Food Fight: Struggling for Justice in a Hungry World

by Paul Jeffrey, Chris Herlinger

Overview

Powerful Photojournalism

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781596272675
Publisher:	Seabury Books
Publication date:	09/01/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	160
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

As a photojournalist for The United Methodist Church, the Rev. Paul Jeffrey has reported from more than eighty countries around the world. Jeffrey lived in Latin America for two tumultuous decades, and continues to focus his attention on how the poor become subjects of their own histories. He blogs at kairosphotos.com.

Chris Herlinger is currently an international correspondent for Global Sisters Report, a project of National Catholic Reporter, for which he covers the impactful humanitarian work of Catholic nuns across the globe. A New York–based freelance journalist, he has written on humanitarian and international issues for the Christian Century, the Huffington Post, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, and Religion News Service. Chris’s work for humanitarian groups has also included stints for Church World Service and for Episcopal Relief & Development. He lives in New York, New York.

Read an Excerpt

Food Fight

Struggling for Justice in a Hungry World

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By Chris Herlinger, Paul Jeffrey

Church Publishing Incorporated

Copyright © 2015 Chris Herlinger and Paul Jeffrey
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-59627-267-5

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CHAPTER 1

Getting Our Bearings in a Hungry World

Hunger is no accident. It can result from unconscious assumptions, as well as from deliberate acts. In either case, studying hunger is to enter a house of horrors. Consider the "Great Famine" that laid waste to parts of China five decades ago and caused people to be literally "driven mad by hunger." Journalist Yang Jisheng has dedicated his life to researching and reporting this catastrophe. In his milestone book, Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958–1962, Yang observed: "The instinct for survival drives a starvation victim to seek out anything that can be eaten." It is one thing to know this intellectually, and another to be confronted with its actuality. In one horrifying example, Yang writes of a mother who cooked and ate her own daughter. When the elder daughter realized what had happened, she pulled at her mother's jacket and begged her, "Mama, please don't eat me! When I grow up I'll look after you."

In the face of famine that became that severe and obscene, there is little that could be done from the outside, as frustrating as that sounds to those of us who work in the aid business, as well as to those "in the pews" who support Church World Service, Lutheran World Relief, Bread for the World, and other groups. Surely, we all hope, it is possible to restore a level of dignity and morality, however imperfectly or incrementally. Sometimes it is, but not always. Why? Because famine is not only rooted in "natural" causes, though certainly natural causes can and do trigger famine, but also in government and corporate policies that ultimately starve people, sometimes in the name of ideology. And it is at that point that the aid business can falter because humanitarian groups nearly always have to work with sovereign governments, and there is little they can do when a government does not want assistance.

In China's Great Famine, 36 million people starved to death. Yang argued it was a combination of ideological fervor, government indifference, and political hubris that commingled in a toxic brew of totalitarian politics. "Control was virtually total. Political power extended into the most remote corners of China's map and allowed the dictatorship of the proletariat to invade every family, every brain, and every stomach." And how precisely did this come to pass? Mao Zedong's desire to catch up, and even surpass, the West as an industrialized country spawned a massive campaign known as the Great Leap Forward. With millions pouring into China's cities, the Chinese government embarked on a parallel program to increase agricultural production to feed urban residents. Rural villagers, Yang wrote, "starved so that urban dwellers could live." That policy resulted in a series of disasters including agricultural experiments that did not work, crackdowns in villages to ensure that all available grains were sent to government-run warehouses for use elsewhere, and the introduction of communal kitchens where Communist Party representatives called cadres fed communities en masse. (As part of the overall absurdity, authorities even confiscated private kitchen utensils and had them melted down into scraps of unused pig iron.) The kitchens were also places where acts of favoritism, political loyalty, and spite empowered a small group of people to decide who would eat and who would not. One of the most chilling quotes from Tombstone comes from a commune cadre who said, "Holding the communal kitchen's ladle and scale in my hand, I decide who lives and dies."

Famine Resulted from Neglect, Mismanagement, Incompetence — and Cruelty

In his study of several famines of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — Ireland in the 1840s, Bengal a century later, and Ethiopia in the 1970s and 1980s — Thomas Keneally noted a key fact about famine in all three locales. Famine, he wrote, in Three Famines: Starvation and Politics, occurred "not because of the loss of a single staple food, or because of natural disasters — drought or plant pestilence — in themselves." Instead, the harm resulted from a lethal combination of neglect, mismanagement, and incompetence — in the case of Ireland and Bengal, with cruel British colonial overseers; in the case of Ethiopia, with a harsh Marxist government headed by Mengistu Haile Mariam.

Racial, religious, and ethnic prejudices were factors in each of these events. The case of Ireland is well known. Some British officials felt God's hand at work when thousands perished in the Irish famine of the 1840s. Keneally quoted the British bureaucrat Charles Trevelyan, who asserted in 1847, "It is hard upon the poor people that they should be deprived of knowing that they are suffering from an affliction of God's providence." God, Trevelyan believed, had ordained the Irish famine "to teach the Irish a lesson, that calamity must not be too much mitigated ... the real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the Famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse, and turbulent character of the people." Similar though non-Christian expressions were voiced in Bengal and Ethiopia, always framed as examples of God's will or punishment against a people's "wantonness."

Outright cruelty also animated the landscape. British troops needlessly evicted thousands of Irish from their homes, all the while guarding foodstuffs for export from Ireland. During China's Great Famine the country continued to export food at record levels. In the 1980s, government troops in Ethiopia trying to quash an antigovernment rebellion destroyed whole villages and prevented food supplies from reaching displaced persons who were hungry, or worse, starving. One displaced person said, "There was no hunger before this." Often in these situations there was not. "The victims [in Ireland, Bengal, and Ethiopia] felt with some accuracy that the land itself produced enough food," Keneally wrote. "It was the fact that the food became inaccessible to millions that produced the emergency."

Who decides who eats — in other words, who decides who lives and who dies — that is politics. Alex de Waal, a British writer and analyst of humanitarian affairs, has long argued that famine is political in nature — that it often results from political actions. As such, outside humanitarian responses that do not take local politics and realities into account are bound to fail. More valuable, in the end, de Waal argued, are actions that empower those who are living with the famine themselves. "The struggle against famine cannot be the moral property of humanitarian institutions," he argued in his book Famine Crimes. "An important step in that struggle is for those directly affected by famine to reclaim this moral ownership." Put another way, he argued, "humanitarian outsiders [can] only make a positive difference if they realize they can only make a small difference. ... [I]t is people's own efforts, made possible by security in rural areas and health services, that will do that."

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But doing that is not easy. The World Bank's Global Monitoring Report on drought in the Horn of Africa in 2012 acknowledged the ways the poor cope with the daily pressures to keep food on the table. According to the study,

reducing the quality of food and the number of meals was one of the most common responses [to the increase in food prices]. ... In addition, reducing nonfood consumption, working more hours, and diversifying income sources (say, by entering a new informal occupation) were common nearly everywhere. ... Migration, sometimes reverse migration to the home area, was also fairly common in response to the food price spikes. Asset sales were common, and loans from family, friends, and moneylenders were also important. [Coping] with economic crises has eroded the savings and asset base of many households, leaving them with few resources to manage future shocks.

In Kenya, the Issue of Food amid So Many Challenges

This was confirmed to me during an assignment to Kenya when I saw how a very unsettled country dealing with many internal and external problems dealt with the issue of food amid so many challenges, including drought. At the time Kenya was experiencing its so-called "first war" — the first cross-border military incursion into border areas of Somalia since Kenya's 1963 independence — to rout out al-Shabaab, the radical Islamist group that ruled much of Somali territory and was blamed for terrorist strikes within Kenya. Yet, the issue that came up again and again with everyone I spoke to (and I mean everyone — in urban and rural areas, professionals and poor alike) was about food and rising food prices. Fr. Pius Kyule, a Catholic priest in the Machakos district, a rural area southeast of Nairobi, told me people came to him every day asking for something to eat. Sometimes he had food; sometimes he did not. "It becomes very awkward when you have nothing to give them," he said.

Personnel at a feeding clinic in the Nairobi area of Mathare said there had been a substantial increase in the number of malnourished children requiring emergency food supplements. Several people living with HIV said their situation had gotten much tougher physically. In order to be effective, antiviral drugs have to taken on full stomachs. But given the rise in food prices, those taking the drugs now had to ration their food for the day so they did not feel sick when they took the medicine. Also striking was how the situation had "privatized" peoples' lives. A lack of trust and a rise of fear among neighbors in areas like Mathare were common. An act as simple as visiting a neighbor was fraught with problems or suspicions. People wondered, "Is this person coming to see me because she needs food or money or a loan?" And when there was no food, neighbors started to snoop. "It becomes so demoralizing when women ask, 'Why aren't you cooking today?'" said Mathare resident Rosalyn Akinyi Ouma.

Sammy Matua of Church World Service, based in Nairobi, helped coordinate the CWS response to the Kenyan drought. He said the agonizing problems stemmed from the lack of "social capital," the accumulation of deep-rooted relationships and trust in urban slum areas like Mathare. "In a village, you can fall back on a social network, but here you lose your social capital," he said. The result, Matua said, was people "look inward. 'What is mine is mine alone,' becomes the operating principle. There is no mutual trust."

Yet even with all of that, the very tangible commitment of humanitarian agencies and churches to do something had its own importance. At a Catholic-supported feeding program for young children in Mathare, carpenter Marselus Odongo Ragweli recounted how two of his six children, ages four and one, had gained strength from the feeding program. His youngest son, Philip, the one- year-old, had the appearance of a much older person with wrinkled skin before he received the food, a peanut-based protein supplement called Plumpy'Nut. In the midst of bad times for the family, as his carpentry work fell off and the family was forced to skip meals, the supplemental feeding improved Philip's health — his skin, his weight, his countenance. This is one example of what has become a foundational cornerstone among nutritionists: proper nutrition in the first 1,000 days of life — from conception to roughly a child's second birthday — is crucial. If a child does not receive that essential grounding in food, irreversible damage results. Ragweli said he didn't know what the family would have done without the food provided by the clinic. "There's nothing else we could have done," he said, rubbing his rough, calloused hands, "You can't steal."

That point of commitment — to remain honorable even at a time of desperate want — was expressed often among those living in Mathare, said Carolyne Munyi, the feeding program's nurse-in-charge. Yet she worried that such pride could become harder to sustain. The cycle of food crisis after food crisis — felt acutely by Kenya's urban poor — was occurring far too frequently, she said. "I don't know how some women are surviving."

It is true that, at the end of the day, the work of the clinic, however limited in its scope, was doing good and saving lives. "It's very, very nice and very satisfying to see the improvements, the changes," Munyi said. But, as a new year began, she remained worried about the future — about more cases of hunger, more broken marriages, more domestic and sexual abuse. "I think it's going to get worse," she said. "You want to give your children something, at least that one meal. They want food on their plate but they can't afford it." She paused. "A hungry man is an angry man."

Systems Rooted in Long Histories Create Problems

One reason the anger is altogether justified is because of the created systems that perpetuate the problem. These systems are based in historical dynamics that are not difficult to understand. In fact, one way to look at global history as a whole is through the prism of food: who controls it, who is denied it, who fights for it. As Akram-Lodhi notes in his book Hungry for Change, "Human history can be powerfully — and critically — understood by the ways and mechanisms through which humanity has tried to meet its food needs." In the course of about 10,000 years, our species' relationship to food has changed dramatically. "The modern world — our world — has its beginnings in a set of transformations that commenced in our relationship to food and farming," he writes. In earlier times, of course, Homo sapiens lived by hunting and gathering; this eventually changed to "sowing, cultivating, and breeding of plants and the management of animals kept in captivity."

This was a crucial and elemental change — what Akram-Lodhi describes as an "agricultural revolution [that] alchemized and transformed human societies — and not necessarily for the better. Dietary changes seen in the shift from a meat-based, protein-rich diet and the shift to a more stationary, sedentary and settled mode of life led to widespread death by malnutrition or its accomplice, disease, and caloric intake collapsed for many societies."

The issue of who controls food is paramount, of course. This truism became a particularly acute dynamic during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when global markets and trade had a pronounced effect on many parts of the world. Historian and social critic Mike Davis notes in Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World that for centuries, "village-level" trade and "reciprocities" were a buffer for peasants and city dwellers dependent on agricultural transactions. By the time of the industrial revolution, however, such a system was upended, creating what later would be termed "the Third World."

What is still called the "Third World" is, as Davis argues, "the outgrowth of income and wealth inequalities — the famous 'development gap' — that were shaped most decisively in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when the great non-European peasantries were initially integrated into the world economy." Up until then, economic divisions were more pronounced within societies than between societies, Davis argues. As an example, the living standards between peasants in France and Africa were, as Davis points out, "relatively insignificant compared to the gulf that separated both from their ruling classes. By the end of Victoria's reign, however, the inequality of nations was as profound as the inequality of classes. Humanity had been irrevocably divided."

India and China were two countries, Davis argues, that "did not enter modern history as the helpless 'lands of famine' so universally enshrined in the Western imagination." In contrast to "orientalist stereotypes of immutable poverty and overpopulation as the natural preconditions of the major nineteenth-century famines," there is, rather, "persuasive evidence that peasants and farm laborers became dramatically more pregnable to natural disasters after 1850 as their local economies were violently incorporated into the world market. What colonial administrators and missionaries ... perceived as the persistence of ancient cycles of backwardness were typically modern structures of formal or informal imperialism."

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Food Fight by Chris Herlinger, Paul Jeffrey. Copyright © 2015 Chris Herlinger and Paul Jeffrey. Excerpted by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments,
Preface,
Introduction,
1. Getting Our Bearings in a Hungry World,
2. The Horn of Africa: "Responding to Shocks Over and Over Again",
3. Gran Chaco: Feeling History's Weight in a Harsh Place,
4. Bringing It Home,
Gallery,
Afterword,
For Discussion,
Select Bibliography,