Plenty of food - yet the poor are starving

[Briar]

This illustrates the real effect of the global Free Market - so widely accepted by political parties of both left and right in the West:


Plenty of food - yet the poor are starving

The two faces of Niger

Jeevan Vasagar in Tahoua, Niger

In Tahoua market, there is no sign that times are hard. Instead, there are piles of red onions, bundles of glistening spinach, and pumpkins sliced into orange shards. There are plastic bags of rice, pasta and manioc flour, and the sound of butchers' knives whistling as they are sharpened before hacking apart joints of goat and beef.
A few minutes' drive from the market, along muddy streets filled with puddles of rainwater, there is the more familiar face of Niger. Under canvas tents, aid workers coax babies with spidery limbs to take sips of milk, or the smallest dabs of high-protein paste.


....

This is the strange reality of Niger's hunger crisis. There is plenty of food, but children are dying because their parents cannot afford to buy it.

The starvation in Niger is not the inevitable consequence of poverty, or simply the fault of locusts or drought. It is also the result of a belief that the free market can solve the problems of one of the world's poorest countries.

...

Niger, the second-poorest country in the world, relies heavily on donors such as the EU and France, which favour free-market solutions to African poverty. So the Niger government declined to hand out free food to the starving. Instead, it offered millet at subsidised prices. But the poorest could still not afford to buy...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/famine/story/0,12128,1540214,00.html

[kennedy867]

1. I disagree

It's the 2 bit thugs and warlords in Africa that keep the people starving. They funnel most of the aid money that comes their way into thier own pockets to buy arms and live in the lap of luxury.

[expatriot]

3. two sides of the same coin.... it's a hand and glove....

first, the two bit thugs and warlords who rule Africa are essential to our post-colonial economic colonization of Africa... we need autocrats in power who are corrupt and detached from any (or at least very little) concern for their people so we (the West and now the Asian dragons) can contine to pay off the leadership to go into agreements with us that only exploit their people.

[greyl]

2. We are fueling the Third World population explosion.

Supplying them more food seems like the right thing to do at first glance, but it is absolutely wrong.

An increase in food results in an increase in population.

[expatriot]

4. birth control.... education and applications

Some people say that speaking of a population problem in Africa is inherently racist and they will ask "why do you think there are too many black people?" But it is all about sustainability. True, one thing that makes Africa economically UNsustainable is the systematic pillaging of its many resources by Western exploiters and its 2 bit autocrats but in order to change this it seems that a certain sustainability must be gained on the realities it has to deal with before making its own conditions (sustainability will lead to greater education of the people, etc.)

Food aid MUST be accompanied with massive birth control education and application. Unfortunately, all aid being at least partially funded by BushCo can not stress this and much of the Christian ministries doing food aid would rather hand out bibles than condoms and/or pills.

[K-W]

5. So your suggestion is that we starve africa to slow population growth?

You do realize you are advocating crimes against humanity?

[Briar]

6. So that's the DU's prescription?

Blame the victims, or let them starve?

Anything except blame the Free market?

[greyl]

8. I'm suggesting you take notice of the factual relationship

between food availability, population growth, famine and disease.

"You do realize you are advocating crimes against humanity?"

No I'm not.

The real "crime" is to fuel the population rate increase on this already over-populated planet. The real "crime" is destroying the community of life on earth causing our present period of mass extinction and guaranteeing that there will be even more millions starving in the future.

Can you show me the evidence that adding food to a population decreases it?
If you bring up birth control, please supply evidence that has ever worked to decrease population growth while food was added to the population.

[K-W]

10. Taking notice of the relationship is not the issue.

I freely admit the relationship, it isnt exactly profound.

The issue is your monstrous suggestion that we not feed people because then they would have more children. Which is indeed encouraging a crime against humanity.

I dont care if they have more children, they deserve food as much as anyone else on this planet. Starving poor people is not a solution to overpopulation. Especially when large portions of this world live in the lap of luxery with the material freedom to have as many children as they want who will all live lifestyles with a huge impact on the environment.

[greyl]

11. People ARE starving.

How do you think that came to be?
What evidence do you have that adding to their food supply will end the starvation of the group?

I understand your reaction. You are only repeating what your culture has told you your whole life.

[K-W]

12. Right and you want them to keep starving.

"What evidence do you have that adding to their food supply will end the starvation of the group?"

I see now you are retreating from your indefensible point. That is good. Now you are arguing an entirely different point which is whether or not we can feed the starving people. I will stick with the human rights groups on the ground who say more supply would in fact feed more starving people.

"I understand your reaction. You are only repeating what your culture has told you your whole life. "

Clearly you dont understand my reaction. And in fact it is you, not I that is pushing conventional wisdom here.

[greyl]

17. No I don't.

The fact that you haven't supplied any evidence for your position is clear.

The fact that you said you understood the relationship between an increase of food supply, population growth, famine, and disease -
doesn't mean you really understand.

I realize my position is a hard pill to swallow the first time one is exposed to it.

[K-W]

20. You should read your own posts.

You argued that because feeding the starving people would cause a population increase, we shouldnt give them more food.

"The fact that you haven't supplied any evidence for your position is clear."

The fact that you keep pretending I have some position that requires evidence is clear. My position is that we should let human rights groups on the ground determine what is and isnt needed. That position requires no evidence.

"The fact that you said you understood the relationship between an increase of food supply, population growth, famine, and disease -
doesn't mean you really understand."

What on earth are you talking about? Of course I understand it, this isnt complicated stuff. I just dont agree with you that the potential for population growth justifies letting people starve. Why dont you stop making silly comments about me not getting things and actually support your point?

"I realize my position is a hard pill to swallow the first time one is exposed to it."

What makes you think this is the first time ive been exposed to it? It isnt.

[greyl]

22. c'mon. Let me clarify something.

By no means am I saying that not sending food to areas where people are starving will solve "the problem". I'm saying that increasing food production is the problem itself.
Where is the evidence that putting more land under cultivation to feed the starving millions will lead to a reduction in the starving millions? There simply isn't any.


"I just dont agree with you that the potential for population growth justifies letting people starve."

1. It's not "potential" for population growth, it's a certainty.
2. I'm not in favor of "letting people starve". I'm even less in favor of continuing into a catastrophe led by faith-based ecology.

You asked me to support my point:

"It sometimes happens that a person in the midst of an LSD trip becomes convinced that human flight can be willed by one who knows how. More than one tripper has stepped off a roof top to prove that he or she has discovered the secret. The rest of us (or at least most of the rest of us) tend to assume that we're subject to the same laws as all other creatures. We can't by an act of will defy the law of gravity or the laws of aerodynamics, hydrodynamics, or thermodynamics. If we fire a gun at our head, an act of will won't keep the bullet out. If we drink a glass of cyanide, an act of will won't neutralize its lethal effects. If we hold our hand in a flame, an act of will won't keep it from burning. If we sink beneath the surface of the sea, an act of will won't let us breathe like a fish. If we step off the roof of a tall building, an act of will won't keep us afloat.

To most of us, this seems obvious to the point of banality. Nonetheless, the vast majority of people of our culture are firmly convinced that acts of will enable us to defy certain laws. There's nothing doubtful about these laws. They're well known—at least as well known as the laws I mentioned above. There's no doubt of their universality; they apply to every species of life on this planet...except our own (or so we tell ourselves). We know without doubt that every other species is subject to these laws, but we're sure we can defeat them...by acts of will."

http://www.ishmael.org/Education/Science/carry_capacity.shtml

Please check these links:
http://www.npg.org/forum_series/tightening_conflict.htm
http://www.ku.edu/~hazards/foodpop.pdf
http://www.potluck.com/offerings/increase.shtml

[K-W]

24. You want proof that giving food to starving people will feed them?

Right.

And you apparently dont know what the word potential means.

And again, you dont need to convince me of the dangers of population growth. We agree on the dangers.

The solution is not witholding food from starving populations.

[greyl]

25. No. And to get back onto the thread topic...

(btw, do you know what a strawman argument is?)

In the case of the op, the government of Niger is doing the wrong thing by keeping the available food under lock & key while those who can't afford to buy it are starving.

The fact that the food is under lock and key is a sign that the population is pursuing or taking part in unsustainable ecological strategies.

[K-W]

26. I do know what a strawman argument is.

And I also know that I havent made one. If I have misunderstood any part of your argument you have been free to clarify.

"The fact that the food is under lock and key is a sign that the population is pursuing or taking part in unsustainable ecological strategies."

That is nonsensical. It is a sign that the government is taking part in an economic design that places profit for the elite over feeding the starving. It is not a sign of the population doing anything, I would agree that capitalism is an usustainable ecological strategy, but that isnt really the main issue at play here.

[greyl]

27. The government is part of the population, obviously.

I never said that capitalism is an unsustainable ecological strategy. Straw man again. That makes about 9.

I think I'll bow out of this rather unproductive conversation now.
If you'd like to add anything, please include the evidence that increasing food production to feed the starving millions results in less people starving.

Keep in mind that we're talking globally, not as if the starving people were within an closed, independent system.

It's about what actually works to curtail the problem, not what we wish would work. It's about closing the wound as opposed to relying on a contaminated tourniquet.

[K-W]

28. I see you dont know what a straw man argument is after all.

I never said that capitalism is an unsustainable ecological strategy. Straw man again. That makes about 9.

First off, that couldnt possibly have been a straw man argument because I didnt argue against the point, I agreed with it. At the best it was a misunderstanding, but it wasnt really that either.

Im not sure what strategy you were talking about since you didnt specify, but the only real strategy discussed in this article was free market capitalism, so I just went with that.

If you'd like to add anything, please include the evidence that increasing food production to feed the starving millions results in less people starving.

Increasing food production? What the heck are you talking about. Did you even read the article? The issue isnt production it is distribution.

Why do you keep asking me to prove points I never made?

It's about what actually works to curtail the problem, not what we wish would work. It's about closing the wound as opposed to relying on a contaminated tourniquet.

Proof by analogy eh? And an analogy that doesnt make any sense at that.

What actually works to curtail the problem is aid based on effectiveness of feeding the population rather than effectiveness at enforcing neo-liberal order.

[HamdenRice]

36. How about all of demographic history?

You wrote: "Can you show me the evidence that adding food to a population decreases it?"

Isn't that the history of the entire developed world???

[oscar111]

16. wow. What would you have recommended during the Irish potato famine?

curious, my esteemed correspondent.

i recommend zero hunger, globally.

[greyl]

21. That was 150 years ago.

I think the human population has at least quadrupled since then, hasn't it? Yet hundreds of millions of humans have starved to death since then as well.

Anyway, I would have recommended not locking people up for hunting or fishing like was done, for starters. Secondly, to send food and seed to diversify the crops. It would have been too late to mention the evolutionarily unstable practice of depending too heavily on one agricultural food source.

[HamdenRice]

29. This is just plain incorrect ...

Please try to read about population, public welfare and child survival rates so that you will better understand progressive and scientifically and economically proven approaches to demographics.

Giving the poor food does not increase population or contribute to overpopulation. This Malthusian idea has been shown to be false many years ago.

The greatest contributor to reduced population growth is child survival rates. When child survival rates are high, parents, especially mothers, chose to have fewer children because they do not need to "insure" against likely deaths by disease or starvation.

So providing a sure supply of food aid during economic crises-- as well as infant and mother health care, clean water, education and birth control -- is one way of reducing population growth.

[Lindacooks]

34. Yep, you're 100% correct.

Thanks for that eloquent and concise response.

[Lindacooks]

33. Actually, when an organism is under stress, population INCREASES.

It's a biological response to the possibility of extinction. The birth rate increases when people are starving.

[HamdenRice]

35. Thanks Linda -- Don't Malthusians drive you crazy??

In addition to just being wrong -- the arrogance! "Let 'em die off". When did they become god, deciding on life and death for hundreds of thousands??

[Lindacooks]

37. Yep, I agree totally.

I don't understand that mindset. Above all, it's about as 'unchristian' as you can get.

[Deja Q]

7. Christianity is about helping the needy. Not selling them into deep dept.

No wonder Jesus cries.

[wli]

9. Third World austerity coming to a city near you

You can already see Bushler's "globalization" plans for America in action.

[oscar111]

13. 12 mill. hungry in US: during Irish famine, plenty: during '3O's, plenty

the info on our Great Depression is from a DU post, so i seek any who have some source in an article, for better validation.

Irish famine.. plenty of food there, just pricey. Seen on PBS special.

The 12 million figure is today, in the USA. But bush's newest Budget {in action now, i think} slates another cut to food stamps, and forsees the 12 to rise to 13 million hungry. 13 Billion would end all US hunger. Taxcuts for the rich , three of them, totalled 35O billion, more than enough to end all poverty, hmlessness and hunger.

Poverty 3OO bllion to end it.
Hmlssness 4 billion to end all
hunger 13 billion

Of course, ending poverty would end the other two as well. I just folded them out if one wants to tackle them independently.

WPA jobs program would end much of all three, for those able physically to work. It would cost NOTHING. It would ADD to the GDP. It harnesses the labor power of those jobless now UNharnessed.
Only ideology, RW, stops us from getting the WPA underway again.
See my sig.

PS ending poverty also ends street crime and burglary. And half of the drug scene.
That saves us tax money in the area of police. Not to mention, less victim pain.

[oscar111]

14. RECCOMMEND FOR GREATEST PAGE buttn at bott of orig post. thanks

xxx

[wli]

15. very, very interesting

I suspect effective currency circulation in such a state of affairs would vastly reduce class disparity. For the ultra-rich to continue to exist as a class they have to starve the masses, otherwise they'd have to pay very high prices for labor for currency to circulate at all.

[phantom power]

18. Imagine how bad it's going to get when there really isn't enough food.

PARIS - Drought around the world threatens to leave its mark on global grain trade flows this season, offering welcome new opportunities for some countries expecting large harvests, analysts said on Friday. Against a backdrop of declining world wheat stocks, bad weather has hit world production this year and will raise trading volumes as countries increase their import needs. "Globally, you can't get away from the fact that stocks are declining," AgriNews analyst James Dunsterville said. "We can still produce enough wheat around the world, but the market is becoming more susceptible to regional losses."

The International Grains Council (IGC) sees global wheat production in 2005/06 at 608 million tonnes, down from 624.5 million last season. World wheat stocks are forecast to fall to 133 million tonnes, down five million from the end of 2004/05. Trade is seen rising to 109 million from 106 million tonnes.

From the plains in the US midwest to the wheat prairies of Australia, water shortages have hit. Argentina is dry and India is mulling a wheat import-duty cut to combat domestic shortages. The US Department of Agriculture said severe drought in Illinois and Missouri will hit the corn harvest there.

In Europe, Spain and Portugal are suffering their worst drought on record and in the major wheat importing countries of north Africa, much lower harvests are expected. Drought in Morocco has caused the crop to fall more than 50 percent from last season, leading to a 33 percent rise in grain import needs to near five million tonnes. In Algeria, the crop is seen at 2.5 million tonnes, against 4.0 million last year.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x27882

[SeanQuinn]

19. Doesn't this hurt the farmers enough for them to lower prices? nt

[sandnsea]

23. Can the poor afford computers?

No. A true free market would work the same for food, water, electricity, housing, correct?

The reason it doesn't in the US is because we subsidize food, power, housing, health care, to the poor and poorish. Along with charities and soup kitchens, etc. But in third world countries, any assistance would 'hinder their development out of poverty through the free market'. :sarcasm:

It doesn't make any sense. It's our social programs that keep the US from full depressions or masses of people in poverty. But right wing denial to these economic realities is what stops third world countries from being allowed to implement the exact same things we already have.

[HamdenRice]

30. Very interesting OP -- and very ignorant, inhumane responses -- Pt 1

First of all, I would like to congratulate the OP for finding this article, although the suggestion that this is something new is simply incorrect.

The economist who most firmly established the fact that famine is not the result of scarcity of food is Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen. Sen is originally from India, but has done most of his work in the UK. His field is development economics.

He showed several decades ago, in an article that is taught in every Economic Development 101 type course, that famine and hunger are not the result of there not being enough food, but of the inability of the starving people to purchase what food is available.

He showed that during the Irish potato famine, Ireland continued to export substantial amounts of food to England. The effect of the potato blight was to destroy the incomes of Irish farmers, which meant that they could not purchase the other foods that were available. He then showed that the same conditions -- abundance of food, but collapsed incomes -- existed during the Bengal famine, the Sahelian (African Sahel) famine of the 1970s, and the Ethopian and Somali famines of the 1980s and 1990s. This is now almost universally accepted by economists, development specialists and developing country agriculture and poverty amelioration administrators.

Sen created a useful analytic terminology that most development economists have adopted. Everyone, Sen says, is born with and acquires assets. These assets may be just your body which enables you to work, or it may include land inherited from the family or an education.

We also have entitlements, such as the right to receive food in an advance welfare state economy. Some entitlements are acquired by exchanging assets. For example when we work, we trade an asset, our own labor, for an entitlement, the purchasing power of our pay. These entitlements Sen called exchange entitlements.

Sen was the first to demonstrate that famines occur when entitlement exchanges collapse. The reason this is important is that it helps economists distinguish the effects of economic crisis between people who seem to be the same but aren't. For example, during a drought, a small land owner may be able to pledge his land and buy food; a sharecropper may have less but his rent will be excused by the failure of the crop; a rent paying tenant may be plunged into insolvency; and a hired agricultural worker may starve.

Sen's analysis helps us predict how entitlement crises will affect different kinds of people who are at risk of famine.



Famines are the result of entitlement exchange crises.

[K-W]

31. Thanks for that post. EOM

[HamdenRice]

32. Very interesting OP -- and very ignorant, inhumane responses -- Pt 2

Once you understand the modern economics of famines, development and demographics, it should become obvious that food aid does not cause population increase which lead to additional famines. This idea is the hard-hearted legacy of the economic philosophy of Thomas Malthus who proposed this over two centuries ago.

Malthus believed that every species produces more offspring than it can support and uses up its resources until its population reaches the limits of those resources.

Every modern economist and every student who has passed econ 101 will tell you that we know now that Malthus was wrong. If Malthus had been correct, England's population would never have exceeded what it was in 1800, but of course it did.

Indeed, any reasonable person who can (and more importantly actually does) read and reason can see that his ideas have no application to economic realities of the developing world. For example, while several African countries are among the few areas of the world that experience famine, Africa in general is the least populated of the world's continents. Africa has the lowest concentration of population per square mile of any continent. Moreover, most of the countries in Africa that are the most densely populated -- Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, for example -- are the ones that never experience famine.

Famines have regularly occurred in the least populated countries of the least populated continent -- Niger, Mali, Somalia, Congo.

The African historian John Ilife in his magisterial work on African poverty from the ground level -- The African Poor -- noted that over the last centuries, the most likely predictor of whether a person in Africa is poor is that he comes from a small family, while the most likely predictor of prosperity is that he comes from a large extended family. This is because Africa -- particularly rural Africa under conditions of little capital -- has a chronic labor shortage, and the best way for anyone to mobilize the labor to create prosperous agricultural enterprises is a big family. This gives lie to the notion that Africans have too many children.

Even an institution as heartless as the World Bank noted in its famous critique of African development -- Sustainable Development in Sub-Saharan Africa -- that one problem that plauges Africa is small populations.

Meanwhile the regions of the world with the highest population density -- Western Europe, Japan, China, India -- are now the least likely to have famines.

Any fourteen year old should be able to conclude that there is little relationship between population density and famine.

Malthus looked at the animal kingdom to draw his conclusions, and of course the reason his work does not apply to people is that people make tools -- which we call capital. So the amount of food that a unit of land produces is related to the labor and capital that is applied to it.

In capital poor Africa, this means that great amounts of labor must be deployed to produce crops. It is the absence of capital and labor, applied to agriculture, that leads to chronic low levels of productivity per acre and resulting rural poverty in Africa.

As I mentioned in post 29, when famine does occur, providing food has only a positive affect on moderating population growth. People in poor regions like Africa produce many children for several reasons. Obvliously, lack of modern birth control is one reason; but as Germaine Greer has pursuasively argued, African women have traditionally deployed a vast array of means of birth control -- although many of these systems have collapsed with urbanization and the loss of traditional medicine. Still, African women have more control over their reproductive lives than we generally credit them.

The main reasons they have many children are: the need for a labor force; old age insurance -- ie someone to take care of them as they age; and most important, insurance against the likelihood that other children will not survive.

One of the surest ways to reduce birth rates in Africa and other developing countries is to make sure that children survive. When mothers and fathers know that there is a near certainty that their infants will survive, they use birth control to prevent further pregnancies. Other ways to reduce population rates is greater authority for womenn and educational opportunities for girls; flexible labor markets that enable farmers to "hire rather than sire" a workforce, and old age pensions.

One way to convince parents in poor developing countries that their children will survive is to give them iron clad entitlements to food aid during economic crises -- the famous Chinese iron rice bowl.

Hence not just food aid, but the widespread knowledge that food aid is forthcoming during tough economic times, is one way to actually reduce population growth.

The purpose of population growth moderation in the low population areas of Africa, it should be remembered, are different from the rationale in crowded countries of Asia -- namely to ensure that the population growth does not outstrip capital formation. But assuming capital formation can be kept in line with population growth, we should expect African country populations to continue growing for some time.

The challenge is not population at all -- it's capital formation.

[HamdenRice]

38. Linda! What happened to the Malthusians? We were ready to take them on

with logic and facts and they just disappeared! I'll take them on with one hand tied behind my back -- no! with one hand behind my back and my legs in shackles! I'll bite their ankles off! ....