Hunger | Introduction
On December 9, 1992, U.S. Marines began landing in Somalia to help provide food relief to a population in the throes of famine. While the Somalia mission— Operation Restore Hope—was criticized for a variety of reasons, few could object to its stated goal: to feed starving people. Indeed, in an era of advanced technology and communications, the fact that thousands of human beings faced death from lack of a need as basic as food seemed incredible and unconscionable to many. Over 300,000 people died in the famine, although the U.S. intervention is credited with preventing thousands of additional deaths.
The word hunger often evokes images of emaciated people, such as the victims of the Somalia famine. However, as Los Angeles Times writer Robin Wright notes, there are three degrees of hunger: acute, chronic, and hidden. Acute hunger (which applies to victims of famine) is a condition in which death is imminent due to an absolute shortage of food. Chronic hunger refers to a lack of food intake adequate for health, growth, and minimum energy needs. Hidden hunger describes those with a deficient diet for a prolonged period of time, which may result in a shortened life span.
It is widely agreed that hunger today is not caused by a global food shortage. Some commentators, such as Lester R. Brown, the president of Worldwatch Institute, predict that population growth, environmental degradation, and a shortage of new agricultural technologies will hinder the earth’s capacity to produce enough food for its people in the future. Most experts contend, however, that current levels of food production are adequate to feed the world’s population, which was 5.6 billion in 1994. And many agree with Stephen Budiansky of U.S. News & World Report that, with proper management, “the Earth’s basic resources are vastly greater than what are needed to feed even the 10 billion people who are almost certain to inhabit the planet by the middle of the [twenty-first] century.”
Rather than being a global problem, most analysts agree that hunger is a regional phenomenon with multiple causes, often compounded, that vary from place to place. As Scott Pendleton, a staff writer for the Christian Science Monitor, writes, “Despite the currency of phrases like ‘world hunger’ and ‘global famine,’ those conditions don’t exist and probably never will. . . . Starvation is local.” Inefficient use of resources, political instability, fluctuating economic conditions, and civil and ethnic conflict are some of the factors that contribute to hunger in different areas of the world.
Famine—the most severe and visible form of hunger—has historically been the result of natural phenomena such as droughts, floods, and crop failures. Today, however, advances in technology and transportation have made these natural factors less relevant. According to Kurt Jonassohn, a professor of sociology at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, “Since the middle of the twentieth century the technology of storing, preserving and transporting food stuffs in large quantities over long distances has made it possible to deal with natural disasters so efficiently that famines should no longer be expected.” Consequently, when famines do occur, they are increasingly viewed as “man-made” rather than natural disasters. For example, Jonassohn writes of Somalia that “in the fall of 1992 the evidence was quite clear that sufficient quantities of the essentials were in the pipeline. . . .The problem was not shortage but distribution.”
The idea that famines are largely man-made suggests that they can be prevented by human action. This seems confirmed by the experience of India, which instituted a famine-prevention system in the 1880s designed to detect and intervene in conditions likely to culminate in famine. When famine appears likely, the government guarantees jobs for all workers and makes food available at reasonable prices. This system has largely been successful at heading off famine in India during the past century despite numerous food shortages. In addition, India’s democratic political system (since its independence from Britain in 1947) is also credited with helping prevent famine. Under democracy, according to Alex de Waal, the associate director of Africa Watch, Indian government officials are motivated to stave off famine in order to remain on good terms with the electorate.
In politically unstable countries, on the other hand, famine often accompanies war. According to Robert W. Kates, director emeritus of the Alan Shawn Feinstein World Hunger Program at Brown University, “In all of the countries that have reported famine so far in the 1990s . . . armed conflict has been a major cause.” Kates argues, moreover, that these famines have not all been inadvertent consequences of war: Warring parties have used food as a weapon, deliberately depriving people of sustenance by destroying and intercepting provisions and by impeding food production. According to Jonassohn, this use of starvation as a war tactic constitutes genocide.
To respond to this intentional starvation of populations, many support the use of humanitarian interventions, such as the one in Somalia, to alleviate hunger in zones of conflict. For example, Tony P. Hall, a Democratic congressman from Ohio, advocates the creation of a military “strike force,” coordinated by the United Nations, to provide food relief in war-torn areas. While some oppose such interventions on the grounds that they violate the sovereignty of nations, others argue that sovereignty is forfeited by countries who use starvation as a weapon. According to Kates, “A new understanding of sovereignty rights must be developed that defers to urgent humanitarian needs. Stated simply, no nation has the right to starve its own or other people.”
The persistence of hunger in the last decade of the twentieth century seems at odds with humankind’s advances in science and technology. According to a report in the New State of the World Atlas, “The world is capable of feeding decently all its inhabitants. That it is conspicuously not doing so at present is the product not of necessity but of choice.” The viewpoints in Hunger: Current Controversies explore the nature and extent of hunger worldwide and debate what measures should be taken to relieve and prevent its occurrence.
