How to get rich
Shiva Naipaul
World of Hunger Jonathan Power and Anne-Marie Holenstein (Temple Smith £1.95)
The Poor of The Earth John Cole (Macmillan £2.95)
A World Divided edited by G. K. HeHeiner (Cambridge University Press Z9 00) Doomsday statistics simultaneously appal the intellect, debilitate the imagination and stun compassion. In no sphere do they operate with deadlier effect than in the apocalyptic mathematics spawned by the Sp-called 'third world'. Nearly every tabula every graph, carries—or is supposed to carrY—an alarming message. At the heart of it all lies the acceleration of population growth and its predicted consequences— mass starvation. It is this which gives the fullest play to our sado-masochistic fantasies. We are all familiar with the emblematic scarecrow figures popularised by • such Philanthropic agencies as Oxfam and War On Want; and we know too the more elaborate technicolor versions which the colour supplements have brought to a pitch of high art. Nowadays, photographers reach the scene of tragedy long before the vultures and the blanket-laden relief trucks.
It has been estimated that the world PoPulation at the beginning of the Christian era was somewhere in the region of 250 million. In 1900 it was 1.55 billion; in 1950, 2-5 billion; in 1974, 4 billion. The most conservative United Nations prediction suggests that it might rise to 10 billion by the end of the 21st century. In the 'sixties alone the world population increased by 700 million—a rise equivalent to that during the entire nineteenth century. A PoPulation growing at a rate of 2 per cent will yield a seven-fold increase in the course or a century; while one growing at a rate of 3 Per cent will increase at least twenty-fold. If Indonesia maintains its growth rate of 2.7 Per cent it will, in a hundred years, have a Population of 1.78 billion : almost half 43.claY's global figure. I won't terrify you With the Indian statistics: the substance of the nightmare is plain enough. Doomsday bears down upon us exponentially and so the most intimate human relationship assumes, in the unwavering eye of the statisticians, a horrific impersonality. The womb of every woman in the poor world is a. biological time-bomb. Of course, population figures exist in a kind of vacuum. World population may never attain its various projected peaks if there is an absolute limit to the food supply: the surplus will simply die like flies, and in the last resort, death will be the major contraceptive.
Books like World of Hunger and The Poor of The Earth, covers adorned with the apparently statutory photograph of a 'starving' Indian, flood off the presses. Maharashtrian peasants are shepherded in front of television cameras to explain to well-fed, 'aid'-giving Western audiences why they insist on having so many children and continue to be such a source of anxiety to the well-meaning, rational gentlemen from the World Bank.
'Hunger' and 'starvation' are highly emotive words. Phrases like the 'hungry millions' trip easily off the tongue. But these are ritual formulae devoid of any precise meaning. In World of Hunger Bangladesh (poor Bangladesh!) is described as a nation of '75 million desperate people'. Well, are there really 75 million desperate people in Bangladesh? When such language is used,. are we dealing with fact or alarmist stereotype ? In a recent article in the New York Review of Books, Nick Eberstadt, a Fellow of the Harvard Centre for Population Studies, wrote: 'Unless you have been there, you would find it hard to imagine that the people of Bangladesh are friendly and energetic and perhaps 95 per cent eat enough to get by. Or that Bangladesh has the richest cropland in the world, and that a Well-guided aid program could turn it .. . into one of the world's great breadbaskets.' It is a pity that Power and Holenstein do not take such matters into account, since they have written a good and informative book.
Malnutrition and und,ernourishment are variable concepts. Calorific requirement, for example, is affected by a host of criteria including age, height, sex, weight, climate and the accustomed level of physical activity. Power and Holenstein suggest an average daily need of 2,700 calories. On the other hand, an FAO estimate for South Asia says that 1,900 calories are an adequate daily intake for the region. A moderate assessment of nutritional needs could yield a figure of about 400 million people (10 per cent of the world's population) Who are seriously at risk ; but a shifting upwards of the criteria could 'prove' that two-thirds of humanity are suffering from some form of nutritional deficiency. If these statistics are then leavened with the ghoulish reflection that lack of protein can cause brain damage then one ends up (to take the case of Bangladesh once again) not merely with 75 million starving, desperate people but with 75 million starving, desperate and mentally stunted people. The nightmare spirals—on paper at any rate.
Too many mouths; too little food. The proposition could hardly be simpler or starker, but we must' not judge by the excessive dietary standards of North America. The Japanese, who are not an undernourished people,. use some 600 pounds of grain per capita per year. Taking world food production as a whole in 1974 there was at least that amount available for every man, woman and child on the face of ihe planet. And, despite the enormous increase in population during the 'sixties, overall food production was more than sufficient to cover the population increase. All the same, millions of people in the poorer countries did continue to subsist on the margins of hunger. The problem is not food production (the technology exists, some experts claim, to feed between thirty and forty billion people) but its equitable distribution not only on a global scale but within the poorer countries themselves. Global and internal redistribution are the Scylla and Charybdis of food politics.
The 'Green Revolution', for example, which has had such a dramatic impact on crop-yields in the poorer countries, is heavily dependent on the application of fertiliser. Yet, the industrialised countries, at present, consume (because they can afford to pay the price) 85 per cent of fertiliser production. Holland uses as much as the whole of Latin America; Japan, with 4 per cent of the cultivated land area, uses more than India. This has a profound effect on the nutritional shortfall. Hypocrisy runs riot. The left-wing in this country weeps for the underprivileged but at the same time advocates stricter import controls on goods produced more cheaply and efficiently in the poorer countries—thereby depriving them of, among other things, the foreign exchange needed for the purchase of fertiliser. A World Divided is a sober symposium on the kind of opportunities open to the less developed economies in their search for parity in world trade and the allocation of financial and other resources.
The other side of the coin—domestic redistribution of income and hence food availability—smacks, inevitably, of 'revolution', and both the domestic oligarchies and the Western powers take fright at the prospect. It might be bad form to mention Allende; but, still, the moral of his story ought not to be forgotten. Philanthropic sentiments are quickly swamped by fears of 'nationalisation' and the 'red menace'. 'Freedom' is often preserved at the cost of those who have nothing to eat. Let us then praise Brazil and its burgeoning GNP, achieved without any of that socialist humbug and with the application of that level of torture necessary to preserve harmonious social relations. But let us too, as we marvel at the skyscrapers of Rio and Sao Paulo, remember the concentrated misery—as appalling as any to be found in Asia—that it harbours in its north-east provinces. In nearly every poor country this pattern of privilege coexisting with mass squalor is repeated to a greater or lesser extent: charity ought to begin at home. John Cole in The Poor of The Earth shows himself to be both a philanthropist and a Kissingerphile: the most unlikely sentiments can bed down together when Westerners, aware of the need for change but wary of what it might bring in its wake, confront the 'third world'.
Ultimately, it ought to be borne in mind that the poor do not breed for the hell of it. Neither do the respectable birth-rates to be found in industrialised countries indicate a virtue denied to the rest of mankind. Birthrates, as study after study emphasise, are a function of economic and social well-being: they fall as standards rise and men and women become more secure. The point has been well put by Jose de Castro, a former chairman of the FAO now in exile from his native Brazil. 'It is not over-population that causes hunger but rather hunger causes over-population.' Before mankind stoops to the indignities of compulsory sterilisation, an attempt to create some semblance of international and social justice might not be altogether out of place. But the vibrations are not good.
Previous page
