Ethics in the Global South

Michael Schwartz, Howard Harris, Michael Schwartz, Howard Harris

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781787432598
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Ethics
• Index: Business

The influence of the global South is increasing in the conduct and governance of multinationals, in the growing interest in the 'bottom of the pyramid', in the debates over the environment, trade and international law. There are questions aplenty. Complexities and tensions, differing ethical interpretations.
The volume includes works by authors from the global South and contributions about ethical issues in the global South, including the responses to famine in East Africa, India and Indonesia, and the applicability of international guidelines and ethical frameworks in South Africa. Other contributions examine the roles of beliefs and philosophies in the establishment of ethical traditions.

WAR AND FAMINE AROUND THE INDIAN OCEAN DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR

Lance Brennan, Les Heathcote and Anton Lucas

ABSTRACT

This paper attempts to understand how the interaction of natural disasters and human behaviour during wartime led to famines in three regions under imperial control around the Indian Ocean. The socio-economic structure of these regions had been increasingly differentiated over the period of imperial rule, with large proportions of their populations relying on agricultural labour for their subsistence.

Before the war, food crises in each of the regions had been met by the private importation of grain from national or overseas surplus regions: the grain had been made available through a range of systems, the most complex of which was the Bengal Famine Code in which the able-bodied had to work before receiving money to buy food in the market.

During the Second World War, the loss of control of normal sources of imported grain, the destruction of shipping in the Indian Ocean (by both sides) and the military demands on internal transport systems prevented the use of traditional famine responses when natural events affected grain supply in each of the regions. These circumstances drew the governments into attempts to control their own grain markets.

The food crises raised complex ethical and practical issues for the governments charged with their solution. The most significant of these was that the British Government could have attempted to ship wheat to Bengal but, having lost naval control of the Indian Ocean in 1942 and needing warships in the Atlantic and Mediterranean in 1943 chose to ignore the needs of the people of Bengal, focussing instead on winning the war.

In each of the regions governments allowed/encouraged the balkanisation of the grain supply – at times down to the sub-district level – which at times served to produce waste and corruption, and opened the way for black markets as various groups (inside and outside government ranks) manipulated the local supply.

People were affected in different ways by the changes brought about by the war: some benefitted if their role was important to the war-effort; others suffered. The effect of this was multiplied by the way each government ‘solved’ its financial problems by – in essence – printing money.

Because of the natural events of the period, there would have been food crises in these regions without World War II, but decisions made in the light of wartime exigencies and opportunities turned crises into famines, causing the loss of millions of lives.

Keywords: Drought; crop disease; balkanisation; colonial; imperial; agrarian structure; El Nino; Indian Ocean Dipole; famine; relief; inflation

That war and famine are close associates is not a modern idea: the biblical story of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse tells us war and famine ride together with disease and death. This paper examines food crises during the Second World War in three regions bordering the Indian Ocean. Death and social disruption over a wide area reached massive proportions only in India but there was heavy mortality in Indonesia, while parts of East Africa experienced a major food crisis. We use a comparative analysis of the experiences in Kenya and Tanganyika, Java, and Bengal to assess the extent to which the war, and policies developed in its pursuit, contributed to the crises, in the context of agrarian structures, anomalous weather events and plant diseases.

Scholars debate aspects of each of the food crises. The East African food crisis has attracted less controversy than the Bengal and Java famines mainly because of the much lower death toll, and the general acceptance of the crucial role of drought for much of the first half of the 1940s. In both Bengal and Java, there are issues about the reasons for and extent of any shortfall in the rice supply during the critical years, as well as about the handling of the food procurement and distribution system by the dominant power. We address these issues in the course of our comparative analysis.

The pre-World War II economic and political pressures of their European rulers transformed the agrarian and industrial structures of these countries. The main changes were in taxation, landholding systems and in the encouragement of cash crops. The colonial powers, in order to control the localities, also added to the privileges of local leaders. Large cities, such as Nairobi, Batavia (Jakarta) and Calcutta developed as locations of colonial administrative, commercial and industrial activity. The demand for food to supply urban centres and those districts where crops such as jute or sugar had developed under colonial encouragement, led to the growth of a widespread food trade. Food for these markets came from surplus districts, some within easy reach – others more distant and therefore requiring significant transport systems. The surplus regions were those enjoying superior climatic or soil conditions or irrigation – that is, those where landowners or cultivators produced more food than they needed for their own or their labourers’ consumption. These normally surplus regions were crucial to the supply of food during food crises.

Natural events in the form of droughts, cyclones, floods, insect plagues and crop disease played roles in previous food crises in the Indian Ocean region. For example, in the period from 1928 to the mid-1930s, droughts and locust plagues brought severe famines to the Kamba people of Kenya (Parsons, 1999, p. 678; Davis, 2001, pp. 92–94; 119–121). The scientific study of the weather systems in the Indian Ocean stretches back over a century from when meteorologists in India tried to understand the factors influencing the variability of the South-West monsoon that was so important to Indian agriculture. In the early twentieth century, Sir Gilbert Walker demonstrated the connections between sea surface air pressure in the Pacific and Indian Oceans (Davis, 2001, pp. 23–38). Since then, increasingly sophisticated study has established the importance of two phenomena: El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events and the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) or Indian Ocean Zonal Mode (IOZM). An ENSO event occurs when sea surface temperatures (SST) in the Pacific Ocean are significantly perturbed from the climatological mean. During an El Niño event, the SST in the eastern and central equatorial Pacific Ocean is warmer than average and the SST in the Western Pacific is cooler than normal. The opposite occurs in a La Niña event. The Southern Oscillation – the fluctuation in the difference between the sea surface air pressure at Tahiti and Darwin – generally reflects the presence of El Niño and La Niña events: prolonged negative Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) values indicate an El Niño, and vice versa (Australian Government Bureau of Meteorology, 2015).

Although the most evident impacts of an ENSO event are experienced around the Pacific littoral, countries bordering the Indian Ocean are also affected. When the Mean Sea Level Pressure (MSLP) in Darwin is higher than that in Tahiti (a negative SOI) and the SST in the western Pacific Ocean is cooler than in the central and eastern Pacific (an El Nino event), Indonesia experiences drought and the south-west Monsoon in India is also weakened. There is also evidence that an El Niño increases the rainfall in Kenya between December and February (U.S. Government, 2015).

The IOD index is a numerical indication of the differences between the SST in the section of the Indian Ocean near Java and Sumatra and that off the coast of Horn of Africa. During a positive IOD, a pool of warm water develops near East Africa and a colder than normal pool of water forms near Java and Sumatra, leading to drought in Java and Sumatra, and heavier rains in East Africa. When the SST near Java and Sumatra is warmer than average and the SST near East Africa is cooler, the former have more rainfall than average, and the latter experiences drought. This is a negative IOD. O.P. Singh of the Indian Bureau of Meteorology argues that, ‘…the anomalous cyclonic circulation during the negative phase may support the formation of cyclones over the [Bay of Bengal] as the anomalous cyclonic vorticity triggers the genesis of cyclones’ (Singh, 2008, pp. 29–30). There is a two-month lag between the peak of strong negative IOD events and the development of cyclones from October to December in the Bay of Bengal (Singh, 2009). Scientists have debated the relationship between ENSO and IOD events (D’Arigo et al., 2008, pp. 1889–1901; Shinoda et al., 2004, pp. 619–635), but whether the latter is a sub-set of the former or whether they are independent is not an issue for this paper. What is important is that there are weather patterns that affect the whole Indian Ocean basin, and that these may have influenced food supply during the Second World War. The questions we seek to answer are the nature, timing and significance of this influence.

The Second World War had important – but different – impacts on the three regions. Kenya, Tanganyika and Uganda, under the political control of governors responsible to the British Colonial Office, were the base for the British resistance to Italian expansion in Africa and had a wider role as a source of manpower and materials. In particular, they were the Allies’ main source of pyrethrum for the insecticides used against mosquitoes in the Pacific and Asian theatres, and of sisal, for rope, following the Japanese conquest of the Philippines.

Indonesia suffered the most from direct warfare as the Japanese overcame Dutch and Allied resistance in a brief but destructive three-week campaign. The political control of Java then lay in the hands of the Japanese Army. Japanese insisted from March 1942 that the rice for their military and local auxiliaries be supplied from local production, and instituted state supervised procurement systems to support this – and the much greater demand for rice from the Javanese cities and towns.

Bengal became directly involved in the war as the Japanese swept the British out of Burma and pushed into the North-East Frontier Agency and Assam. In December 1942, the Japanese bombed Calcutta, the transport and industrial centre of the British-Indian war effort, causing as much psychological as substantive damage. More importantly, the conquest of Burma removed from British control the main source of India’s supply of cheap rice, which had moderated prices in the pre-war years. The political structure of Bengal was more complicated than that of the East African colonies or Java. Under the Government of India Act of 1935, Bengal enjoyed ‘provincial autonomy’ with an elected legislature: the Governor, however, retained considerable power (Reeves, 1975, p. xxxix). While military and major financial matters remained in the hands of the Government of India, food supply and famine relief were provincial responsibilities.

In the course of the war, the three regions shared the problem of transport. Shipping was in short supply due to the demands of the war and the submarine campaigns of both sides. From early 1944, the American submarine campaign increasingly isolated the Japanese in Indonesia from their homeland and also restricted inter-island trade (Costello, 2002, pp. 454–455). Although the British were fortunate in being allied with three wheat surplus nations in Canada, the USA and Australia, shipping grain for relief was always secondary to the demands of the war. In Churchill’s Secret War, Madhusree Mukerjee goes much further, arguing that Winston Churchill deliberately denied India shipping and food during the Second World War in order to build reserves in Britain, thereby turning a food shortage into a famine (Mukherjee, 2010, pp. 120–124). We will discuss this issue later in the paper. There were also serious problems of internal transport. This was especially the case in Bengal. During 1942, the British, worried that the invading Japanese would use local boats to penetrate the riverine interior of Bengal, sank or commandeered most of the craft that were used in coastal districts, as part of the Denial Policy. They also requisitioned surplus grain from the coastal districts – again in case it fell into the hands of the Japanese (Conference of Commissioners, 2 July 1942). Local transport was hindered by the shortage of trucks and fuel. The railways in Bengal were also under great strain, and were barely sufficient for the military needs of the British Fourteenth Army (Slim, 1958, pp. 170–171).

The physical difficulties caused by the war were accompanied by financial problems as the governments sought to finance their military needs. The inflation brought about by these activities was an important factor in each of the food crises. Consumer goods, especially cloth, were in short supply in each of the countries.

The colonial authorities had developed famine relief strategies to cope with pre-war food crises. These varied from the highly structured Famine Code in Bengal to locally organized relief operations in the Netherlands East Indies (Government of Bengal, 1941; Brennan, Heathcote and Lucas, 1986, pp. 7–8; Lumley, 1976, pp. 55–66). During the Second World War, systematic relief was of secondary importance. In each of the countries, the main government strategy was to gain control of the supply of food grains. The attempts at procurement played significant roles in shaping the nature of the crises.

EAST AFRICA

During the Second World War, th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Ethics in the Global South
• Ethics in the Global South
• War and Famine Around the Indian Ocean During the Second World War
• Bringing International Sustainability Guidelines Home: A Case Study of a Mega South African State-Owned Enterprise
• Religion as Apparatus of Ethical Similarity: A Catalyst Towards the Framework of Ethical Behaviours (FEB) in Technical Environment
• Modern Business and the Doctrine of the Mean
• Gift Giving, Guanxi, Bribery and Corruption Challenges in Australia–China Business: An Ethical Tension Between the Global South and the East
• A Short History of Applied Ethics in Australia
• Ethics and the Unified Justice Examination of the People’s Republic of China
• Reviews