**The interlinkages and dependency of the factors of Supply, Distribution and Consumption in the Land/Food issue continue to fuel the argument regarding the a priori factor in accounting for the widespread prevalence of global hunger, writes Raana Haider from Cairo.

If T?AMINE la like insa ni 1H ty. hard to define, but A glaring enough when

Taylor, quoted tn "The famine syndrome; its defirii tion for relief and rehabilitation in Bangladesh . B. Currey in Famine: Its Causes. Effects and Management. B. Robson. Gordon and Breach. New York. 1981.

"In a world ot potential food plenty, we have collectively failed more than one billion of our people

Bellagio Declaration on Overcoming Hunger in the 1990s.

The inlerlinkages and dependency of the factors, of Supply. Distribution and Consumption in the Land/Food issue continue to fuel and the argument regarding the a priori factor in accounting for the widespread prevalence of global hunger. The World Food Summit to be held in Rome from 13-17 November 1996 will address the critical issue of Food Secu rity.

Food Security has been defined by the World Bank as "the access by all people at all times to enough food for an active, healthy life. The key elements are the availability of food and the ability to acquire it. The first has today generally been assured; the second has not. and in fact, in many societies is declining. As stated by Amartya Sen, "starvation is the characteristic of some people not having enough food to eat. It Is not the characteristic of there not being enough food to eat. While the latter can be a cause of the former, it is but one of many possible causes." (Amartya Sen. Poverty and Famines. Clamdon Press. Ox ford. 1981).

According to the Food and Agricultural Organisaton (FAO), nearly 800 million peo e in developing countries suf-from chronic malnutrition, including 200 million children under the age of 5 who suffer from a lack of protein and energy. Currently, the number of countries which are classified as low income, nutrition poor countries is 88. The number .includes 42 in Sub-Saharan Africa. 19 in Asia and the Pacific. 9 in Latin America and the Caribbean. 6 in the Middle East and North Africa and 12 in Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States.

At the same time, the amount of foreign aid. both bilateral and multilateral given to poor countries for agricultural subsidies has decreased significantly from $10 billion in 1982 to $7.2 in 1992. The share of agricultural aid, within total developmental assistance has also decreased from 24 per cent to 16 per cent destruction of marine resources and forest cover lias reduced the share of the individual In agri-gable farm land to .25 hectares. "Land whether it is Inherited, allotted, purchased or seized, is the most basic resource of agricultural production Yet an in creasing number of people find themselves without sufficient land to feed their families or still worse, without any land at all." notes Jean Davison (ed.) in Agriculture. Women and Land. Westview Press. Colorado 1988.

Global population is estimated lo reach 8 7 billion peo pie by the year 2030. The cur rent population is estimated at 5.7 billion, in such a scenario, the number of people who suffer from chronic malnutrition will inert .ise to 730 million by 2010. including some 300 million in

Sub-Saharan Africa alone.

Janies G. Speth, Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in a lecture on Food Security. Environment and Poverty in Bangladeshi in 1994. highlighted the global dimensions of the problem by noting that: most hunger — 85 to 90 per cent — arises from silent poverty; only 10-15 per cent stems from famine ana similar emergencies and that some one billion people — 20 per cent of the global population — live in households too poor to obtain the food necessary for sustaining normal work.

The various intensities of hunger range, singularly or in combination form: from malnourishment. to undernourishment to starvation and death. Malnutrition, state M Biswas and P Pinstrup-Ander-sen (eds.) in Nutrition and Development. Oxford University Press. New York. 1985. is the "insufficient intake of calories and protein caused primarily by the inability of low income households or individuals to acquire food at a given point in time and not by an absolute scarcity of food in the market. Only households with adequate income can meet their nutritional needs.”

In Environment, by PH Raven. LR Berg and GB Johnson. Saunders College Publish-

ing. 1993: they note that the average adult human must consume enough food to get approx imately 2600 kilocalories per day (3000 kcal, per day for the average male and 2200 kcal per day for the average female.) Any consumption of less than the required kcal per day will result in undernourishment in any lengthy period of time and even

However, the total number of calories consumed is not the only measure of good nutrition. One cap receive enough calories yet bJrialMni/sdJfCgge not consuming enough of specif, psapntial nutrients, such as proteins and vitamins.

Contrary to popular think ing. malnourishment is not a condition only prevalent among children in developing countries. Any human condi tion in which normal activity, work performance, adequate growth or recovery from illness. disease and the process of pregnancy and lactation is affected is a key indicator of mal nourishment. And mainour-ishment. is an accurate indica lor of the culture of poverty

Food insecurity, in Its sever est form — famine — has been defined as, "a socio-economic process which causes the accel erated destitution of the most vulnerable, marginal and least powerful groups In a conunu nity. to a point where they can no longer, at a group, main lain .i oiislainable livelihood P

Walker in Famine Early Warning Systems: Victims and Destitution. Earthscan. London. 1989. In other words, food deprivation in its extremist form is a problem of destitution, not just starvation and a discontinuation of normal' processes and not the result of any one event. The famine that killed in Sudan and Somalia is one kind of a famine. In this context, death is the finality but before that lies a long process of deprivation. This destitution or victim of the climate of poverty implies a vulnerability, a predisposition to weakening forces, processes and not simply singular events.

The essence of the argument has been captured by R V Garcia in Nature Pleads Not Guilty. Drought and Man. Vol. 1. Pergamon Press. New York. 1981. Fifteen years later, his argument that the critical food global situation is "a result of increasing fragility due to the action of socio-economic factors which increase their structural vulnerability, still holds. We are predisposed to attribute 'external' factors, such as climate, population pressure and environmental problems. "The emphasis is on the pro-ductlon/population ratio or on the misuse of the soil... even when the emphasis is shifted from production to distribution of food, the analysis remains

superficial as long as the distribution problems are taken to be those associated with transport and storage, instead of those related to the accessibility of the food. The actual problem is the distribution of the means which make the food accessible to people This has much more to do with the structure of property. employment and incomes than with transport. The food crisis Is not the result of natural disasters, bad harvest years, on crop failures. The food crisis the reyull of longtcmi,p6occss

JfJin^l jnd d^flv^^il of . hunger and malnutrition.

Amartya Sen raem: theory and policy".

World Qua ter Iv 4 (3) July 1982 identifies two sets of approaches to the food problem'. “One group emphasises the natural sciences and engineering, and relates the fooa issue to technological issues of various kinds. The other group concentrates on social issues. Including political economy and sees the food problem primarily In social terms Al the risk of oversimplification, the two classes of approach may be tailed nature lot list'd and so ciety locused respectively

A frequently cited argument is that countries are running a losing battle in food production vis a vis the burgeoning |x>pu)a-tlon and thus, any c rop failure will devour limited reserve food stocks. However, many developing countries are now t-x|x>rting

food. Some of these net ex porters of food grain are host to large numbers of nutritionally deficient people. The widespread low level of nutrition in any number of countries In the South is not the result of these countries not producing sufficient food for the needs of its population, since the "surplus" Is exported; but the "direct result of the structure of production. distribution and trade." states Garcia (1981).

In such a situation exists the duality' of the agrarian system. On the one hand, the agrarian economy has to produce cash crops for export and foreign currency exchange earnings. On the other hand, the same agricultural base has to produce food for domestic consumption. The former requirement has come to demand quality land and subsistence agriculture has to settle for marginal land. The fruits of modernisation; mechanisation of agriculture and technological innovations have gone to cash crop production. Human muscle power continues to be the backbone of the subsistence sector of agricultural production.

According to (Garcia. 1981). "the 'modern' agricultural subsector is oriented towards exports and production of more sophisticated food for the urban elite and the 'traditional' — the 'poor' one — carries the burden

of the industrialisation process... support of the State, in the form of credits and investments. goes only to the former... thus the coexistence of the two subsectors and in particular, the permanence of the traditional' one is not due to the backwardness of the population Involved in it. but to the effect of State policies."

This argument is also valid for any analysis of the gender factor In agricultural production. Men are appointed as the agents and ghannefa in the pro-r

jnje.aMWt^^md,resources which increase productivity and income. Credit, agricultural extension programmes, training sessions, the input of pesticides and herbicides, irrigation schemes and other Innovations are much the purview of male farm workers. Women farm labourers frequently engage in subsistence farming for family consumption as unpaid family labourers without the benefit o! cash returns or the benefit of technological innovations.

Easter Boserup argues that even the use of animals for land

preparation and transport Is always a male monopoly Men perform the operation for which animals are employed, while women and children j«-r form some or all of the tasks for which only human muscle pow< i is used (Easier Boserup ■Popiil.uion the Status of

Women and Rural Development". in Rural Development and Population Institutions and Policy. G McNlcoll and M Caln (eds.). Population Council and Oxford University Press. New York, 1990).

Global economic liberalisation. in the form of the new face of capitalism' has forced more and more people below the poverty line. In Latin America alone, since the Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAP) were implanted in the early 1980s, the number of people below the poverty line has increased from 130 million to 180 million. According to the President of the Inter-American Development Bank, implementation of SAP has in many cases, has caused loss of the many social and economic gains achieved in the 1960s and 1970s. Class polarization has intensified with a twentyfold income differential between the richest and the poorest 20 per cent. Such a scenario is replicated in countries through out the world.

Worldwide, tn 1991. countries with the poorest 20 per cent of the world's population enjoyed only 3.6 percent of the world income (down from 4.9 per cent in 1960). while the richest fifth enjoyed almost 64 per cent of world income. The disturbing picture of a highly skewed distribution of national income has manifested in the few rich growing richer and the masses of the poor getting poorer.

"Development in the 1990s has created winners and losers by generating wealth for some and impoverishment for others. While the winners accumulate land, assets and power; the losers (such as peasants and Gastoralists) are pushed onto :ss productive land. During crises, they are forced to transfer their already meagre resources. in the form of land rights, labour power, and assets to the wealthy on unfavourable terms." remarks S Deverreux in Theories of Famine. Harvester Wheatsheaf. Hertfordshire." England. 1993. In this process, the two worlds’ are thrown further apart, one in particular, increasingly marginalised. In such a global scenario, todays modern' development is rein-forming inequality and not mitigating it.

In an effort to break the inheritance of hunger pattern — the generational process of malnourishment. it is urgent to recognise that the foremost need is to provide purchasing power This is a curative and long term solution rather than a piecemeal preventive shot term measure. For this reason cash for ynr^iialietlrt means to^edifrapp^riythan ixMijor work progfatnmA Similanv cash aid is requjryd more, thap^

Adequate food production is .i necessary but not sufficient condition tor adequate nutrition. Availability does not ensure accessibility This expression is vividly borne out in the area of food security. The common bond of malnourished people is poverty. Mohammed Yunus. Managing Director of Grameen Bank. Bangladesh remarks, non-availability of food does not mean that food is scarce in the market; we say it 1>ecause I don't have the money tc buy it The most Important factor Is the buying ability . not the scarcity or abundance of supply of food items. And. this is what the poverty story Is all aliout."

We are talking aliout — food, food, everywhere but not a bit lot'll anywhere