How Economic Inequality Fuels Starvation Throughout the World
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It was a very hot day at the outskirts of Ahmedabad, India, where I met with
a group of men and women at a local bus stand. They were itinerant laborers,
people who move from one part of India to another in search of work. The
city of Ahmedabad in Gujarat has a population of about six million people;
among them are about 1.5 million migrants. Official figures from the Indian
government suggest that there are 139 million internal migrants in India.
This is likely a low figure.
Rural distress brings these men and women to the city, where work in
construction and light manufacturing as well as domestic service is their
lifeline. Many of the migrants struggle to find work each day. One of them,
a man from Bihar, tells me that the situation for him and his friends is
dire. Hunger, he says, is a constant sound inside [our] head.
Inequality and Starvation
Its impossible to ignore the growth of economic inequality in each corner
of the planet. Vulgarity is the order of the day, with the very rich
hoarding vast amounts of wealth while the poor scratch the earth for their
livelihood. The British-based charity group Oxfam has done an important
service by offering an annual indication of the gravity of inequality. This
year, Oxfam noted that a mere 42 rich people have as much wealth as 3.7
billion poor people. What is most astounding is that in 2017, 82 percent of
the social wealth produced by the worlds people was vacuumed into the bank
accounts of the wealthiest 1 percent among us. This is not an ancient
problem, in other words, but a current problem posed by the structure of
capitalism: goods and services are produced socially, but profit is
sequestered privatelyand with fewer and fewer hands able to seize this
profit.
What is less digested is that increased inequality compounds not only
povertywhich is obviousbut hunger. It is true that war and climate change
are major factors that leave people without access to food. Starvation
follows aerial bombardment and rising tides. But, it is even more important
to focus on the much wider problem of inequality and poverty that make
hunger a normal part of lifethe constant sound in the heads of the
impoverished.
Data on poverty should make any sensitive person pause. The United Nations
and the World Bank keep track of poverty figures. There is always some
disagreement about the methodology followed by the analysts. But, there is
near consensus that half of the worlds peoplesin excess of three billion
peoplelive on less than $2.50 a day, the benchmark for poverty. Of these
people, at least 1.3 billion live on less than $1.25 a day, the standard of
extreme poverty. Hunger in this part of the planet is a normal part of life.
As food costs rise, notes the World Bank, hunger increases. The rise of food
prices in 2010 itself pushed 44 million people into poverty. UNICEF
calculates that each day 22,000 children die due to povertymost of them
from malnutrition and starvation.
Poverty in the Farms
The majority of the poor live in rural areas or else migrate from rural
areas to join the vast numbers of people who come into cities in search of a
livelihood. Work and wages in rural areas have declined quite sharply. Blame
for this rests on the domination by monopoly firms over agriculturefrom
seeds to supermarket shelves. Three monopoly firmsDuPont, Monsanto and
Syngentacontrol the global seed market, while an additional three monopoly
firmsADM, Bunge and Cargillcontrol the grain trade. Most of the processed
food trade is controlled by a handful of monopoly firms, with only 10 firms
owning every single major food brandAssociated British Foods, Coca-Cola,
Danone, General Mills, Kelloggs, Mars, Mondelez, Nestlé, PepsiCo and
Unilever. These corporations, which make fabulous profits, suffocate those
who work the land. These firms have forced down the prices paid to farmers
and agricultural workers as well as increased the costs of processed foods.
If you live in the countryside and work on the fields, neither are you
getting paid enough nor are you able to afford to eat. No wonder that
300,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide over the past 15 years and
that millions of farmers are on the move in search of any work at all.
The United Nations has made a pledge to end hunger by 2030Zero Hunger. This
is an important standard. A decade remains before this task must be
accomplished. But, all signs point in the opposite direction. There is
simply no political will to constrain the power of the agri-business sector,
none to provide a just economic foundation for farmers to survive as
capitalism transforms the countryside into dystopia. The phrase Zero
Hunger mirrors Fome Zero (Zero Hunger), a key policy of the Brazilian
government led by Lula. It was under Lula and his Workers Party (PT) that
Brazil almost entirely abolished hunger. The policies that Lula drove to do
so are what earned him the blinding hatred of the oligarchy and its Western
allies. The ruling bloc that conducted the judiciary coup against the PT
now presides over an increase in hunger. Sugary rhetoric at the UN to end
hunger means nothing if little is done against the agri-business sector and
if the political war against the Left (in this case, Lula) continues without
challenge.
Two Roads
Two roads lie ahead before humanity.
The first road leads to annihilation, with more and more people drifting
into the arms of hunger, more and more people attempting to migrate to
places where they believe they can survive. Rapacious growth of the power of
agri-business, lack of state initiative to provide an alternative foundation
for farmers and agricultural workers, inflation of food pricesall this will
lead to more farmer suicides, more migration, more desolation. It could also
lead to the food riot, the uprising of the hungry that erupts when prices of
food rise. Examples of such uprisings are legion, from the bread riots of
Egypt to the fuel riots of Haiti. These riots do not necessarily open the
door to an alternative history. They are, as often as not, the last gasp of
a desperate people before history closes in around them.
The second road leads to a new history. This week, in New Delhi, two major
marchesorganized by the Lefttook place. The first (on September 4) brought
women to the city. They demanded jobs and dignity, an end to violence
against women and an end to hunger. The second (on September 5) brought
industrial and agricultural workers as well as farmers to the citymany of
those in the crowd having been to the September 4 march as well. They
demanded much the same thing, with an emphasis on pushing the state to
manage prices and to produce a new basis for Indian agriculture. The
agricultural workers and farmers ask a simple question: shouldnt the state
provide land, credit and fair prices to protect those who work the land from
the irrational destruction of agriculture by monopoly firms?
What will end hunger? Not an empty pledge by the United Nations nor the
expansion further of monopoly firms into the countryside. Onus is on the
peoples movements, whose slowly growing political power must change the
terms of the conversation about starvation. Fixation on efficiency and
marketsthe code words that mask the power of monopoly firmsrather than on
an economic policy that understands the rhythms of agriculture will create
profits for the large firms, but not food for people.
Hunger, that constant sound inside the head of the poor, has to be silenced.
Human beings who can come to terms with the prevalence of hunger have lost
their humanity.
This article was produced by Globetrotter, a project of the Independent
Media Institute.
Vijay Prashad / Independent Media Institute