Senator Martino, distinguished guests, and esteemed parliamentarians: Why do we live in a world in which millions upon millions of children and adults suffer from the scourges of extreme hunger and malnutrition? Why does famine, that age-old terror, still stalk the earth today?
These are profound and terrible questions. We gather here at the World Food Summit to confront these questions at the end of a great, but also a terrible, era. Our century has been a time of extraordinary wonder, and of extraordinary horror. It is the paradox of our time that we can marvel at the tempo of technical advance, even as the global gap between what can be done and what is being done grows ever wider, indeed, that in the century when the formula for attaining mass affluence was finally perfected, more people should perish from famine than ever before in human history. This paradox invests your deliberations here in the days ahead with a special and grave responsibility. As we are all too aware from events well within living memory, the power of modem government and the potentialities of collective international action can alter the human prospect for the better, but they can also alter it very much for the worse.
Esteemed parliamentarians. I hope you will indulge me if I speak frankly today, and take my frankness as a sign of my respect. As delegates to the World Food Summit, and as legislators in your own countries, you occupy positions of considerable influence on the global food situation. Through your efforts and activities you can accelerate the pace of progress against global hunger, and bring us closer to the day when famine is permanently conquered. But your official decisions, here and in your home countries, can equally hinder the international struggle for worldwide food security, and exacerbate the risk of mass starvation for vulnerable populations in the years ahead.
Of course we are all gathered here in good will, possessed of noble purpose. It is apparent that we share the same concerns and cherish the same ultimate objective. The success of our venture, however, is not predetermined by the intensity of our intentions. Success will instead depend on just how we choose to pursue our common objective. Effective policies and initiatives must be based on a realistic understanding of the problems we are striving to solve.
Why should I begin with so obvious a point? Because it is often forgotten when people of good will talk about world hunger. For some perhaps primordial reason, it seems that contemplating the problems of starvation and famine can cause the vision of ordinarily brilliant intellectuals, learned academicians and clearheaded statesmen suddenly to blur. This peculiar phenomenon, moreover, is not confined to any particular country or group of countries. All around the world today, specialists and policymakers continue to entertain beliefs and accept premises about the world food situation that are demonstrably invalid, sometimes even glaringly invalid.
To a strange and disturbing degree, modern international man is, quite literally, starved for ideas. Widely accepted misconceptions, stubborn "idees fixes" and crude ideological notions about the nature of hunger and famine in the modern world are impeding the quest to achieve food security for all. Guided, or more exactly, misguided, by fundamentally flawed assessments of the prevalence and causes of global hunger, we cannot hope to attain satisfactory results. At best, our wellmeaning efforts will be merely ineffective; at worst, we risk making bad conditions worse, and injuring those we seek to help.
Modern day myths about the world food problem are legion. Today I wish to discuss three that seem to me particularly fashionable, and particularly pernicious. The first concerns the current dimensions of the hunger problem. The second might be described as the "Malthusian specter." The third bears on the relationship between hunger and political morality.
According to what is by now a large body of major studies by reputable and authoritative organizations, the magnitude of the global malnutrition problem in the modern era is vast, so vast, in fact, as to be almost incomprehensible. According to some of these studies, moreover, the problem has, at least in some respects, been worsening over time.
A few citations may be illustrative. In 1950, Lord Boyd-Orr, the first Director General of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), warned that "a lifetime of malnutrition and actual hunger is the lot of at least two-thirds of mankind." Thirty years later, a United States Presidential Commission on World Hunger concluded that "(t)his world hunger problem is getting worse rather than better. There are more hungry people than ever before." In 1991, the World Food Council declared that "the number of chronically hungry people in the world continues to grow." And at the World Food Summit today, a principal FAO document puts the undernourished population of the world at well over 800 million, indicating that one out of five persons from developing countries was suffering from chronic undernutrition in the early 1990s.
That most recent FAO estimate seems to suggest both absolute and relative improvement on the world food situation over the long period since Lord Boyd-Orr issued his grim assessment. On the other hand, the FAO's third World Food Survey, back in 1963, concluded that a fifth of the developing world was undernourished at that time. By that benchmark, we would seem to have made no relative progress whatever against Third World hunger over the intervening decades; given the growth of population in the less developed regions (a topic to which I will return) the absolute number of hungry people in the world would have increased tremendously over the past generation.
On the whole, these expert findings paint a disheartening picture. There is just one small thing wrong with this picture: the methodologies of the studies from which it is drawn. Astonishing as it may sound to the non-specialist, the approach underpinning every one of the major international studies over the past two generations that has attempted to quantify global hunger is demonstrably and deeply flawed, although the specific methodological defects vary from one study to the next.
Using the methods employed in any one of these oft-quoted studies, it would be impossible even under ideal circumstances to derive an accurate impression of the global hunger situation, and the conditions under which some of those studies were prepared were far from ideal. For citizens and policymakers committed to charting a course against world hunger, these studies offer a distorted and misleading map.
The troubles with the studies are sometimes technical, but they are never difficult to describe. In every instance, their calculations pivot upon questionable and indeed unsupported assumptions about individual nutritional needs in large populations, and upon equally questionable assumptions about the correspondence between national food supplies and individual food intake. Remember: malnutrition is a condition that affects individuals. Short of clinical or biomedical examination, there is really no reliable means for determining a person's health or nutritional status. Lacking such information, these studies draw necessarily crude inferences about individual well-being from highly aggregated economic and agricultural data. They cannot cope with such exacting, but important, issues as whether individuals with lower caloric intake have lower than average caloric requirements; whether individual metabolic efficiency adjusts in response to changes in the nutritional supply; or whether individuals predicted by their models to be undernourished actually suffer from identifiable nutritional afflictions. To pose these questions is not to presuppose an answer to them; rather it is simply to discharge a basic duty of careful inquiry.
Sometimes the results of these hunger studies could be dismissed after the most casual inspection. In 1980, for example, the World Bank published a paper purporting to show that threefourths of the population of the less developed regions suffered from "caloric deficits." This ominous conclusion, however, was reached by a chain of dubious suppositions, the final and most spectacular of which was that anyone receiving less than the average "recommended dietary allowance" was underfed. In reality, of course, about half of any population will need less than the average allowance, that is the meaning of the word "average." Consequently, this model could only generate nonsense numbers. Its computations, for example, showed that nearly half the people in prosperous Hong Kong were getting too little food!
To their credit, the World Bank researchers on this particular project recognized that their work failed the "reality test," and went back to the drawing board to improve their product. Unfortunately, others working on the problem have not always met the same standards of intellectual accountability. Lord BoydOrr, for example, never explained the method underlying his now famous estimate of the prevalence of world hunger. After reviewing contemporary FAO data, one of the leading agricultural experts of the day, Prof. Merrill K. Bennett, surmised that the estimate might have been an elementary computational mistake, a misreading of the figures in two particular columns of an FAO table. The FAO, however, never replied to Prof. Bennett's inquiry, and has never offered substantiating evidence for Lord Boyd-Orr's original assertion.
Other FAO estimates about world hunger have remained similarly protected against outside inspection: most of the data and calculations in the first three FAO World Food Surveys, for example, are still unavailable to the public. In more recent FAO studies, where somewhat greater intellectual openness is in display, we can see that the FAO's definition of the caloric threshold level for undernutrition has been steadily climbing over time. But why? These upward revisions do not seem to reflect any obvious changes in the scientific consensus concerning nutritional norms, but they do produce higher totals for any given estimate of the number of hungry people in the world.
If we could only for a moment extricate ourselves from this numerical house of mirrors, we would see that there are indeed meaningful data that bear upon the actual nutritional status of humanity, and that they tell a rather different story from the tales you may be hearing here in Rome.
Household spending patterns in less developed regions, for example, can reveal how the poor assess their own nutritional status. If a family treats food as a "superior good," that is to say, if an increase in income raises the overall share of the household budget going to food, it renders a telling judgment that its members have too little to eat. By this criterion, the incidence of serious hunger in the world would be far lower than the FAO currently suggests: about two-thirds lower, for example, in some years for India (a country which happens to have reasonably good household expenditure data).
Mortality rates, for their part, offer a direct and unambiguous measure of the material condition of any population. Despite the limitations of demographic data in some regions today, it is nonetheless clear that the so-called Third World has experienced a revolution in health conditions over the past generation. According to estimates and projections by the Population Division of the UN Secretariat, life expectancy at birth in the less developed regions rose by an average of almost a decade and a half between the early 1950s and the early 1990s; over that same period, infant mortality in the less developed regions is estimated to have dropped nearly by half. Can one really imagine that such dramatic gains were entirely unaccompanied by nutritional progress?
A precise and reliable method for estimating the incidence and severity of worldwide malnutrition has yet to be devised. We can be all too sure that scores of millions in our world suffer from heart-rending, life-impairing hunger. But exaggerating the current scope of the problem, and minimizing the strides we have already made against it, will serve no worthy purpose. Hungry populations certainly do not benefit from such misapprehensions. In an age of "compassion fatigue," these misrepresentations of reality tend instead to discourage action by depicting the problem as almost insurmountably large. To make matters worse, they may misdirect available humanitarian resources away from the places where they might have made the most difference. And by obscuring true patterns of nutritional change, these misrepresentations obstruct our efforts to learn from experience. Denying the existence of progress against global hunger denies us as well the hope of studying, and attempting to replicate elsewhere, local strategies that have actually resulted in progress.
Let us turn now to the Malthusian specter. As you know, the postwar variant of the Malthusian worldview holds that the globe cannot support the enormous increase in human numbers that we are witnessing, and holds further that we will be faced by rising poverty, mass hunger, and perhaps even worldwide catastrophe unless we somehow check this uncontrolled demographic growth. Overpopulation, increasing scarcity of food and natural resources, and famine, Malthusians argue, are clear and present dangers, the existence of which, they say, demonstrably validate their explication of how the world works.
In intellectual and political circles, the influence of Malthusian ideology today ranges wide and often runs deep; not surprisingly, it is especially evident in deliberations about the world food outlook. For its proponents, Malthusianism has some of the trappings of a secular faith. Matters of faith, as we know, do not readily lend themselves to testability, or to disproof. If we try to treat the Malthusian specter as an empirical rather than a theological proposition, though, we will find little evidence that its advent is nigh.
Consider the problem of "overpopulation." So much has been said about this problem over the years that it may surprise you to hear that there is no fixed and consistent demographic definition for the term. I repeat: none exists. How would we define it? In terms of population density? If so, Bermuda would be more "overpopulated" than Bangladesh. In terms of rates of natural increase? In that case, pre-Revolutionary America would have been more "overpopulated" than contemporary Haiti. In terms of the "dependency ratio" of children and the elderly to working-age populations? That would mean Canada was more "overpopulated" in 1965 than India is today!
We could go on, but I trust you see my point. If "overpopulation" is a problem, it is a problem that has been misidentified and misdefined. The images evoked by the term, hungry children; squalid housing; early death, speak to problems all too real in the modem world. But these are properly described as problems of poverty. The risk of poverty, however, is obviously influenced, indeed, principally determined, by a panoply of nondemographic forces, not the least of these being the impact of a govemment's policies upon its subjects or citizens. As for the particulars of the relationship between population growth and poverty, these are more complex and far less categorical than one is often led to suppose.
At the very least, we know for a fact that rapid and sustained population growth does not preclude rapid and sustained economic and social advance. If it did, the vast material transformation we have already witnessed in the Twentieth Century could not have occurred.
Since the beginning of this century, according to the best available estimates, the world's population has more than tripled. Nothing like this had ever taken place before, and although the tempo of global population growth appears to have peaked and to be declining, it is still proceeding with extraordinary speed by historical perspective. This unprecedented demographic explosion, however, did not consign humanity to penury and destitution. Just the opposite: it was accompanied by a worldwide explosion of prosperity. According to the eminent economist Angus Maddison, the world's per capita GDP quadrupled between the turn of the century and the early 1990s. In Latin America and the Caribbean, per capita GDP, by his estimates, has more than quadrupled this century; in Asia and the Pacific, it has more than quintupled; and even in troubled Africa it may have more than doubled. While such calculations cannot be exact, there should not be the slightest doubt about the consequence of the trends they represent.
Why has the most rapid period of population growth in the history of our species been the occasion for the most extraordinary economic expansion in human experience? Part of the answer may lie in the "population explosion" itself, or more precisely, in its proximate causes. The modern "population explosion" was sparked not because people suddenly started breeding like rabbits, but rather because they finally stopped dying like flies. That is to say, it wasn't that fertility rates soared; rather, mortality rates plummeted. Since the start of our century, the average life expectancy at birth for a human being has probably doubled, it may have more than doubled. Every corner of the earth has joined in this health revolution, and on the whole, incidentally, health progress in our century has been more dramatic in the less developed regions than the more affluent ones.
Improvements in health are conducive to improvements in productivity. It is not just that healthier populations are able to work harder; improvements in health and reductions in mortality enhance the potentialities of what economists now call "human capital": education, training, skills, and the like. By so doing, they significantly relieve constraints against attaining higher levels of per capita output.
And what about fertility, which so many influential voices today posit as "excessive" in one or another regions of the world? Unlike better health and longer life, which are universally regarded as desirable, there is no "universal" view on optimal family size. The number of children that parents wish to have, like other big decisions in a person's life, is an inescapably subjective choice, while it may surely be shaped by economic, cultural, or religious factors, in the final analysis it is a personal choice. Before we speak of "excess fertility," we should ponder what we imply by questioning other peoples' choices about family size. Let me be blunt. Human beings are not heedless beasts. They do not procreate with utter disregard for their own well-being, much less the welfare of their own children.
With the tremendous growth of human numbers, and of per capita output, the world's GDP has grown phenomenally in our century: Maddison's aforementioned research, for example, suggests a fourteen-fold rise. Despite this awesome surge in demand, however, the prices for foodstuffs and natural resources have not rocketed skywards over the course of the Twentieth Century. In fact, the long-term trend for primary commodity prices has been heading in exactly the opposite direction. According to one careful study, for example, inflation-adjusted prices for primary commodities, including energy products, had dropped by over a third between the turn of the century and the 1980s. And as you may already have heard in the past few days from our friends from UNCTAD and the "Group of 77," the real price of primary commodities has fallen still further since then.
I regale you with these details about price trends because prices are meant to measure scarcity. Other things being equal, scarce items are supposed to cost more; plentiful items, less. Yet by the very information that prices are intended to convey, it would appear that foodstuffs and natural resources have been growing less scarce, not more, despite mankind's steadily increasing demand for them!
For convinced Malthusians, this seeming contradiction constitutes an unsolved mystery, and indeed an unsolvable one, if they are to maintain faith in their doctrine. We may note, however, that there are perfectly good explanations for the divergent directions of these long-term trends, not the least of these involving an appeal to economic reasoning and an attention to the actual workings of the modern economic process.
And what of famine? Malthusians expect famines to strike what they call "overpopulated" regions, what we might call very poor regions. It is surely true that the margin for error for the very poor is perilously thin. But it does not follow that the very poor in the modern world are inexorably consigned to mass starvation, or that they are pushed there by their own fertility trends. If we examine the actual record, we will see that modern famines are a quintessentially political phenomenon. In the modern world, people starve en masse not because famine is unavoidable. They starve instead because their own rulers happen to be indifferent to their plight, or because the state under which they live has actively contrived to bring about their death.
Recall the most fearsome famines that have gripped nations in our century. Over six million people perished in the Ukraine in 1933. That was Stalin's terror-famine: it was provoked by a deliberately punitive collectivization of agriculture, designed to subjugate an unwilling people. As many as three million people died in Bengal, India in 1943. That was when the British Viceregency, with available stocks of grain at hand, refused to enact the empire's stipulated relief procedures, lest those somehow compromise the overall war effort. Between 1959 and 1961, China lost as many as 30 million people through abnormally high death rates. That was Mao's cruel utopian experiment: first his forcible communization of the countryside shattered the nation's agriculture, then his government closed the country to outside view, denied there was a hunger problem, refused foreign help, and made a point of exporting food. Perhaps a million Biafrans perished from famine in the late 1960s. That was the Nigerian civil war, when food blockades were consciously employed literally to starve the rebels into submission.
In the late 1970s, perhaps a million, maybe more, died from abnormal mortality in Cambodia. That was the Khmer Rouge's methodical and barbaric program of auto-genocide. In the 1980s and 1990s, famine has stricken Ethiopia, Sudan, and Somalia. If the details of these more recent tragedies differ in some specifics from the earlier famines I have mentioned, rest assured that the patterns are entirely the same.
Amartya Sen, the distinguished economist and philosopher, and perhaps the pre-eminent student of contemporary famine, has stated it starkly: "Famines are, in fact, extremely easy to prevent. It is amazing that they actually take place, because they require a severe indifference on the part of the government."
Esteemed parliamentarians: in our epoch, famine has been caused not by an ominous excess of people, but instead by a frightening surfeit of callous rulers and killer states. Malthusian delusions would distract us from this central and gruesome fact, just as they divert us from probing too deeply into the reasons that some countries have, anomalously, experienced persistently poor economic performance, or even economic retrogression, in our age of progressive global economic advance.
Finally, let me turn directly to the relationship between hunger and political morality, a topic upon which we have already touched, if indirectly. At international gatherings, it is sometimes regarded as declasse to observe that one form of national political or legal arrangements might be preferable to others manifest elsewhere in the world. To the urbane, the latter view sometimes sounds embarrassingly provincial. In any case, many intellectuals and not a few political figures would contend that such considerations have no bearing on the pragmatic quest to conquer hunger. They would agree with the renowned playwright Bertolt Brecht: "Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral" 1: food first, morality after.
Brecht's famous and seemingly worldly dictum is at once cynical and appallingly naive. How can we reflect upon the history of our century without being struck by the singular role certain political principles have played in abetting mankind's escape from hunger, and the dark role of other political philosophies in perpetuating the threat of hunger and starvation? At the end of the day, this much is crystal clear: economic liberty is the enemy of hunger, and political freedom is the nemesis to famine.
Permit me to quote Amartya Sen once more: "In the gruesome history of famines there is hardly any case in which a famine has occurred in a country that is independent and democratic, regardless of whether it is rich or poor." We can take this point further. There are practically no instances of famine in any setting where local newspapers were free to criticize their own government, or where citizens enjoyed the substantive right to participate in an opposition party. In open and accountable political systems where governments serve at the sufferance of the voter, there is tremendous pressure and incentive for policies that forestall famine. Impoverished as it is often said to be, India has not suffered famine since its independence. Far from being a luxury that only the rich can afford, as some would have it, political freedom is thus actually an indispensable necessity for the very poor.
Marxist-Leninists have sneered at the liberal conception of political freedom; they still dismiss it as a dangerous illusion. But as the nightmare of totalitarianism at last begins to pass, and its legacy of worldwide wreckage is finally laid bare, there can be no more dispute about just who was entranced by perilous political fantasies. For all their proclamations about enshrining "people's rights," Marxist-Leninist regimes never did divide those vaunted rights into individual portions. And while terrible atrocities were committed in our time by regimes of many political hues, only the totalitarians committed atrocities out of cold-blooded principle.
Just as political liberties place a systemic check on the threat of famine, so economic liberties can dynamically reduce the risk of severe malnutrition. This is so, quite simply, because the institutional framework for securing economic liberties happens also to be conducive to material advance, productivity improvement, and, ultimately, the escape from poverty. Rule of law; protection of individual rights, including property rights; enforceability of contracts; sound money; the sanction of mutally beneficial economic exchange: from the standpoint of protecting liberty, all these things are virtues in their own right. But insofar as they decrease the uncertainty, lower the costs of obtaining information, and reduce what are called the "transaction costs" that confront individual economic agents, the underpinnings of economic liberty stimulate economic activity and enhance economic welfare.
One may also also make the case, as some of us have elsewhere, that economic liberty is especially important to the poor, the vulnerable and the marginalized, the groups, in other words, least capable of fending for themselves in an economic and political system that is neither regular nor just.
In much of the world, including areas where basic political freedoms are secure, the ordinary workings of domestic and international markets are today regarded with suspicion, even hostility, in many elite circles. Such circles speak gravely of the perils of "market failure," and claim these perils justify farreaching interventions into economic life. Truth to tell, markets, like all human inventions, are imperfect. Some specific instances of modern "market failure," moreover, have been conspicuous. But before learning all the fascinating exceptions to the rules, it is best to get the rules themselves straight. For it is the opportunities that lie in market development, and under a regimen of economic liberty, that offer the greatest inherent scope for improving the purchasing power of the world's poor, for stabilizing their access to food supplies, and thus for promoting nutritional security for vulnerable populations. What development specialist Deepak Lal termed "the dirigiste dogma" is still deeply entrenched in many of the world's poorest, and hungriest, spots. As many here will recognize, this dogma commands faithful followers within FAO and other multilateral institutions as well. Alas: adherents of the dirigiste dogma have an unsettling tendency to discover "market failures" where none in fact exist, and to misdiagnose the adverse consequences of their own preferred therapies as "market failures" that will only be remedied through further dirigiste treatments. To belabor the obvious once more, such a state of affairs does not relieve the plight of the world's poor, or expedite progress against global hunger.
As we look toward the coming century, we have more than a presentiment of some of the challenges that will face us. With the enormous increases in world population anticipated in the coming generations, we will need to arrange for commensurately enormous increases in agricultural production capabilities, or disproportionately enormous increases, if we hope to improve the world's dietary quality. Moreover, insofar as agricultural production is just one facet of the complex modern economy, we must be prepared to let agriculture make its fullest contribution to overall development; man's needs and desires, after all, extend far beyond a sufficient dinner. And in the world's hungriest regions, establishing effective, responsive, and limited governance is a task barely begun, much as it was when Lord Peter Bauer warned us so over a generation ago.
That will be the hard work. What I have discussed today, the need to redress some obvious misconceptions, is the easy part. But you will not be able to get around to the hard work unless you do the easy work first. Esteemed parliamentarians and distinguished guests: As you begin the work ahead, which will affect millions of lives, I leave you with a reminder, and a plea. Never forget that harm can come from even the best of intentions. And as you consider the tasks before you, set your course by an injunction as old as the desire to go good itself: first, do no harm. First, do no harm. Ladies and gentlemen, please: first, do no harm.
