An Economics to Sustain Humanity

This is not a time when mere tinkering will do. The world is very near the brink, in part by virtue of the political-economic “equilibrium” we have made for ourselves in the last 400 years. We are in an interregnum, between the ages of affluence and scarcity; confused and uncertain about the past, we have hardly begun the attempt to grasp the future. Our political and economic institutions have lost the confidence of the people, and for good reason.

As Wendell Berry has put it, “as a nation we no longer have a future that we can imagine and desire ... We have become the worshippers and evangelists of a technology and wealth and power which surpass the comprehension of most of us, and for which the wisest of us have failed to conceive an aim. And we have become, as a consequence, more dangerous to ourselves and to the world than we are yet able to know.”

“Is there an economics to sustain humanity?” I have just returned from the World Food Conference and am convinced that there can be no new “equilibrium,” no political and economic meaning for the '70s, if we are not able to solve the intricate problems of world food. I want to speak of those problems, suggest some solutions and discard others, and finally issue a challenge to “re-vision” our culture.

The present world food crisis emerged suddenly in 1972 with global bad weather, the disappearance of the unassuming Peruvian anchovy, and a variety of other factors that caused the first decline in world food production in 20 years as the demands of population and affluence continued unabated. The result: Import demand climbed steeply, reserve stocks evaporated, and prices soared.

The high-income countries as a whole, with about 30 percent of the world’s population, accounted for 51 percent of the total consumption of cereals for all uses in 1969-71. The 370 million tons of grain used annually in these countries for livestock feed alone in 1969-71 was greater than the total human consumption of cereals in China and India combined. We in the United States consume nearly a ton of grain per capita each year, but only about 160 pounds of it directly. Most of the remainder is fed to animals; some of its used to make beer and liquor. On the other hand, the poor people of the world have an average of only 400 pounds of cereal grain to eat each year, nearly all of it consumed directly. These consumption levels have strained production capacity to the point that we have reserves sufficient for only 27 days of annual food consumption, down from 95 days in 1961. World food supplies of basic foodstuffs and food grains are perilously dependent on the harvest of a single season, and a widespread crop failure in any major producing area in 1974-75 could well mean catastrophe.

It is a testimony to the amorality and inhumanity of our economics that these figures do not ordinarily move us; that we see these things in terms of bushels, not shattered human lives. The U.N. estimates that one half of all child deaths are in some way attributable to malnutrition; the percentage of the population in the developing countries who must try to exist with food deficiencies ranges up to 30 percent or higher in some areas, and amounts to more than 434 million people in total, probably more.

Elie Shneour, author of The Malnourished Mind, believes that at least half of the world’s population has endured a period of severe nutritional deprivation during childhood. This is a serious business, for malnourishment in early years of life causes irremediable brain damage.

The immediate effect of malnutrition is obvious and appalling. Its long-term impact on our world cannot be fully known yet. But it is apparent that “we have not yet reaped the whirlwind of the famines that have pinched the brains of millions of people on several of our continents in the past 10 years.” (Dr. Richard Selzer, Harpers, June 1974.)

To meet the world food crisis, most proposals advanced by national and international agencies and private aid organizations have been based oil the following concepts:

(1) An increase in government services and support for rural development, with particular emphasis on productive investments in the agricultural sector and technical assistance for the farmer. This would include irrigation, flood control, an increase in arable land, improved storage and transportation facilities, etc., all involving the transfer of modern technology from rich to poor countries.

(2) Reliance on the high-yield varieties of grain and the technologies needed to support their production -- i.e., the “Green Revolution.”

(3) Another idea, although one offered with substantially less enthusiasm because of its necessarily political nature, is the suggestion of income redistribution, land reform, and improved marketing procedures which serve the farmer not the middleman.

(4) Increasing attention is being paid of the other half of the Malthusian equation: population There is growing insistence that no response to the world food crisis can be at all adequate if it does not propose an effective means of controlling population.

(5) Finally, as a defense against emergency situations created by natural disasters or war, leading authorities have urged the creation of a world food bank controlled by an international agency and drawn upon in time of need.

These proposals form the core of plans to deal with the world food crisis that have been offered in recent years. Yet none of them offers anything new; they are all traditional concepts of the conventional wisdom, which has done nothing to help the poor, and has in fact worsened their plight as the gap between rich and poor continues to widen. The traditional propositions fail to address the complex relationships of a society’s internal institutions, class structure, international intentions, and industrial progress; over which the traditionalists would simply impose their plans for agricultural improvement, however, ill-fitting.

A recent study has identified a constellation of 64 different factors which, singly and in combination, can affect food production and demand. Any effort that addresses only one of these factors and ignores the others will fail. For example, why extend arable land under irrigation if the available technology is not appropriate for maximizing output attainable through irrigation? What advantages are there to greatly increasing the land under cultivation if the means of getting the fruits of this new cultivation are inadequate? Most important, what advantages are there to significantly improving yields if the benefits of these improvements do not accrue to the growers, who need them to pay for the necessary technological improvements? And what if the potential consumers of these products lack the funds necessary to purchase them? It is this plight of the desperately poor both in town and country that best illustrates the failure of traditional development proposals.

The basis of wealth in a non-industrialized society is primarily land; thus in a goodly number of developing nations the majority of land is held by relatively few owners. These owners have relatively easy access to the financial and technological systems that are available to boost production in accordance with traditional development proposals. In turn, the financiers, technologists, and bureaucrats whose continued prosperity depends on the success of techniques requiring their expertise are only too quick to lend their aid to the large landholders and ignore the poor who are in greatest need of assistance, for the sake of a better “profit.”

In short, technical improvements such as those of the “Green Revolution” devoted exclusively to increases in production with no attention to social reality, increases inequality by serving those already well-established at the expense of the poor worker. This is true not only within the developing countries themselves, but also in the relationship of the developed, industrialized nations to the developing countries.

Because of the political-economic philosophies undergirding the technotronic culture of the developed countries, their involvement in the food programs of the developing nations is limited to those types of agriculture which serve their own interests, commercial or otherwise. Multinational agribusiness corporations operating in the Sahel of Africa devote their efforts to the production of vegetables, cotton, and cattle for foreign markets, depriving the indigent population of land for the production of essential cereal grains.

Direct colonialism has virtually ended, but it has been replaced by this more subtle and insidious form of exploitation, which primarily rests on the monopolization of capital by the multinational enterprises of the rich, developed countries, be they market economies or centrally planned.

The exploitation of the poor by the rich is not solely accomplished by the captains of industry, however. As Lester Brown, among others, has shown us, our personal consumption patterns can have a direct impact on the quality of life in a poor country.

The aggregate of the rich countries (capitalist and socialist) with 30 percent of the world’s population consumed 51 percent of the world’s total grain production during the period 1969-71. Of the more than 600 million tons of grain consumed by those countries, 370 million tons were used for animal feed. Obviously, the rich countries’ increasing tendency to use vegetable protein for the production of animal protein, a very inefficient conversion process that raids the world’s grain supplies for the sake of our luxurious lifestyle, has direct impact on the amount of food available for the poor.

Finally, this much must be said about the efficacy of population control as a means of reducing world food demand. There is no doubt that an all-out, concerted effort must be made by all nations to curb their population growth, and not only to reduce food consumption: But population control alone will not suffice. First, no population control program short of wholesale destruction of human beings will have any short-term effect on food consumption or resource depletion. More important, population control policies historically have been most effective when they involve populations or portions of populations that are relatively prosperous and have achieved minimum levels of education, nutrition, and health maintenance.

Unless such minimum standards are achieved through development programs designed to benefit the rural poor directly rather than through the ineffective “trickle down” programs enjoyed primarily by a majority of bureaucrats and large landholders, the population of the world’s poor will continue to swell, and the poor will be pushed farther into the abject poverty which renders them in capable of improving their food production or consumption.

Having dismissed as insufficient the traditional development proposals advanced as the way out of the world food crisis, I want to suggest what I see to be the fundamental approach that must be taken, and what implications this will have for finding a political-economic meaning for the '70s and an economics for sustaining humanity.

It is hard to envision successful development in the poor nations of the world if comprehensive land reform and income redistribution are not made the first tasks. This reform should be aimed at eliminating sharecropping and farm operations too small to accommodate the single family living on them. The new units created should be large enough to allow optimum use of “intermediate” technology; yet small enough that the land can be worked without the substantial inputs and expense of technology and energy required by American methods of agriculture.

Heavy capital investments would be financed by cooperatives serving these small land holders, rather than by urban bureaucrats or foreign corporations. Outside assistance in the form of technical aid or education, loans, credits, or grants, should all be directed toward facilitating the operation and production of these small units and their cooperative organizations, as much as possible by passing profiteering bureaucrats and middlemen.

This emphasis on relatively small operations replacing the present mix of landholding elite and a poor majority of peasants would accomplish several development goals at once. First, it would help stop the flight from rural areas to the even worse conditions of the urban slums prompted by the acquisition of small holdings by the elite and the replacement of the small farmer by technology he cannot afford.

In turn, rural development in this fashion would foster rural employment by the maximum use of labor-intensive methods as much as possible. Rural employment would begin to create for the rural poor the small measure of prosperity that so enhances population control efforts. Finally, marketing procedures would be simplified and distribution costs reduced, through the operation of cooperatives, to the benefit of rural producer and urban consumer alike.

This last is most important, for as the U.N. “Assessment of the World Food Situation” puts it, “the causes of inadequate nutrition are many and closely interrelated; including ecological, sanitary, and cultural constraints, but the principal cause is poverty.”

To break the grip of that poverty, we must discard traditional development policies which in poor countries have been characterized by high degree of concentration of power, wealth, and income in the hand of relatively small elites of national or foreign, individuals or groups. We cannot rely on any program which, like our P.L. 480 program in recent years, is devoted to “national security” interest that may have little or nothing to do with hunger or, for that matter, national security.

Nor can we expect the multinational agribusiness corporations, in their present form, to aid in a development process based on the well being of millions of Lilliputs rather than a handful of Gullivers. The business of the multinationals is to maximize profits. In the developing nations, that is best done through appropriation of the best land, use of technology beyond the reach of the indigenous population, and whatever use of cheap local labor seems necessary. After all, the world’s poor and starving are virtually non-existent to the “food industry,” for the poor cannot afford to purchase the food produced, and only the consumer counts.

Nor can we bring “marginal people” into full participation in the world community unless the rich of the world, and particularly those of us in the United States, abandon their rapacious lifestyles. The resources necessary to accomplish the elimination of poverty in what has now become known as the “Fourth World” will not be available if we continue to regard our planet as a quarry for exploitation. Kenneth Boulding said years ago that anyone who believes that people can go on forever plundering the resources of a finite earth must be either insane or an economist. “Forever” is the key word of that statement, for time is what the growth/no-growth debate is all about.

But whatever the specific time frame, it is apparent now that the size of the pie is limited, and the amount of it we consume, and the way in which we consume it, is going to affect our ability to transfer resources to the poor. If we share the goal of eliminating hunger in the world (and there are those who do not), then we would be wise to begin the transfer now, before we regard them as exclusively “ours” and the transfer becomes “expropriation.”

What will be required is what has always been most difficult to accomplish without violence: a redistribution of power, and the wealth that brings power; an end to pre-emption of resources by the rich; and a replacement for the kind of economics which divides the world into potential consumers and expendable workers for the sake of acquiring more money.

Developing that sort of political economic meaning will be a tremendous task, for it requires grasping a new reality through experience, understanding, and no small amount of sacrifice. It will take as Claude Levi-Strauss has said, “a spiritual revolution as great as that which led to the advent of Christianity. It would require that [humanity], who since the Renaissance has been brought up to adore himself, acquire modesty, and that we learn the lesson of all the atrocities we have experienced for 30 or 40 years.”

In the United States, the task will be particularly difficult, for we have not really known war in our own land, or want, or disease. In their stead we have created the most massive aggregation of wealth in the history of humanity, the comforts of which blind us to its destructiveness and insulates us from the pain it inflicts in its exploitation of the world’s poor.

Meanwhile, our policies for the agricultural development of the poor countries, insofar as we have any policies at all, tend to be copies of the American experience, driving people off the land to make way for tractors, chemicals, and “efficiency” without a thought of where the people should go from there--much less what they might do when they arrive.

Underpinning this wanton disregard for human consequences is an economics for which no better synopsis is available than that of Lord Keynes, who observed in 1930 that there might come a day when we would “value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful,” But, he continued, “the time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to everyone else that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.”

We still have 60 years to go on the Keynesian timetable, and already his philosophy has put us in the preposterous situation of using an extremely advanced technology to maintain nearly 4 billion people at a low average level of living while stripping the world of its resources, contaminating its water, soil, and air, and driving most other species into extinction, parasitism, or domestication. It is time we replaced that philosophy, that political-economic meaning, with one that could sustain humanity. Perhaps something like Gandhi’s dictum that “earth provides enough to satisfy everyone’s need, but not for everyone’s greed” can give us a start.

Adapted from an address delivered at the James H. Oliphant Forum in New York City on November 12, 1974. When this article appeared, Mark Hatfield was a U.S. senator and a contributing editor to the Post American.