Reports about famines trigger human emotions. Images of children with bloated bodies, faces covered with flies, noses running with mucus and traumatized elders with an agonizing look in their eyes galvanize the television viewers and they rush to donate money. No one doubts for a moment that those emotional pictures are used for manipulation or imagines that food-aid is being used as a weapon to blackmail the hungry.
The media regularly focus famines as hotspots, often exaggerating and dramatizing human tragedies, to capture the attention of the audience, but completely neglect to deal with the causes of famines. Thus, the viewers fail to understand the context of how and why they occur.
Famines appear when countries experience extreme collapses in food availability, which result in a widespread rise of the death rate. Although lack of rain and poor harvest is often regarded as major causes, droughts alone does not trigger famines. In fact, historical, political and economical factors of the affected country can accelerate the problem to a crisis. Experts claim that debt payments, foreign interference, dependency, monoculture, lack of grain storage and poor infrastructure have more to do with famines than adverse climate conditions.
For example, in 2002, Malawi’s food shortage developed into a famine as a result of complex circumstances. A drought and floods in 2001, withholding of aid from donors (the US, the UK and Denmark) and the IMF’s advice to the Malawi government to sell their maize reserves for debt repayments, in fact, worsened the situation. The World Development Movement stated that the IMF policies - privatisation, removal of agricultural subsidies and deregulation of price controls on staple food - increased the price of maize during the critical period by 400 per cent. Maize was imported at three times the price for which the grain reserves had been sold. The famine could have been avoided but Malawi faced a national disaster because it became a hostage to the international monetary system and to the donor countries.
Famines and colonialism
Those who deal with famines in detail claim that most famines in history were man-made and the consequences of colonialism. Famines and catastrophes were opportunities to plunder and exploit people as well as to strengthen and expand the colonial power. In his book ‘The late Victorian Holocausts’ Mike Davis writes that each famine, each catastrophe was a green light for the grabbing of more territory, more agricultural land. The New Imperialism of the late Victorians thought of nothing else than exploiting people weakened by natural disaster and epidemic disease.
Throughout centuries, countries knowing that droughts appear occasionally used to store grain to provide them to the needy. Imperial rulers destroyed this very system to create a vacuum so that the Indians became dependent. Having power over food the British rulers exported grain from India to England at record levels even when Indians were dying of hunger. Millions of innocent people in colonized countries underwent horrifying deaths not because the weather had been unkind, but due to the selfish, insatiable greed of the colonizers who put imperial interests before humanity. During the British rule in India, 31 serious famines took place. Bengal, once a rich and a prosperous part of India underwent a disastrous period experiencing six major famines. In 1770, an estimated 10 millions perished reducing the population to a one third.
At the height of the Great Bengal Famine in 1943-44, where around 3 million people died of starvation, Winston Churchill, the de facto ruler of India, made a callous, sarcastic statement saying that the famine was caused by the tendency of the Indians to breed like rabbits. Churchill, showing no compassion for the people suffering from hunger even hindered a provision of 10,000 tons of grain from Canada to help the starving.
Those who held racist ideas and felt superior were quick to blame the victims and conveniently looked away when millions died. The ‘golden period’ of colonialism triumphed as the colonizers made profits out of every possible means including disasters. By securing power over life’s most essential need the, food, the rulers were able to decide the fate of the ruled.
Beggars cannot be choosers
Today, famines are fabricated and food-aid is used to feed the bio-technology industry rather than the poor.
African nations refuse GM food for several reasons. Food donated by the US holds patents. That means farmers who try to plant the GM seeds can get into problems. Bio-technology companies had already filed a number of cases against farmers who had crops contaminated with gene manipulated DNA. In Mexico, farmers unaware that donated food from the US was gene manipulated and held patents, planted the seeds in their fields, which later contaminated the local maize varieties through ‘gene flow’.
Africans civil societies say: "We are enraged by the emotional blackmail of vulnerable people in need being used this way.... This is another form of colonisation, first through slavery, then through economic colonisation and now through the control of food and medicine through GM creating total dependency."
The US refuses to understand the concerns of developing countries regarding GM food. The role of the WFP is very much to be criticised as it openly ignores the rights of the people in developing countries in favour of US interests. Although the WFP is well aware that most developing countries while signing the Biosafety Protocol insisted that they wanted to be informed about GM imports, nevertheless, it distributed GM food as aid to India, Columbia, Guatemala and other African countries breaching the local regulations.
Hungry people deserve compassion, not arrogance, and respect, not humiliation. Above all they have the legitimacy to decide what they like to eat and what not. Those who fail to respect them by ignoring legitimate rights and think of making profit out of destitute situations are sure committing an evil crime against fundamental issues of justice, dignity and democracy.
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