[News] Hunger Gnaws at the Edges of the World

[Anti-Imperialist News]

 https://www.thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/20-2020-famine/ Hunger
Gnaws at the Edges of the World: The Twentieth Newsletter (2020).
May 14, 2020
------------------------------

[image: Kanat Bukezhanov, Coronavirus, 2020.]

Kanat Bukezhanov, Coronavirus, 2020.

Dear Friends,

Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
<http://thetricontinental.org/>.

On 21 April, the head of the UN World Food Programme (WFP) David Beasley
said
<https://www.wfp.org/news/wfp-chief-warns-hunger-pandemic-covid-19-spreads-statement-un-security-council>
that the world was experiencing a ‘hunger pandemic’. That day, the Global
Network Against Food Crises and the Food Security Information Network
released
<https://www.fsinplatform.org/sites/default/files/resources/files/GRFC_2020_ONLINE_200420_FINAL.pdf>
the *2020 Global Report on Food Crises*. It suggested that 318 million
people in 55 countries experience acute food insecurity and are on the cusp
of acute hunger. This number is a gross underestimate: the actual number
<http://www.fao.org/3/a-i3027e.pdf> – before the global pandemic – would
have been closer to 2.5 billion, if you measure hunger by caloric intake
for intense activity.

The reasons for this hunger, they say, are armed conflict, extreme weather,
and economic turbulence. More people could slip into the situation of acute
food insecurity, the report says, as a result of a ‘shock or stressor, such
as the Covid-19 pandemic’. Half of the world’s population fears going
hungry as a result of the pandemic.

At Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, we have been seized of
the danger of this ‘hunger pandemic’. The newsletter below, drafted by our
Senior Fellow P. Sainath (founder of the People’s Archive of Rural India
<https://ruralindiaonline.org/>), Richard Pithouse (the Coordinator of the
South Africa office of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research), and
myself, focuses on the enormous weight of this ‘hunger pandemic’. At the
end of the newsletter, we offer a ten-point agenda for this aspect of the
Great Lockdown. We would like your thoughts on this list.

[image: Salim al-Habschi (Mogli), Naufrages, 1948.]

Salim al-Habschi (Mogli), Naufrages, 1948.

What the International Monetary Fund calls
<https://blogs.imf.org/2020/04/14/the-great-lockdown-worst-economic-downturn-since-the-great-depression/>
the Great Lockdown sent 2.7 billion people, according
<https://www.ilo.org/global/about-the-ilo/newsroom/news/WCMS_741905/lang--en/index.htm>
to the International Labour Organization, into either full unemployment or
near unemployment, with many people one or two days away from desperate
poverty and hunger. Starvation is already evident in many regions of the
world. Social movements are doing what they can to organise horizontal
forms of solidarity from below, but food riots are already a reality in
India, South Africa, Honduras – everywhere, really. In many countries,
states are responding with militarised forms of force, with bullets rather
than bread.

Before the pandemic, in 2014, the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture
Organization wrote <http://www.fao.org/3/a-i3940e.pdf>: ‘Current food
production and distribution systems are failing to feed the world’. That is
a damning statement. It needs to be taken seriously. Half-hearted measures
are not going to work. We need a social revolution in the world of food
that breaks the grip of capital over the production and distribution of
food.

Hunger is a bitter reality that modern civilisation should have expelled a
century ago. What did it mean for human beings to learn how to build a car
or fly a plane and not at the same time abolish the indignity of hunger?

[image: James Ensor, Comical Repast (Banquet of the Starved), 1917-18.]

James Ensor, Comical Repast (Banquet of the Starved), 1917-18.

The old English reverend Thomas Malthus was wrong when he wrote that, for
eternity, food production would grow arithmetically (1-2-3-4) and that
populations would grow geometrically (1-2-4-8), with the needs of the
population easily outstripping the ability of humans to produce food. When
Malthus wrote his treatise in 1789, there were about a billion people on
the planet. There are now almost eight billion people, and yet scientists
tell us that more than enough food is produced to be able to feed everyone.
Nonetheless, there is hunger. Why?

Hunger stalks the planet because so many people are dispossessed. If you do
not have access to land, in the countryside or in the city, you cannot
produce your own food. If you have land but no access to seed and
fertiliser, your capacities as a farmer are constrained. If you have no
land and do not have money to buy food, you starve.

That’s the root problem. It is simply not addressed by the bourgeois order
according to which money is god, land – rural and urban – is allocated
through the market, and food is just another commodity from which capital
seeks to profit. When modest food distribution programmes are implemented
to stave off widespread famine, they often function as state subsidies for
a food system captured, from the corporate farm to the supermarket, by
capital.

[image: Jose Tence Ruiz, The Pro-Rated Wage of the Abang Guard, 2011.]

Jose Tence Ruiz, The Pro-Rated Wage of the Abang Guard, 2011.

Over the course of the past decades, the production of food has been
enveloped into a global supply chain. Farmers cannot simply take their
produce to market; they must sell it into a system that processes,
transports, and then packages food for sale at a variety of retail outlets.
Even this is not so simple, as the world of finance has enmeshed the farmer
into speculation. In 2010, the United Nations’ former special rapporteur on
the right to food, Olivier De Schutter, wrote
<http://www.srfood.org/images/stories/pdf/otherdocuments/20102309_briefing_note_02_en.pdf>
about the way that hedge funds, pension funds, and investment banks
overpowered agriculture with speculation through commodity derivatives.
These financial houses, he wrote, were ‘generally unconcerned with
agricultural market fundamentals’.

If there is any shock to the system, the entire chain collapses and farmers
are often forced to burn or bury their food rather than allow it to be
eaten. As Aime Williams writes
<https://www.ft.com/content/da5c2e66-c946-4726-b6a5-b1dbdd6b7f50> in
the *Financial
Times* of the situation in the United States, these are ‘scenes out of the
Great Depression: farmers destroying their products as Americans line up by
the thousands outside food banks’.

If you listen to agricultural workers, farmers, and social movements around
the world, you will find that they have lessons to teach us about how the
system should be reorganised during this crisis. Here is a little bit of
what we have learnt from them. It is a mix of emergency measures that can
be immediately implemented and more long-term measures that can build
towards sustained food security, and then food sovereignty – in other
words, popular control over the food system.

[image: Chittaprosad, Hungry Bengal, 1943.]

Chittaprosad, Hungry Bengal, 1943.

   - Enact emergency food distribution. Surplus stocks of food controlled
   by governments must be turned over to combat hunger. Governments must use
   their considerable resources to feed the people.
   - Expropriate surpluses of food held by agribusiness, supermarkets, and
   speculators, and turn this over to the food distribution system.
   - Feed the people. It is not enough to distribute groceries.
   Governments, alongside public action, must build chains of community
   kitchens where people can access food.
   - Demand government support of farmers who face challenges to harvest
   their crops; governments must ensure that harvesting takes place following
   World Health Organization principles of safety.
   - Demand living wages for agricultural workers, farmers, and others,
   regardless of whether they are able to work or not during the Great
   Lockdown. This must be sustained after the crisis. There is no sense in
   looking at workers as essential during an emergency and then disdaining
   their struggles for justice in a time of ‘normalcy’.
   - Encourage financial support for farmers to grow food crops rather than
   turn to large-scale production of non-food cash crops. Millions of poor
   farmers in the poorer nations produce cash crops that the richer nations
   cannot grow in their climate zones; it is tough to grow pepper or coffee in
   Sweden. The World Bank ‘advised’ the poorer nations to focus on cash crops
   to earn dollars, but this has not helped any of the small farmers who do
   not grow enough to support their families. These farmers, like their
   communities and the rest of humanity, need food security.
   - Reconsider the entanglement of the food supply chain, which injects
   enormous amounts of carbon into our food. Reconstruct food supply chains to
   be based on regions rather than on global distribution.
   - Ban speculation of food by curbing derivatives and the futures market.
   - Land – rural and urban – must be allocated outside of the logic of the
   market, and markets must be established to ensure that food can be produced
   and the surplus distributed outside of the control of corporate
   supermarkets. Communities should have direct control over the food system
   where they live.
   - Build universal health systems, as called for by the Declaration
   <https://www.who.int/publications/almaata_declaration_en.pdf> of
   Alma-Ata in 1978. Strong public health systems are better equipped to
   constrain health emergencies. Such systems must have a strong rural
   component and must be open to all, including undocumented people.

The fact that so many people around the planet, including those living in
the richest countries, were going hungry before this crisis is a profound
indictment of the failures of capitalism. The fact that hunger is exploding
exponentially during this crisis is a further indictment of capitalism.
Hunger is among the most urgent of human needs, and immediate steps need to
be taken to get food to people in this crisis. But it is also vital that
the social value of land, rural and urban; the means to produce food, such
as seeds and fertiliser; and food itself is affirmed and defended against
the socially ruinous logic of commodification and profit.

In 1943, the British Empire’s bureaucrats took grain from Bengal and left
the people in the grip of a terrible famine which killed between one and
three million people. Sukanta Bhattacharya, a member of the Communist Party
of India who was nineteen at that time, edited a poetry anthology called
*Akal* (Famine) for the Anti-Fascist Writers’ and Artists’ Association. In
this book, Bhattacharya published a poem called *Hey Mahajibon* [O Great
Life!].

*O great life! No more of this poetry.*
*Now bring the hard, harsh prose.*
*Dissolve the tender poetic chimes.*
*Strike the robust hammer of prose today.*

*We do not need the tenderness of poetry.*
*Poetry, today you can rest.*
*A world devastated by hunger is prosaic.*
*The full moon looks like burnt bread.*

Before I let you go, I would like to ask you to consider supporting our
work at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Go to our website
and click on the link at the right of the site on the Donate button. Thank
you.

Warmly, Vijay.
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