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

The 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

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

processing engineers! But buying our basic nutrition, in the form of commodities, is no less absurd, though it does accurately reflect the ethics of an economy that measures success in terms of accumulated capital and value in terms of price.

Being alive is more than simply making and spending money, and so we must consider how we can make it possible to think of our lives differently. The provision of, or allowance for, the minimal requirements of air, water, and food for everybody is a common-sense beginning. The issue is universal access rather than market access.

There are many ways one can imagine organizing the production and distribution of food to ensure that every person receives what he or she requires as members of society. Children do not make a decision to be born. We bring them into the world, and they remain our responsibility. In a sense we have recognized this in South Africa through the intent of our National Health Insurance (NHI) scheme with its principle of universal access. Yet basic health care, in the form of good nutrition, remains in the competitive Market Economy. Global capital will not and cannot, feed the world. The contradiction between food and profits is far too fundamental. Food is about sustenance. Profit derives from excess – draining the ‘natural resources’ and squeezing the economic system, from the bottom like a tube of toothpaste, to provide unearned wealth for investors. The reason for addressing the issue of current and future food supply and price is often cited as possible “social and political unrest”. The words hunger; malnutrition and starvation do not appear in these reports. Neither do justice or responsibility.

The Sowetan newspaper graphically illustrated the human tragedy of this situation for the South African experience in November 2011, when it reported on the death of four siblings in the North West province, caused by hunger. They died in their quest to find their mother and sister who had left in search of food. The post mortem results revealed that the cause of death was hunger and dehydration after they had walked a distance of more than 10km . A child that dies of starvation these days has been murdered. The murderer is the cannibalistic world order and multinational corporations dominate that world order! Some 10 multinational companies that function according the principle of profit maximization dominate the global agricultural market and that’s completely normal. It’s not a matter of attacking them. What matters here is the structural violence of a cannibalistic order. The tyranny of the oligarchy of globalised financial capital has existed for over 20 years now. Things have been liberalised and privatised as never before in the history of humankind.

Yet hunger is growing. Minimum wages for farmers and farm-workers, land rights, rights to seeds, rights to fertilizers, the legally protected access of people to sufficient food: these are things we can achieve – it is not a utopian dream.

We just have to wonder how many hungry people have the time, energy and money to seek out a lawyer to take their case to court.

And if they get that far, who will provide them with food while they are waiting? In fact, it is fair to say that while the right to food may be a globally popular term, it is little more than a morally upright principle without a cost to those in command of food production and distribution. More importantly, food security cannot be realized until women are centrally included in policy discussions about food.

Women’s special relationship with food is culturally constructed and not a natural division of labour. Women’s identity and sense of self is often based on their ability to feed their families and others; it goes without saying that food insecurity denies them this right. As such, the crumbling of the world, as we have known it now requires that we reconsider the assumptions and framing of the concepts and practices of ‘western civilization’, including individualism, progress, property, capitalism and human rights.

Calls to “fix a broken world food system” assume that the capitalist food system used to work well. This assumption ignores the food system’s long, racialized history of mistreatment of people of colour in particular. The food system is unjust and unsustainable, but it is not broken. It functions precisely as the capitalist food system has always worked, concentrating power in the hands of a privileged minority and passing off the social and environmental “externalities” disproportionately to racially stigmatized groups. We need fundamental change in the food system that has developed in the rich world, particularly in the last 75 years or so. It is dysfunctional and unjust - and it fails to deliver a safe, secure, sufficient, nutritious diet sustainably for everyone with equity.

As Amartya Sen noted more than three decades ago, if people go hungry, that is about them not having enough food to eat, not a characteristic of there not being enough food to eat. We know that we can feed the world by shifting human food production toward localized, sustainable, diverse, smart farming systems. While this may entail some changes in how we eat and shop, it is critically important to initiate a planned transition in order to initiate these changes without creating systemic shocks and instability within the food chain. On the other hand, the damage wrought on the planet is mirrored in the damage on our health. We really need to turn onto the smart path. If no urgent response is formulated in response to the obvious challenges facing the realization of the right to food – all of us will feel the impact of this perfect storm, but yet again it will be the poorest amongst us who are most seriously affected. This has serious implications for social stability – as was seen in Egypt with the 2008 food riots, for a country like ours beset by the twin challenges of poverty and inequality the ball needs to get rolling.

Lastly, land is at the centre of all these challenges and trade-offs in the food system! While the nature of the relationship between people and the planet has changed in once unthinkable ways, land remains a fundamental component of the world’s ability to feed itself. The “only way” we’re going to achieve food security for large numbers of people is to produce a lot more food in the countries that are food-insecure.

And this is why land reform and redress is non-negotiable! We need to fortify the link between land rights and food security. Food scarcity is not the problem, but the scarcity of real democracy protecting people’s access to nutritious food is the problem. So, fighting hunger means tackling concentrated political and economic power in order to create new equitable rules. Otherwise hunger will continue no matter how much food we grow. And so, to conclude, as has been experienced over and over again in the ongoing struggle for fairness and justice, human beings have an inbred inclination towards greed, self-interests and shameless disregard for the vulnerable, the Wretched of the Earth.

This, compounded by abhorrent political systems, which enable global corporate greed to inflict reckless social practices on humanity, means that extreme measures are required to protect humanity from themselves! It is only those directly affected by the abominable food system that leaves the most vulnerable of our global society hungry, and those who have embodied human rights within their personal human integrity and sense of fairness and justice that have the political will to transform the system. Only collective efforts that are closely connected to communities, groups, and individuals facing oppression, and that “nurture sensibilities and skills compatible with a collective fight for social change”, can be ultimately successful in addressing human rights problems that we face at present in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) era, and may face in the future.

Busiso Moyo (M.A) is a doctoral research candidate with the School of Public Health at the University of the Western Cape and an affiliate of the DST-NRF Centre of Excellence in Food Security.

1. See: https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/ documents/5987our-common-future.pdf 2. The Sowetan. Hunger killed them. 11 November 2011.