The political economy and the global food crisis

• The solutions offered by the delegates at the Rome food summit confirmed a continuing faith in interventions that have failed to address the fundamental cause of food emergencies.
• Over the last 50 years, technology has increased world food production by 30 per cent, yet the number of hungry people has continued to grow.
• The State offers little, if any, social protection measures that would assist those trapped in poverty.

In the latter part of the 18th century, hungry masses poured into the streets of Paris demonstrating against a shortage of bread – their staple. Informed of this, Queen Marie Antoinette offered: ‘‘Let them eat cake’’.

Who would have thought that in June 2008, world leaders meeting in Rome to discuss the international food crisis would give us a 21st century version of Antoinette’s attitude?

The solutions offered by the delegates, far from being radical departures from the past, confirmed a continuing faith in interventions that have failed to address the fundamental cause of food emergencies.

Reduced to their bare minimum, all the solutions translated into one – increase food production.

Increasing food production will admittedly have the effect of making food both cheaper and available. But cheaper and available for whom?

For the agricultural boards and the upper classes, yes. But poor people will still be unable to afford the food.

Over the last 50 years, technology has increased world food production by 30 per cent, yet the number of hungry people has continued to grow.

Even the assumption that increased food production would make food cheaper is not incontestable.

Food prices are at the mercy of other internal and external factors. In effect, the poor would only be exchanging a situation in which there was no money and no food, for one in which there was food but no money to buy it.

The delegates, like Queen Antoinette and her class more than 200 years ago, failed to seize the historic opportunity to address the fundamental cause of hunger – poverty, and its supporting philosophical and systemic structures.

The way in which our societies are structured creates and maintains poverty, trapping generations in a vicious grip.

The State offers little, if any, social protection measures that would assist those trapped in poverty.

The neo-liberal philosophy that informs this structural inequity argues that the market, not the government, is the ‘‘great equaliser’’. If poor people were not benefiting, it was their own fault, owing to their penchant for self-destructive behaviour.

Neo-liberalism, a product of privileged elites, and supported by conservative religious and social movements, cannot see that the poor are structurally disadvantaged by the system.

So, while the upper classes can easily access credit, health and other services, poor people are largely left to fend for themselves.

In the 1980s and 1990s, neo-liberalism, now backed by the formidable intellectual and monetary resources of the Bretton Woods institutions, would drive the process of State divestiture from social provisioning in Africa and elsewhere. Services such as education and health became even harder to access for the poor.

In Bangladesh, Mohammed Yunus started a micro-finance scheme that provided small amounts of money to the poor without security.

His experiment was derided as an idealistic gesture which would soon collapse in the face of economic and behavioural reality.

But he proved everyone wrong. Poor borrowers had a payback rate equal or even better than traditional borrowers. Mr Yunus’ experiment is now considered a model for poverty reduction.

African governments will have to assume the role of guarantor of a minimum standard of living for their citizens by instituting safety net measures.

The most effective way of doing this is by making available small cash grants to the poor, especially older people who are highly represented among the poor.

In a letter to the Financial Times, Stephen Kidd of HelpAge International, an organisation that is at the forefront of advocating for the establishment of national social pension schemes in the developing world, argues that “putting cash directly into the hands of poor people – on a regular and predictable basis – is the best way to reduce poverty”.

The provision of safety nets, especially social pensions and cash grants for citizens is not only a rights issue, it also makes economic sense. People who are healthy, educated and well-fed contribute to economic activity.

The growing acceptance of this argument in development circles has not meant absence of resistance. This resistance is once again cast in the language of cost-effectiveness and aid dependency.

Yet studies show that the cost of social protection, including non-contributory and other cash grants, would amount to less than 2 per cent of GDP.

The solutions offered by the delegates in Rome, therefore, amounted to telling poor people who have no money and no state assistance: “We will make food available so that you can buy it.”

In 1775, Antoinette offered a similarly impossible solution to the food crisis in France.

Mr Ngugi is a journalist working in Namibia.