David Rieff - The Reproach of Hunger: Food, Justice, and Money in the Twenty-First Century

THE

REPROACH

OF

HUNGER

ALSO BY DAVID RIEFF

Against Remembrance

Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Sons Memoir

At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention

A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis

Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West

Exile: Cuba in the Heart of Miami

Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World

Going to Miami: Exiles, Tourists and Refugees in the New America

THE

REPROACH

OF

HUNGER

Food, Justice, and Money in the
Twenty-First Century

DAVID RIEFF

This book is for Judith Thurman

But we dont see or hear those who suffer, and the horrors of life go on somewhere behind the scenes. Everything is quiet, peaceful, and only mute statistics protest: so many gone mad, so many buckets drunk, so many children dead of malnutrition.... And this order is obviously necessary; obviously the happy man feels good only because the unhappy bear their burden silently, and without that silence happiness would be impossible. Its a general hypnosis. At the door of every contented, happy man somebody should stand with a little hammer, constantly tapping, to remind him that unhappy people exist, that however happy he may be, sooner or later life will show him its claws, some calamity will befall himillness, poverty, lossand nobody will hear or see, just as he doesnt hear or see others now.

ANTON CHEKHOV, GOOSEBERRIES

Poor nations are hungry, and rich nations are proud; and pride and hunger will ever be at variance.

JONATHAN SWIFT

Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply. Primarily this is because the rulers of the exchange of mankinds goods have failed, through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and abdicated.

Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men....

The money changers have fled from their high seat in the temple of our Civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.

FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT, FIRST INAUGURAL, 1933

Contents

Introduction

I t

They could not have been more wrong. At the end of 2006, the price of wheat, rice, corn, and soybeansthe four food staples that nearly three billion people who live on less than two dollars a day principally depend on not just as one element among several of their diets (as is the case in the rich world), but as the foodstuffs they almost exclusively depend on to avoid going hungrybegan to rise vertiginously on world markets. By the time they peaked in early 2008, the price of corn had gone up by 31 percent, of rice by 74 percent, of soybeans by 87 percent, and of wheat by 130 percent, compared to what they had been in early 2007 at the beginning of what came to be known as the global food crisis. In many parts of the globe, the brutal secondary effects on the prices of food available to ordinary people in the market were almost immediate. In Egypt, for example, the price of bread doubled in a matter of months. In Haiti, the price of rice increased by 50 percent, while in South Africa, the price of maize meal increased by 28 percent. By some estimates, taken in aggregate the food bill for the worlds poor rose by 40 percent, while what soon came to be known as the global food crisis added 25 percent to the food import bills of many poor countries. And in thirty of the worst-affected countries across the globe, from Ethiopia to Uzbekistan, food riots broke out.

The significance of these riots was subsequently somewhat exaggerated. As every college student learns in freshman statistics, correlation is not causation. These were spasmodic episodes of civil unrest, not insurrections, let alone revolutions. And given the enduringly dire social and political conditions of the poor in those countries, to claim that the food crisis was the principal underlying cause of the conflicts seems too much like special pleading. But it is undeniable that the price spikes galvanized the poor in many countries in different regions of the world to a degree that, however briefly, seemed to be a genuine and at least potentially uncontrollable threat to the status quo.

And to the poorest of the global poor, the so-called bottom billion of the worlds people who try to survive on less than a dollar a day, the threat was literally existential. For several billion more, any hope of food security, the term of art in the development world meaning that one can depend on getting enoughas well as the right thingsto eat throughout the year, seemed to be evaporating before their eyes. And it was not only those who had joined in the food riots, but also the vastly larger number of people who despaired in silence who worried for their survival and the prospect of any better future for their children. To put it another way, what the food crisis meant for the poor was the very real prospect of going hungry, not because there would not be enough food, but because they would no longer be able to afford to buy it. The anger that this crisis produced is one that has, across the centuries, proven to be the most dangerous form of anger of all: anger in the belly.

In the rich world, there were many who reasoned that because the worst effects of the crisis were occurring in parts of the world where there had been huge population increases, brute demography had been at the root of what had taken place. But this was a fundamental misunderstanding of what had occurred; however counterintuitive the thought may be, it was wrong. Instead, what had in fact taken place was not the population bomb finally exploding, to use the phrase coined by the neo-Malthusian American biologist and demographer Paul Ehrlich, leading inexorably to famine. For despite the fluctuating relationship between food consumption and food production, when the crisis began to unfold in 2007 there was (as there is as of this writing in 2015) more than enough food being produced to feed everyone alive. In the two decades preceding the 2007 crisis, global population increased by an average of 1.5 percent per year, and food production rose by 2 percent over the same time. If there was confusion about this among the general public, it was in considerable measure. The preponderance of media reports about hunger, at least those to which the general public in the rich world are exposed, focus on famines in the Horn of Africa or, in more sophisticated narratives, on hunger in rural India. This focus understandably gives the false impression that there are important food shortages, but in actuality the problem is food affordability, not availability.

But, important though it is, pointing out what the food crisis was not does little to explain how and why the global food system could have seized up to such an extent in 20072008. Nor does it shed much light on how even most agricultural experts and both governmental and nongovernmental development agencies throughout the world could have been taken by surprise in this way. In other words, if the effects of the global food crisis were obvious, its causes were much harder to get right. In part this was because, if anything, there were too many causes that could be credibly held out as having contributed to the disaster, and figuring out which had played major roles and which had played minor ones proved to be enormously difficult.

One key driver of the crisis beyond dispute was the rising price of oil which, beginning in late 2006, had a secondary effect on the price of the fertilizers needed for industrial agriculture. This type of farming has increasingly become the norm not just in the rich world but in much of the poor world as well, far more to the detriment of its masses of smallholder farmers. Another factor, seemingly episodic rather than systemic, was the severe weather in many parts of the world during 2006, ranging from drought in Australia, the In the rich world, the practice of diverting grain from feed for livestock to the production of biofuels (40 percent of US corn now goes to ethanol production) certainly played a role, as did the virtual takeover of the worlds commodities markets by speculators whose entry radically increased the volatility of these markets, causing wild price swings in the costs of food staples. In short, viewed as a discrete event, the 20072008 global food crisis had been, as the clich goes, a perfect storm.