Agriculture
Organization for achieving food self-sufficiency. And
by 1998, it had become the largest recipient of food
aid in the world. It is not that there were no more
crops in Indonesia. The reason was that the US and
Australia were to unload their surplus wheat under the
conditions agreed to by Jakarta to get "food aid." It
is interesting to note that Indonesians don't eat
wheat. 

Another irony is that more than half of the countries
that suffer from child malnutrition also export food.
The case in point is Ethiopia's famine during the
1980s. Many may not be aware that, during that famine,
Ethiopia was exporting green beans to Europe. 

What has happened during the past decade is that after
the end of the cold war, aid turned into a device for
finding new markets for US agribusiness, and now for
dumping foods containing genetically modified
organisms (GMOs), which are being rejected by
consumers in the West because they know so little
about their long-term effects on humans and the
environment. 

A disturbing aspect of the situation is the fact that
food aid is not usually free. It is often loaned,
though at a low interest rate. When the US sent wheat
to Indonesia during the 1999 crisis, it was a loan to
be paid back over a twenty-five-year period. By using
this tool, food aid has helped the US take over grain
markets in India, Nigeria, Korea, and elsewhere.
Secondly, it is used as a political tool, as in North
Korea, where famine was deliberately allowed to
aggravate to bring the country to its knees before
food assistance could be sent. 

Food aid is a euphemism for food business. In Somalia
and Ethiopia, during the famine of 1980s, the food aid
arrived very late, after the rains were over and crops
were ready. It was procured from big transnational
corporations of Canada and America. The result was
that the Ethiopian farmers were deprived of their
livelihoods as their produce was dumped in the market
at low prices and the people were forced to buy
imported food at high prices which not many could do. 

According to Anuradha Mittal, co-director of the
Institute for Food and Development Policy, the hard
fact is that destroying local agricultural
infrastructures is a central function of food aid.
Once the local farmers have been driven out of
business, the people of the region become dependent on
the West for survival. Equally disturbing is the fact
that the big corporations want to increase their
control over the world food supply by marketing
genetically engineered crops. 

In 2000, US Congress approved a budget that included
an estimated $30 million to promote biotechnology in
the Third World. The US is already sending genetically
modified food to the Third World nations without the
consent of the people there. In late 1999 and early
2000, when the Indian state of Orissa was hit by
floods, the US sent food aid which contained GMOs but
the Indian government was kept in dark about that.
Mozambique, the Philippines, Bolivia, and many other
nations have received similarly tainted shipments of
food aid. 

Recently, when Sri Lanka adopted a law banning imports
of genetically modified foods, it was threatened by
the US, and pressure has since been put on the
government to remove the restrictions. 

Small wonder, hunger is also being used to promote
biotechnology. Suddenly, transnational corporations
like DuPont, Monsanto, Novartis, and Syngenta are
casting themselves as poor-friendly corporations. Now
they claim that biotech food can end world hunger and
the civic groups which oppose GM foods are dubbed as
selfish people who do not want hunger to end by
denying the Third World the benefits of modern
technology which. 

Food is both personal and political. Food unites
families and communities and the festivals on the eve
of harvest seasons are about sharing and strengthening
the communities. And food is political: The French
Revolution wasn't driven just by the ideals of
liberty, freedom, and egalitarianism. It was driven by
the fact that there wasn't enough bread in Paris. 

In the seventies, there were riots in Peru because the
World Bank demanded an increase in the price of bread.
In the 1990s, the Zapatista uprising and the protests
in Bolivia were spurred by food shortages and
privatization of the basic necessities of life. The
same has been true in Pakistan and India. In 1995,
villagers in Mexico stopped trains to loot them - not
for gold, but for corn.

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