Omar Noman
UNDP Regional Centre in Colombo
&
He Changchui
Food and Agriculture Organisation
“As on every other day, on September 11, 2001, when terrorists murdered 2,973 people in the United States, almost twelve times that number, an estimated 35,000, were killed by hunger around the world. In Europe, a few centuries ago, hunger was considered an inevitable part of the human condition for it was seen as divine retribution for man’s sinful ways….in the modern world no one deserves to live with hunger, let alone die from it.”
James Vernon , Hunger – a modern history (Harvard University Press, 2007) |
Food riots in Haiti, Egypt, Senegal, and street protests in Bangladesh, and several Asian, Latin American and African countries. These Malthusian images shocked a world in the first decade of the 21st century. Material abundance had made the 20th century distinct from any other in history. Post-industrial services societies came to dominate the global economy, signaling the welcome relegation of agriculture’s share in GDP and a shift into higher productivity activities, which raised living standards.
A life of subsistence and drudgery had been the fabric of rural existence through the course of history. Low yields in food production generated the fears associated with Reverend Thomas Malthus, whose dire predictions of food scarcity and famine were based on a projected imbalance between population growth rates and food production. This earned economics, essentially a study of prosperity, the unfortunate title of a dismal science.
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The 20th century defied many of the numerical myths of doom emanating in the 19th century. Predictions of a falling rate of profit and worker immiserisation did not materialise, nor did the threat of geometric increase of population and an arithmetic progression in food supply. Such rigid ratios were undermined by spectacular increase in productivity due to the exponential expansion in the material fruits of science and technology. |
An example was the Green Revolution, which was based on new, high yielding varieties of wheat and rice that led to a quadrupling of yields in the space of a few years in the 1960s. At the global level, food was so ample that farmers had to be paid, in some countries, not to grow any more. World food prices showed a secular decline partly due to abundant supply and agricultural subsidies. The problem of food shortage seemed solved. However, even in the midst of such triumph, distributional issues gnawed at consciences, especially when they exploded into visible famines. The extremes of starvation and famine were typically related to conflict, violence and discrimination. They were not viewed as disasters emanating in agriculture. There was enough food in the world, and countries built enough food stocks and sufficiently supple emergency systems to avert famines, in normal political circumstances. Occasionally, dictatorships and closed societies could not react to famines but even these, by and large, had successful inoculation against starvation. The role of a globalised internationalist media, as well as national information transmitting systems, in freer societies, acted as effective early warning systems against extreme hunger.
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