2.8.3: Theories - The Causes and Consequences of Persitent Global Hunger

 

 

Learning Objectives

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Identify the key features of the nature-focused approaches to the causes and consequences of persistent global hunger 
• Identify the key features of the socio-political approaches to the causes and consequences of persistent global hunger

Hunger as a Social Question

In general there are two approaches to explaining the causes of persistent hunger and planning towards its eradication. The first approach treats lack of food as a periodic natural event that humans can plan to avoid; while the second is focused on the socio-political relationships that can provide or prevent access to food.  

Nature-focused approaches to hunger

British economist and demographer Thomas Malthus is a particularly notable theorist within the nature-focused school of thought. Thomas Malthus believed that human beings had the capacity to reproduce beyond the ability of the environment to support their needs (Malthus, 1998). In his 1798, An Essay on Population, Malthus asserted that the human population will grow more quickly than the available resources, unless checked by moral restraint. Once a population has grown beyond the capacity of the land to support it, a food crisis becomes inevitable. This type of crisis has been called the Malthusian catastrophe. In making this claim, Malthus asserted a pessimistic view of the ability of humankind to live within the limits imposed on it by the available natural resources and also on the ability of human communities to increase those natural resources to meet greater needs (Spengler, 1971). He believed that people needed to intentionally limit the number of their offspring to ensure that enough food would be available to sustain them. In practice, the calls for population control resulting from this theory have fallen disproportionately on lower income and non-European populations.  

Figure 8.3.1: "Thomas Robert Malthus" by John Linnell is in the Public Domain

Although Malthus argued that people in communities where food was scarce should limit their reproduction, the nature-focused approach has also motivated research into methods to increase the amount of food produced. Norman Borlaug was a botanist who spent a great deal of his life seeking to improve the grain plants that provide food for a large number of people worldwide. Naturally occurring wheat varieties tend to be quite tall with large seed heads at the top. They can easily fall over, often resulting in spoiled grain. Borlaug worked for years as a part of a Rockefeller Foundation funded program to develop a dwarf variety of wheat, which would resist disease and ensure greater production of the grain in less space (Swaminathan, 2009). He was successful, and the varieties of wheat that he developed in Mexico began to be used in countries around the world. The resulting increase in grain production led to further experiments with rice varietals and has been called a Green Revolution. Borlaug was, unsurprisingly, an advocate for the use of genetically modified food crops, and warned of excessive regulation and anti-scientific suspicion (Borlaug, 2000).

Socio-political approaches to hunger

In contrast to these models, which hold that either the population growth must be constrained or that production must increase, there are many who have focused on the ways that communities can be structured so that they are more or less vulnerable to food crisis. As we have already explored, in the second half of the Twentieth Century it became increasingly clear that a food crisis could occur even when food was plentiful. Socio-political thinkers who observed these new famines, developed very different ideas about how and why people are left without sufficient food.

Scholars like Karl Polanyi and Amartya Sen each considered how members of a community gain access to resources when they are needed. In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, Polanyi published a text that considered the very early history of state intervention in the free market. He documented the conception of the Speenhamland Scale, which was in place during the industrialization of Great Britain and was copied by other industrializing powers. Industrialization was a massive social change that required movements of many people from small agricultural hamlets, where they might have been able to provide for themselves, into urban centers where they became dependent on wage labor to provide for their household. During this earliest moment of industrial capitalism, wages often fell below the amount needed to procure fundamental necessities like food. The result was a social crisis. The Speenhamland Scale was an attempt to prevent low wages from endangering the British working class and extended the promise that the state would intervene to make up the difference between earnings and the cost of bread (Polanyi, 2001). Based on this example Polanyi suggested that state intervention may be necessary when market conditions do not ensure adequate wages.

Figure 8.3.2: "Amartya Sen" by USAID is in the Public Domain

Amartya Sen, a Nobel prize winning economist, has offered a framework for understanding how people are left hungry that he calls the entitlement approach. Sen observes that communities will all have some standards by which people become eligible to claim a share of available food. It may be through work, through possession of money, or by belonging to a particular class of people (i.e. mothers or citizens), but each society has a system for distributing food. When people are left out of this system of entitlement, whether they are excluded intentionally or not, they will be vulnerable to hunger. In many contemporary communities, money establishes entitlement to food. A person is entitled to the food they can afford to buy; however, during periods of high inflation or high unemployment this money-based entitlement system can fail, resulting in famine (Sen, et. al., 1982).  

Sen also examined state action during such economic crises. In his analysis of the 1943 Bengal Famine, Sen challenged the idea that famine is related to the amount of food available. During this particular food crisis, there were large stocks of food stuffs in Bengal; however, the food was not made available to those who needed it because of a simultaneous employment crisis among the rural workforce. There was as much, if not more, food than there had been in prior years, but people in rural communities had far less money to buy it with, resulting in starvation and disease. Sen suggests that this was the result of “Malthusian optimism”, which he describes as the belief that if food stores exist famine is an impossibility (Sen et.al, 1982).

Sen makes an even bolder claim when comparing the frequency of famine in China and India after decolonization. During the second half of the Twentieth Century, after becoming independent from the British Empire, India did not experience a major famine. During the same time period, China experienced several major food crises, including the Great Chinese Famine of 1959-60. Although neither country was rich, Sen could not find a credible link to an economic factor. Rather, he found that democratic governance in India ensured that the government received early warnings of problems through representative government and the free press (Dreze and Sen, 1991). Government officials, seeking to ensure their continued electability, had a strong incentive to respond early and to ensure that food aid made it to the specific communities that needed it. Democracy, surprisingly, helped to prevent famines.  

With a similar attention to the ways in which people can lose access to food even when it is plentiful, Alex DeWaal’s work has focused on the relationship between hunger and conflict. DeWaal builds on the work of Raphael Lemkin, who famously invented the term genocide. Lemkin emphasized that one of the mechanisms for physically destroying an ethnic community was “racial discrimination in feeding” (DeWaal, 2017). Alex DeWaal claims that all modern famines are fundamentally human caused, with violent conflict creating conditions for all of the mass starvation events of the last 50 years. He has meticulously documented the ways in which food was used in the ethnic cleansing campaigns of the Sudanese government in the Darfur region. Similar practices have been linked to nearly all famines during the Twenty-first Century.

Theory that Shapes Action

It is important to remember that these theories about the causes of food crisis have led to actual action. The writings of Thomas Malthus motivated early attempts to slow the pace of population growth worldwide because his work persuaded several generations that rapid population growth could spell disaster. Borlaug’s successful genetic modification of wheat lead to a greater focus on agricultural efficiency because it demonstrated that human beings did have the power to significantly increase production through new technologies. Those policies are significantly different from the ones that might be motivated by the socio-political approach. Sen’s work speaks to the importance of a free press and a public who can criticize and make demands of government. Democratization itself may be the set of policies that helps to curb the prevalence of chronic hunger. While DeWaal’s work orients us away from domestic policy toward the transnational arena of international and non-governmental organizations. If conflict drives hunger, early de-escalation and humanitarian interventions are likely the policies that will curb it.  

Figure 8.3.3: "Sustainable Development Goals" by IAEA Imagebank is in the Public Domain

The current approach, outlined as a part of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, is reflective of each of these disparate approaches to the persistent challenge of hunger. The UN has set targets that will help drive action and end hunger and malnutrition worldwide. These targets represent policies that are designed to address both the natural and manmade causes for hunger, including:

• Focused support for the most vulnerable, including children, women, and those who live in rural communities (Targets 2.1 and 2.2)
• Expanded production by small-holder farms facilitated through the increased access to land, financing, and information (Target 2.3)
• Increased resilience in the face of global climate change (2.4)
• Maintaining genetic diversity of food stores through national and transnational seed banks (Target 2.5)
• Increase investment, including international investment, in rural infrastructure and technologies (Target 2.a)
• Prevent disruption within international food markets through the elimination of agricultural export subsidies by all countries (Target 2.b)
• Prevent extreme price volatility within international food markets by ensuring accurate information about food stores (Target 2.c)

Clearly, this list includes policy proposals designed to address both the natural and socio-political components of food crises.