Why the third world goes hungry

...During the 1960s and 1970s, Western banks and governments encouraged third-world countries to borrow billions of dollars to make up the difference between their export incomes and their import expenses...

...Famine exists now, when there is food enough to feed the world...

...Structural adjustment programs rest on the theory that countries adopting them will be able to work their way out of debt through economic growth that will generate income to finance development and pay off debts, and, not incidentally, prevent banks in the rich countries from collapsing...

...Subsistence farmers who cannot afford these increased costs are being displaced by commercial growers...

...The very profitability of third-world commercial crops has hurt rather than helped the poor...

...The World Bank has come to play an even more important role than the IMF in directing the development policies of Southern governments...

...In line with this mandate, the IMF extends loans at close-to-market interest rates to countries faced with balance-of-trade and payments deficits...

...Every year since 1986, according to an estimate by the Overseas Development Council, at least $43 billion in net financial resources has been transferred from the global South to the North...

...Its export emphasis, however, is unlikely to change...

...Typically, countries which borrowed once soon had to borrow again...

...As interest rates soared, debtor nations were pressed by banks and international lending agencies to take on new loans just to keep up the interest payments on their previous loans...

...In 1987, low- and middle-income governments paid out $102 billion in interest alone 3.4 times the total development assistance from all aid-giving nations...

...This means cuts in education, health care, nutrition programs, agricultural extension services, and environmental monitoring...

...Efforts by farmers to resist displacement from their land, to gain access to land through land reform or, when that fails, through land occupations, are frequently met with repression that precipitates an escalating cycle of violence...

...Few would choose to farm such unfriendly fields if they had other ways to survive...

...But those who need this food and who do most of the work of producing it are often not the ones who consume it...

...Today, about a quarter of the Bank's loans to the South are "sectoral adjustment" or "structural adjustment" loans...

...The purpose of the IMF, as established in its charter, is to promote the continuation and expansion of international trade according to "free market" principles...

...8. Militarization and war...

...As already noted, development and development education agencies in the U.S...

...In addition, some environmental organizations, such as the Environmental Defense Fund, are coming to recognize that saving the natural environment is impossible if it entails destroying the livelihoods of the people who inhabit rain forests and other threatened areas...

...Tremendous sums are accumulated in the North at the expense of the South through the international drug trade...

...others put the South's net loss higher...

...In Amazonia and other moist tropical regions, thin rainforest soils that are too frequently replanted quickly lose their fertility...

...Unless we understand why today's surplus does not reach the needy, and until we do something about it, we will not be able to avert more widespread starvation in any future context of scarcity...

...In many parts of the third world, land, wealth, and political power are concentrated in the hands of an elite...

...The incentive to conserve dwindles as the distance increases between those who produce food and those who control food-producing resources...

...More than enough food is grown to feed everyone on earth...

...They had inherited political and economic structures established to facilitate the transfer of raw materials to the colonial powers or other industrialized countries...

...But worldwide competition among exporters of grains, other foods, minerals, and fibers has resulted in even lower prices for these commodities, and thus in lower incomes for many farmers (including some in the United States), and a decline rather than an increase in the earnings from exports by third-world nations...

...Then also in the late 1970s third-world debt bills rose sharply in response to a dramatic increase in interest rates...

...Discrimination against women...

...That's nearly one person in five worldwide...

...UNICEF has reported that third-world countries spent $145 billion in 1988 on weapons and armies...

...Over the past three decades, moreover, the bulk of development aid has not been for farming to meet local needs but for projects like large dams, ports, and power plants, or for export crops...

...As a consequence of their debts, many countries of the South have become subject to the economic stewardship of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank...

...Insistence on drastic reduction of public services for the sake of meeting debt schedules saps human capital...

...Linkages are most evident in the partnerships between nongovernment organizations engaged in self-help projects in the third world and private agencies in the North that provide these projects with modest funding and people-to-people publicity and support...

...2. Government policies and aid programs that increase dependency...

...Needless to say, relief from the debt burden is a prior condition of progress...

...This is happening in a variety of ways...

...European powers carved what we now call the third world into colonies, creating states that did not correspond to existing political boundaries, dividing linguistic and cultural groups across arbitrary borders, and giving certain ethnic and religious groups new or greater power over others...

...These "conventional" wars have killed about 25 million people, made millions more into permanent refugees, and caused incalculable damage to third-world economies and environments...

...Understanding of this reality is spreading, however, and in consequence grassroots and nongovernment organizations in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean have begun to form regional and international organizations such as the Malaysia-based Third World Network and the women's organization, DAWN, with offices in Mexico, India, and Brazil...

...Thus, the phases of production which add the most value to and raise the prices of most goods that are traded internationally take place outside the territories and economies of the South...

...More often, they have contributed to increased debts as borrowing countries have been forced to take on loans from other sources to meet strictly enforced IMF repayment schedules and IMF-required targets for economic growth...

...Efforts to accumulate quick cash for debt repayments accelerate these processes...

...though needless hunger is a scandal, it is a hidden one, and ending it is not seen by the elites of North or South as serving their interests...

...The importance of such projects is partly that they provide a testing ground for development models at their best, they embody or prefigure elements of an alternative and achievable definition of development and partly that they are conceived and carried out by the aid beneficiaries themselves...

...they are harder to calculate, but very real...

...In brief, IMF policies serve to shift the burden of debt repayment onto those least able to bear it, and thus to deplete the human capital on which development depends...

...The UN Food and Agricultural Organization has documented that food production during the past twenty-five years has outpaced population growth in every major region except Africa south of the Sahara desert...

...So also with the value added to garments, gadgets, and other goods assembled in export processing zones of the third world...

...Commercialization of agriculture in societies where men hold land titles and money means less control by women over family resources and food distribution...

...Because of the inequities built into global systems of production and trade, the third world continued to sell cheap and buy dear...

...KATHY McAFEE, senior writer and researcher for Oxfam America, has written extensively on international debt, causes of poverty, and alternative development models and processes emerging from the global South...

...individuals add to capital flight by smuggling out hard currency into foreign bank accounts...

...They are asking not for charity in the form of food shipments, but for change...

...The World Resources Institute reports that if all the food produced were distributed equitably throughout the world, it could provide an adequate diet for nearly six billion people one billion more than now live on the planet...

...Decision-makers in bank and aid agency board rooms seldom confront the consequences of their actions, which alter the lives and landscapes of millions...

...By supporting efforts like these, we can help the people of the South to overcome hunger and develop along their own chosen pathways...

...3. Structures of dependency...

...The estimate is conservative...

...Non-oil-producing countries in the South had to double or triple their borrowing just to keep their economies going at pre-1970 levels...

...These loans finance economic reprogramming that alters not only the external trade policies but also the internal economic priorities of indebted countries...

...It has been calculated that food deprivation causes as many deaths in a year as would a Hiroshima-size atomic bomb dropped somewhere in the third world every two or three days...

...workers there earn a small fraction of the wages paid to those doing comparable factory work in the North...

...Other resources flow unseen, like underground rivers, in the same direction...

...Meanwhile, these same countries must purchase finished goods trucks, steel, factory-made consumer goods from the industrialized countries, at constantly rising prices...

...5. IMF-sponsored economic austerity...

...Nutritional anemia affects about half of all third-world women of child-bearing age, draining their strength and lessening their resistance to disease...

...Much of this aid money ends up in the bank accounts of contractors and consultants from the donor nations...

...Although many third-world countries became politically independent during the three decades following World War II, most remained economically subordinate...

...More than half this bounty is grown in the third world...

...By reducing social services, they increase the pressures on women and others who care for children, the elderly, and the infirm...

...The World Bank has esti-mated that as many as 950 million people are "chronically malnourished": too hungry to lead active, productive lives...

...IMF practices do not address the causes of third-world poverty, and IMF loans have done little to reduce overall debts...

...Religiously motivated lobbying groups in particular, Bread for the World carry out extensive research on the causes of hunger and the impact of U.S...

...As a condition of loans, the IMF requires recipient countries to adopt policies to increase their export earnings and simultaneously to reduce government spending on social services and most other programs not geared toward increasing exports...

...Members of oppressed castes, tribal groups, and religions often have less access to food-producing resources and government assistance, and are more likely to have to go without food...

...Hunger makes news during severe regional famines, when cameras portray hundreds of thousands sinking toward death...

...Some analysts, including Lester Brown and John Young of the Worldwatch Institute, warn that global population growth may soon begin to exceed the rate of increase of world food production this as the result of erosion, deforestation, and other consequences of policies and practices that undermine the planet's capacity for producing food and fresh water...

...Even the World Bank's own chief economist stated in March that the bank intends to reduce its structural adjustment lending...

...In the process, participants strengthen their technical and leadership skills, confidence, the ability to identify problems and plan solutions...

...Northern policies that require Southern governments to negotiate structural adjustment programs one by one and that enforce a strategy of exports-at-any-cost rule out alternative strategies based on self-reliance and regional cooperation...

...Though women head one out of three third-world households, and perform an estimated two-thirds of all hours worked, it is women and girls who starve most often...

...Few large-scale international aid projects are designed to promote local food production, and those that are food-related often result in increased dependency...

...Economic growth, it was said, would generate the funds needed to repay the loans...

...Imports of such tropical products are still increasing...

...6. World Bank failures...

...In the context of an overall drain of resources out of the global South, even successful local projects cannot engender development by themselves...

...By making credit and imported inputs impossibly expensive while opening local markets to foreign competition, they frequently put local farms and factories out of business, adding to massive unemployment...

...Third-world militarization is a result as well as a cause of increasing hunger: many third-world governments have come to power in the wake of food riots or other forms of mass protest against falling living standards...

...The Bank makes longer-term loans, sometimes at lower interest rates, intended to promote economic growth and trade through private enterprise...

...In the movement of wealth around the world, far more flows out of impoverished countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America and into the richer economies of Europe, North America, and Japan...

...Neither do most reporters and financial analysts who cover these matters...

...Their failure to promote sustainable growth and equitable development has been publicly recognized by a wide range of institutions and observers, including the UN's Economic Commission on Africa, the New York Times, and the U.S...

...They require impoverished countries to reduce taxes on the wealthy, increase taxation of the working majority, sell land and other public assets to private owners, devalue their currencies further, raise still higher the prices of transportation and many food items, keep wages low, and offer tax breaks and cheap factory space and services to foreign manufacturers...

...According to United Nations figures, more than 15 million children die each year of malnutrition and related sickness...

...Increasingly, those with greater control edge out those with less...

...A 1-percent increase in interest rates automatically adds $700 million to Mexico's annual debt bill...

...We can also help to avert ecological disasters of great consequence, and to prevent replacement of the East-West cold war by a devastating global struggle between the North and the South.astating global struggle between the North and the South...

...The goods removed via these routes were, and still are, processed and manufactured into finished goods in the nations of the global North, or in refineries and factories owned by foreign corporations...

...These, along with local, national, and regional organizations of farmers, women, workers, indigenous and minority peoples, certain scholars, and some government officials, have begun to formulate experience-based alternatives to the failing debt-financed, export-dominated model of development...

...Enforcement of adjustment programs that multiply human misery will require increased coercion, repression, and military intervention...

...More accurately, the IMF serves the international financial system and reinforces the system's underlying power relations...

...In reality, largely as a consequence of structural adjustment and related export-promotion policies, more resources food, minerals, labor power, and money are flowing out of the third world to the wealthiest countries than ever before...

...The measurable portion of this hemorrhage is made up in large part of debt payments...

...And, across the country, citizens are forging links among towns, churches, and trade unions in Southern Africa and Central America and their U.S...

...During the past decade, Bank priorities shifted...

...Four times as many malnourished children are female than male, and their mortality rate is 40 percent higher than that of boys...

...These loans are intended as short- to medium-term measures to tide countries over until they can balance their books by bringing expenditures into line with earnings...

...The consequence is that millions of farmers are being deprived of resources they need to raise food for themselves and their communities: land, water, tools, draft animals, credit, traditional knowledge, and structures of community cohesion and support...

...Many IMF programs call for devaluation of the borrowing country's currency as well...

...Under such conditions, the harder farmers work over the years, the less they get for their labor...

...UNICEF reports that in 1988 would-be developing countries had to channel $178 billion to Northern nations to meet their debt bills...

...Yet there is cause for hope: North and South, a great many Davids are confronting their respective Goliaths, and, to an extent, they are learning to collaborate across borders toward achievement of common goals: to reduce hunger, eliminate its causes, bring about sustainable, broad-based development, and achieve a more just distribution of the world's resources...

...Where there is hunger today in the third world, all do not hunger equally...

...But these same measures also lead to immediate and often drastic increases in the prices of food, transportation, and basic consumer goods...

...Indigenous people in Latin America and minority ethnic groups in Africa and Asia are among those who suffer most as policies to speed debt payments increase the pressure on their lands...

...in a phrase, more workable and more genuinely democratic development...

...Structural adjustment programs are not working, even on their own terms...

...It has contributed to increased prices and rents for land, and to higher costs for irrigation equipment, fertilizers, and pesticides...

...It didn't happen...

...Often, the aid is in the form of loans, but most of these expensive projects have failed to generate enough income to pay off the loans...

...Often it entails reduction or elimination of subsidies many Southern governments have used to keep food prices affordable for the poor of their nations, and thereby to keep a lid on social unrest...

...Other farmers, displaced by tractors and threshing machines, can find no work at all in rural areas, and must seek jobs in the third world's swelling cities, or abroad...

...By 1983, 79 cents of each new dollar borrowed by Latin American nations was used solely to pay interest on past loans...

...They are deeply rooted and well protected...

...Indebted countries that are unable or unwilling to take IMF loans, repay them on schedule, and adopt economic policy changes acceptable to the Fund are often unable to obtain longer-term development loans, or even short-term credit to import desperately needed food, fuel, medicines, and spare parts for machinery...

...The amount spent every minute could feed two thousand malnourished children for a year...

...The opposite is closer to the truth...

...growing still faster are imports of foods like canned fish and meat, fresh fruits and vegetables, and fibers such as cotton all products that can be produced in temperate climates but that can be raised and harvested more cheaply (or during winter) in the third world...

...Most of these hunger-related deaths, whether of children or adults, occur in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean the global South, or third world...

...Today, cattle ranches and plantations growing export crops such as sugar, coffee, cotton, and bananas cover much of this land...

...7. Farming practices that damage the environment...

...Andean peasants, many of whom can no longer find an adequate income alternative to growing coca leaves, receive a tiny fraction of the immense wealth gathered by the cocaine industry bosses, who use banks and corporate fronts in the U.S., Europe, and the Caribbean to launder their earnings...

...Half the farmers in the third world have access to less than 2.5 acres, often not enough to support a family...

...The pressure to increase export crops production and the lack of other ways of earning income compel growing numbers of farmers to adopt agricultural practices that undermine the long-term productivity of the land...

...Governments that respond to the unrest of their impoverished peoples with military violence cannot be reliable allies...

...In the fertile lowlands of Central America, for instance, peasants once grew crops that provided a nutritious diet: corn, beans, melons, squash, tomatoes, and chilis...

...Both institutions were established by the victorious industrialized nations in the aftermath of World War II...

...Catholic Conference's administrative board in its statement on third-world debt (September, 1989...

...most are at a forty-five-year low...

...Examples in the U.S...

...Cumulatively, these massive transfers of wealth from the impoverished third world to the comparatively affluent industrialized nations constitute the most important underlying cause of third-world poverty and hunger...

...Structural and sectorial adjustment programs redirect resources away from domestic needs...

...Even where the poor have broader access to land, many governments provide farm loans, irrigation, seeds, and technical assistance for cash crops, but not for subsistence farming or local and regional marketing of food crops...

...One-third of all rural third-world households have no access to land at all...

...The mineral and agricultural products transferred out of Latin America, Asia, and Africa are vital to the global economy, but the prices paid for them do not begin to reflect their practical usefulness, or the profits they make possible for shippers, processors, and speculative commodity traders in the North...

...favor the relatively few landowners who can afford fertilizers, pesticides, machinery, and fuel...

...In 1973 and again in 1978, rising oil prices contributed to a massive increase in third-world debt...

...include Oxfam America, Food First, the American Friends Service Committee, Grassroots International, the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, Catholic Relief Services, Food for the Poor, and Global Exchange...

...When those interest rates rise, debt bills mushroom...

...It is customary to think of IMF's mission as a form of aid from the North to the South...

...Still more unseen wealth is drained from the third world by illegal or semilegal means...

...The theory was that foreign financial fueling would enable Southern countries to "take off' on their own toward industrialization...

...From 1977 to 1987 the third world's share of the global arms budget increased from 9 percent to 16 percent, draining resources that could be used to combat poverty and hunger...

...There have been more than 130 wars since 1945, nearly all of them in the third world...

...On the dry plains of Africa's Sahel, soil plowed to plant cotton and peanuts is quickly turned to dust by desert winds...

...Most of these deaths are needless...

...The effect of modernization in many rural third-world areas has been to worsen the situation of women...

...Mechanization of plowing and harvesting often means a loss of income for women, since agricultural loans and technology are often made available only to men...

...4. Third-world debt...

...Excessive employment of pesticides creates toxic hazards for present and future generations...

...that is to say, systemic...

...Cultivation of steep hillsides results in soil erosion...

...Thus the causes of world hunger are at once multiple and unitary...

...This makes the devaluing country's exports cheaper and, in theory, more competitive on global markets, and discourages imports by making them more expensive for the borrowing country...

...in times of famine, women and girls may not eat at all...

...The poor of the third world are being integrated into a global economy in which allocation of food is determined by market criteria...

...Thus, in practice, the IMF acts as a sort of "economic policeman" on behalf of commercial banks, Northern governments, and other international lending agencies...

...News media report emergency food shipments, foreign aid grants, private and governmental loans from the developed countries, leading us to assume that by these measures the rich countries are sustaining the battered economies of the third world...

...Such policies, third-world groups contend, harm the long-term interests of the majority of citizens in the North as well as the South...

...Many peasants who have lost their farms now work as laborers on the same land they once owned, often earning too little to buy enough staples for an adequate diet...

...Central to the goals being articulated with increasing clarity and unanimity by progressive third-world NGOs is increased food production for local and regional needs...

...Wealthy countries have imported products like coffee, tea, and chocolate from the third world since the days of colonialism...

...The total external debt of the third world is a crushing $1.2 trillion...

...The rich countries are also increasing their purchases of crops such as soybeans from Brazil, peanuts from West Africa, cassava from Thailand" foods that could nourish hungry people in the countries where they are grown, but are fed instead to livestock in rich countries...

...For that reason, and because the "aid" policies of national governments in the North and the international lending agencies constitute the major obstacles to third- world development, local and regional groups in the South are asking citizens of wealthier nations for support...

...AID, these projects are small in scale: a women's cooperative processing local fruit, a community poultry-rearing project, an old cargo boat renovated to carry crops to market, to list some carried out by project partners of Oxfam America...

...Farmers who cannot sell their crops, workers who cannot earn a living wage, the growing numbers with no land or job at all cannot be good customers for Northern products...

...World-wide military spending has doubled over the past twenty years to more than $800 billion yearly...

...are responding to this call by entering into new relationships with third-world groups that replace almsgiving with partnership...

...The same thing happens when' good farm land is overcultivated, without fallow years and without replacement of organic matter removed from the soil...

...Under pressure from their creditors, most indebted countries have increased the volume of their exports to make up for the lower prices they receive for them...

...Her book on debt and development in the Caribbean, Storm Warning, will be published in early 1991...

...Peasants displaced from high-quality farmlands by commercial producers often have no choice but to try to raise food or cash crops on land not suitable for continuous farming...

...Throughout the South, governments invite investors to fell more forests, mine more mountains, plow up pastures, drain wetlands, and replace staple foods with export crops...

...The expansion of export agriculture and commercial farming...

...Yet Northern pressure on Southern governments to produce quick cash for debt repayment virtually insures that third-world lands will not be developed or preserved in the interest of the majority...

...Before the 1980s, most World Bank loans funded the construction of roads, ports, dams, power plants, and large-scale agricultural export projects...

...The prices of unprocessed commodity exports crops and minerals have been declining...

...In many societies in times of plenty, men and boys eat first...

...7), the same factors that lead to hunger also serve to degrade the environment in many places...

...counterparts...

...The World Bank calculated that interest rates affecting third-world borrowers rose 30 percent in just two years (1980-1982...

...For example: Roads, railroads, and communications lines, where they exist, generally link interior areas to port cities, but do not run between cities and towns, or even between countries in the interior of Southern continents...

...Two-thirds of Latin America's export earnings were being consumed by debt payments...

...In the only markets to which poor people of the third world have access, they have no control over trading terms, interest rates, investment choices, or the other rules of the game...

...Other projects are adopting new methods of conservation and reviving old ones, building small-scale irrigation works and better food storage facilities, organizing production and marketing coops, expanding women's income-generating activities: weaving, dairying, farming...

...Their predictions may prove true, but that does not mean we can solve the problem of hunger by limiting population growth...

...They also hope to promote more South-South trade, closer agro-industry links, more use of local materials and skills, more control by Southern nations over the prices of their exports, greater involvement and consultation of farmers and others affected by development schemes...

...World Bank loans are increasingly geared toward export production, both in agriculture and in low-wage industries...

...Farming methods developed in Europe and the U.S...

...But if the existence of chronic hunger in a world of abundance is rarely acknowledged, its root causes are even less understood...

...Although in many parts of the South women are the main food producers, more women than men suffer from malnutrition...

...Many commercial bank loans to Southern countries were made at "floating" interest rates...

...Conquest and exploitation of some peoples by others, long a part of human history, acquired a new dimension in the colonial era...

...They are developing literacy and skills-training programs, and making use of radio, popular theater, and creative new forms of research, education, and communication to enhance their understanding of the causes of poverty and the means of improving their lives...

...The greatly increased use of chemical fertilizers often depletes the soil...

...Compared with the mega-projects financed by the World Bank or U.S...

...Corporations disguise the removal of profits through the shady accounting practices of transfer pricing...

...Moreover, as explained below (point No...

...Church-based organizations, under the multi-denominational umbrella of Interfaith Action for Economic Justice, are paying attention to alternative development proposals from the third world...

...It is a skewed system, as different as could be from the free and competitive model imagined by Adam Smith...

...9. Ethnic and religious oppression...

...Other components of the measurable flow are the profits claimed by foreign owners of third-world businesses, and the deposits by the South's elite in Northern banks...

...So also are public policy organizations such as Development GAP and Policy Alternatives for the Caribbean and Central America (PACCA...

...Meanwhile, IMF austerity programs aimed at bringing about "stabilization" have severely weakened many third-world economies...

...Little of the money earned by these sales goes to the primary producers...

...policies...

...Capital for local development is not accumulating but dwindling...