As Pakistan faces wheat shortages of a magnitude that tend to create enough cause for alarm, in the wake of a sudden rise in flour prices and reports of hoarding in almost every province , some concerned citizens have failed to resist recalling some bitter memories of the distant past.
When the Wheat Commissioner of Pakistan, while addressing a meeting of the Scientists Club in Islamabad last week, talked of placing major reliance on the private sector this year - only to satisfy the latter's demand of getting adequate price of the crop and hence allowing it to lift 1.8 million tons - many in the audience felt uneasy and a scientist rose to remind him that the Bengal famine had occurred, despite the presence of huge stocks of foodgrains. A similar situation, he was too quick to conclude, does exist in Pakistan today.
What he implied was the Commissioner's repeated assurances of enough wheat availability in the warehouses. This was no guarantee that a crisis had been averted and that no one would go hungry. What is of prime concern and needs to be monitored is the element of greed, if any, on the part of private traders.
Only five months back 65,000 tonnes of wheat pertaining to the year 2000 crop was sold to a Sindh trader at a throwaway price in an auction by the government, leaving its godowns with inadequate stocks. Another 35,000 tonnes is with the flour mills owners in Karachi.
Apparently, the current situation is a product of an enhanced role being carved out for the private sector in Pakistan on the advice of the IMF whose conditionalities include an end to all kinds of subsidies and bringing into driver's seat the market forces, and a gradual withdrawal of state actors from the agriculture business.
The fears arise from the presence of large stocks with the private sector on which the officials have no control and Islamabad's decision to import 0.5 million tonnes wheat, despite its claim that sufficient stocks are at hand to meet the requirements till April when the new crop arrives. It is this year only that the government has procured less quantity, only 3.5 million tonnes of wheat and gave about two million tonnes to the private sector.
Last year the procurement figure was four million and the next year the intention is to procure five million tonnes in view of "the experience gained this year".The Bengal famine of 1943 had killed nearly three million people and, incidentally, it was not the result of - as the Nobel laureate Amartya Sen explains in his well-known theory of entitlements - of a drastic slump in food production.
It occurred because the colonial rulers had diverted most of the foodgrains to elsewhere for commercial purposes. And 150 years ago, it were the same British who were seen loading maize on ships bound for their country when the great Irish potato famine that killed some 1.5 million people was at its height.
The hard fact is that it is not the lack of food which often leads to drought, famine, massive poverty and hunger. It is the lack of political will on the part of the local ruling elites and those in the industrialized states that makes it happen.
The expertize to address the problem of world hunger does exist, what does not exist is the human concern and the willingness on the part of those who call the shots. Incidentally, some 60 per cent of the global food stocks are currently in the hands of big corporations, six of which control 70 per cent of the world's grain trade and they intend to do business only.
The latest report of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), released last month, says that the world hunger is on the rise and an estimated 842 million people go to bed hungry every night. Most of them live in Africa and Latin America. Pakistan is among that group of countries which has suffered a reversal of falling numbers of the malnourished and hungry. Other countries are Sudan, Nigeria, Indonesia and India. In fact, the pattern of change in the developing countries as a whole has shifted from a declining to a rising trend.
It is of interest to note that prior to the introduction of capitalism hunger was almost unknown in the Soviet Union during peace time, despite a highly bureaucratic system of production and distribution. Now 34 million people are chronically hungry in the ex-Soviet bloc countries where agricultural land is no less productive than the one found in the United States.
In India, drought is a continuing feature while in Pakistan it often visits the Thar region and parts of Balochistan. Currently, it is Udaipur in Rajasthan, which is in its grip and people are starving to death because of the crop failure. However, it is not the drought, it is the economic liberalization which is the real culprit. Drought can be comfortably controlled because enough grain is available in the country. In fact, India is surplus in grain this year.
India started opening its state-controlled markets to the international competition and trade at the start of the 1990s. Since then, the growth rates have risen and millions have moved up to join the middle class, but the rural poverty has multiplied. Liberalization has removed various subsidies and people cannot afford to buy their produce, as inflation has driven food prices up.
During the last half of the 20th century, food has been used as an instrument of dominance and hegemony and food aid as a political weapon by the rich nations to subjugate poor countries. Now, it has become a major commercial tool, even if it means exploiting the famine victims and starving millions, as is evident from the USaid decision to offer food worth $50 million to famine-stricken Zimbabwe, provided it agrees to purchase genetically modified (GM) maize.
A similar offer by the USaid about the corn has been made to Zambia, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Mozambique and Malawi, where an estimated 13 million people face severe hunger and live under the spectre of an impending famine after two years of drought and floods.
An eminent Indian journalist, Davinder Sharma, who has done extensive research on the linkage between food and politics, says: "For the genetically modified food industry, reeling under a growing rejection of its untested and harmful food products, there is money in hunger, starvation and death." The WFP, which has become an extension of the USaid, had helped the United States to reduce its grain surpluses by taking the GM food for a mid-day meal programme for school children in Africa.
Currently, the biotech industry is using all its political and financial clout to break the African resistance, but the Zambian President Levy Mwanawasa says his people would rather die than eat toxic food.
But Malawi had to surrender. Ann Pettifor of the New Economics Foundation says just three months before the famine hit, Malawi was encouraged by the IMF-World Bank "to keep foreign exchange instead of storing grain" because creditors will not accept debt repayments in Malawian currency, nor indeed in bags of maize. Only "greenbacks" would do.
Malawi's president, in a BBC interview, said his government "had been forced (to sell maize) in order to repay the commercial loans taken out to buy surplus maize in the previous years". He said that the IMF and the World Bank "insisted that, since Malawi had a surplus and the (government's) National Food Reserve Agency had this huge loan, they had to sell the maize to repay the commercial banks." So Malawi sold 28,000 tonnes of maize to Kenya. In other words, it exchanged its people's staple diet for dollars.
In the recent past, the United States has threatened Sri Lanka, Mexico and Thailand with trade sanctions if they regulated or banned the import of genetically modified foods and crops. It is now threatening China, accusing it of unfair trade restrictions over soybean imports.
Davinder Sharma has given some interesting instances of how food has been used by Washington as a political weapon. According to him, at the height of the 1974 famine in Bangladesh, the US had withheld 2.2 million tonnes of food aid to 'ensure that it abandoned the plans to try Pakistani war criminals'.
A year later, when Bangladesh was faced with severe monsoons and imminent floods, the then US Ambassador to Bangladesh made it abundantly clear that the US probably could not commit food aid because of the Bangladesh's policy of exporting jute to Cuba. And by the time Bangladesh succumbed to the American pressure, and stopped jute exports to Cuba, the food aid in transit was 'too late for famine victims'.
The FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf writes in the foreword to the new report: "If the latest data tend to confirm our understanding of factors that contribute to food security, they also confront us with another difficult question: if we already know the basic parameters of what needs to be done, why have we allowed hundreds of millions of people to go hungry in a world that produces more than enough food for every woman, man and child?"
The Ethiopian Environmental Protection Authority recently pointed to one of the ways in which the West has prevented Ethiopia from becoming self-sufficient in food. The Western governments and the international financial institutions have insisted that the private sector must control the Ethiopian food supply. They have prevented the government from building granaries and food depots that could store grain for more than a year.
As a result, while during the last three years Ethiopia experienced record harvests, now it faces famine again. Ethiopia's experience reveals the extent to which the growth in world hunger is a manmade phenomenon.
With the United States, the European Union and the Cairns Group having emerged as the biggest food exporters, at stake is the very survival of 1.5 billion small and marginal farmers of developing countries. As food is poised to become the weapon of the future, equally under threat is the food sovereignty and the economic independence of the Third World.