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

Rieff, David

 
9781439123881: The Reproach of Hunger: Food, Justice, and Money in the Twenty-First Century
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1439123888 ISBN 13: 9781439123881
Verlag: Simon & Schuster, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

Hailed as “invaluable…a substantial work of political thought,” (New Statesman) in a groundbreaking report, based on years of reporting, David Rieff assesses whether ending extreme poverty and widespread hunger is truly within our reach, as is increasingly promised.

Can we provide enough food for nine billion people in 2050, especially the bottom poorest in the Global South? Some of the most brilliant scientists, world politicians, and aid and development experts forecast an end to the crisis of massive malnutrition in the next decades. The World Bank, IMF, and Western governments look to public-private partnerships to solve the problems of access and the cost of food. “Philanthrocapitalists” Bill Gates and Warren Buffett spend billions to solve the problem, relying on technology. And the international development “Establishment” gets publicity from stars Bob Geldorf, George Clooney, and Bono.

“Hunger, [David Rieff] writes, is a political problem, and fighting it means rejecting the fashionable consensus that only the private sector can act efficiently” (The New Yorker). Rieff, who has been studying and reporting on humanitarian aid and development for thirty years, takes a careful look. He cites climate change, unstable governments that receive aid, the cozy relationship between the philanthropic sector and giants like Monsanto, that are often glossed over in the race to solve the crisis.

“This is a stellar addition to the canon of development policy literature” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). The Reproach of Hunger is the most complete and informed description of the world’s most fundamental question: Can we feed the world’s population? Rieff answers a careful “Yes” and charts the path by showing how it will take seizing all opportunities; technological, cultural, and political to wipe out famine and malnutrition.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

David Rieff is the author of eight previous books, including Swimming in a Sea of Death, At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention; A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis; and Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West. He lives in New York City.

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The Reproach of Hunger

• 1 •

A Better World Finally within Reach?

In order to properly understand what the food crisis is, it is essential first to understand what it is not. Unfortunately, it often seems from their public statements as if officials charged with coping with the food crisis and developing plans for reforming global agriculture are as mystified as the general public. Instead of asking hard questions, these officials frequently seem content to fall back on pat answers and development boilerplate. A particularly egregious example of this occurred in April 2008, when Josette Sheeran, then executive director of the World Food Programme (WFP) and an official widely admired in the world of relief and development, described the global food crisis of the previous year as a “silent tsunami,” and declared that it presented the WFP with “the greatest challenge in its 45-year history.” Such over-the-top rhetoric, an amalgram of apocalyptic worst-case scenario building and shameless institutional self-aggrandizement, is not peculiar to responses to the global food crisis. To the contrary, it has been more often the rule than the exception in the development world at least since the days of Fritjof Nansen, whose pioneering efforts on behalf of refugees in the early twentieth century served as an inspiration for the current humanitarian relief system. In this sense, Sheeran’s statement was unremarkable, a standard-issue iteration not simply of the rhetorical but of the ideological furniture of relief and development work.

However they are communicated, whether in speeches by senior officials, in press conferences and briefing materials for the media, or on the organizations’ websites, such appeals almost invariably start with a lurid, oversimplified account of a particular crisis and end with a fund-raising pitch that usually either states or at the very least implies that if donors will just fork over, the agency in question is ready, willing, and able to save the day.

In fairness, Sheeran was only fulfilling one of the principal institutional demands that went with her job. Her predecessors were certainly no better. Four years earlier one of them, James Morris, had called the Asian tsunami of December of 2004 “perhaps the worst natural disaster in history.” And in the immediate aftermath of the 2010 earthquake that devastated Port-au-Prince, Elizabeth Byrs, the spokeswoman for the UN Office of Humanitarian Assistance (OCHA), one of the WFP’s sister agencies, stated flatly that the UN had “never been confronted with such a disaster,” which she characterized as being “like no other.”

Morris’s claim was absurd—nonsense on stilts, to use Bentham’s inspired phrase. Only someone historically illiterate, or at least a person whose historical imagination did not reach much further back in time than 1961, when a UN General Assembly established his agency, could have seriously advanced such a claim, and it is of course entirely possible that Morris, who was a cultivated man, knew better but felt constrained (just as Sheeran may well have done) to adhere to the familiar script. But Byrs’s assertions were not much better. Was the Haitian earthquake truly a greater challenge and a more profound human tragedy than the refugee emergency that followed the Rwandan genocide of 1994 or the outbreaks of famine in North Korean in the 1990s—in both cases, human disasters that involved the relief and development arms of the United Nations? Perhaps a moral philosopher could have adjudicated the hierarchy of these horrors, but surely it was above the moral pay grade of an international civil servant such as Byrs, or Morris, or Sheeran (or, for that matter, of a writer like me). But even in the context of the shameless hyperbole that has been the common coin of humanitarian agencies since the refounding of modern humanitarian action that can be dated to the work of the so-called French Doctors in Biafra between 1967 and 1969, and the specific special pleading of WFP agency, Sheeran’s image of the global food crisis as a silent tsunami was particularly ill judged. It was not an assault of nature for which, at least in the case of earthquakes or tsunamis, it is possible to prepare but that human beings can do nothing to prevent. If anything, the food crisis is the diametrical opposite of a natural disaster such as a tsunami or an earthquake, and is instead the product of the current world system. In other words, it is the result of such things as the current relations of force between haves and have-nots, on how world markets work, on what technologies we use (and the moral and political assumptions behind those technologies)—­when all is said and done, about what kind of world we want to live in, about the world order that now exists and the world order that might one day exist. There is nothing “natural” about it.

To posit matters in such starkly ideological terms is commonplace in the Global South. But it tends to disturb mainstream opinion in the Global North, where most economic and political power still resides, both on the center-right and on the center-left. There it has been widely assumed, and with increasingly hegemonic authority since the end of the Cold War, that throughout the world, enlightened people agree on how global society should be organized. It is a view championed first and foremost by the human rights movement, and it has percolated through global institutions, above all the UN system. It might have been thought that the rise of China would of itself serve to undermine such millenarian fantasies. For the moment, however, it has not. And yet it is the persistence of ideology that helps explain why, despite the “zero-sum game” quality of much of the debate that the global food crisis has engendered, intelligent people can disagree so comprehensively and passionately both about the causes of the price rises of 2007–2008 and about how, in its wake, the world’s food system can be successfully reformed or even almost entirely remade so that even if hunger persists, the number of hungry people begins finally to diminish.

If we do not agree on how societies should be ordered, we are unlikely to agree about how poverty can be alleviated and hundreds of millions of poor people can enjoy at least a measure of what development experts call food security. Is capitalism the answer or the root of the problem? Can there be nutritional transformation without political transformation? Are the challenges to the global food system analogous to an engineering problem that one can expect to be largely solved by technical innovation, scientific innovation, and of course money, accompanied by some lashings of “good governance” and “transparency” (to use two “default” expressions favored by those in the mainstream for whom the concept of ideology is an intellectual atavism that stubbornly and incomprehensibly refuses to sign on to the humane global consensus that democratic capitalism is asserted to be)? Or is greater social justice what matters most, and with it the need to stop thinking of food as a commodity like any other and start thinking of it as a human right?

On the antiglobalization side of this “dialogue of the deaf,” as the French often call such mutual incomprehension, the conviction is strong that the food crisis is first and foremost the inevitable product of what one briefing paper from Food First, the think tank based in...

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Verlag
Simon & Schuster
Erscheinungsdatum
2016
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1439123888
ISBN 13 
9781439123881
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
432
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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