Still Hungry

In 1974, the first World Food Conference declared "the inalienable right to be free from hunger." Meeting at the just-concluded World Food Summit in Rome 22 years later, governments, international institutions, non-governmental organizations, and food producers themselves could hardly avoid the obvious. The number of hungry hasn't declined significantly. Today 809 million people go hungry today, including 200 million children under 5. In 1974, the estimate was 840 million.

Of course, there are more people now. The population of the world is growing. But in contrast to 1974, the Rome conference didn't propose eliminating hunger in the foreseeable future, only cutting the number by half in the next 20 years. Few believe it can meet that goal.

An indignant Fidel Castro asked delegates: "What kind of cosmetic solutions are we going to provide that in 20 years from now there would be 400 million instead of 800 million starving people? The very modesty of these goals is shameful."

The basic problem is that international conferences on hunger don't set the rules for global food production and distribution. The real power lies elsewhere.

The world's basic decisions about food production are increasingly made by transnational corporations and banks, and the governments which protect them, under the free-trade rules of the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs, the World Trade Organization, and trading blocks like NAFTA and the European Community. While some of the countries which suffer under those rules criticized them in Rome, they don't have the power to change them. Those countries that have that power have no intention of doing so.

The last 22 years have seen the growth of free trade, of structural adjustment programs to open up the economies of poor countries, and the increasing domination of agriculture worldwide by food-producing corporations. More food is produced than ever before, but as a profit-making commodity, not for the sake of feeding the hungry.

At the World Food Summit, the governments of the south--the poor and developing countries--attacked the unequal distribution of the world's wealth, funneled from the poor to the rich. The increasingly-conservative governments of industrially-developed countries, led by the United States, called for ending the old systems for distributing aid to poor countries. Instead, they touted the free operation of market forces, claiming that open economies, free trade, and austerity programs will lead to greater production.

In a related controversy, some environmental organizations, led by Lester Brown of the World Watch Institute, warned that the world's productive capacity is limited. The population is growing in developing countries, particularly China, he asserted. Plus, people are eating more meat as their income rises, which requires an increasing consumption of grain. He predicted an unbearable strain on food resources as a consequence. Brown's opposition in Rome came from an unusual alliance of the Vatican and underdeveloped countries, who said the problem isn't how many people live in the world, but the fact that some have the money to buy food while others don't.

Finally, the non-governmental organizations, with much closer links to rural communities and food producers, criticized the whole proceeding. The globalization of food production, both in terms of trade and the "green revolution" in production, has increased hunger and poverty, they say, instead of alleviating it.

One of the most eloquent denunciations of the world economic order came from Prime Minister Cheddi Jagan of Guyana. Jagan, a left-wing socialist, was the target of successful CIA destabiliations efforts in the 1960s, when he tried to implement wide-ranging land reform and nationalization of foreign enterprises. After years out of power, he was reelected in the early 1990s, and found the string of debt on Guyana wound so tightly that he couldn't reintroduce the kinds of reforms he had initiated years before, without devastating reprisals from the world financial community.

"A stop must be put to an unjust global economic order," Jagan said, "which robs the south of about $500 billion annually in unjust, non-equivalent trade; an order where the south finances the rich north with south-to-north capital outflow of $418 billion in the 1982-90 period as debt payments--a sum equal to six Marshall Plans...[which] did not even include outflows from royalties, dividends, repatriated profits and underpaid raw material."

Guyana paid $308 million in debt service from 1992-95. Those funds would otherwise have gone to poverty relief, rural development, agriculture, health and education, all of which would have reduced hunger and helped Guyanans eat more adequately. Jagan called the idea that privatization, free markets, and foreign investment would lead to development "a myth."

But that was the position taken by the United States in the negotiations around the Rome Declaration which preceded the conference. The declaration, in fact, was already agreed before the World Food Summit opened. As a result of U.S. insistence, point four of the declaration's plan of action is dedicated to the pursuit of "a fair and market-oriented world trade system." Market-orientation is the key. It leads to support for GATT and free trade, which caused riots among European farmers and even, in the declaration's own words, may cause "short term negative effects" on the world's poorest countries.

Market-orientation means continuing the process of dropping trade barriers, which in poor countries protect farmers from floods of cheap grain or other foodstuffs, marketed by some of the world's largest corporations, like the Cargill and Continental grain companies. Eliminating the barrier against corn imports into Mexico, following the implementation of NAFTA, led to the Zapatista rising of small indigenous corn farmers in Chiapas.

The U.S. essentially sees food production as a business, while most other countries, especially the poor ones, see farming as the means of subsistence for a large percentage of their population. In Rome, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman boasted to the assembled nations that the U.S. "is the leading supplier of food to the world," whose farmers "plant for world demand instead of for government programs." For the U.S., "the private sector is the great untapped frontier in the world war on hunger."

Under President Clinton, the Agriculture Department has been turned into a shill for U.S. exports, giving it such close ties to that private sector that they cost Glickman's predecessor his job. Ex-Secretary Mike Espy was linked to the huge chicken producer, Tyson Foods, almost as soon as the administration took office in 1992, and his brother was named as a recipient of bribes paid by California's huge Sun-Diamond growers marketing cooperative.

The U.S. believes that developed countries have no obligations to developing countries, based on the historic flow of wealth from south to north. Sounding as though he was plugging the recently-enacted welfare reform bill and talking about welfare moms, Glickman called on the leaders of poor countries to "enact the reforms necessary to pull their countries out of poverty and dependence."

Just to drive the point home, on the last day of the summit, the U.S. filed a clarification of its position on the final declaration. "The United States believes," it said, "that the attainment of any 'right to adequate food' or 'fundamental right to be free from hunger' is a goal or aspiration to be realized progressively that does not give rise to any international obligations nor diminish the responsibilities of national governments toward their citizens."

The U.S. approach was backed up by the World Bank, and the world's chief banker, James Wolfensohn, was a big figure in Rome. Much of the debt already saddling developing countries was arranged by the bank, which cooperates with the International Monetary Fund in designing the austerity programs it requires in order to qualify for, and repay, the loans. Another big chunk of third world loans have gone to import food itself. But despite the debt burden, the lack of any other financing led many countries to criticize the bank for reducing the money lent for agricultural projects. Wolfenson agreed to boost the amount in coming years.

He also said he was open to proposals for debt forgiveness, but not without conditions. "We'll look at how the country is run," he said, "and if after three years it seems OK, we'll look at forgiving some debt."

Wolfenson was asked to explain the bank's support for austerity programs, in light of the recent estimate by the International Labour Organization that the number of children working in the world has increased from 80 to 250 million. This estimate indicates a big increase in hunger and rural poverty, since most of those children live in the countryside, and are forced to work because their families can't eat without their labor. Although the increase parallels the same period which has seen the flowering of free trade and structural adjustment, Wolfenson denied any connection. Criticizing Malthus, Wolfenson called the World Bank "a cautious optimist" that food production would be able to meet the needs of a growing population.

The pope was even stronger. While saying that demographic growth could not be limitless, he asserted during his address on the conference's opening day that there was no reason to think that the stabilization of population growth, or even its reduction, would eliminate hunger. Instead, he called hunger a consequence of economic inequality between rich and poor, of refugees fleeing their homelands, and the "sometimes insupportable burden of the foreign debt."

The pope also listed economic embargoes as a cause of hunger, and during the summit he met with leaders of two states, Cuba and Iraq, which are subject to them. Over U.S. objections, a section of the Rome declaration declares that food must not be used as an instrument of economic or political pressure.

Missing from the formal debate of summit delegations were the voices of those people who produce the food--the world's rural populations. "We are the point of view closest to production," challenged Isabel Cruz, coordinator of Via Campesina, "and although our point of view isn't the only one, it is the missing element here. Communities of farmers and small producers see the globalization of food production from below. And from our point of view, this globalization of production is also producing a globalization of hunger."

Via Campesina is a coalition of farmers organizations and unions of rural workers from 60 countries, and helped coordinate the non-governmental organization conference which paralleled the summit. The NGO's criticized the summit process for giving them only four minutes in a five-day agenda.

Cruz directs the Mexican Association of Social Sector Credit Unions, and organizes credit unions for Mexican campesinos. IMF-mandated austerity policies, adopted by the Mexican government, have cut rural credit and restructured the country's economy to produce a more favorable climate for foreign investment and to pay its foreign debt. As a result, Mexican rural communities are shrinking as people find it more and more difficult to make a living on the land, and head for the cities looking for work, or leave for the U.S.

The lack of rural credit is one cause of this population shift. An even larger one is the instability of prices for agricultural products, as price controls and subsidies have been eliminated by NAFTA and economic reforms. "No one knows now when the season starts what the price will be for the products they're growing when they're harvested," Cruz explains. Further, it now competes against corn imported from the United States.

"Small Mexican farmers have low crop yields and high costs, compared to the high-tech farms run by huge agro-industrial companies. They can't compete," Cruz says, "and they're being driven off the land as a result. That's why one of the basic demands of Via Campesina is the right to produce. It makes no sense to talk about feeding the world through highly mechanized production, if its effect is to displace millions of rural families."

Via Campesina also proposes guaranteeing the right of access to land, as well as greater control over the marketing of food. It calls for the preservation of a diversified agriculture, in which rural communities grow a variety of crops, as opposed to dependence on a few crops grown by large producers for the world market.

"While we criticize neoliberal economic policies, it's much harder to propose alternatives," Cruz says. "In theory, for instance, we have very little disagreement with the general goals supported by the official Mexican government delegation, of ending hunger and preserving rural communities. The problem is the basic contradiction between having those goals on one level, and pursuing overall economic policies on another which makes it impossible to achieve them."

But while NGOs like Via Campesina condemned the growth of large-scale, export agriculture, neither they nor the official summit delegations had much to say about an even more voiceless group, the huge number of rural wage workers. Nevertheless, a few representatives of rural unions did show up at the summit, from one of the first agro-industries to transform rural life in Central and South America--bananas.

Gilberto Bermudez, who represented Costa Rica's Sitrap, the Union of Farm and Plantation Laborers, came "to let the world know our position, the banana workers position, about food security. We don't have any representation in these discussions, although we're certainly affected by the policies of globalization. When they discuss the problems of production and producers here, they're often talking about people who farm the land themselves, not workers. And when they talk about large-scale food production, they do it from the point of view of the companies who employ us, not from the point of view of people who work in the industry."

The first banana unions were organized in the violent strikes and labor upsurge of the 1930s. But five years ago, Costa Rica's largest producers, including Dole, Chiquita (United Fruit) and Del Monte, all refused to negotiate new contracts. The union became effectively illegal when the companies began firing activists, evicting them from company towns like those in U.S. coal fields decades ago, where they run the stores, own the houses, and supply the basic necessities of electricity and water to the workers. To replace the union, they brought in the "solidarista movement," which teaches workers to identify the company's welfare with their own. In addition, undocumented workers from Nicaragua, driven off the land, have gone to work in the Costa Rican plantations, where employers use their migrant status to threaten them.

Bermudez remembers "when we used to be a country which not only grew enough rice and beans to feed ourselves, but exported them. Now we import them. The land which used to be used for our food now grows bananas and coffee for export. Not only hasn't this improved the situation of people in the countryside, it's actually made our situation worse. Our standard of living has gone down."

Making common cause between peasants and wage laborers, Isabel Cruz condemned this kind of production for "transforming rural communities into sources of cheap labor, in which rural people are unorganized and poorly-equipped to fight for their rights as workers."

The World Food Summit did help to underscore one of those rights, despite U.S. reservations--the right to food. But it also made clear the political problem, for which it had no answer.

Where will the power come from to reshape the world's economic system, which is responsible for keeping that a right just on paper, a right unfulfilled in real life for almost a billion people?