[PEN-L:28713] Amartya Sen on the dangers of "a little bit of equity" Re: Vandana Shiva

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

>  > The only differences have been whether the processes of urbanization and
> >  proletarianization were slow or rapid; whether the processes were
> >  organized by capitalist primitive accumulation or socialist state-led
> >  modernization; and what proportions of the formerly rural population
> >  could be incorporated into the nation's labor force as wage workers,
> >  shafted into the informal sector (petty trading, drug dealing,
> >  prostitution, etc.), or forced to emigrate to richer nations (often to
> >  remit money to support those trapped at home).
>
> That is the exactly the qustion.  Not whether or not, but how.  The
> question is whether a large increase in gradualism (with its attendent
> good effects on the welfare of the population ) could be achieved without
> sacrificing growth in their economic wellbeing (with its obvious bad
> effects on their welfare) under alternative schemes of rural development
> that are theoretically possible but have not yet been tried.  Or whether
> all such courses are theoretically impossible and TINA.
>
> Also whether the 19th century American model of agriculture is superior to
> say the 19th century French, both in itself and as a model for a
> developing country.  I.e, whether its greater division of labor and
> industrialization and export orientation, at the cost of lower per acre
> volume and nutritional content, and higher production of waste products
> and higher import needs for petroluem products, is obviously a better
> package deal for all concerned than its lower division-of-labor cousin.
>
> It's a question of relatives, not absolutes.  As well as largely
> consisting at this point of historical counterfactuals and speculation
> about possible (alternative) futures.
>
> Michael

Here's some food for thought:

*****   Hunger: Old torments and new blunders

Amartya Sen

...It is not that nothing has been achieved in India over the 
half-century or more since independence in 1947. Positive things have 
certainly happened. First, the rapid elimination of famines in India 
with independence is an achievement of great importance (the last 
sizeable famine occurred in 1943 - four years before independence), 
and this is certainly an accomplishment that contrasts with the 
failure of many other developing countries to prevent famine. And yet 
this creditable record in famine prevention has not been matched by a 
similar success in eliminating the pervasive presence of endemic 
hunger that blights the lives of hundreds of millions of people in 
this country.

Second, the stagnating agriculture that so characterised - and 
plagued - pre-independence India has been firmly replaced by a 
massive expansion of the production possibilities in Indian 
agriculture, through innovative departures. The technological limits 
have been widely expanded. What holds up Indian food consumption 
today is not any operational inability to produce more food, but a 
far-reaching failure to bring entitlement to food within the reach of 
the more deprived sections of the population. Indeed, as M.S. 
Swaminathan has pointed out, "We have reached a stage in our 
agricultural evolution when our production will increase only if we 
can improve consumption."[1]

...How can things be changed? The first thing to get rid of is the 
astonishing smugness about India's food record and the widespread 
ignorance that supports it. India has not, we must recognise 
unambiguously, done well in tackling the pervasive presence of 
persistent hunger. Not only are there persistent recurrences of 
severe hunger in particular regions (the fact that they don't grow 
into full-fledged famines does not arrest their local brutality), but 
there is also a gigantic prevalence of endemic hunger across much of 
India. Indeed, India does much worse in this respect than even 
Sub-Saharan Africa.[2] Calculations of general undernourishment - 
what is sometimes called "protein-energy malnutrition" - is nearly 
twice as high in India as in Sub-Saharan Africa. It is astonishing 
that despite the intermittent occurrence of famine in Africa, it too 
manages to ensure a much higher level of regular nourishment than 
does India. About half of all Indian children are, it appears, 
chronically undernourished, and more than half of all adult women 
suffer from anaemia. In maternal undernourishment as well as the 
incidence of underweight babies, and also in the frequency of 
cardiovascular diseases in later life (to which adults are 
particularly prone if nutritionally deprived in the womb), India's 
record is among the very worst in the world.

A striking feature of the persistence of this dreadful situation is 
not only that it continues to exist, but that the serious public 
attention it gets, when it gets any at all, is so badly divided.[3] 
Indeed, it is amazing to hear persistent repetition of the false 
belief that India has managed the challenge of hunger very well since 
independence. This is based on a profound confusion between famine 
prevention, which is a simple achievement, and the avoidance of 
endemic undernourishment and hunger, which is a much more complex 
task. India has done worse than nearly every country in the world in 
the latter respect. There are, of course, many different ways of 
shooting oneself in the foot, but smugness based on ignorance is 
among the most effective.

...This takes us to the next question. Once we get rid of the 
smugness, what should we do? The old barriers to good nutrition do, 
of course, remain, and we have to recognise that they have not lost 
their bite. People have to go hungry if they do not have the means to 
buy enough food. Hunger is primarily a problem of general poverty, 
and thus overall economic growth and its distributional pattern 
cannot but be important in solving the hunger problem. It is 
particularly important to pay attention to employment opportunities, 
other ways of acquiring economic means, and also food prices, which 
influence people's ability to buy food, and thus affect the food 
entitlements they effectively enjoy.[4]

Further, since undernourishment is not only a cause of ill health but 
can also result from it, attention has to be paid to healthcare in 
general and to the prevention of endemic diseases that prevent 
absorption of nutrients in particular. There is also plenty of 
evidence to indicate that lack of basic education too contributes to 
undernourishment, partly because knowledge and communication are 
important, but also because the ability to secure jobs and incomes is 
influenced by the level of education.

...So low incomes, relatively higher prices, bad healthcare and 
neglect of basic education can all be influential in causing and 
sustaining the extraordinary level of undernutrition in India. Yet, 
as Siddiq Osmani has shown, even after taking note of low levels of 
these variables, "one would have expected a much higher level of 
nutritional achievement than what actually obtains" in India in 
particular, and in South Asia in general.[5]

So something else must be brought in. Osmani suggests - plausibly 
enough - the lasting influence of maternal undernourishment, working 
its way via underweight babies (India and South Asia lead the world 
in this field), who grow into children and adults more prone to 
illnesses of various kinds. This is in line with findings that have 
been identified by others, such as Ramalingaswami and his 
colleagues.[6] Recent medical research has brought out the long-run 
effects of foetal deprivation, reflected in low birth weight, which 
appear to cause immunological deficiencies and other health 
vulnerabilities. The health and nutritional adversity related to 
maternal undernutrition and low birth weight children is almost 
certainly a significant factor in explaining the terrible nutritional 
state of India.

Since maternal undernourishment is causally linked with gender bias 
against women in general in India, it appears that the penalty India 
pays by being unfair to women hits all Indians, boys as well as 
girls, and men as well as women. Even though there is ambiguous 
empirical evidence regarding the relative nutritional backwardness of 
girls vis-à-vis boys (as Svedberg discusses in his paper in this 
number), there is no dearth of definitive evidence of the neglect of 
pregnant women. For example, the proportion of pregnant women who 
suffer from anaemia - three quarters of all - is astoundingly higher 
in India than in the rest of the world. The long-run effects of 
underweight births not only worsen the chances of good health and 
nutrition of children - both boys and girls - but also immensely 
increase the incidence of cardiovascular diseases late in life.[7] 
Interestingly, since men are, in general, more susceptible to 
cardiovascular diseases, it also turns out that the adverse impact of 
the neglect of the nutrition of pregnant women is, in this respect, 
even greater for men than for women. What is sown in the form of 
unfairness to women is reaped as illfare of men, in addition to the 
suffering of women themselves....

The barriers to nutritional progress come not only from old dividing 
lines, but also from brand new ones. Sometimes the very institutions 
that have been designed to overcome old barriers have tended to act 
as reactionary influences in adding to inequity and unequal 
deprivation. The terrible combination that we have in India of 
immense food mountains on the one hand and the largest conglomeration 
of undernourished population in the world is one example of this.[8]

In 1998, stocks of food grains in the central government's reserve 
were around 18 million tonnes - close to the official "buffer stock" 
norms needed to take care of possible fluctuations of production and 
supply. Since then, it has climbed and climbed, firmly surpassing the 
50 million mark, and it appears, according to recent reports, that 
our stocks now amount to 62 million tonnes. To take Jean Drèze's 
graphic description, if all the sacks of grain were laid up in a row, 
this would stretch more than a million kilometres, taking us to the 
moon and back. Since Jean Drèze wrote this last year (2000), the 
stocks have risen some more, and the sacks would now take us to the 
moon and back to the earth, and then back to the moon again.

It is good to hear from the Government of India that a small part of 
this large stock will be used for various good purposes, including 
one million tonnes going for relief in Afghanistan (I applaud both as 
a human being and as the Honorary President of OXFAM, which is much 
involved in providing relief in Afghanistan), but this would neither 
make much of a dent in the food mountain, nor stop its relentless 
enlargement - perhaps to 75 million tonnes soon, or even to a 100 
million.[9] The Food Minister has also proposed a different way of 
paying subsidies to the farmers, which apparently distributes them 
more equitably among the regions. Instead of the government's being 
obliged to buy food grains at the minimum support prices, food would 
now be sold at market prices and the government will pay the farmers 
the difference between the market prices and the minimum support 
prices. Farmers - even very big farmers - would no doubt be relieved 
to hear that their "interests", as the expression goes, "will be 
protected". And, of course, the stocks will keep accumulating, even 
though they are now approaching four times the official "buffer 
stock" requirements. And the public expense of the programme of 
subsidies (estimated not long ago at a staggering Rs 21,000 crore a 
year) is unlikely to spiral down. We are evidently determined to 
maintain, at heavy cost, India's unenviable combination of having the 
worst of undernourishment in the world and the largest unused food 
stocks on the globe.

...What can be the explanation for this odd insistence on 
counterproductive policy? The immediate explanation is not hard to 
get. The accumulation of stocks results from the government's 
commitment to unrealistically high minimum support prices of food 
grains - of wheat and rice in particular. But a regime of high prices 
in general (despite a gap between procurement prices and consumers' 
retail prices) both expands procurement and depresses demand. The 
bonanza for food producers and sellers is matched by the privation of 
food consumers. Since the biological need for food is not the same 
thing as the economic entitlement to food (that is, what people can 
afford to buy given their economic circumstances and the prevailing 
prices), the large stocks procured are hard to get rid of, despite 
rampant undernourishment across the country. The very price system 
that generates a massive supply keeps the hands - and the mouths - of 
the poorer consumers away from food.

But does the government not remedy this problem by subsidising food 
prices according to the level of procurement prices - surely that 
should keep food prices low to consumers? Not quite. Jean Drèze and I 
discuss this issue more fully in our forthcoming book, India: 
Development and Participation, but one big part of the story is 
simply the fact that much of the subsidy does in fact go to pay for 
the cost of maintaining a massively large stock of food grains, with 
a mammoth and unwieldy food administration (including the Food 
Corporation of India). Also, since the cutting edge of the price 
subsidy is to pay farmers to produce more and earn more, rather than 
to sell existing stocks to consumers at lower prices (that too 
happens, but only to a limited extent and to restricted groups), the 
overall effect of food subsidy is more spectacular in transferring 
money to farmers than in transferring food to the undernourished 
Indian consumers.

Need for a clearer class analysis

If there were ever a case for radical class analysis, in which the 
Left could take the Right to the cleaners, one would have thought 
that this would be it. Sure enough, some public interest groups have 
protested and taken issues of fundamental rights to the Supreme 
Court. But the systematic criticism of this problem from the 
perspective of class inequality has been amazingly muffled and 
silent. The protest we hear is strangely divided, along with 
repetition of the mantra about keeping food prices high for the 
benefit of farmers and cultivators. Why is this so?

When the policy of food procurement was introduced and the case for 
purchasing food from farmers at high prices was established, various 
benefits were foreseen, and they are not altogether pointless, nor 
without some claim to equity. First, building up stocks to a certain 
point is useful for food security - even necessary for the prevention 
of famines. That would make it a good thing to have a large stock up 
to some limit - in today's conditions, perhaps even a stock of 20 
million tonnes or so. The idea that since it is good to build up 
stocks as needed, it must be even better to build up even more 
stocks, is of course a costly mistake.

It is important in this context to also examine a second line of 
reasoning in defence of high food prices, which too comes in as a 
good idea and then turns counterproductive. Those who suffer from low 
food prices include some that are not affluent - the small farmer or 
peasant who sells a part of the crop. The interest of this group is 
mixed up with those of big farmers, and this produces a lethal 
confounding of food politics. While the powerful lobby of privileged 
farmers presses for higher procurement prices and for public funds to 
be spent to keep them high, the interests of poorer farmers, who too 
benefit from the high prices, are championed by political groups that 
represent these non-affluent beneficiaries. Stories of the hardships 
of these people play a powerful part not only in the rhetoric in 
favour of high food prices, but also in the genuine conviction of 
many equity-oriented activists that this would help some very 
badly-off people. And so it would, but of course it would help the 
rich farmers much more, and cater to their pressure groups, while the 
interests of the much larger number of people who buy food rather 
than sell it would be badly sacrificed.

There is need for more explicit analysis of the effects of these 
policies on the different classes, and in particular on the extreme 
underdogs of society who, along with their other deprivations 
(particularly low incomes, bad healthcare, inadequate opportunities 
of schooling), are also remarkably underfed and undernourished. For 
casual labourers, slum-dwellers, poor urban employees, migrant 
workers, rural artisans, rural non-farm workers, even farm workers 
who are paid cash wages, high food prices bite into what they can 
eat. The overall effect of the high food prices is to hit many of the 
worst-off members of society extremely hard. And while it does help 
some of the farm-based poor, the net effect is quite regressive on 
distribution. There is, of course, relentless political pressure from 
farmers' lobbies in the direction of high food prices, and the 
slightly muddied picture of some farm-based poor being benefited 
permits the confusion that high food prices constitute a pro-poor 
stance, when in overall effect it is very far from that.

It is said that a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. So, 
unfortunately, is a little bit of equity when its championing 
coincides with massive injustice to vast numbers of underprivileged 
people....

[The full text is available at 
<http://www.littlemag.com/hunger/aks.html> & 
<http://www.littlemag.com/hunger/aks2.html>.]   *****

I'm gonna get back to work now.  :->
--
Yoshie

* Calendar of Events in Columbus: 
<http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>
* Anti-War Activist Resources: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/activist.html>
* Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/>
* Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osu.edu/students/CJP/>