Author: WHES

By David Beckmann and Arthur Simon

Paulist Press, 997 Macarthur Boulevard, Mahwah, New Jersey, 07430. 1999. Paperback. 219 pp. ISBN: 0-8091-3866-2.

Reviewed by Berard L. Marthaler

This book may be ordered online through Hunger Notes’ bookstore.

This work belongs to the genre of literature classified on the Internet under the heading FAQ– Frequently Asked Questions. It may be that the questions in Grace at the Table about “ending hunger in God’s world,” are not frequently asked, but the authors think they should be. Arthur Simon and David Beckmann, respectively the founding president and the current president of Bread for the World, have compiled a catechism that describes the extent of world hunger, identifies the causes, and proposes strategies for dealing with it.

The catechism image comes to mind both because of the book’s Q and A approach and because its message is expressed in religious and moral terms. The authors declare, for example, that hunger “is a scandal not only in the sense of moral outrage, but also because it causes despair and alienates people from God.” The second chapter weaves together a number of biblical references, and asks the question, “Is there a Christian political agenda on hunger?,” and ends with the assertion, “Helping hungry people is to Christian faith as breathing out is to breathing in.”

Although regular readers of WHES’ Hunger Notes will not find much in these pages that they do not already know, they cannot help but recognize Grace at the Table as a valuable resource that organizes a broad range of information, including facts and figures in a readable format. Twenty-nine chapters subdivided into eight sections, it covers such topics as “Too Many People?,” “Creating Good Jobs,” “Women Bear The Brunt,” “The Economics of Hunger,” and “Charity Is Not Enough.” It is an engaging book that deserves wide circulation among the general public (that is, people like me who are not regular readers of Hunger Notes !). Informed leaders in the drive to overcome global hunger will also find it useful because the list of “Resources for Anti-hunger Work” at the back of the book, as well as endnotes at the end of each chapter, make it a handy reference tool.

Berard L. Marthaler is a faculty member at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.

By Michel Chossudovsky

Zed Books Ltd. London and New Jersey. 1997. Paperback. 288 pp. ISBN: 1856494020.

Reviewed by Leo Vox

This book may be ordered online through Hunger Notes’ bookstore.

In countries as diverse as Russia, India, and Rwanda, Michel Chossudovsky’s The Globalization of Poverty takes severely to task the structural adjustment programs of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Readers uninitiated in criticism of the International Financial Institutions might perhaps be put off by Chossudovsky’s polemical treatment of the Bank and the Fund. They would be mistaken, for the author joins with his rhetorical style truly remarkable insights into the workings of Bank and Fund adjustment programs in 10 countries over more than a decade.

Chossudovsky’s thesis– that Bank and Fund loan programs create economic strait jackets, which do more to impoverish the recipients and cast them in the yoke of international division of labor than to promote economic growth– is not entirely new to Bank and Fund criticism. The strength of the book is the diversity and detail of the country studies and the author’s seeming first-hand experience in several of them.

A structural adjustment loan is a quick disbursing loan in foreign exchange, usually used to repay prior international debt, and for which a number of economic policy reforms are most often required. Balancing domestic tax receipts and spending, freeing prices from government control, freer labor markets and a private sector-oriented investment code are some of the reforms frequently required and which are thought to make the economy more efficient.

Meant to balance national budgets, rectify market imbalances and make the economy more competitive, the real effect of these policies, according to Chossudovsky, is to impoverish the working and middle classes and cause the economy to plunge into a serious economic depression due to shrinking internal demand. In example after example, the book explores the deleterious effects of structural adjustment programs on the working poor through the mechanism of rising prices, falling exchange rates, higher taxes and reduced welfare programs, which Chossudovsky claims result ineluctably from the very reforms insisted upon by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. The raising of taxes to “balance” the budget, the reduction in social programs for the same fiscal reasons resulting in disinvestment in education and health, rising market prices as a result of “freeing” them, are some of the policy effects Chossudovsky documents and criticizes.

In addition to the more direct effects of Bank and Fund “reforms,” the author accuses the institutions of promoting anti-labor policies by “freeing” up wages, as they argue for reduction or abolition of the minimum wage in the guise of enhanced competition, and for “freeing up” labor markets through anti-union provisions in local laws. As the author documents, rather than the more “efficient” use of labor that they ostensibly promote, more often than not these programs result in greater exploitation of children, women, migrants, and the poor, generally.

Alliances of local elites with the lender community often result in acceptance of the international prescriptions with otherwise scant domestic constituencies. Chossudovsky documents cases so egregious that even national policies are drafted at Bank and Fund headquarters before being forwarded for local signature. All this would seem to result from the burden of debt from which countries are unable to escape, which Bank and Fund programs caused in the first place, and which, under structural adjustment, now provide not relief but modest downsizing. Under structural adjustment the book explains how old debt is replaced with the new debt of a structural adjustment program, with its additional burden of all the externally imposed conditions on the local economy. According to Chossudovsky, many of these conditions are hardly appropriate to local conditions, have no local base of support, certainly not among the poor or middle classes, and serve more to impoverish the country and create cheap labor for export of wealth to the developed countries than to extract the country from its situation.

In one of its few failings of insight, the book does not complete its critique of the international lending mechanism. It is not the claim that legitimate debt should be repaid, which is at the core of this critique, but the legitimacy and soundness of the debt itself. Unlike mortgage debt or business debt, created by two parties privy to risk and gain with limited liability as a fence around the transaction, with Bank and Fund debt there is no collateral, no structured investment, and a sovereign guarantee of repayment. Such conditions all too often imply that international institutions will insist upon loan repayment by the mass of working poor.

As Chossudovsky’s very informed country case studies show, the Bank and Fund are not dupes to local elites but willing partners in this exchange. The exchange of non-performing loans for structural adjustment loans with their ensuing policy conditionality allows the International Financial Institutions (IFIs), through the mechanism of sovereign guarantee commitments, to extend the system’s dominion and consequently their own power through the structures of finance. A country that doesn’t repay a Bank or Fund loan, even for a totally bankrupt project, will be excluded from future international loans and trade. Here Chossudovsky’s examples, especially what happened to Peru in the late 1980s as a result of President Garcia’s policy of limiting debt repayments to what could be afforded, are particularly illustrative. IFI loans are the only types of loans for which such draconian practices prevail. For ordinary commercial bank loans, collateral is split at the end of the day, once a borrower is unable to repay. Under the “poor pay all” system of international lending, economic impoverishment, child labor and human suffering are, unfortunately, only too likely outcomes. There are many positive aspects to the structural adjustment programs as well, especially those providing enhanced economic freedoms, and these are among the aspects of the programs its defenders would stress. Unfortunately, by the time these are put in place it is very much too late for many to have very significant effects.

Where the average reader may have the most difficulty with the book’s thesis is in following the arguments to their implicit conclusion of willful intent. Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa. As many economists he seems to believe that individual and institutional acts can be treated as rational constructs with a particular purpose in mind. Alas, in dealing with the Bank and the Fund and their staffs the purpose he attributes to them as final arbiter of an international system of wealth, class and the transmission of political power is little understood generally and most significantly, little understood by those who are its primary agents. How does the system defend its actors from its own logic? Here we might be of some help.

The staffs of the IFIs are hardly the villains who deliberately promote child labor, wreak havoc with the fragile economies of Rwanda, India and Bangladesh, devalue currencies and force the repeal of minimum wage laws, as one might conclude from Chossudovsky’s analysis. The staffs of these institutions are for the most part hopelessly middle-class creatures who by dint of being somewhat overpaid have become zealous defenders of a system which they understand only in part. A system which goes in large measure to assure the wealth, power and its counterpart poverty, from which they profit, but of which they are also, to a lesser extent, the victims. Staffs and defenders of the IFIs would point to the good intentions of the programs, sound technical foundations, the moral soundness of debt repayment and that local corruption and mismanagement are not the fault of the Bank and the Fund. All this may be true at the same time that the IFIs have played an important role in the repartitioning of wealth between the industrialized and underdeveloped world.

Quite recently, the G-7 has pledged to forgive a portion of multilateral debt whose repayment has become increasingly onerous, as well as unlikely. While it remains to be seen whether our Congress will vote the funds to implement this accommodation, at a time when the system remains overwhelmingly intact, The Globalization of Poverty is a good reminder of where it has taken us.

Leo Vox is the pen-name for an economist from the United States Agency for International Development.

The following excerpt is from: The Globalization of Poverty; Ch. 6, pp. 125-35:

“India: The IMF’s “Indirect Rule”

World Bank structural adjustment loans and IMF loans were signed shortly after the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in November, 1991. Earmarked for repayment of six months of debt servicing of India’s external debt totaling $80 billion, the loans helped stem a crisis of confidence on the part of international lenders. Policy conditionality on which the loans were predicated, while held tightly as a “state secret”, is reported to have been wide sweeping in its scope. Ensuing measures to address balance of payments difficulties, reduce the fiscal deficit and relieve inflationary pressures may have had just the opposite effect. The economy suffered from “stagflation”, the price of rice increasing by more than 50 percent in the months following the 1991 measures and the balance-of-payments continued to deteriorate as rising import costs were not able to be offset by a decline in imports of essential commodities or an increase in exports. The negative effects of the program on internal demand pushed a large number of firms into bankruptcy. The program resulted in dismissal of roughly one-fifth of the public sector work force with only a very modest “safety net”. More “liberal” labor legislation may have marginalized further lower wage employees and landless farm workers as wages for these groups came under pressure while consumer prices rose.

While in recent years India has returned to economic growth in the neighborhood of 5 percent per annum, the program may well have contributed to a two-tier economy of increasing poverty for some and growing opportunity for others.”

by Janet Poppendieck

New York: Penguin Putnam Books. 1999. Hardcover. 354 pp. ISBN 0670880205.

This book may be ordered online through Hunger Notes’ bookstore.

Many anti-hunger food programs in the United States have been driven by supply considerations, principally the need to dispose of U.S. food surpluses, but they have also been community based, pragmatic, innovative, and often heroic in their attempt to provide a safety net for America’s poor. But does the growth of these efforts discourage Congress from addressing root causes?

Janet Poppendieck, a professor at New York’s Hunter College, argues yes: U.S. community-based feeding programs reduce pressure for more fundamental change.

Based on recent field visits she made to dozens of programs around the United States, she concludes that the growth of kindness abets a decline in justice. But the author’s premise goes untested as she finds no data to test her proposition that the availability of help from food pantries “may” deter people from exercising their rights to government entitlements, with the consequence that they “may end up worse off, materially at least.”

Her conclusions are strongly conditioned by her assumptions, which she states early on. She feels that the government is responsible for income inequality. She prefers Federal entitlements to community-based action. She writes glowingly about how food stamps in the 1960s brought “us together, to make us one society,” while she was “taken aback when soup kitchens and food pantries began to proliferate in the early 1980s.” Of particular value are the historical lessons about the ebbs and flows of U.S. surplus commodity distribution programs to the poor, dating to the 1930s.

She catalogues the reasons given by anti-hunger workers for why they volunteer, including relief of guilt, reduction in waste, and religious zeal. She recognizes as well the ritualistic significance and emotional power of providing meals. She reports imperfections in the pantries, soup kitchens, and food drives she visits, citing instances of logistical inefficiency, poor nutritional quality, indignities encountered, and limited access by the poor. In the process of proving her pre-determined case, the author does a disservice to much charitable enterprise when she demeans the work of thousands of U.S. charitable organizations as “creating the illusion of effective action.”

In the end, Sweet Charity provides a strong argument for programs that help the poor gain access to public sector benefits for which they are entitled, through counseling or advocacy, or to find jobs.

by James V. Riker

Bread for the World Institute, Silver Spring, MD. 1998. Paperback. 138 pp. ISBN: 1884361072.
This book may be ordered online through Hunger Notes’ bookstore.

Bread for the World’s new report on hunger– celebrating BFW’s 25th anniversary– stakes the claim that we know how to eliminate hunger and have sufficient resources to do so in the United States and worldwide. “The end of hunger is within reach” within 15 years, asserts Richard Hoehn, Director of the Bread for the World Institute, in the lead article.

Empowering the hungry is the solution returned to by each of the dozen authors in this report. Each agrees that the right to food is more basic than almost any other human right.

One lesson Bread for the World has learned, Hoehn says, is the need to promote fair and democratic participatory structures, extending the insight of this year’s Nobel Prize Winner, Amartya Sen, that famines do not occur in any democracy with a free press. In another piece, Frances Moore Lappe extends this point, writing, “Hunger is not caused by a scarcity of food, but a scarcity of democracy.”

Much of the report deals with the trend of economic globalization: the increased role of trade, foreign investment, international financial institutions, and also with the distorting effects of media coverage. Vignettes are provided about hunger in Malawi, Rwanda, Sudan, El Salvador, Indonesia, and North Korea. In the case of North Korea, the report argues that aid ought to “facilitate the rehabilitation process, rather than [be used] as a weapon against its withered Stalinist regime.”

Former Bread staff-person Kathy Selvaggio gives an insightful background piece on the movement to achieve debt forgiveness among the world’s poor countries, a movement deftly cultivated by Oxfam, and recently coordinated by Jubilee 2000. (The Winter 1998 Hunger Notes will have a special section on debt forgiveness and Jubilee 2000 initiatives). The World Bank and International Monetary Fund boards have begun to initiate debt forgiveness by poor countries under the HIPC (Heavily Indebted Poor Countries) Initiative, for which grassroots movements can take some credit.

Twenty-five years of domestic hunger programs are described by Leon Howell, tracing the fluctuations in resources given through school meals, food stamps and Women, Infants, Children (WIC). In 1997, total Federal food programs amounted to $36.4 billion.

Lynette Englehardt describes the grassroots responses to the welfare reform recently enacted in the United States, where the number of people on welfare fell below 10 million people for the first time since 1970. Since 1996, welfare caseloads have fallen dramatically, 25 to 40 percent in most states (0 percent fall in Nebraska at the low end, and 80 percent in Iowa at the high end). As a result, charities have found food needs have increased since the 1996 welfare bill, adding that needs may swell further. And because the 1996 act established a five-year lifetime limit of benefits for the typical participant, there may be a dramatic increase in those seeking assistance in the not-too-distant future. Job placement may not address the realities of everyone: “The marginally employable may or may not find– and keep– employment, depending on the support available to them,” Englehardt writes, who adds, “Much is still unknown about one of the largest social experiments in U.S. history.” In citing lessons of recent experience, Englehardt calls for more grass-roots coalitions: “Local groups must monitor welfare reform’s effects in their communities and raise their voices regarding necessary changes in the welfare reform law.”

In the end, the report argues for creative political action, such as, “the linking of people across borders [to] bear witness through joint political action.” The authors also exhort the reader to vote and run for office.

by Peter Uvin

Kumarian Press, West Hartford, CT. 1998. 288 pp. (Paperback) ISBN: 1565490835, (Cloth) ISBN: 1565490843.

This book may be ordered online through Hunger Notes’ bookstore.

Peter Uvin shifts focus from the role played by the international community in responding to the Rwandan genocide of 1994 with humanitarian aid, to consideration of the role played, or not played, by the development aid community operative in Rwanda leading into the 1990s. Uvin details how international organizations, in addition to failing to catch warning signs of impending genocide and respond appropriately, also failed to weigh carefully the effects and potential to harm inherent in the development programs. The development community failed to acknowledge institutionalized racism and indirectly intensified inequalities and the social exclusion of peasants. The development community failed while believing its efforts were successful, pointing to traditional development indicators that made the country’s outlook seem so promising.

Given increasing efforts to monitor and measure the potential for genocide throughout the world, Uvin’s book is an important tool in stimulating discussion and debate about the role of the international community in preventing genocide and structural violence in all stages of development, well in advance of deterioration into violence. Aiding Violence points us to the need to rethink the development process, increase its accountability, and cleanse it of the elements that unwittingly exacerbate social problems instead of support for positive social change.

by Michael C. Latham

Pub.: Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), (Food and Nutrition Series, V. 29, No. 2). FAO Bookshop, Viale delle Terme di Caracalla, 00100 Rome, ITALY. Year: 1997. Paperback. 508 pp. ISBN: 925103818X. E-mail: Publications-sales@fao.org.

Reviewed by Joan Allen-Peters
This book may be ordered online through Hunger Notes’ bookstore.

FAO promotes this as a ‘comprehensive introduction to nutritional problems in developing countries,’ and from the perspective of someone who has been looking for just such a resource text for undergraduates majoring in nutrition, their statement is accurate but perhaps overly modest!

Dr. Latham’s many years of teaching in the field of international nutrition provide the basis for a broad and scientifically sound coverage of nutrition issues. Even more important for those interested in the holistic approach to health, nutrition and development, the book examines not only the major nutritional disorders, their causes and prevention, but also the factors contributing to these. Food production, food security, health status, and social and cultural factors are all given careful consideration.

The book pays special attention to the important role that food security, adequate care and good health play as prerequisites to human nutritional well-being. There is a welcome emphasis on the value of multidisciplinary applied approaches to overcoming malnutrition, especially those that are food-based and truly sustainable.

Part V of ‘Human Nutrition in the Developing World’ reviews nutrition policies and programs in a number of timely and relevant areas, including nutrition surveillance, food safety, micronutrient deficiencies, group feeding and street foods. Useful annexes, including tables of recommended nutrient intakes, nutrient content of selected foods, and anthropometric tables complete the practical information provided. Attractive illustrations, including some from the second edition of the excellent Savage-Kind and Burgess text ‘Nutrition for Developing Countries,’ add to the readability and interest level of the text.

This is an ideal text not only for formal undergraduate teaching in international nutrition, but also as a reference for community health, education and agriculture workers looking for simple and practical information to help solve problems of undernutrition in the developing world.

By The World Bank Group. Oxford University Press. 2000. English version. Also available in Spanish/Espanol and French/Francais. Paperback. 544 pp. ISBN: 0195211294.

Reviewed by Diane Ray

This book may be ordered online through Hunger Notes’ bookstore.

Attacking Poverty, the World Bank’s 2000/2001 World Development Report (WDR) was released in September, 2000. The WDR illustrates that poverty remains a global problem, with 1.2 billion people in the world living on less than $1 a day, and 2.8 billion living on less than $2 a day. To reduce poverty, the WDR promotes a three-part framework of promoting opportunity, facilitating empowerment and enhancing security for those who are poor.

The World Bank has produced its WDR annually since 1978. Along with providing selected world development indicators, each release addresses at least one topic in the development field, such as education or health. Poverty has been addressed by the WDR at the beginning of each decade, in 1980, 1990 and now 2000/2001. The 2000/2001 Report was the first in which the team director resigned in protest months before the release. In June, 2000, team director Ravi Kanbur resigned citing personal reservations regarding the emphasis of the main messages of the Report.

Research for the WDR went beyond the walls of the World Bank, beginning with discussions with more than 60,000 poor women and men in 60 countries, in order to understand poverty from the perspective of the poor themselves. In 1999, a three-month electronic discussion took place regarding the main themes of the WDR. In January, 2000, a consultation draft was posted on the World Bank’s web site, and a month-long public electronic discussion of the draft followed.

Poverty, as addressed in the WDR 2000/2001, has four dimensions. These dimensions are: 1) income, 2) health and education, 3) vulnerability, and 4) powerlessness of those without a voice. The WDR’s poverty reduction strategy addresses these four aspects of being poor in a three-part framework, which includes: Opportunity, Empowerment and Security.

The first pillar of the poverty reduction framework, “Opportunity,” has two main categories: 1) “Making Markets Work Better for Poor People,” and 2) “Expanding Poor People’s Assets and Tackling Inequalities.” In “Making Markets Work Better for Poor People,” the report acknowledges that market-oriented reforms influence different groups in different ways, and that in order to help the poor the following three areas must be addressed. These three areas are as follows: 1) to lighten the regulatory burden, especially for small businesses, 2) to promote core labor standards, such as elimination of forced labor and child labor, and 3) to improve access to financial markets for poor people so they can benefit from credit, savings and insurance services. In “Expanding Poor People’s Assets and Tackling Inequalities,” assets include human, physical, natural, financial and social assets that can enable the poor to advance economically and socially. The WDR proposes three guiding principles for building up assets and tackling inequalities. These principles are as follows: 1) to use the power of the state to redistribute resources, especially education, health and infrastructure, 2) to implement policy and institutional reforms to ensure effective delivery of services, and 3) to engage poor households and poor communities in decisions regarding the services that build their assets.

The second pillar, “Empowerment,” addresses the voicelessness and powerlessness of the poor. Empowerment involves 1) Making State Institutions More Responsive to Poor People, and 2) Removing Social Barriers and Building Social Institutions. The report calls on state institutions to include the poor and consider their interests in political processes, to change laws and make legal proceedings more responsive to the poor, to support legal service organizations for the poor, and to decentralize and move programs closer to the users. The report recognizes the importance of social structures and networks and calls for the removal of social barriers and the building of social institutions of and for the poor. Discrimination based on gender, ethnicity, race, religion or social status is identified as a major barrier to moving out of poverty, and must be removed. In addition, the social institutions of the poor such as local organizations, networks, and kinship systems must be supported to help the poor build their social capital and increase their participation in political and civil processes.

The third pillar, “Security,” encompasses: 1) Helping Poor People Manage Risk, and 2) Managing Economic Crises and National Disasters. As a result of the World Bank’s consultations with the poor, the report acknowledges that part of being poor is not being able to prepare for tragedies. Helping Poor People Manage Risk involves policies that reduce risk and safety net programs that can lessen the impact of shocks so the poor can continue to move out of poverty instead of being hopelessly set back. Seven instruments of protection are discussed. These seven instruments are: 1) health insurance, 2) old age assistance and pensions, 3) unemployment insurance and assistance, 4) workfare programs, 5) social funds, 6) microfinance programs, and 7) cash transfers. The second aspect to Security, Managing Economic Crises and Natural Disasters, considers approaches to the link between macroeconomic downturns and rising poverty. To address the vulnerability of the poor to economic crises and natural disasters, the report advocates a two-part approach: 1) prevention and, 2) response plans that protect the poor when events do occur.

Most importantly, the WDR 2000/2001 emphasizes that the three pillars of Opportunity, Empowerment and Security do not form a rigid prescription for poverty reduction, but a flexible framework that should be adapted to the needs of particular regions, countries, communities, households or groups. A closer look at poverty data reveals variations in the occurrence of poverty. For example, while global levels of poverty have remained about the same over the past decade, East Asia saw a decrease in poverty while all other regions experienced an increase. Similarly, within regions, some African countries experienced a decrease in poverty even though the region as a whole unfortunately saw an increase. Within the country of Mexico, poverty fell by two-thirds in Mexico City between 1989 and 1994 but rose by 10 percent in the Southeast. In Sub-Saharan Africa, life expectancy for men has improved much faster than that for women, and in Europe and Central Asia, the ratio of female to male life expectancy rose only because male life expectancy dropped. These variations in the occurrence of poverty, the WDR argues, illustrate the need for carefully tailored approaches to poverty reduction, formed within a comprehensive framework.

Diane E. Ray is a research analyst at the United States Agency for International Development’s Development Information Services project, specializing in economic growth.  Her primary interests are in hunger and food security. She also serves as a research consultant to the Farmers’ Market Trust in Philadelphia, a nonprofit organization dedicated to increasing access to affordable fresh fruits and vegetables and nutrition education in Philadelphia’s low-income communities.

by Lester R. Brown

New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. Worldwatch Institute, Environmental Alert Series. 1995. 163 pp. (Hardcover) ISBN: 0-393-03897-1, (Paperback) ISBN: 0-393-31409-X.

Reviewed by Cate Johnson, Ph.D., RD

This book may be ordered online through Hunger Notes’ bookstore.

NI CHELE FAN NE MEIJOU? (“Have You Eaten Rice Today?”)

For the Chinese, rice provides the sustenance of life. Having sufficient food has remained a central theme throughout the centuries. The age-old greeting “Ni chele fan ne meijou” reminds the Chinese people of the Great Famine of 1959-1961 which claimed roughly 30 million lives, leaving an indelible impression on China’s national psyche.

In “Who Will Feed China?”, Lester Brown again urges us to respond to the warning signs of high population, shrinking cropland, and water scarcity in formulating global development policy for the 21st century. Reminding us that the Chinese account for 20 percent of the world’s people, Brown states: “In an integrated world economy, China’s rising food prices will become the world’s rising food prices. China’s land scarcity will become everyone’s land scarcity. And water scarcity in China will affect the entire world.”

China’s route to development has been fundamentally different than that of the West: it was already densely populated before it industrialized. The pressure of industrialization has displaced cropland, leading to a net decline in food production despite rising land productivity. Only three other countries have faced a similar situation: Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, who (over the past few decades) lost 52 percent, 46 percent, and 42 percent of their grain-harvested areas, respectively. Cropland losses soon exceeded rises in land productivity, leading to declining output: since a peak in 1960, grain production has fallen 32 percent in Japan; and 24 percent in both South Korea and Taiwan since 1977. Brown warns that China’s rising industrialization may result in the same fate.

In addition to loss of cropland, China also faces an extensive diversion of irrigation water to non-farm uses. This problem is particularly acute in a country where nearly 80 percent of the grain harvest comes from irrigated land.

The problem of shrinking resources is compounded by rising grain consumption. As incomes rise, people diversify traditional diets by adding meat, poultry, dairy, and even beer, foods that are higher in the food chain and can demand even more grain for production. China’s enormous population– projected to be 1.5 billion by 2017– adds even more stress on grain reserves. Sheer numbers make keeping grain production in pace with population growth a daunting and improbable task. Although China has succeeded in slowing the momentum of population growth rate from 2.7 percent in 1970 to 1.1 percent in 1994, it is still adding approximately 12 million people each year to its population. Even a small increase in per capita grain consumption will have a substantial cumulative effect: Brown cites that just two additional beers per person in China will demand the entire Norwegian grain harvest.

To avert a crisis, Brown calls for stabilizing population growth (as set forth in the Cairo Platform for Action in 1994), protecting the environmental resource base (soils, aquifers, and the climate system), ensuring that cropland is utilized for food crops (for example, switching from tobacco to grain), and undertaking adequate agricultural research to maximize the value of new technological advances, augmenting food production.

In concluding, Brown remarks that “…China’s emergence as a massive grain importer will be the wake-up call that will signal trouble in the relationship between ourselves…and the natural systems and resources on which we depend. It may well force a redefinition of security, a recognition that food scarcity and the associated economic instability are far greater threats to security than military aggression.”

New York: The Free Press, 1997. Hardcover, 287 pp. ISBN: 0684828006.

Reviewed by Steven Hansch

This book may be ordered online through Hunger Notes’ bookstore.

Every few years, a major publication critiques the aid industry not merely on the merits of specific projects, but on the principles on which aid agencies do their business. The Road to Hell, by Michael Maren, a former relief worker turned journalist, takes the hardest look yet at how NGOs and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) design and conduct relief and development projects. Like its predecessors– Graham Hancock’s Lords of Poverty in 1989, Francis Moore Lappe in the 1970s and the Paddock Brothers in the 1960s, Maren’s book provides useful insights into the most serious failings of the aid system, yet neglects to give any credit where credit is due.

The book also offers an enlightening case study of frustrated aid efforts in Somalia from the 1979 crisis with Ethiopia through the famine of 1991-93. The presentation is replete with original quotes and first-hand observations, drawn from Maren’s NGO and USAID assignments in Somalia and Kenya. It is his longer historical sense, beyond any one crisis or any one set of projects, that is Maren’s strong suit.

Maren’s central criticism of the aid business is its insincerity. This insincerity, he argues, alienates aid workers themselves and reinforces an ongoing myopia about how best to adapt foreign aid.

In Maren’s analysis, the trust between NGOs and the American public is betrayed because NGOs do not reveal to the American public how problematic aid work is. In their advertising, the goal is not to make us think about hunger and poverty. It is to relieve us of the burden of having to think about it.

By use of behind-the-scenes vignettes of NGO staff working for Save the Children, CARE, USAID and other agencies heavily involved in Somalia, Maren suggests that the aid community is more concerned with fund-raising and image than in beneficial impact. He tells how NGOs focus too much of their energy on playing the game of getting donations, and too little on building on past performance to improve effectiveness of programs. Referring to the home office training of one NGO, Maren recounts, “There was (only) one practical thing taught in (the home office): They were shown how to pose children for photographs to go into brochures and ads.” He recounts the tendency of some NGOs to jetting into a crisis to be part of the spectacle of compassion, and then leaving swiftly, along with the TV cameras.

Alternately, NGOs frequently blunder in their sincere efforts to help: Maren recounts how one NGO airlifted into Goma over 250 doctors and nurses who had none of the skills that were really needed.

Maren’s harshest criticism is toward those bureaucrats in the aid system who wield authority without humility and who pretend to be wiser than they are. Referring to one U.S. Ambassador to Somalia: “He had the useful skill of projecting an enigmatic half smile whenever confronted with questions he didn’t want to or more likely couldn’t answer. Most of the assembled press corps interpreted this as a sign of higher knowledge.”

Somalia provides Maren an excellent, though extreme, case for long lists of “unintended consequences” of foreign aid. He shows how the relief aid in 1979 helped create and bolster the corrupt regime of President Siad Barre. Later, the United States inadvertently resurrected General Aydeed: his tribesmen joined forces only when Aydeed focused their attention on the common U.S. enemy. Ironically, while U.S. troops sought futilely to rid Somalia of him, each bloody confrontation raised his profile farther.

According to Maren, it was the inept conduct of aid in the 1980s that led to famine in Somalia in 1991 and 1992. Maren is on strong ground when he makes the case that supply-driven dumping of commodities in the 1980s led to Somalia’s vulnerability to crisis in the 1990s. The humanitarian aid system was able to provide Somalia with plenty of food aid when it wasn’t needed, but then unable to provide it when it was needed during the critical period of December, 1991 through September, 1992.

Though acknowledging that the aid effort saved over 100,000 lives, Maren indicates that now little evidence remains of the U.S. intervention, and little trace of the $4 billion that was spent.

More than other reviews of famine in the Horn of Africa, Maren shows keen insights into the dynamics of crises. Reviewing the forced relocation of famine-affected populations in northern Ethiopia, Maren writes, “The government had launched a cynical campaign: First you starve them, then attract them to central areas with food, then cart them off to where you want them. That had been the government’s plan, carried out with the assistance, unwitting sometimes, of local foreign charities using monies donated by schoolchildren and old ladies and working-class families in church.

Most of the recent literature on Somalia has attempted to interpret why international intervention failed. Mohamed Sahnoun’s focus on the tentative, ponderous, inflexible way the UN reacted (Mohamed Sahnoun, 1994, Somalia: the Missed Opportunities, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Institute of Peace). Jonathan Stevenson’s 1995 Losing Mogadishu: Testing U.S. Policy in Somalia (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press) focuses instead on the particular role of the U.S. military and its alternately cautious and aggressive rules of engagement. Maren’s book goes one step further by giving some of the perspectives of everyday Somalis receiving aid. The Road to Hell depicts Somali leaders who, more often than not, are part of the relief system, either as employee or refugee leader. However, Maren’s book does not venture into the broader countryside and explore the extent of risk or need in the population. Maren generalizes from a few examples to indict the entire aid effort. By extension, it is also difficult to generalize about aid in general, based only on Somalia, which remains an extreme case of local manipulation of aid.

For all its insights, Maren’s book is misleading in the extreme in the overall picture it leaves about the community of aid professionals. Most unfairly, Maren conveys a view (which he certainly doesn’t believe) that aid workers are unaware themselves of these many pitfalls and tradeoffs that Maren recounts. Maren implies that only he and a select group are concerned about dependency, overpopulation, unsustainability, political manipulation of aid and the many myths about the Third World cherished by the public. The key difference between Maren and the community he chastises is that current aid workers keep trying to put forward solutions, not give up, and write critiques that cater to the foreign policy isolationists who prefer to believe that all aid is without long-term benefit.

Curiously, Maren concludes that NGOs cannot be trusted to monitor themselves, and are best evaluated by journalists. Since few journalists have any of the technical expertise necessary to interpret project data, epidemiologic trends, or economic effects, Maren is encouraging more of the simplification that already exists.

Hansch is a member of the Hunger Notes editorial board, is affiliated with the Congressional Hunger Center, and has written extensively on refugee nutrition and health issues.