>LE MONDE DIPLOMATIQUE - November 1998
>
> The politics of hunger
>
> by IGNACIO RAMONET
>
> Now here's a statistic you might have missed. The total wealth of
> the world's three richest individuals is greater than the
> combined gross domestic product (1) of the 48 poorest countries -
> a quarter of all the world's states.
>
> Everybody knows inequality has increased over the last 20 years
> of unfettered ultra-liberalism. But who could have imagined the
> gap had widened so far? In 1960 the income of the 20 % of the
> world's population living in the richest countries was 30 times
> greater than that of the 20 % in the poorest countries. Now we
> learn that in 1995 it was 82 times greater (2). In over 70
> countries, per capita income is lower today than it was 20 years
> ago. Almost three billion people - half the world's population -
> live on less than two dollars a day.
>
> While goods are more abundant than ever before, the number of
> people without shelter, work or enough to eat is constantly
> growing. Of the 4_ billion people living in developing countries,
> almost a third have no drinking water. A fifth of all children
> receive an insufficient intake of calories or protein. And two
> billion people - a third of the human race - are suffering from
> anaemia.
>
> Is this the way it has to be? The answer is no. The UN calculates
> that the whole of the world population's basic needs for food,
> drinking water, education and medical care could be covered by a
> levy of less than 4 % on the accumulated wealth of the 225
> largest fortunes. To satisfy all the world's sanitation and food
> requirements would cost only $13 billion, hardly as much as the
> people of the United States and the European Union spend each
> year on perfume.
>
> Next month will see the 50th anniversary of the Universal
> Declaration on Human Rights, which states that "everyone has the
> right to a standard of living adequate for the health and
> well-being of himself and of his family, including food,
> clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social
> services". But for most of humanity, these rights are
> increasingly inaccessible.
>
> Consider, for example, the right to food. Food is not in short
> supply. In fact, food products have never been so abundant. There
> is enough available to provide each of the Earth's inhabitants
> with at least 2,700 calories a day. But production alone is not
> enough. The people who need the food must be able to buy it and
> consume it. And that is precisely the problem. Thirty million
> people a year die of hunger. And 800 million suffer from chronic
> malnutrition.
>
> Again, there is nothing inevitable about this. Climatic problems
> are often predictable. When humanitarian organisations like
> Action Against Hunger (3) are able to intervene, they can often
> nip a famine in the bud in a matter of weeks. And yet hunger
> continues to decimate whole populations.
>
> Why? Because hunger has become a political weapon. In today's
> world, no famine is gratuitous. Hunger is a strategy pursued with
> unbelievable cynicism by governments and military regimes whom
> the end of the cold war has deprived of a steady income. Rather
> than starving the enemy, as Sylvie Brunel points out (4), they
> are starving their own populations in order to cash in on media
> coverage and international compassion, an inexhaustible source of
> money, food and political platforms.
>
> In Somalia, Sudan, Liberia, North Korea, Burma and Afghanistan,
> governments and military leaders are holding innocent people
> hostage and starving them for political ends, sometimes with
> appalling cruelty. In Sierra Leone, the men of ex-Corporal Foday
> Sankoh's Revolutionary United Front (RUF), in a horrific
> year-long campaign of terror, have been systematically chopping
> off peasants' hands with machetes to prevent them cultivating the
> land. Climate has become a marginal factor in major famines. It
> is man who is starving man.
>
> Amartya Sen, the winner of this year's Nobel prize for economics,
> is renowned for showing how government policies can cause famine
> even when food is abundant. On several occasions, he has stressed
> "the remarkable fact that, in the terrible history of famines in
> the world, no substantial famine has ever occurred in any
> independent and democratic country with a relatively free press
> (5)". Rejecting the arguments of the neo-liberals, Professor Sen
> contends that greater responsibility for the well-being of
> society must be given, not to the market, but to the state. A
> state that must be sensitive to the needs of its citizens and, at
> the same time, concerned with human development throughout the
> world.
> ____________________________________________________________
>
> Translated by Barry Smerin
>
> (1) Overall national production of goods and services.
>
> (2) Human Development Report 1998, United Nations Development
> Programme, New York, September 1998. See also Dominique Vidal,
> "Dans le Sud, diveloppement ou rigression?", Le Monde
> diplomatique, October 1998.
>
> (3) UK office: 1, Catton Street, London WC1R 4AB, email
> aahuk at gn.apc.org; US office: 875 avenue of the Americas, Suite
> 1905, New York NY 10001, email jfvidal at aah.usa.org
>
> (4) See Sylvie Brunel and Jean-Luc Bodin, Giopolitique de la
> faim. Quand la faim est une arme, (annual report by Action
> Against Hunger), PUF, Paris, 1998, 310 p., 125 F, soon to be
> available in English as "The Hunger Report".
>
> (5) See "Human Rights and Asian Values: What Lee Kuan Yew and Le
> Peng don't understand about Asia", The New Republic, July 14,
> 1997.
>
>
>
> ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ) 1998 Le Monde diplomatique
>
><http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/en/1998/11/01leader.html>
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