Cynicism, food and power

"Within a decade, no man, woman or child will go to bed hungry", vowed Dr. Henry Kissinger as US Secretary of State in 1974 in his keynote speech to the World Food Conference. Yet more than two decades later, at the time of the World Food Summit in November 1996, 800 million men, women and children (more than the combined population of the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Greece, the Netherlands, Belgium and the Scandinavian countries) were still going to bed malnourished, hungry or starving.

This time, the gathering did not reiterate Kissinger's promise, but instead offered the starving an 'Action Plan' to reduce the numbers of hungry people by half within two decades - in effect, officially sanctioning the continued malnourishment of some 400 million people for the next 20 years and beyond.

Such cynicism - masquerading as 'realism' - was roundly condemned by Fidel Castro, President of the Communist Party of Cuba. "Hunger", he told the Summit, "is the offspring of injustice and the unequal distribution of the wealth in this world." Indeed, the history of hunger has always been a history of unjust social and economic systems which have marginalized the poor and deprived them of the means to eat.

Rather than address these systems, the powerful and well-fed invariably turn to a litany of handy explanations for the hunger of others - be it economic mismanagement, technological backwardness, feckless bedroom habits or genetic inferiority. The delegates to the World Food Summit (a handful apart) were no exception.

The result is an Action Plan that does nothing to tackle the root causes of hunger but a great deal to nurture them. It presents rhetorical concern for landlessness, but no measures to address the need for agrarian reform. It contains plenty of fine words to condemn poverty, but no measures to curb the power of the transnational corporations whose control over international trade in food lies behind much of the starvation in the world today.

It outlines commitments to increase rural employment, but no measures to address the declining bargaining power of the rural poor in an age of globalisation and 'devil-take-the-hindmost' economics. Far from undermining the power structures that generate hunger and malnutrition, the Action Plan insists on trade liberalisation and other agricultural policies that will further entrench the very forces that deprive the poor of food.

As NGOs and people's representatives gathered at the Summit made clear in their final statement, ensuring food security demands an approach to agricultural policy that is, in almost every respect, the reverse of that adopted by the Summit's delegates:

• Instead of requiring countries to liberalize their agricultural markets, it demands respect for the rights of nations to "achieve the level of food sufficiency and nutritional quality [they] consider appropriate without suffering retaliation of any kind".
• Instead of pursuing policies that encourage the spread of corporate agriculture, it demands the "reorientation" of policies "in favour of family farmers".
• Instead of encouraging industrialised agriculture, it demands policies that favour "organic production ... with the goal of reducing or eliminating the use of pesticides and other agro-chemicals".
• Instead of policies that concentrate control over land and decision-making in the hands of large landowners, corporations and distant bureaucrats, it demands "agrarian reform in favour of rural poor people who will work the land".
• And instead of locking farmers into a global economy over which they have little control, it demands that "resources ... be shifted in favour of local and regional food producers and food systems".

As the peasant movement Via Campesina has pointed out, "Food Sovereignty can only be achieved through solidarity and the political will to implement alternatives." Acting together to create such political will offers the best hope of ensuring that the 400 million people written off by the World Food Summit do not starve.