20
Human Rights
HUNGER
in the face of plenty:
Can humans right this wrong? Can the Industry 4.0 technologies? Will it be a digi-human collaboration?
A HUMAN RIGHTS ISSUE
BY: BUSISO MOYO
T
he essential story of development over the past century has been one in which a succession of celebrated technological breakthroughs has failed to bring about the emancipation of human societies. Global hunger is perhaps the prime example of this fact. Despite numerous commitments and acknowledgements that the resources to feed the world now exist, starvation and hunger persist at unprecedented levels. “Food security” in this sense has always been an aspirational term, describing a state, which has never existed in any part of the world. The Market Economy is based on the economics of scarcity, or more precisely, the dogma of scarce resources. Nature is held responsible for inequities because she is stingy and does not provide enough to go around. The other way of stating this same approach is that there are too many people. If a society does not want to address the issue of distributive or social justice – making sure that every member of the household is fed – then a theory of scarce resources and overpopulation can serve a useful function in maintaining class inequities: there simply isn’t enough to go around they say. The result is that there are many people who believe that unless we continue to become more productive, we will face disaster within a few decades as the growth of the global population outstrips the growth in the world’s food supply. Generally speaking, the class of people that put this argument forward are followers of Thomas Malthus, the 19th-century prophet of overpopulation and famine. Their argument has been consistent: poor people tend to multiply at a higher rate than rich people, and left unchecked they will multiply beyond the ability of the earth to provide for them. Thus the poor are themselves believed to be the cause of their own poverty. Now, for black African people in particular, human reproduction rates are, in fact, closely correlated with economic well-being: the harder the circumstances, the more children a family will have in order to have more breadwinners and to ensure that there will be enough that survive to care for the elderly. The easier the circumstances, the smaller the families, and until a woman can be sure that all her children will survive, it does not make economic sense to her to limit her family. As a study done for the Brundtland Commission expressed it, “the problem is not one of global food production being outstripped by the global population … The problem has three aspects: where our food is being produced, by whom, and who commands authority over the global food value chain .” 1
PEOPLE DYNAMICS | March - April 2020
Efficient, productive, and competitive; these are the three magic words of the modern Market Economy. They are being used to facilitate the reduction of agriculture to a lifeless industrial process under the control of a limited number of transnational corporations. Within the political economy of food, this logic, “competitive” describes the character of social relations between individuals seeking what is best for themselves. Those that are successful, the winners, are by definition “efficient” and “productive”. If, as a result, some people get rich and others starve, that is regarded as an unfortunate consequence of an efficient market economy and not a moral issue. How does a fifth of the South African population have severely inadequate access to food, one third of children experience hunger and two-thirds experience income poverty? For a country deemed “food secure” we are clearly witnessing starvation in the face of plenty! For South Africa, these risks remain powerfully linked to race, gender and where we live in the country. Constitutionally speaking, we have the “right to access sufficient food”, however, the debate needs to extend beyond a production and land focus, and consider the food system as a whole and barriers to urban residents in particular in their efforts to secure sufficient food for a healthy life. South Africa’s biggest failure in establishing a nourishing food system for all has revolved around its lacklustre approach in confronting capital interests and reforming agricultural markets. The fact that our agricultural policies have prioritized industrial farming practices highlights the system’s failure. Food security, quality, health and the land tenure question have all stagnated. If we are to progress we must implement alternative models that have been proven to work. It is strange how we have come to regard as normal and reasonable the notion that the only way to eat is to first buy food at a store. We don’t start life this way, and it is often a matter of years before we learn how to function properly as customers in the food system. We have to be taught (some might say brain-washed) to be accomplices in the crime of capital accumulation through the necessity of eating. If we were to be consistent and the Market Economy universal, we might carry with us little air meters, so we could pay for the air we require. It would be a bit complicated, because we would have to have accounts with “owners” of the air in every jurisdiction through which we might pass. Truly a challenge to the electronics and information
