I just read a sad, scary, important book: Three Famines: Starvation and Politics, by Thomas Kenneally. It’s a study of famine generally and of three in particular: the Irish potato famine (which started in 1845), the Bengal famine (1943-44), and the Ethiopian famines of the 1970s and 1980s.
It’s painful reading, especially when detailing the actual anatomical, physiological, and behavioral consequences of starving to death, but all the more necessary for those of us who have almost certainly been hungry but never experienced genuine, chronic hunger. And it’s important because of the connections established between famine and ideology, specifically how the above three famines were not acts of God or nature, but rather, of politics.
Indeed, much as I am convinced that there are way too damned many people on this planet, Keneally is also convincing about his thesis that famines aren’t caused by too little food but by too much indifference—or, worse yet, direct culpability—on the part of unaccountable political rulers. A famine isn’t nearly so much a production problem as a distribution problem. Kenya, for example, is a very rich country; only the people are poor.
Natural triggers initiated each of the disastrous famines Keneally documents so effectively, but in every case, as he also shows, there was more than enough food to avoid wholesale starvation, or even widespread suffering. It appears that throughout history, many rulers have been either indifferent to their subjects’ fates, committed to using famine as a direct act of suppression, or in the grip of obsessional ideology such as the right-wing variety that insists on letting the “wisdom of the market” work its purported magic. And in many such cases, there can be a huge need for food, but no “demand” for it in the economic sense, insofar as those who are hungry can’t pay.
During the Irish potato famine, Charles Edward Trevelyan wrote that the famine was a message sent by God, “to teach the Irish a lesson.” “The real evil with which we have to contend,” wrote this administrator of supposed English “relief” efforts, “is the not physical evil of the famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people.” And, of course, any interruption in the free flow of trade (such as diverting crops or livestock to alleviate starvation) would have constituted unacceptable interference in that holiest of holies, the free market.
An observer of the Irish scene in 1845 wrote that even as the British government continued to seize and ship Irish-grown beef, pigs, and vegetables to England, “insane mothers began to eat their young children who died of famine before them; and still fleets of ships were sailing with every tide, carrying Irish cattle and corn to England.” Note, by the way, that this wasn’t Jonathan Swift’s famously fantastical “modest proposal,” but rather the real thing.
I’m quite aware (as is Keneally) that what Francis Bacon might well have labeled right-wing Idols of the Free Market aren’t the only source of famine; there have been horrendous ones orchestrated in the recent past by tyrants of the far left as well (especially by Stalin in the USSR and Mao in China), not to mention that perennial disaster, North Korea, testimony both to a failed system and to a grotesque disconnect between rulers and ruled.
But the fact of massive abuse by extremists of one ideology hardly suffices to whitewash abuse by anyone else, especially when hard-right ideological fixes are being peddled influentially by what increasingly passes for mainstream Republican policies here in the United States. Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen pointed out that there has never been a famine in a democratically governed country, largely because in such countries, governments are accountable to their people: an important response to those loony American extremists who proclaim government the problem, and who seek to divorce it from its rightful role as custodian of the common good.
It can’t happen here, you say? You might want to read Paul Krugman’s recent op-ed in The New York Times, titled “Free to Die,” which describes how current Tea Party ideology (albeit focused in Krugman’s case on health care) could have been written and endorsed by the same cruel, invisible hands that years later remain stained with so much innocent blood.
[image from Wikipedia]
