World Hunger

Liz Young

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134774937
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Naturwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Geographie

World Hunger explores the nature and extent of contemporary world hunger, explaining why hunger still persists while agricultural production increases and genetic engineering revolutionises food production and distribution. Numerous case studies, drawn from the North and South, illustrate the diversity of diets in the world and the connections between the global and local. Globalisation and access to food in the global supermarket is examined.
Explaining the essential political character of hunger, the author exposes popular myths and identifies positive changes where prevailing inequalities and ideologies are challenged and it becomes possible to envisage a world where hunger is history.

1
A framework for analysis and historical overview

Introduction

Sainsbury’s marketing manager described entering the store as a geography lesson or a trip around the world.

(Cook, 1994, 244)

This book examines the geography of the world food system. It examines the processes ‘behind the supermarket shelves’ which explain the geography of food production and consumption. The main thesis is that hunger persists because the political will to eliminate it is lacking. Decisions made at all scales, from the international to the familial, help explain why some people enjoy a rich and varied diet while others suffer from hunger. This book challenges traditional conceptualisations of hunger, which analyse it with reference to natural disasters and ‘overpopulation’ and which tend to grant it an element of inevitability. There is nothing inevitable about the persistence of hunger. When the essential political character of hunger is appreciated then it becomes possible to envisage a world where hunger is history.

While the political character of the problem has long been appreciated by some academics (Warnock, 1987), the ‘problem of hunger’ in popular consciousness and in some textbooks continues to assume an apolitical character which denies the connections between feast in some regions and hunger in others. It is conceptualised as a ‘world food problem’ rather than a problem of ‘world hunger’; these are quite different things. Most students, when asked to rank the causes of world hunger, prioritise natural causes over human ones; floods, droughts and poor soils are most popular. When the human dimension is acknowledged, the ‘problem of population’ is most frequently offered, followed by war. Several other assumptions are exposed through discussions with students. Among the most relevant are the following:

• that hunger exists only in the developing world;
• that hunger in the developing world is explicable with reference to the internal characteristics of those countries alone, that is they are ignorant of the historical and international dimensions of the problem;
• that famine is the main problem;
• that the problem of hunger is most serious on the African continent;
• that increased food production is imperative.

This text challenges all of these easy assumptions.

A framework for analysis

Many students subscribe to the ‘lack of’ school of thought, usually associated with the ‘cycles of poverty’ school. This theory is based on the notion that where hunger persists it is because people lack everything from ‘good weather’ to ‘modern technology’, ‘the pill’ and ‘education and investment’, and that all these reinforce each other. These mantras prove incredibly resilient and have been known to emerge in examinations at the end of a series of lectures and seminars specifically designed to undermine them as explanations of hunger. This text reflects my efforts, in lectures and seminars, to alter these widely held assumptions so that we, individual consumers in the affluent world, can appreciate how we are implicated in the problem of world hunger.

Since the middle of the nineteenth century the most popular assumption has been that hunger is caused by population growth, that population growth proceeds at a faster pace than food production and that famine occurs if population growth is not reduced. This is testament to the persistence of Malthusian interpretations of hunger, which are adequately critiqued elsewhere (Arnold, 1988; Devereux, 1993; Lappe and Collins, 1986) and need not be repeated here. Recent analyses have turned Malthus on his head, so to speak, by understanding that poverty causes population growth rather than vice versa. The best way to reduce fertility is to raise the living standards of the poor and to improve the status of women in society and their access to power, which may include increasing their ability to make informed decisions about their fertility (Momsen, 1991). It has also been observed that population can expand rapidly and not be accompanied by widespread hunger—China since 1949, except for the 1958 famine—or indeed that food production per capita can increase without being accompanied by any diminution of the problems of hunger. Clearly, a more sophisticated framework is required to reveal the complexities of global hunger.

Proximate and structural causes of hunger

A useful first step is to differentiate between proximate and structural causes of hunger. Proximate causes of famine and/or undernutrition are those which can be identified immediately as playing a role. Some of the most important are war, drought, flooding, late rains, and crop failures due to disease or pests. A recent example is the chaos to food supplies in North Korea because of floods in 1995 and torrential rains in 1996. The food crisis that ensued caused the World Food Programme to launch an emergency aid operation in 1995 which was expanded in 1996; it is currently supplying food aid to approximately 1.5 million people in North Korea. This analysis occasionally considers the proximate variables listed above, but prioritises instead the role of long-term structural processes and the political context of hunger creation. The thesis is that while proximate variables trigger hunger or famine, these are only effective as triggers in specific ‘spaces of vulnerability’ (Watts and Bohle, 1993) that have emerged consequent upon historically created processes and ideologies which dictate access to power, in its many manifestations, at the international, national and local levels.

The entitlement concept

Starvation is the characteristic of some people not having enough food to eat. It is not the characteristic of there being not enough food to eat. While the latter can be the cause of the former, it is but one of the many possible causes.

(Sen, 1981, 1)

Since the publication of Sen’s (1981) research on hunger a new concept has been available to inform analyses of hunger. That is the concept of entitlement. Some of the limitations of the term as initially outlined by Sen have been addressed and an elaborated notion of entitlement has been constructed which is more comprehensive. It is this formulation that informs the analysis outlined in this text. The analytical focus is upon understanding distributive mechanisms; that is, what determines how available food is distributed and how politics, economics and ideology influence distribution. A main proposition is that concepts used to analyse famine are as relevant to analyses of chronic hunger, of which acute hunger, manifest as famine, is a part. The geography of hunger is explained by employing an elaborated conceptualisation of entitlement and examining how it controls command over food at a variety of scales. Table 1.1 shows some of the factors and mechanisms at every scale which influence peoples ability to command food. The following discussion summarises the main elements of the term and indicates its utility in exposing the social relations that explain the gross inequalities in access to a decent diet which exist between populations.

The patterns of food distribution, at a variety of levels, may be examined with reference to people’s entitlements, reflected in their ability to command food. This term, ‘entitlement’, used by Sen, may be employed more generally than he suggested by understanding historical and contemporary patterns of food production and distribution as reflecting the relative power of people in different times and places to command food. The ability of some people to command (acquire) food may reflect their political, military, economic or inherited position within the international system and its national and sub-national elements. The term ‘command’ is used because it suggests that an individual’s or group’s ability to acquire food is correlated with their access to power, however expressed and at whatever level. Elements which determine entitlements, and hence people’s command over food, are now explored at the international, national and local levels.

As employed here the term ‘entitlement’ refers to the power of any individual or group to acquire a decent diet: the ability to command food. In Britain, any person’s entitlement comprises capital they may possess, income they earn from selling their labour, supplements from the state and assistance from family. In rural areas of the developing world many peasants have entitlements based on a small plot of land, from which they may produce food for consumption or sale, occasional earnings from selling their labour, earnings from the sale of domestic production and assistance from other family members. Urban dwellers in the South often depend on very insecure entitlements: earnings from casual labour, crops grown on common land, publicly subsidised food programmes, etc. Generally, in the developing world there is no generalised state assistance, although in some areas there may be an expectation that, in a crisis, help is provided by the state or as charity.

Table 1.1 The construction of entitlements: selected factors and mechanisms at different scales

Commonly the term ‘entitlement’ is used to explain how specific groups within any society command food. Groups of people can be identified who have similar entitlement packages at any given time. In contemporary Britain the homeless have vulnerable and limited entitlement packages. In the developing world landless rural people have limited and precarious entitlement provision and urban, unemployed people in the cities in the South have varied and insecure entitlements. Entitlement packages are dynamic and alter as social change differentiates groups by class, ethnicity, age, region and gender, and as those with limited entitlements try to extend them by a variety of methods—squatting on land, colonising land, fighting for changes in public policy, etc.

The term ‘entitlement’ may be used to understand differential power relations in international relations too. The United States and the countries in the European Union (EU) have diverse and generous aggregate entitlement packages based on their natural resource endowment and their inherited status as major world powers. This latter status grants them greater influence in modifying and directing the contemporary world economy. Many of the states in sub-Saharan Africa are at the less privileged extreme on the international entitlement continuum; they have weak economies and little political influence to exert for the advancement of their national ambitions. Countries classified as newly industrialising (NICs) fall in between these two extremes and are extending and diversifying their economies and political influence in international affairs. Gross domestic product per capita (GDP pc) and human development indices (HDI) rankings are a rough guide to any country’s entitlements, although it is important to stress that as with all aggregate statistics these conceal great differences within countries.

Historical perspectives

A review of mortality decline in Western Europe is valuable because it establishes the crucial role of social, political and institutional changes in the disappearance of famine and widespread hunger. Demographic transformations in Western Europe during the late eighteenth century and nineteenth century have been the focus of sophisticated technical and theoretical attention since the 1960s. Most important for our purposes are the analysis of spatial and temporal variations in mortality rates. Recent interpretations of the mortality decline in Western Europe can be understood with reference to changes in people’s entitlements. The evidence is briefly considered below.

It is difficult to appreciate how drastically our lives in Western Europe at the end of the twentieth century contrast with those of Europeans in previous centuries, even the last century. One of the most dramatic manifestations of that contrast is mortality rates. In previous centuries people lost family and friends more rapidly than we do today; consider the following average demographic experience of the eighteenth century:

Of every 1,000 infants, only 200 would go on to the age of 50, and only 100 to the age of 70. A man who had beaten the odds and reached his half-century would, we imagine, have seen both his parents die, have buried half his children and, like as not, his wife as well, together with numerous uncles, aunts, cousins, nephews, nieces, and friends. If he got to seventy, he would have no relations and friends of his own generation left to share his memories.

(McManners, 1981, 50)

The Great Irish Famine

Famines, or food crises, occurred in Europe until the nineteenth century, and the majority of people were poorly nourished; diets for all but the privileged few were boring and inadequate, and until the last decade of the nineteenth century food and drink were liable to be adulterated (Box 1.1). The last famine in Western Europe accompanied by massive increases in mortality was the Great Irish Famine, which was at its most serious during the winter of 1846/47. The Irish population in 1841 was approximately 8.2 million. After the potato failures in 1845, 1846 and 1847 and the deaths and migrations which followed in its wake, the population in 1901 was approximately 4.5 million. During the famine over a million men, women and children died. The proximate cause of the food crisis was a fungus, which devastated the potato crop that formed the bulk of the diet of the poor. The structural causes were more complex and are more contentious but certainly a ‘space for famine’ had been created. That space was the result of the particular process of capitalist incorporation which had been integrating Ireland into the British and larger North Atlantic economy since the seventeenth century, the specific changes in capitalism that had occurred in the decades which preceded the Famine and finally, but perhaps most crucial, the prevalence of ideologies about the nature of poverty and the source of funds to relieve it.

Box 1.1

The quality of food and drink in nineteenth-century England

Until the 1870s bread production in London and the large towns was dispersed among a multitude of small, competitive, primitive bakeries. The typical bakehouse oven was built in a cellar under the roadway. The mixing troughs and kneading boards were in an uncleaned, vermin-infested basement. Bakers worked through the night and it was normal to lock them in to prevent stealing, or drinking, while unsupervised. The usual temperature in the basement was 80 to 110 degrees Fahrenheit. Some bakehouses had a privy under the stairs, butintheevenless capitalised concerns the men relieved themselves on the coal heap. The men used both hands and feet while kneading the dough, sweating as they worked. They washed in the water used for the next batch of dough.

As control of adulteration strengthened, tampering contracted to the two mass-consumption perishables, milk and butter. The milk started in bad surroundings and got worse. Until the 1860s in London, and elsewhere until the twentieth century, milking cows were kept crowded in yards, cellars or closed sheds within cities and towns. The standard feed was brewers’ grains and distillers’ wash. This gave the milk a distinctive taste and the cowsheds a distinctive ‘offensive smell’. Dairymen believed that the more immobilised, by crowding, the cow was kept, the less food she consumed and the more milk she gave. Until 1862 in London and 1879 elsewhere, there was no law requiring cowsheds to be regularly cleaned. Dairies were run jointly as slaughterhouses. Disease was rampant. Beasts in extremis were quickly dispatched as meat, so disease could not be calculated.

In 1902 butcher Harris of Clerkenwell suffered his second conviction for selling bad meat. He had pork that was ‘suppurating and decompose’, and veal that was ‘green and slimy’. Harris claimed that the meat was only ‘muggy’ and would be ‘alright [when] it was wiped’. Beef always became cheaper during outbreaks of disease. In mid-1861 farmers were getting 2d a pound for the meat of diseased beef and sheep.

One clear lesson is that, among the working classes and the poor, all [food] choices were dirty ones. Take meat. The crucial point is not how much meat the lower classes got but its quality. Meat at the ruling prices was sold in at least four grades: first to third, and then ‘inferior’. But below ‘inferior’ there was an enormous trade in cheap offal and old and diseased meat. In the countryside, before the 1850s, bullocks’ heads and ox-cheeks were never seen; a sheep’s head had to be ‘bespoken weeks’ before the sheep was killed and sheep’s pluck ‘cost too much’ for agricultural labourers’ families. Within the family, both rural and urban, into the mid-1860s, wives who were not delicate or who did not go out to work were said ‘never’ to eat meat. Throughout the century there was no effective control on the quality of meat at the point of slaughtering. Street vendors of food, unlike hawkers, remained unlicensed until at least 1912.

Source: Smith (1979).

The ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• In the same series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Plates
• Figures
• Boxes
• Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1: A framework for analysis and historical overview
• 2: The contemporary nature and extent of hunger
• 3: International perspectives on global hunger
• 4: National perspectives
• 5: Gendered fields
• 6: Sub-national perspectives
• 7: Conflict and hunger
• 8: Alternative futures
• Review questions, references and further reading