The causes of famine
Michael Allaby
Ours is not the first generation to be haunted by the spectre of famine. It formed a thread that linked much of the scientific research and many of the political movements of the 19th century. As the famines failed to materialise the fears subsided. A new mood of technological optimism came over our fathers and it was not until the Forties that the old dread appeared again. The war had brought peoples into close contact with one another on an unprecedented scale. The 1914-18 war eroded social barriers within nations. The 193945 war eroded them between nations. Intelligent, sensitive Europeans, Americans, Australasians and others came home from the wars with an awareness of the gulf that separated their wealth from the poverty and deprivation of many Africans. Asians and Latin Americans.
They had seen people who were hungry. At that time our knowledge of nutrition was rather primitive. Scientists defined 'hunger' by measuring the diets of citizens in their own, wealthy countries and assuming that. by and large. those diets were necessary for the maintenance of good health. Since the human metabolism does not vary from one part of the world to another, the definition of nutritional adequacy could be extended to anyone, anywhere; and it was. It showed that in the tropics and subtropics many people ate less than the declared optimum and so scientists assumed that malnutrition was widespread. The first mistake had been made. In fact, most Europeans and Americans eat more than is necessary. and some of them eat so much that they injure themselves, The standard had been set far too high, but that was not all. The amount needed to sustain a person varies quite widely according to age, sex, body size, occupation, climate and other factors.
Having decided that most of the world was undernourished, scientists did not have to look far before they discerned the cause.
The malnourished peoples were suffering from the effects of diets deficient in pro teins. There was a 'protein gap' separating the diets of the rich from those of the poor. This idea began with an assumption. As a matter of convenience, and so they could be arranged in columns inside neat textbook tables, food items were allotted particular nutritional roles. Potatoes, for example, provide energy, and meat provides protein. Such an arrangement is undoubtedly con venient. The trouble with it is that it is not strictly speaking, accurate. Potatoes contain useful amounts of protein, and meat pro vides quite large amounts of energy. It had been assumed, however, that since proteins were the most important nutrients contained in meat a diet that lacks meat lacks
protein. Thus when it was discovered that most tropical peoples eat little meat, and many of them eat none at all, their deprivation became clear.
It was much later that scientists realised that the human body needs energy more urgently than it needs protein. Energy is used in respiration, in maintaining a constant internal temperature and, for that matter, in the digestion of protein. If the body cannot obtain the energy it needs from sugars and fats, it will obtain it in any way it can. It will use its own reserves of fat and when these are exhausted it will 'burn' protein. Under these circumstances it is quite possible for dietary protein to be diverted to supply energy. so that the symptoms that appear are those of a protein deficiency. If more protein is added to the diet, it will be 'burned' as well and the process will continue until the diet supplies an adequate amount of energy in whatever form. What most people lacked was not protein, but food of any kind. Had they been able to consume enough of their traditional foods to satisfy their energy needs, in most cases the protein shortage would have vanished — . despite the fact that many were vegetarians. The attempt to improve food supplies began with the export from North America and Australia of huge surpluses that had accumulated during and after the war. It would be unkind to suggest that such food donations were made out of motives less than purely altruistic, but it cannot be denied that they were convenient and afforded opportunities for doing well by doing good. The recipients being poor, the food was supplied at a very low price. This was fortunate for some, but it was less fortunate for local farmers who were unable to compete with non-existent prices. Had such aid programmes continued, recipient countries would have become perpetually dependent upon them, their own agriculture having been brought to bankruptcy. It became clear that if the problem was to be solved, the solution lay in increasing the output from farms in the countries where shortages occurred.
The model for agricultural development was derived from the kind of farming that had proved highly successful in the industrialised countries and new crop varieties were developed that suited the climates of lower latitudes. Too little account was taken of the very different political, economic and social structures of the countries engaged in this transfer of technologies. The results were crude. often socially divisive, but all in all the rate of agricultural expansion was impressive. It tended to fall short of the targets set for it. even so, and this was worrying. for the targets were calculated in relation to the rate at which populations were held to be increasing.
The world food problem is connected closely to the world population problem. The introduction of better hygiene and a little Western medicine had reduced mortality throughout the developing regions, but birth rates continued at their previous levels. Projections were made — and still ai-e — of the anticipated regional and world population in years to come. Demographic projection, however, is one of the more hazardous of intellectual enterprises. It requires the collection of large amounts of reliable data and it has to make assumptions about the behaviour of human beings. some of whom have not yet been born. The prediction of future behaviour is even more unreliable.
The fact that we can talk of 'world population' and, indeed, of 'world food' has much to do with the American space programme. Pictures of the Earth revealed it to be an oasis amid the hostile environment of space. We came to talk of 'Spaceship Earth'. The idea of the Earth as a set of closed systems proved very convenient. If we can see the Earth as a whole, we can reduce its details to a small number of components. relate the components to one another. and so make the world comprehensible. An earthquake in Scotland might well be measurable in Malaysia. We added together human problems. This may have made them simple, but made them very large. We began to ask whether the farmers of the world are capable of feeding the people of the world.
This led us to produce graphs that show the rate of population increase and the rate at which agricultural output increases. The graphs show that the two lines march together, more or less, while the hunger remains. We had forgotten the most obvious fact about farmers: they are businessmen. As citizens and human beings they are as concerned as everyone at the misfortunes of their fellows, but as businessmen they produce food only for those who can buy it from them. Most of them are poor and they cannot afford to give food away. If people demand more food, and can pay for it, the farmers will grow more. but if people go hungry because they are poor there is little that farmers can do to help them.
The problem, then, reduces itself to one of poverty. No amount of agricultural improvement will remedy it, nor will charity solve it. It will disappear on the day the very poor find paid employment, and until that day it will remain. This is the new problem that emerges to haunt us and it presents us with all the possibilities for misunderstanding and over-simplification that we encountered when we believed it was a matter of matching food production and supply to population growth. Yet it allows for hope. Poverty is an economic concept,' a product of human institutions rather than of impersonal natural forces, and we should be able to find ways to remove what we have created. The history of the final decades of this century will consist very largely of the story of our approaches to this task.
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