24 Why do so many starve?

Why do so many people starve?

Dear Lily,

In almost every civilization, sooner or later large numbers of people starve. I am not talking about malnutrition or seasonal shortages, which are almost universal in agricultural societies. Famine is different in degree and kind, a particularly awful kind of catastrophe.

Famine refers to a state where people actually die of hunger or hunger-aggravated diseases. ‘They that die by famine die by inches’. People’s emaciated bodies suck up the reserves of fat, a horrific way to die. There have been great famines in India, China, Russia, Europe and now the land of frequent famine is Africa.

What causes famine?

The case of Africa reminds us of some of the most popular arguments to explain famine. These are variations in weather (usually too much or too little rain), war and political dislocation, pests, low prices for crops, corruption and poor communications. There are also, as in many countries in the past, local tolls which prevent the movement of food except at very high costs. Yet while all of these may be important we have to look a little deeper to understand the almost universal tendency towards famine in agricultural civilizations.

What causes famine?

In the majority of societies famine is related to over-population. The size of the population increases as a result of a temporary improvement in resources. For a while there is relative plenty. Then demand begins to exceed supply and people are even more vulnerable to food shortages.

Changing from several types of crop to just one can be disastrous. The wide variety of crops and livestock which provide a buffer for people in difficult years is replaced by just one. Everyone grows potatoes, or rice, or wheat, or cotton, or coffee, and little else. When that crop is threatened there is nothing much to fall back on.

Another cause is the widespread tendency for the strong to prey on the weak, to extract as much of what they produce from them as possible, so that most people live with their noses just above the water of disaster. In bad years they drown.

This is a world-wide problem. The pressures of lenders to extract from borrowers is an international problem. The rich countries of the world have lent large sums of money to the poor, and now much of the prosperity of these poorer countries is being sucked out of them in interest payments. The activities of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank are often criticized for supporting this unfairness. They are accused of putting enormous pressure on Third World countries to drop their customary agricultural methods and to specialize in crops which then cannot compete against the subsidized crops in richer parts of the world.

Often the family in its desperation preys on itself, its members driven to ever harder and less well paid work, replacing animals and other labour saving devices by their own labour. As these processes work through time, almost everywhere in the world we see vast areas of poverty. If there is a small variation in politics or weather, disastrous famines often ensue.

What should we do if famine threatens?

An obvious thought is that ‘the government should do something about it’. Yet many argue that the amount of damage caused by government interference outweighs the positive effects. They suggest that the so-called ‘laws of the market’ be allowed to operate. If there is a scarcity, the shortage will raise the price of that commodity, for example wheat. More wheat would then be produced because it is worth doing so, and in due course the shortage will automatically be corrected.

On the other hand, government efforts to force farmers to sell their produce cheaply can have a disastrous effect. The grain producers and merchants hoard their grain for later sales. They also tend to produce less of a commodity from which they gained little or no profit. So, they argue, government interference causes famines rather than reducing them.

This theory was reasonable in the context of the commercialized agricultural systems which existed in eighteenth century England, Holland or North America. Unfortunately it does not work everywhere. When it was applied in Ireland in the 1840’s or Bengal in the 1940’s it led to disaster.

There are several flaws in the theory when it is applied beyond highly developed commercial economies. One lies in the nature of how food is produced. It may often be the case that over a few years market prices will encourage more production of a particular crop. Yet for those who are starving to death it is not possible to wait for a few years until more grain is planted and harvested.

The theory also assumes the kind of geography, ecology and good water communications found in Europe. In such a situation one region could supply another since the areas with acute shortages were quite local. This does not apply to the huge stretches of mono-culture found in land-locked areas of India, China or central Europe. Wheat or rice or maize is almost all that is grown for hundreds or thousands of miles. There is no way it can be replaced from a nearby area if the harvest fails. So people will starve to death.

In Bengal (India) in the 1940’s and Ethiopia in the 1980’s, there were foodstuffs available, either in stores or at the end of railway lines. Yet there was no market mechanism available to ‘draw’ them to the starving. Ordinary people lacked the economic power (money) to pay for the food. They may clamour outside the warehouse, but no-one is going to give valuable grain away for free. So they starve. The laws of supply and demand do not work because although there is huge ‘demand’ in one sense (starving families dying in agony) there is no effective demand because the starving families have nothing to bargain with.

‘Work for food’ programmes, the artificial creation of some bargaining power for very poor people, is one solution to a situation where most people have never really entered fully into a market system. Only by making them commercial consumers, giving them ‘coupons’ so to speak to start them off, can they be given the chance to rise above an impoverishment where they have nothing that the food-producers want, not even their bodily labour.

These two major arguments as to what should be done to prevent or alleviate famines refer to different cases. One analysis works reasonably in the historical English context, where the population was well above subsistence level, where the market forces operated reasonably, where shortages were relatively local and ways of carrying bulk goods like grain were well developed. The other analysis describes situations where there is food available but the poor starve because they do not have the means to pay for it.

Neither of these theories, however, applies to most famines in history, where there is an absolute shortage of food in a larger area. There is no food, even with money to buy it. The available technology and crop patterns do not produce enough to feed the population in a difficult year.

Here the only escape is through much longer-term planning and the creation of a proper system of diverse agriculture, proper communications, decent storage and the creation of a society where people live well above subsistence levels. Yet how can this possibly be achieved?

When did the first escape from famine occur?

On the eve of the industrial revolution, just two hundred years ago most people in Europe, Asia and Africa lived close to famine. Yet in England, a different situation had emerged. While even close neighbours, Scotland, Ireland, France, were still famine-prone, England had somehow escaped from the normal tendency. How had this happened?

The extraordinary fact, which everyone began to notice from about the fifteenth century was how affluent the rural dwellers of England were. Highland Scots, French, Italian or Spanish peasants were often poorly dressed, fed and housed and very often overworked and ill. Yet many of their English counterparts wore reasonable clothes and good leather shoes, ate a good deal more protein, drank beer and ale, lived in reasonable houses and worked moderate hours.

Ordinary housing can be taken as just one example. Here in England the houses of ordinary villagers of the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries have survived in large quantities. As I sit writing this in a village farmer’s house which has changed little for over three hundred years, I can see that the old houses provide a comfortable and spacious environment for affluent countrymen, even in a relatively poor area of the Cambridge fens.

The relative affluence of the English can be seen from their eating habits. They have been able to let their wild life teem around them. They cherish song birds, leave much of the flora and fauna on their beaches untouched, do not like the idea of eating their horses or things like snails and frogs.

I still remember my amazement when I went to a beach in France and found many people combing it for tiny creatures and seaweed of a kind that were left untouched on the beaches of my childhood in England. I also remember my feeling of sadness as I walked through the silent woods of France and Italy, where no bird sang or animal moved.

Of course there were exceptions to this picture. There were some who starved on the streets in England. Yet, by the eighteenth century, while almost all the country people of Europe and Asia had reached a level only just above subsistence, many of the English were modestly affluent. Famine was a thing of the past, as it has recently become in much of China and India.

Are famines inevitable?

How the divergence between a few fortunate societies and others occurred cannot be explained from within the framework of a discussion of famine. The immediate cause of famine is food shortage but food shortage is just a symptom of other things. The conditions which lead to the shortage are cumulative, just as the escape from famine is the result of cumulative changes. We can see this in the second half of the twentieth century.

Africa did not, on the whole, suffer from famines in the 1960s, while India and Bangladesh did. Now, despite terrible droughts or flooding, India and Bangladesh seem largely to have escaped from famine and parts of Africa have almost perennial famine. Perhaps the climate has changed, but ultimately the reasons for these shifts are only partially related to that. Famines are ultimately man-made, even if they may be precipitated by nature.

Nor are famines directly and inevitably the result of absolute numbers of people. When China or India had half or a quarter of their present population they had serious famines. There are now many more people and no famine. It was sparsely inhabited Highland Scotland, not relatively densely crowded England, that had famines in the eighteenth century.

Ultimately the presence or absence of famine is about human relations. Great inequalities breed famine. If, as in England, property is secure, people will benefit from their own work and from their own creative improvements. A large middling group will expand and absorb more and more people. Then a world where famine is only a distant memory can begin to emerge.

In the case of Africa today such a virtuous circle could be created, but only after a careful analysis of all the traps these countries face; disease, soil, communications, politics, the conditions attached to aid programmes, the policies of the International agencies. The difficulty is that all the traps have to be avoided simultaneously. It is not enough just to improve agriculture, or education, or to provide political stability or to minimize malaria and AIDS.

The whole package or system has to be altered; open politics, security of property, these and many other things are needed. This is not easy when much of the wealth and attention of the world is devoted to attacking hidden threats of supposed terrorism or in making weapons for the lucrative arms trade.