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<font size="1"><a href="https://www.thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/39-hunger/">https://www.thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/39-hunger/</a>
</font><h1 class="gmail-reader-title">Hunger Will Kill Us Before Coronavirus: The Thirty-Ninth Newsletter (2020).</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">September 24, 2020 - Vijay Prashad<br></div>
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<div id="gmail-attachment_28263" class="gmail-wp-caption"><p><img src="https://www.thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Baasanjav-Choijiljav-Mongolia-Promise-2018.-3.jpg" alt="Baasanjav Choijiljav (Mongolia), Promise, 2018." style="margin-right: 0px;" width="443" height="310"></p><p id="gmail-caption-attachment-28263" class="gmail-wp-caption-text"><span>Baasanjav Choijiljav (Mongolia), <i>Promise</i>, 2018.</span></p></div>
<p>Dear friends,</p>
<p>Greetings from the desk of the <a href="http://thetricontinental.org/">Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research</a>.</p>
<p>In April 2020, a month after the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared the pandemic, the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) <a href="https://www.wfp.org/news/covid-19-will-double-number-people-facing-food-crises-unless-swift-action-taken">warned</a>
that the numbers of people who lived with acute hunger around the world
would double due to COVID-19 by the end of 2020 ‘unless swift action is
taken’. A report from the Global Network Against Food Crises – which is
comprised by the WFP, the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO), and
the European Union – <a href="http://www.fightfoodcrises.net/food-crises-and-covid-19/en/">said</a> that the pandemic would ensure the highest level of food insecurity since 2017.</p>
<p>None of these reports made the front pages of newspapers. Little was made of the fact that this is not a <a>crisis</a>
of food production – since we have enough food in the world to feed
everyone – but a crisis of social inequality. This crisis – the pandemic
of hunger – should have seized the attention of every country. But it
did not. Apart from a few <a href="https://www.thetricontinental.org/studies-3-coronashock-and-socialism/">countries</a>
– such as China, Vietnam, Cuba, and Venezuela – little has been done to
create mass-scale feeding programmes to prevent famine-like conditions
(as the FAO <a href="http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/1276081/icode/">warned</a> in May).</p>
<p>Six months into the pandemic, the question of hunger remains a
burning issue. In September, the Global Network Against Food Crises
released a new <a href="http://www.fightfoodcrises.net/unga-side-event/en/">report</a> on the deepened crisis. FAO Director-General Qu Dongyu <a href="http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/1308236/icode/">warned</a>
of ‘looming famine’ in many parts of the world, particularly in Burkina
Faso, South Sudan, and Yemen. It is now estimated that one in two
people on the planet struggles with hunger. No-one should go to bed
hungry at night.</p>
<div id="gmail-attachment_28283" class="gmail-wp-caption"><p><img src="https://www.thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Shaima-Tamimi-Yemen-So-close-yet-so-far-away-2019.-2.jpg" alt="Shaima al-Tamimi (Yemen), So close yet so far away, 2019." style="margin-right: 0px;" width="443" height="295"></p><p id="gmail-caption-attachment-28283" class="gmail-wp-caption-text"><span>Shaima al-Tamimi (Yemen), <i>So close yet so far away</i>, 2019.</span></p></div>
<p>Yemen, which has faced an unyielding war prosecuted by Saudi Arabia
and the United Arab Emirates (backed fully by the West and by arms
manufacturers), has struggled with famine and with desert locusts and
now with the enormity of the pandemic. Two days after Qu made these
comments, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres pleaded for an end to
the war on Yemen. The war had ‘decimated the country’s health
facilities’, Guterres <a href="https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/09/1072692">said</a>,
which are not able to tackle the near million cases of COVID-19 in the
country. The war, he said, has ‘devastated the lives of tens of millions
of Yemenis’.</p>
<p>It is important to understand that the population of Yemen before the
Saudi-Emirati war began in 2015 was only 28 million, which means that
‘tens of millions’ means almost all of the Yemeni people. A new UN <a href="https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/HRBodies/HRCouncil/GEE-Yemen/2020-09-09-report.pdf">report</a>
shows that Canada, France, Iran, the United Kingdom, and the United
States continue to fuel this conflict with arms sales. Pressure on the
Saudis and the Emiratis, as well as on the Western arms dealers, to end
this war against the Yemeni people should be the focus of attention. It
is a war that brings starvation to Yemen.</p>
<div id="gmail-attachment_28293" class="gmail-wp-caption"><p><img src="https://www.thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Tshibumba-Kanda-Matulu-DRC-Simba-Bulaya-1973.-4.jpg" alt="Tshibumba Kanda-Matulu (DRC), Simba Bulaya (‘Lions of Europe’), 1973." style="margin-right: 0px;" width="443" height="295"></p><p id="gmail-caption-attachment-28293" class="gmail-wp-caption-text"><span>Tshibumba Kanda-Matulu (DRC), <i>Simba Bulaya (‘Lions of Europe’)</i>, 1973.</span></p></div>
<p>Equally absent in popular global consciousness is the ongoing war in
the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), driven in large part due to
the presence of immeasurable resources in the country (such as cobalt,
coltan, copper, diamonds, gold, oil, and uranium). The war, economic
distress, and heavy rain has <a href="http://www.ipcinfo.org/fileadmin/user_upload/ipcinfo/docs/IPC%20DRC%20AcuteFoodSec%202020July2021June%20Snapshot%20ENGLISH.pdf">brought</a>
21.8 million people (out of a population of 84 million) into acute
hunger as of December 2019, a situation that has been exacerbated since
the emergence of COVID-19. Social indicators in the DRC are miserable:
72% of the population lives <a href="https://www.banquemondiale.org/fr/country/drc/overview">below</a> the national poverty line, while 95% live <a href="https://www.radiookapi.net/2016/07/09/actualite/societe/rdc-15-de-la-population-acces-lelectricite-avec-delestage">without</a>
electricity. These are just two numbers, but perhaps the most startling
is the estimated wealth of its resources at $24 trillion. Little of
this wealth goes towards the people of the Congo.</p>
<p><img src="https://www.thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/190117_Lumumba-1-e1600906996949.jpg" alt="" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="443" height="443"></p>
<p>On 30 June 1960, when Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba pronounced the
independence of the DRC from Belgium, he said that ‘Congo’s independence
is a decisive step towards the liberation of the whole African
continent’ and that the new government would ‘serve its country’. This
was the promise of the country and the continent; but Lumumba was
assassinated by the imperialist bloc on 17 January 1961, and the country
was handed over to the Western multinational corporations. Before he
died, Lumumba wrote a poem, with a hope that remains alive:</p>
<blockquote><p><em>Let the fierce heat of the relentless midday sun</em><br>
<em>Burn up your grief!</em><br>
<em>Let them evaporate in everlasting sunshine,</em><br>
<em>Those tears shed by your father and your grandfather</em><br>
<em>Tortured to death upon these mournful fields. </em></p></blockquote>
<p>It is hard to feel this hope at times, with northern Nigeria seeing an <a href="http://www.fightfoodcrises.net/fileadmin/user_upload/fightfoodcrises/doc/GlobalNetwork_Technical_Note_Covid19_Food_Crises_Sept_2020.pdf">increase</a>
in its population of hungry people by 73% during the pandemic, Somalia
seeing an increase of 67%, and the Sudan seeing an increase of 64% (a
quarter of whose population is now acutely hungry). Burkina Faso,
meaning ‘the Land of Upright People’, meanwhile, has seen a 300%
increase in cases of acute hunger. When Thomas Sankara led Burkina Faso
for four years from 1983, his government nationalised land to guarantee
access to those who worked it and launched tree planting and irrigation
projects to increase productivity and combat desertification. After the
government passed an agrarian reform law in 1984, Sankara went to
Diébougou, where he addressed a peasant rally with the promise, ‘Improve
our land and farm it in peace. The time is over when people, sitting in
their parlours, can buy and resell land on speculation’. All of this
ended when Sankara was assassinated in 1987.</p>
<p>The famine sweeping these countries is not from want of resources. The DRC has 80 million <a href="https://www.investindrc.cd/fr/Agriculture">acres</a>
of arable land, which could feed two billion people if it were
cultivated with food crops in an agro-ecological manner; but, as of now,
only 10% of the country’s arable land is cultivated. Meanwhile, the
country spends $1.5 billion per year in food imports – money that could
be used to invest in the agricultural sector, where the main work is
done by women subsistence farmers (who <a href="https://africa.unwomen.org/fr/news-and-events/stories/2020/03/onu-femmes-remerciee-en-rdc">own</a>
less than 3% of the cultivated land). A lack of power amongst the
agricultural workers and the farmers results in a lopsided system that
privileges a handful of agri-business conglomerates rather than
cooperatives and family farms.</p>
<div id="gmail-attachment_28273" class="gmail-wp-caption"><p><img src="https://www.thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Parmar-India-Riot-1965-1975.-1.jpg" alt="Parmar (India), Riot, 1965-1975." style="margin-right: 0px;" width="443" height="372"></p><p id="gmail-caption-attachment-28273" class="gmail-wp-caption-text"><span>Parmar (India), <i>Riot</i>, 1965-1975.</span></p></div>
<p>This brings us to India. The far-right government of Narendra Modi
pushed through three agricultural bills in the upper house of parliament
by voice vote, the loudest shouting their assent while the problems
with the bills were not allowed to be debated. The bills have names that
suggest an orientation towards small-scale farmers, but they will
implement a policy that favours the agri-businesses: Farmers’ Produce
Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Bill, the Farmers
(Empowerment and Protection) Agreement on Price Assurance and Farm
Services Bill, and the Essential Commodities (Amendment) Bill. The bills
put the entire agricultural system in the hands of ‘traders’, meaning
large corporations, who will now set the terms for prices and
quantities. The absence of government intervention leaves family farms
at the mercy of large corporations, whose power will now be largely
unchecked. This will adversely impact food production and will certainly
contribute further to the impoverishment of small farmers and
agricultural workers in India.</p>
<p>As hunger increases, so does the attack on those who farm the soil.
Little wonder that farmers and agricultural workers across India say
that hunger will kill them before coronavirus. This is a slogan familiar
to farmers and agricultural workers from Brazil, who – as we
demonstrate in our <a href="https://www.thetricontinental.org/dossier-27-land/">dossier</a> no. 27 <i>Popular Agrarian Reform and the Struggle for Land in Brazil</i> – have long been in the midst of a fight to bring democracy to the land. Like Sankara’s Burkina Faso, the brave <i>sem terra</i>s
[landless] of Brazil have their own project: to reforest land that was
once saturated with agro-toxins, to occupy unused land that they then
farm through agro-ecological practices, and to forge ‘a broad demand for
a new vision for the country as a whole’.</p>
<p>Warmly, Vijay.</p>
<p><br></p>
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