Editorials
commonweal THE QUALITY OF MERCY DESPITE THE SEASON and Pope John Paul II's recent exhortation, chances are that stagflation will strain the quality of mercy in Washington and around many U.S....
...The 1973-74 "scarcity crisis" illustrates the justice of this demand...
...assistance thus hinges on internal agrarian reform within third-world nations...
...That mutuality of interest is spelled out in the areas of energy, commodities and trade, food and agriculture, inflation control, financing of projects, technological innovations, ground and space communications, and arms control...
...banks and U.S...
...aid efforts are linked to basic agrarian reform, to land-to-tiller programs which release the energies of rural majorities in third-world nations, there's little chance the mercies of miracle seeds, irrigation projects, and scaled-down technology will benefit the hungry or cap the exploding well of third-world revolution...
...From 1945 until the seventies, the U.S...
...In the Philippines, where production doubled within the decade, the average consumption of grain has in fact sunk to the lowest level in all Asia, with the single exception of Pol Pot's Kampuchea...
...When trade deficits, debt service, and repatriated profits are computed, it turns out the third world gives back to the first world billions more than it gets...
...The criticism of current aid performance, no monopoly of conservatives, is crucial if we are to understand how additional funding can be made effective—and equally important to expose the fallacy of those willing enough to finance autocrats while sneering at "social reformers...
...The specifics of reorganization are perhaps less important than the argument, again geopolitical and economic, for the mutual stake both developed and developing nations have in restructuring the global economic system so the poor get a better shake...
...Nonetheless, after assessing the "new aid" (agricultural/rural) of the seventies, it's possible to understand where the snags in development lie, why, for instance, the laudable efforts of World Bank and U.S.-AID assistance too often don't reach the hungry...
...tribution of land and landCommonweal: 708 use green-revolution technology has quickened the pace of rural unemployment...
...it wreaks havoc with their national planning—and malnutrition worsens...
...Of these numbers, 60 to 90 percent subsist in rural areas and are increasingly landless, unable to pay for an adequate diet even when food is available...
...The lesson is clear...
...The threat from malnutrition, the Commission said, was as real as any from "advancing armies or nuclear 19 December 1980: 707 arsenals...
...19 December 1980: 709...
...The fact that it is not has to do with its land tenure system, and with political choices...
...In my the context of an unjust disother life,I was a Republican...
...In 1979, the Year of the Child, UNICEF estimates some twelve million children died of hunger...
...The Linowitz Commission correctly cautioned, however, that neither expanded food production nor increased aid, by themselves, will materially change the status of the hungry...
...On moral grounds, if no others, developing nations deserve some voice in this matter...
...Supposedly "vital" alliances with autocrats and oligarchies may provide allies for the moment, but in the long term they guarantee hordes of enemies for our children...
...The encouraging note there is that in both the first and the third worlds, agricultural and rural development is finally getting the attention denied it in the fifties and sixties...
...The stress, however, on what third-world nations must do for themselves is onesided...
...the main beneficiaries have been bureaucrats, local landed elites, and bankers, including U.S...
...Effective multilateral and U.S...
...with Canada), as the world's major surplus food producer, had kept international market prices relatively stable by releasing reserve stocks during periods of shortage...
...The problem is not too many people...
...both liquidated those reserves and reduced domestic grain production...
...Figures tell the story...
...The reason is that in "That's a coincidence...
...Unless U.S...
...corporations which in effect get subsidies (from Export-Import Bank and the federally supported Overseas Private Investment Corporation) to move their plants ("runaway shops") to foreign cheap labor sites...
...The strength of the President's Commission report lies in its powerful geopolitical and economic backing, pesuadive we hope even for "realists,* for its principal recommendation, that the U.S...
...must surrender to guarantee equity at the level of international trade...
...Yet for some 800 million people around the world, about half of them children under five, there won't be much dinner at all...
...And who bears the greatest burden of price instability due to these unilateral American decisions...
...Green-revolution countries like India and the Philippines are classic...
...On top of that it's proved such a bonanza for feudal and semi-feudal landlords — and small farmers— that this "aid" has hardened resistance to land reform...
...standpoint, must be linked to social reform—the very thing to which some of Mr...
...Count the minutes...
...The other piece in this frustrating picture of U. S. foreign aid is that in providing military assistance to unjust political economies such as those in the Philippines or Haiti, the U.S...
...Nor is the problem technological...
...Our left hand, which knows mercy, does not seem to know what the right hand, which knows none, is up to...
...The quality of the mercy, the kind of development we assist, is the thing...
...In both, food production during the last decade has outpaced population growth, but per capita food grain consumption has declined...
...Bangladesh, for instance, has cropland and potential fisheries second to none in the world...
...Neither enhanced food production within developing nations, nor vastly increased aid from outside, will suffice, unless sharecroppers, tenants-at-will, and the growing ranks of the rural unemployed are given a stake in the land, in sum, become owner-cultivators...
...They also indicate why development assistance, from the U.S...
...it could not only feed its own people, but could become a major food exporter...
...The Linowitz report, unfortunately, all but ignores what the U.S...
...In the early seventies, the U.S...
...As each one passes, twenty-one children die somewhere of starvation...
...Something's badly wrong...
...Nor the scarcity of arable land...
...Green-revolution technology is available...
...champions social systems which undercut the effectiveness of economic aid...
...The strengths and weaknesses in two recent blue-ribbon reports, that of the President's Commission on World Hunger headed by Sol Linowitz, and of Willy Brandt's Independent Commission on International Development Issues, illustrate the nature of the ineffectiveness...
...dinner tables this Christmas...
...That is, the commission omits any call for "structural" reforms regarding international monetary policy, freer access to Western markets, or the stabilization of remunerative raw material and commodity prices...
...too often, however, as in the showcase Mexican state of Sonora, the mechanization that has gone with miracle seeds has accelerated rural unemployment...
...Frances Moore Lappe, for instance, argues in Aid as Obstacle (Institute for Food & Development Policy, 1980) that, given landholding patterns in most of die poorest third-world nations, lots more money and technology does more harm than good...
...Of course it's the lowest-income nations...
...And IMF (International Monetary Fund) fiscal austerity constraints, which grind hardest on the poorest borrowers, have resulted in dramatic price rises for basic commodities without corresponding wage increases— setting off "food riots" in Peru, Turkey, and Egypt...
...Further, debt service virtually compels national planners to divert agricultural production from the domestic food market to cash export crops...
...The strength of the Brandt Commission report lies precisely in the area of envisioning the democratization of the international economic order...
...Yet U.S...
...Second, most multilateral and unilateral loan assistance stumbles over banker's logic...
...Finally, in case after case of U.S.-AID programs promoting the green revolution, Lappe's studies show that the povertystricken get almost no "trickle down...
...But somehow, despite acknowledging the internal social and economic reforms needed within developing nations, the Brandt report's sweeping schemes for investment in development tend to minimize the very real difficulties in existing programs of aid...
...The undernourished world today holds 70 percent of the world's population, will have 80 percent by die year 2000, and 90 percent by 2050...
...It proposes vastly expanded funding for development through international levies on trade (especially arms traffic), increased lending through international financial institutions such as the World Bank, a Commodity Fund to stabilize prices, and a World Development Fund with decision-making "more evenly shared" between lenders and borrowers...
...Without such social reforms, the bitter fact is that green-revolution technology actually exacerbates poverty...
...Reagan's foreign policy advisors would now have us be blind...
...the landless or near landless, who comprise 60 to 90 percent of the rural poor, do not qualify as credit-worthy risks...
...But before you merely feel guilty over the turkey, know that starvation, and the far larger problem of chronic malnutrition for millions, will not be solved by throwing money, or dumping surplus food...
...during a period of world-wide shortfall, prices shot up (in 1974, nearly four times above 1968 levels), and have fluctuated widely since...
...First off, despite the welcome attention to rural development, industrialization—which benefits an urban, frequently westernized elite—still gets most of the dollars, about three quarters, for instance, of Wprld Bank loans...
...The per capita caloric consumption in Brazil stands at about what doctors recommend for a healthy diet, but given the inequitable income distribution in that nation.nearly half the country suffers malnutrition...
...foreign assistance remains at 0.22 percent of GNP, way under the 0.7 percent to which we are officially committed...
...make the eradication of hunger the centerpiece of its relations with the developing nations for the 1980s...
Vol. 107 • December 1980 • No. 23
