Study Research on Hunger lead to Poverty

Land rights and ownership

One important aspect about the causes of hunger is often ignored; that is, land ownership and who controls the land.

The following passage summarizes it very well, asking Is It Overpopulation or Who Controls the Land?

The often heard comment (one I once accepted as fact) that there are too many people in the world, and overpopulation is the cause of hunger, can be compared to the same myth that expounded sixteenth-century England and revived continuously since.

Through repeated acts of enclosure the peasants were pushed off the land so that the gentry could make money raising wool for the new and highly productive power looms. They could not do this if the peasants were to retain their historic entitlement [emphasis is original] to a share of production from the land. Massive starvation was the inevitable result of this expropriation.

There were serious discussions in learned circles about overpopulation as the cause of this poverty. This was the accepted reason because a social and intellectual elite were doing the rationalizing. It was they who controlled the educational institutions which studied the problem. Naturally the final conclusions (at least those published) absolved the wealthy of any responsibility for the plight of the poor. The absurdity of suggesting that England was then overpopulated is clear when we realize that the total population of England in the sixteenth century was less than in any one of several present-day English cities.

The hunger in underdeveloped countries today is equally tragic and absurd. Their European colonizers understood well that ownership of land gave the owner control over what society produced. The most powerful simply redistributed the valuable land titles to themselves, eradicating millennia-old traditions of common use. Since custom is a form of ownership, the shared use of land could not be permitted. If ever reestablished, this ancient practice would reduce the rights of these new owners. For this reason, much of the land went unused or underused until the owners could do so profitably. This is the pattern of land use that characterizes most Third World countries today, and it is this that generates hunger in the world.

These conquered people are kept in a state of relative impoverishment. Permitting them any substantial share of the wealth would negate the historic reason for conquest -- namely plunder. The ongoing role of Third World countries is to be the supplier of cheap and plentiful raw materials and agricultural products to the developed world. Nature's wealth was, and is, being controlled to fulfill the needs of the world's affluent people. The U.S. is one of the prime beneficiaries of this well-established system. Our great universities search diligently for the answer to the problem of poverty and hunger. They invariably find it in lack of motivation, inadequate or no education, or some other self-serving excuse. They look at everything except the cause -- the powerful own the world's social wealth. As a major beneficiary, we have much to gain by perpetuating the myths of overpopulations, cultural and racial inferiority, and so forth. The real causes must be kept from ourselves, as how else can this systematic damaging of others be squared with what we are taught about democracy, rights, freedom, and justice?

--  J.W. Smith, The World's Wasted Wealth: the political economy of waste, (New World's Press, 1989), pp. 44, 45

Diversion of land use to non-productive use

When precious arable land use is diverted to non-productive, or even destructive use, the overall costs to society can be considerable. Examples of such land use include, but is not limited to the following:

• The tobacco industry
• Tea and Coffee plantations the world over to be sold to the wealthier countries, primarily
• Floriculture to sell flowers in the wealthier countries comes at a high cost to the growers
• Sugar cane growing for sugar exports
• Certain dam projects

The tobacco industry

The tobacco industry diverts huge amounts of land from producing food to producing tobacco:

Dr Judith MacKay, Director of the Asian Consultancy on Tobacco Control in Hong Kong, claims that tobacco's minor use of land denies 10 to 20 million people of food. Where food has to be imported because rich farmland is being diverted to tobacco production, the government will have to bear the cost of food imports, she points out.

... The bottom line for governments of developing countries is that the net economic costs of tobacco are profoundly negative -- the cost of treatment, disability and death exceeds the economic benefits to producers by at least US$200 billion annually with one third of this loss being incurred by developing countries.

--  John Madeley, Big Business Poor Peoples; The Impact of Transnational Corporations on the World's Poor, (Zed Books, 1999) pp. 53, 57

Madeley also describes in detail other impact on land from tobacco use:

• The land that has been destroyed or degraded to grow tobacco has affects on nearby farms. As forests, for example, are cleared to make way for tobacco plantations, then the soil protection it provides is lost and is more likely to be washed away in heavy rains. This can lead to soil degradation and failing yields.
• A lot of wood is also needed to cure tobacco leaves.
• Tobacco uses up more water, and has more pesticides applied to it, further affecting water supplies (which are also further used by the tobacco industry recommending the planting of quick growing, but water-thirsty eucalyptus trees.)
• Child labor is often needed in tobacco farms.
• For more detail, refer to Big Business Poor Peoples; The Impact of Transnational Corporations on the World's Poor, by John Madeley, (Zed Books, 1999) ch. 4.

Madeley continues on to point out that heavy advertising of tobacco by TNCs can convince the poor to smoke more, and to use money they might have spent on food or health care, to buy cigarettes instead.

A report by the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids says that from a socioeconomic and environmental perspective, there is little benefit in tobacco growing, and that While a few large-scale tobacco growers have prospered, the vast majority of tobacco growers in the Global South barely eke out a living toiling for the companies. Furthermore, the cigarette companies continue to downplay or ignore the many serious economic and environmental costs associated with tobacco cultivation, such as chronic indebtedness among tobacco farmers (usually to the companies themselves), serious environmental destruction caused by tobacco farming, and pesticide-related health problems for farmers and their families.

In fact, it is interesting to note that the tobacco industry has gone to extraordinary level to discredit the World Health Organisation (WHO) and others that are fighting tobacco issues, as a report from the WHO describes. A Committee of Experts had been set up in October 1999 to enquire into the nature and extent of undue influence which the tobacco industry had exercised over UN organisations. This Committee produced the report that found that the tobacco industry regarded the World Health Organization as one of their leading enemies, and that the industry had a planned strategy to contain, neutralise, reorient WHO's tobacco control initiatives. They added that the tobacco industry documents show that they carried out their plan by:

• staging events to divert attention from the public health issues raised by tobacco use;
• attempting to reduce budgets for the scientific and policy activities carried out by WHO;
• pitting other UN agencies against WHO;
• seeking to convince developing countries that WHO's tobacco control program was a First World agenda carried out at the expense of the developing world;
• distorting the results of important scientific studies on tobacco;
• discrediting WHO as an institution.

While some countries, such as the US have had the resources and political will to tackle the large tobacco corporations, these multinationals have intensified their efforts in other regions of world such as Asia, to continue growing and selling cigarettes, as well as expanding advertising (to create demand, not meet).

PAHO, the Pan American Health Organization (a regional office for the Americas for the WHO) issued a report titled Profits over People (17 December 2002). Looking at the Latin American and Caribbean countries and information from Philip Morris and British American Tobacco, the report details how the tobacco companies:

• were intensely competitive but collaborated in campaigns against common threats to the industry
• hired scientists throughout the region to misrepresent the science linking secondhand smoke to serious diseases, while cloaking in secrecy any connection of these scientists with the tobacco industry;
• designed youth smoking prevention campaigns and programs primarily as public relations exercises aimed at deterring meaningful regulation of tobacco marketing;
• had detailed knowledge of smuggling networks and markets and actively sought to increase their share of the illegal market by structuring marketing campaigns and distribution routes around it; and
• enjoyed access to key government officials and succeeded in weakening or killing tobacco control legislation in a number of countries.

They also added that these tactics and strategies are not unique to the Americas region.

Reports such as those mentioned above show that there is a lot of political manouvering by large tobacco companies to lower prices, to increase sales, etc. In addition, the poor and small farmers are the ones most affected by the impacts of tobacco companies. The hard cash earned from this foreign investment is offset by the costs in social and public health. In effect, profits are privatized; costs are socialized.

One billion people smoke worldwide and around 3.5 million die from tobacco-related illnesses annually. By 2030, this figure will rise to ten million, with 70 percent of deaths in lower and middle income countries (LMICs). Four companies now control 75 percent of global cigarette sales, as sophisticated strategies for supply, production and sales have produced increasingly popular global brands.

The onward march of Marlboro man epitomises this globalisation, exploiting the opportunities presented by trade liberalisation, regional organisations and the communications revolution. Control efforts are undermined by the industry's success in developing favourable relationships with many governments, the magnitude of their foreign direct investments and the scale of advertising, marketing and sponsorship campaigns. In addition, large-scale cigarette smuggling, which comprises one-third of total exports, depletes tax revenues and further jeopardises public health.

--  Controlling the global tobacco epidemic. Towards a transnational response, ID21 Insights, March 2001

Tobacco is a silent killer, the WHO highlights. As they also add, From 1950 to 2000, tobacco will have killed more than 60 million people in developed countries alone, more than died in World War II. If current trends continue, tobacco will kill more than 100 million people in the first two decades of the 21st century.

In addition, the WHO also points out that supporting the tobacco industry is bad economics: Tobacco not only kills people, it also saps national treasuries. Just as there are no safe levels of tobacco consumption, there are no safe investments in tobacco. The economic impact of tobacco has been analyzed in many countries in recent years. ... Their combined message is unequivocal - the alleged economic benefits of tobacco are illusory and misleading.

If one doesn't wish to give up smoking because it is considered their free choice, how about giving up smoking so others may have a choice?

Food as a Commodity

And when food is treated as a commodity, those who can get food are the ones who can afford to pay for it. To illustrate this further, the following is worth quoting at length (bulleting and spacing formatting is mine, text is original):

To understand why people go hungry you must stop thinking about food as something farmers grow for others to eat, and begin thinking about it as something companies produce for other people to buy.

·        Food is a commodity. ...

·        Much of the best agricultural land in the world is used to grow commodities such as cotton, sisal, tea, tobacco, sugar cane, and cocoa, items which are non-food products or are marginally nutritious, but for which there is a large market.

·        Millions of acres of potentially productive farmland is used to pasture cattle, an extremely inefficient use of land, water and energy, but one for which there is a market in wealthy countries.

·        More than half the grain grown in the United States (requiring half the water used in the U.S.) is fed to livestock, grain that would feed far more people than would the livestock to which it is fed. ...

The problem, of course, is that people who don't have enough money to buy food (and more than one billion people earn less than $1.00 a day), simply don't count in the food equation.

·        In other words, if you don't have the money to buy food, no one is going to grow it for you.

·        Put yet another way, you would not expect The Gap to manufacture clothes, Adidas to manufacture sneakers, or IBM to provide computers for those people earning $1.00 a day or less; likewise, you would not expect ADM (Supermarket to the World) to produce food for them.

What this means is that ending hunger requires doing away with poverty, or, at the very least, ensuring that people have enough money or the means to acquire it, to buy, and hence create a market demand for food.

--  Richard H. Robbins, Readings on Poverty, Hunger, and Economic Development

Thinking about solutions to world hunger then, requires the recognition that there are political and economic causes related to poverty.