The Paradox of Plenty and Scarcity in World : Experts, Meeting at UCLA, See Self-Sufficiency as Long-Term Solution to Problems of Hunger

World hunger; famine; starvation; malnutrition. Neither acts of God nor fate nor nature. Acts of man.

That essentially was the message at the unsettling conference on ending hunger--”Feeding the World: The Paradox of Plenty and Scarcity”--held at UCLA last weekend. No pictures of emaciated mothers and children listlessly holding out their hands. Just words: the politics of hunger; food aid--a cure worse than the disease; the food empire--its international clout; grain merchants--a world awash in grain; no quick fix.

The paradox? As conference participants stressed repeatedly, there is more than enough food to feed everyone. In a famine, they said, rural farmers die first. Bureaucrats, military and urban classes do not die of hunger.

It Can Be Done

It was unsettling because as speaker after speaker made clear, ending hunger need not be a wishful dream for the future. It can be done. Now. If. . . .

“It’s meaningless to want to get rid of hunger unless we know where it’s coming from,” keynote speaker Susan George said. “If our analysis is not right, our actions will just be scattershot.”

An agricultural economist who has written “How the Other Half Dies: The Real Reasons for World Hunger,” George cautioned that if hunger is attributed to acts of God or natural catastrophes, people will react to it on a case-by-case basis, giving to relief efforts. Ad infinitum. If hunger is attributed to a belief that poor countries are incapable of feeding themselves, because they are backward, overpopulated, corrupt, the solutions will tend to perpetuate the status quo dependency between donor and recipient.

Like almost all participants at the conference, she saw self-sufficiency rather than dependency as a necessary long-term solution to hunger.

Her bias, she said, was that “somewhere, someone--many someones--are responsible for this state of affairs.” As she described them the “many someones” have one thing in common--power.

Calling climate and overpopulation aggravating factors, she mentioned as causes the inequalities between the nations of the north and south, between urban and rural people, between people of different status living in the same village, between men and women.

George lives in France and she mentioned a New Year’s Eve toast that the French say in jest: “It is better to be rich and in good health than poor and ill.” A more accurate wording, she said, would be, “It is better to be a Northern upper-class urban person than it is to be a person from a poor country, black or colored, and living in a rural area.”

Matter of Justice

Righting the balance, she contended, is not a matter of largess or charity but justice. She depicted food as a basic right, as have any number of international covenants and other legal documents, and said of the right to food, “no human right has been so frequently and spectacularly violated in recent times as the right to food.” Other violations of human rights, such as torture, arbitrary imprisonment, and even war, combined are second to hunger “in the toll it takes on human life,” she said.

Righting the balance, however, means that “if someone is going to get more, someone else is going to get less.” She called it absurd to think the solutions would come from interaction between the commercial and financial elite at the centers of power in the countries that help cause the problems and their Third World counterparts at the center. More effective, she said, would be the action taken by concerned people on the periphery of power in both countries.

What to do?

--Push at the center of this country to change the structure of national and international aid bureaucracies, she said. Get them off one-year corporate-style budgets that create a “get rid of the money or else” imperative that does little to promote long-term development.

--Ask the peasants what they think is important when planning development projects. Consult women separately.

--Resist the temptation of institutionalizing food aid, limiting it to emergencies, because it discourages local peasants from competing to produce food. Helping to transfer food within a region would be more important.

Warning Signs

--Learn to recogonize the signs of a pending famine and prepare--the point being, she said, “to keep the people in the village” and prevent an outmigration. Advance warnings include prices of grain rising as prices of animals go down; peasants selling their assets, animals, jewelry and beginning to conserve energy, doing only the work necessary for the family unit.

--Encourage governmental or private programs that extend credit and loans to peasants and small groups who, although their repayment rates are good, borrow sums thought too insignificant for banks to bother with.

--Recognize governments’ self-interest in their aid programs as legitimate but start with what is needed in a country rather than “we’ve got the vaccine; therefore you’ve got the disease.”

--Refuse to work with governments that are actively preventing aid or development from reaching the people. Put more conditions on aid when dealing with a place like Ethiopia that was bombing its own country.

--Recognize external national debt as a factor contributing to hunger and work out innovative ways of reducing the debt such as allowing local currency to be put into development.

The conference was the third annual one on world affairs sponsored by UCLA’s International Student Center, Office of International Students and Scholars and African Development Institute. It was free and open to the public, and held on a Friday and Saturday for maximum participation of students and community. The speakers were impressive--experts in hunger and agriculture, government and private development officials, prize-winning journalists on the topic from major newspapers, scholars from UCLA.

And relatively few came. Workshops averaged about 20 in the audience; major addresses about 50. Speakers mentioned it among themselves, slightly baffled, and observed they were often each other’s audience.

At the workshop on “The Hunger/Compassion Networks,” about 30 came to hear Ann Critteden, former New York Times reporter; Anselm Rothschild, director of the End Hunger Network, and Steve Commins, coordinator of the African Development Institute, discuss the pros and cons of the recent wave of mass-media events raising consciousness and funds for hunger.

One student at the workshop, Tracey Chew, a senior at UCLA majoring in nutrition, listened to the talk about the difficulty of translating all the consciousness-raising that the media provide into action and spoke out in frustration.

“I feel like you’re speaking to me. When you’re studying you can’t vote, participate or get involved. Now I want to get involved . . . . Some students feel the same way. They aren’t here. (The conference) was publicized in the Bruin. We don’t recognize we have the potential to do anything.”

Looking for Reasons

That was about as close as anyone could come to explaining the disappointing turnout. Feelie Lee, the conference director, mentioned the recent anti-apartheid activity on campus that had taken a lot of people’s attention and energy. Other than that, it seemed to be perhaps not enough advance publicity. And burnout.

For those who came, burnout was about the last thing they felt. The indicators were there, in great detail, that hunger is not an insurmountable problem, but that it will require great work and perhaps disturbing changes to end it.

Jean Mayer, president of Tufts University and nutritionist, spoke of “the spectacle of hunger reappearing here in a country that doesn’t know what to do with its food excesses.”

For this country he had hard facts--and hard words, calling some government policies and attitudes “stupid” and “idiotic.” The malnutrition that existed in parts of the country in the 1930s made those areas resemble what we see of the Third World today, he said. Specific food programs such as school lunch, meals on wheels, feeding the elderly, pregnant women, infants and children, food stamps helped eliminate malnutrition over the years. In Appalachia, in an area where employment and the economy did not change but where food programs were introduced, malnutrition disappeared in 10 years.

Reappearance of Hunger

And now nationwide, the reappearance of hunger. The programs are being cut to save money, he said, “and it is very expensive to cut them.” Every dollar taken out of nutrition programs causes an increase of $3 in health expenses, starting with the birth of poorly developed babies, he said.

Internationally, the advances in agriculture are such, he said, citing the green revolution that has made famine almost a thing of the past in Asia, that there need be no hunger. The technology either exists now or could in 10 years, Mayer said, saying that the same corporations making harmful herbicides and pesticides are also developing the seeds that will eventually eliminate the need for them.

‘What we lack is good will here and abroad, and the political organization to get it done,” he said. “We are doing very well in natural sciences,” Mayer concluded. “We are doing very poorly in social sciences, and even worse in terms of political organization.”