The Reproach of Hunger: Food, Justice and Money in the 21st Century - Hardcover

DAVID RIEFF is the author of eight previous books, including Swimming in a Sea of Death; At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention; A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis; and Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West. He lives in New York City.

The Reproach of Hunger

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A Better World Finally within Reach?

In order to properly understand what the food crisis is, it is essential first to understand what it is not. Unfortunately, it often seems from their public statements as if officials charged with coping with the food crisis and developing plans for reforming global agriculture are as mystified as the general public. Instead of asking hard questions, these officials frequently seem content to fall back on pat answers and development boilerplate. A particularly egregious example of this occurred in April 2008, when Josette Sheeran, then executive director of the World Food Programme (WFP) and an official widely admired in the world of relief and development, described the global food crisis of the previous year as a “silent tsunami,” and declared that it presented the WFP with “the greatest challenge in its 45-year history.” Such over-the-top rhetoric, an amalgram of apocalyptic worst-case scenario building and shameless institutional self-aggrandizement, is not peculiar to responses to the global food crisis. To the contrary, it has been more often the rule than the exception in the development world at least since the days of Fritjof Nansen, whose pioneering efforts on behalf of refugees in the early twentieth century served as an inspiration for the current humanitarian relief system. In this sense, Sheeran’s statement was unremarkable, a standard-issue iteration not simply of the rhetorical but of the ideological furniture of relief and development work.

However they are communicated, whether in speeches by senior officials, in press conferences and briefing materials for the media, or on the organizations’ websites, such appeals almost invariably start with a lurid, oversimplified account of a particular crisis and end with a fund-raising pitch that usually either states or at the very least implies that if donors will just fork over, the agency in question is ready, willing, and able to save the day.

In fairness, Sheeran was only fulfilling one of the principal institutional demands that went with her job. Her predecessors were certainly no better. Four years earlier one of them, James Morris, had called the Asian tsunami of December of 2004 “perhaps the worst natural disaster in history.” And in the immediate aftermath of the 2010 earthquake that devastated Port-au-Prince, Elizabeth Byrs, the spokeswoman for the UN Office of Humanitarian Assistance (OCHA), one of the WFP’s sister agencies, stated flatly that the UN had “never been confronted with such a disaster,” which she characterized as being “like no other.”

Morris’s claim was absurd—nonsense on stilts, to use Bentham’s inspired phrase. Only someone historically illiterate, or at least a person whose historical imagination did not reach much further back in time than 1961, when a UN General Assembly established his agency, could have seriously advanced such a claim, and it is of course entirely possible that Morris, who was a cultivated man, knew better but felt constrained (just as Sheeran may well have done) to adhere to the familiar script. But Byrs’s assertions were not much better. Was the Haitian earthquake truly a greater challenge and a more profound human tragedy than the refugee emergency that followed the Rwandan genocide of 1994 or the outbreaks of famine in North Korean in the 1990s—in both cases, human disasters that involved the relief and development arms of the United Nations? Perhaps a moral philosopher could have adjudicated the hierarchy of these horrors, but surely it was above the moral pay grade of an international civil servant such as Byrs, or Morris, or Sheeran (or, for that matter, of a writer like me). But even in the context of the shameless hyperbole that has been the common coin of humanitarian agencies since the refounding of modern humanitarian action that can be dated to the work of the so-called French Doctors in Biafra between 1967 and 1969, and the specific special pleading of WFP agency, Sheeran’s image of the global food crisis as a silent tsunami was particularly ill judged. It was not an assault of nature for which, at least in the case of earthquakes or tsunamis, it is possible to prepare but that human beings can do nothing to prevent. If anything, the food crisis is the diametrical opposite of a natural disaster such as a tsunami or an earthquake, and is instead the product of the current world system. In other words, it is the result of such things as the current relations of force between haves and have-nots, on how world markets work, on what technologies we use (and the moral and political assumptions behind those technologies)—­when all is said and done, about what kind of world we want to live in, about the world order that now exists and the world order that might one day exist. There is nothing “natural” about it.

To posit matters in such starkly ideological terms is commonplace in the Global South. But it tends to disturb mainstream opinion in the Global North, where most economic and political power still resides, both on the center-right and on the center-left. There it has been widely assumed, and with increasingly hegemonic authority since the end of the Cold War, that throughout the world, enlightened people agree on how global society should be organized. It is a view championed first and foremost by the human rights movement, and it has percolated through global institutions, above all the UN system. It might have been thought that the rise of China would of itself serve to undermine such millenarian fantasies. For the moment, however, it has not. And yet it is the persistence of ideology that helps explain why, despite the “zero-sum game” quality of much of the debate that the global food crisis has engendered, intelligent people can disagree so comprehensively and passionately both about the causes of the price rises of 2007–2008 and about how, in its wake, the world’s food system can be successfully reformed or even almost entirely remade so that even if hunger persists, the number of hungry people begins finally to diminish.

If we do not agree on how societies should be ordered, we are unlikely to agree about how poverty can be alleviated and hundreds of millions of poor people can enjoy at least a measure of what development experts call food security. Is capitalism the answer or the root of the problem? Can there be nutritional transformation without political transformation? Are the challenges to the global food system analogous to an engineering problem that one can expect to be largely solved by technical innovation, scientific innovation, and of course money, accompanied by some lashings of “good governance” and “transparency” (to use two “default” expressions favored by those in the mainstream for whom the concept of ideology is an intellectual atavism that stubbornly and incomprehensibly refuses to sign on to the humane global consensus that democratic capitalism is asserted to be)? Or is greater social justice what matters most, and with it the need to stop thinking of food as a commodity like any other and start thinking of it as a human right?

On the antiglobalization side of this “dialogue of the deaf,” as the French often call such mutual incomprehension, the conviction is strong that the food crisis is first and foremost the inevitable product of what one briefing paper from Food First, the think tank based in Oakland, California, that has produced much of the best analysis of the current global agriculture and broader food system from a radical perspective, describes as a “dangerous and unjust global system.”1 Leave that system standing, this argument goes, and no matter how many reforms are put in place, the world will lurch from food crisis to food crisis, because, on this view, systematic injustice is the root cause of hunger, and the only steps that can ever make a lasting difference are those that lead to its removal—a transformation that, to be effective, could not be restricted to poor farmers and their families but would have to include all poor workers, rural and urban alike.

On the other side of the ideological divide, a consensus most powerfully articulated by the World Bank has developed around the view that the crisis had three central causes. The first was the insufficient global attention paid to agriculture during the three decades before the crisis. The second was the failure to increase the production of vegetable staples. And in diametrical opposition to the food rights campaigners’ claim that the dire situation of smallholder agriculture has been the inevitable result of the deepening of a global regime of free trade, the mainstream view is that on the contrary, the real problem was the failure to open markets completely during the 1980s and 1990s. This is despite the fact that this was the era of the so-called Structural Adjustment Program (SAP), a free-market economic prescription for developing countries whose adoption was a prerequisite for further loans or guarantees. But, unlike at the WFP, neither officials of the World Bank nor their food activist adversaries have ever suggested that the crisis of global agriculture was anything other than man-made. Indeed, in a number of interviews, Robert Zoellick, who became the World Bank’s president in 2007—after the brief and troubled tenure of Paul Wolfowitz, former US deputy secretary of defense in the George W. Bush administration—­and served until the summer of 2012, was quite explicit. He flatly rejected the tsunami image outright, instead calling the global food crisis “a man-made catastrophe that must be fixed by people.”

The point would seem to be self-evident. That is what makes it so difficult to fathom why someone as knowledgeable as Josette Sheeran, whose tenure at the WFP has been viewed favorably even by a surprising number of the institution’s many critics on the left (this despite the fact that her political roots were in the American right, hardly a place where commitment to the UN system has ever been in ample supply), could think it appropriate to speak of a silent tsunami. And as if the natural disaster image was not bad enough, the image of a “silent” crisis was even more wildly off the mark. For if the global food crisis so quickly provoked, as it did, the extreme degree of alarm within an international policy elite that literally for decades was comfortable to the point of complacency in ignoring the predicament of agriculture in the poor world, it is precisely because the manifestations of the crisis have been so, well, noisy, which is to say, so potentially destabilizing to the status quo. Tsunamis or earthquakes provoke fear, but also a large measure of resignation, and appropriately so, since human beings have no means of preventing them, only of doing a better or worse job at rescue and at mitigating their long-term effects. It is only when the effectiveness of the emergency relief and subsequent development efforts is found wanting that the anger arises—again, appropriately so. In contrast, the anger that the global food crisis provoked among the poor of the Global South, who have been its principal victims, and activists north and south who support them, has had an entirely different quality to it.

It is probably the case that in the late twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries, what remains of the global left has a weakness for grasping at straws, too often seeing the constituent elements of a new global revolutionary moment in almost every eruption by an urban jacquerie—from the Los Angeles riots of 1992 to the London riots of 2011—as well as in various episodes of student wrath—from the student protest in France in 2005, through the student riots in Santiago de Chile in 2011 and 2013, and on to the so-called Occupy movement that began on Wall Street in the fall of 2011 and soon spread to many parts of the world before slowly fizzling out. In reality, though, none of these events ever posed a serious challenge to the global system as it is currently organized. In contrast, historically, time and time again food riots actually have been the catalyst for revolutions. It is a commonplace that a rise in the price of bread was at least as important a catalyst to the French Revolution as taxation or Enlightenment ideas. Less well known is the fact that the failed revolutions that broke out across much of Europe in 1848 followed hard on the heels of a series of lethal droughts that had provoked a significant number of food riots. And all but forgotten in twenty-first-century America were the widespread food protests by poor women in New York City almost one hundred years ago. These began in February 1917, lasted for almost two months, and quickly spread to Philadelphia and Boston. The parallels with the current global food crisis are startling. Just as in 2007–2008, the women were confronted not by food shortages but by food prices they simply could no longer afford. The protests centered on a successful mass boycott of the pushcart peddlers from whom the urban poor bought most of their staples, though at one point it also led to the storming, not of the Bastille this time, but of the Waldorf Astoria hotel.

Historically, it should come as no surprise that global food crises should have global political and social ramifications, perhaps most lastingly in the Islamic Middle East. For while it is important to avoid overstating the influence of the global food crisis on the genesis of the so-called Arab Spring, it is not unreasonable to assume that the further immiseration of the poor of the Maghreb that the events of 2007–2008 engendered played at least some role, even if they were secondary to other, largely more conventionally “political” and religious grievances and hopes. A comprehensive report by the US think tank the New England Complex Systems Institute would appear to demonstrate a correlation between sharp rises in food prices and social unrest. For example, it is true that the rioting that swept thirty countries in 2007–2008 virtually ceased once food prices had dropped to precrisis levels at the beginning of 2009. But they began to break out again in the Middle East at the end of 2010 and the beginning of 2011 as prices once more started to rise—in other words, at more or less the same time as street protests began in earnest first in Tunisia and then in Egypt.

It is impossible to prove this, of course, and, to paraphrase August Bebel on anti-Semitism, conspiracy theories are the political understandings of fools. Nevertheless, it hardly seems likely that the major rich-country governments and international and intergovernmental institutions that had been so passive (to put it charitably) in their previous responses to the problem of global hunger should have reacted as swiftly as they did in 2007 and 2008 had the dangers to the current global system of inaction not been apparent. After all, while it is true that that the price spike directly or indirectly caused at least one hundred million more people to go hungry (though neither of two familiar demographic responses—famine or a reduction in the birthrates of the affected populations—resulted), somewhere between eight hundred and nine hundred million people were already hungry when prices were lower, and it was broadly assumed that prices either would remain stable or continue to trend lower as they had done during the previous thirty years. What made the hunger of a billion or so people a crisis when the hunger of eight hundred million had been the factual backdrop for business as usual? It is not as if the major international donors, the World Bank, or the IMF had been in the dar...