A Spoonful of History with Your Metric Ton of Rice!

Is Production Shortfall the Root Cause of Hunger?

Ben Wisner

3 June 2008

Nothing is more humiliating than hunger, said UN Secretary General, Ban-Ki Moon, at a world conference on rising food prices in Rome today. Delegates are discussing what they take to be the root cause of the problem: lack of investment in agriculture. Since the surge in agricultural productivity in the 1960s and 1970s, investment in farming technology has declined.

Conferees in Rome are being told that more than a billion Dollars in rapid impact investment and food aid are needed in the short run, and more over the next decade. Simultaneously the Islamic Development Bank has been meeting in Jeddah, and has voted US$ 1.5 billion to spur agriculture among that bank’s poorest members including Niger and Mauritania in West Africa.

No doubt the impact of rocketing food prices threatens the health and well being of hundreds of millions of people. High prices for basic foods are undermining the stability of nations only now emerging from conflict such as Liberia and Kenya, and they have helped to spark the anti-immigrant riots in South Africa. Ban-Ki Moon is right: it is also humiliating only to be able to buy your family’s rice by the cup rather than by the bag.

But a spoonful of history is necessary to aid policy makers’ and donors’ digestion of all this talk of cups and bags and metric tons, Dollars, Pounds and Euros.

In Africa during the 1980s there was a failed strategy to combat hunger called “production first.” I saw it up close and documented its impacts in Kenya, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Botswana, and Lesotho and wrote about it in a book called “Power and Need in Africa.”*

All the investment in crop improvement, mechanization, irrigation benefited wealthy farmers and some middle sized farmers – as well as an army of highly paid foreign consultants, contractors, and makers of machinery. Production did increase, but so did hunger among those unable to benefit because they had no land or too little land or were too far away from district headquarters to benefit from farm extension. Others couldn’t access credit. Ninety percent of farm extension time in those days was going to the top ten percent of farmers ranked by wealth.

So in 2008 and the decade to follow, will massive increases in farming investment rescue the Millennium Development Goal: to reduce hunger and halve the number living on less than one Dollar a day by 2015? Is lack of investment in agricultural productivity the root cause of hunger?

The answer is clearly no.

In the past few years fertilizer subsidy in Malawi has increased production of the stable, maize, but poor governance means that the Parliament is often deadlocked and farmers remain under the threat not only from more variable and uncertain weather but from untimely disbursement of fertilizer funds. A long history of rural poverty means that rapid deforestation continues because the poor make charcoal for sale to supplement their meager incomes. In the long run fertilizer input won’t be able to keep up with the resulting soil erosion, and there is no sign that Malawi will ever be able to afford input subsidies without external donor support.

The current price spike has many causes. These include a catastrophically low rice harvest due to drought in Australia – a major exporter – and increased grain demand as a growing world wide middle class eats more meat. Also implicated are diversion of land and food to bio-fuel production, high oil price, and speculation.

Investment in agro-production will not solve all these problems.

If the delegates in Rome are serious about battling hunger and not just further enriching chemical companies and agro-engineering corporations, they will seek to support small farmers around the world with a call for land justice. They will provide money for investment in health care and soil conservation. Meanwhile, yes, of course, food aid needs to be provided so that the children of small farmers in stress don’t have to drop out of school. In countries such as North Korea and Somalia food aid is a life or death matter, and it has become much more expensive for the World Food Organization to purchase and to deliver.

But don’t confuse the price crisis with the hunger crisis. In 1976 Susan George published a book called, “How the Other Half Dies.”** She documented how the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization has become a lobbyist and tout for big agricultural machine companies and firms producing agro chemicals. In the 1980s the author of “Diet for a Small Planet” exposed “myths of hunger” including the production first myth. She campaigned for democracy as a cure for hunger with the NGOs she formed.*** Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen exploded the production myth in 1981 with his book, “Poverty and Famines.”++

Let’s not forget so soon. Let’s use this opportunity for a sea change in the way that small farmers are supported – building on their local knowledge and skill, providing them with access to health care, education for their children, clean drinking water, credit and removing the huge US, European, and Japanese subsidies to their own farmers that block market entry by small farmers in Africa and elsewhere.

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*London: Earthscan, 1988.

**Montclair, NJ: Allanheld Osmun ,1977.

*** Institute for Food and Development Policy http://www.foodfirst.org/; “Hunger: 12 Myths” http://www.foodfirst.org/en/store/book/World_Hunger; “Diet for a Small Planet,” New York: Ballantine Books, 20th anniversary edition, 1985 & Small Planet Institute: http://www.smallplanet.org/ .

++Oxford: Oxford Univesity Press, 1981.

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