Hunger
on REM Zoe Lara (in India) (India), 13/Apr/2011 10:51, 34 days ago
In previous posts, I have blogged of my experience of urban poverty in the course of six months living in Delhi: the man with a disability whocrawled at the train station, the lady with TB whocoughed blood outside my Hindi class, the lady who cleans the communal areas outside our flats for£1.40 per month and feels she has tobeg for her agreed wages.Walking home from work about a month ago, I passed a man on a bridge who was dying. He lay on cardboard boxes with his back against the bridge railings. He was limp, emaciated and unable to speak. He was more alone than most people in urban slums because he had no family around him at all. I had no food on me, so I broke my giving-food-only policy and gave him the only note I had in my purse. He took it from me and placed it carefully on the cardboard underneath his protracted ribcage. I had walked on a few steps before I realised that he probably couldn't spend it: He was too ill to stand up, let alone to walk down from the bridge to buy food. In fact, since he was alone, my gesture of giving had probably made him less secure: if anyone opportunistic had seen, he was sitting duck.I didn't go back. He flurried in and out of my mind with the same speed as the other sights, smells and experiences on my way home: the traffic charging past, street vendors selling garlands of orange flowers, the gangs of teenagers around the slums, the children darting around cars and grinning and laughing; the tops of temples and the one-toothed old lady that greets me briefly each day as I pass her. I thought of his bloodshot, empty stare again only two days later when leaving work. I asked a co-worker about calling for a hospital for him and scribbled down the number they gave me; and I bought some chipatis from a street vendor and put them in my bag as well.When I got to the bridge, he had died. His coat and flattened out cardboard boxes were still there, but he wasn't. I stood staring at the imprint where his body had lain on the cardboard, trying to tell myself that he had just gone for a walk– as though a man who couldn’t stand really could have walked; and as though a person with nothing would really leave his jacket behind. I turned my anger outward, towards the other strangers on the platform who were walking past the remnants of a dead man without knowing it. I realised that someone had been called – and had come – to clear his body away. My veins fizzed with angry judgements that I should have suppressed:What the hell kind of a place is this, when the poverty alleviation programs aren’t implemented and health infrastructure spending is 0.9% of GDP, but the program to clear the impoverished dead from the streets is highly efficient...I looked around the coat and cardboard for a contact number or remnants of a family who'd want to know but I found nothing and eventually just walked away.--------------Since arriving in Delhi, I have been trying to learn a little more about poverty here. Internationally, 'extreme hunger' is defined as when a person's daily intake of calories is well below the minimum needed to survive. Worldwide, the number of people suffering from extreme hunger has increased every year since 1996, despite government commitments tohalve hungerat international summits in2000and2002. In 2009, we even managed a new world record: there are now more than1 billion peoplesuffering from extreme hunger worldwide, even though the Food and Agriculture Organisation has estimated that we actually produce enough food every year to feeddouble the current world population.The Indian government has been accused of projecting to the outside world only the 'shining' India– the one with the fifth largest and second fastest growing economy in the world. With annual GDP growth ofat least 8.2%in the last six years, the percentage of the people living in poverty in this country has declined, though not by very much. Since 1991, every singleHuman Development Reporthas demonstrated worsening levels of inequality in India. The middle class has burgeoned to 300 million butfour out of every ten peoplelive below the international poverty line of $1.25 dollars per day. That's 456 million people– more than eight times the population of Britain and a third of all the hungry people in the world. Two thirds of women areilliterateand almost half of all children aremalnourished, which according to one national expert, roughly equates to the deaths of 5000 children per day as a result of malnutrition. One of my favourite rural affairsjournalistsfrequently quotes a Edward Abbey, who famously commented that growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of thecancer cell.It would be a gross misrepresentation to say that nobody cares and that nothing is being done to end poverty here. The commitment to eradicate poverty began with the birth of the Republic of India– it was enshrined into theconstitutionin the late 1940s as a directive principle of state policy . Since then, India has eradicated large-scale famine principally through its commitment to set up the largest public food distribution system in the world. Though poverty persists, as long as democratic processes are allowed to function as they ought to, there is an incentive for governments to keep working out poverty alleviation programs. Successive political parties have run successive election campaigns on the promise of ending poverty, and in the course of the life of the Republic of India, a number of additional access to food schemes have been developed as a result.Poor implementation of government schemesWhether election promises have been fulfilled, however, is another matter. Many living in poverty are often excluded from access to their entitlements. According to one national expert, a fifth of the poorest people do not have ration cards. In rural areas, there is poor awareness of what the law is and of government schemes set up at a federal level. In cities, NGOs like my own frequently struggle with assisting people in slums in accessing their entitlements because documentation is required and many migrants from rural areas do not have birth certificates or any other identification. A group at my work have been involved in organising jan sunwais, public hearings for people to have their voices heard by government officials. They are accountability forums, used by marginalised groups to ask for answers when programs are not being implemented and their needs aren’t being met. I won't disclose identities, but here is one exemplary submission to the hearing:My child is a child with Disability. At the time of her birth, I was admitted to hospital and was told that blood was required. My husband deposited blood at 9:00 a.m. They kept saying that blood had not been deposited. Our names were repeatedly announced in the labour room and I was told that my baby would not be delivered till blood was received. When my condition worsened, I was told that there was no place in the operation theatre. My child was delivered without help. The doctor spoke very rudely saying your child is dead. My child only shown to me after 9 days. After I was discharged, I refused to go back to the hospital for check up because of the bad experience and also because of the distance from home (12 kms) and transport costs. Later when we had a card to go to another hospital, I was told the child is disabled and nothing can be done. An NGO advised me to get a Disability Certificate for my daughter. They require a ration card or an identity card. I have neither.The focus of the civil society movement to end poverty here has so far been on pressuring the government to better implement the schemes that already exist. In 2001, a case was lodged in the Supreme Court on the basis of a contradiction that exemplifies inequality in India. In the year 2000, there were starvation deaths all over Rajasthan, which could have been avoided if the government had decided to distribute some of the food stocks that it holds habitually in case of war or public emergency. In the same state where people were dying,60 million tonnes of grain were rotting undistributed in godowns of Rajasthan– if set out in a straight line, enough grains of rice to go to the moon and back. In some cases, the distance between these food stocks and the communities of people starving was barely 75km. Rather than spend on transport to distribute the grain to people in desperate need, however, the government either dumped it in the sea or exported it to other countries at artificially low prices, where it was used as cattle feed. The petitioners in the case worked out from the export subsidy that the government was effectively spending more per head on subsidising a Mexican chicken than it spent perhead on India's poor; and concluded that "it seems that the government wouldrather feed the fish in the Arabian seathan the people of India" .In February, I attended a public talk at theHuman Rights Law Networkby the Special Advisor to the Supreme Court on the right to food, who alleged that when some people from starving communities had begged the government for access to the grains and been denied it, they were desperate enough to beg instead to be allowed to shoot the rats feasting on the grain so that their families could eat. The Court has yet to issue its final verdict– but on the basis of the constitutional commitments to the right to life and to raising the standard of living of its people, it has set out an extraordinary number of interim orders – more than forty to date – directing the government to pull their socks up. The judge presiding over the first case sternly told the government that lack of funds was not a sufficient cause for negligence, and the government – which incidentally, approved £1.7 billion spending on its space exploration program in 2009 – must"cut the flab somewhere else".The right to foodmovementthat has grown up around these cases is enormous and has led to demonstrable success; but two things about it nonetheless trouble me. The first is that results have been achieved principally through judicial action, with the court directing– through the formation of special committees and in minute detail in some cases – the actions that must taken by the executive. Judges are not policy makers; but it seems that they have forced to become so because other avenues for tackling the problem had proved ineffective. Courts are slow and reactive and there ought to be better ways within the Indian constitutional system and its everyday running for people to be heard and to demand redress of grievances – by policymakers rather than law-interpreters. That strategic litigation was the only perceived way forward raises wider concerns about the health of India's democracy. Judicialisation skews the important balance of power between the legislature, executive and judiciary. It would surely be preferable to tackle the underlying reasons why the legislature and executive are not working for a third of Indian people, rather than to mine – and possibly, to overextend – the one branch of power that still does.My second concern is about the fact that– at least in its earlier stages – the movement focused almost entirely on campaigning for the implementation of existing schemes. This was a strategic choice by the petitioners in the right to food case: success in court was better guaranteed if the litigants merely held the government to account for commitments that they had already made, rather than directing them make new ones. For its strategic merits, however, this shifted the focus away from important debates that need to be had about the underlying causes of poverty in India and whether the government's approach to tackling it is adesirable one. In effect, the object of the movement's attention might mean patching up the symptoms of poverty in India rather than directing attention the disease. Is there a way to make livelihoods more secure, so that it becomes less necessary to distribute food to the hungry? Ought India to re-examine its relationship to the global trading system and – for example – the effects of liberalising its agricultural market upon Indian farmers, rather than merely to campaign for a more efficient way to give out food when livelihoods fail? Can India work to prevent the deleterious impact ofcorruption upon the population's access to entitlements? These are not the only factors to consider – but unless they are considered, it is extremely unlikely that poverty here will be eradicated.Systemic corruption is one factor underlying poor implementationLack of awareness about legal entitlements is a problem compounded by illiteracy– but corruption, bad management and the difficulties inherent in negotiating complicated federal-state government relations are behind the poor implementation of government schemes. It is always difficult to measure anything that starts and ends with the black market – but it is not a gross misrepresentation to say that corruption is widespread here. In the course of my work, I readone reportthat investigated corruption just in the lower judiciary (rather than the Supreme and High Courts). It concluded that corruption there is "systemic" and estimated that the amount paid in bribes to lawyers, court officials and middlemen alone is 2630 crores each year (more than£375 million). Given the relative clean-ness of the judiciary in comparison to other branches of power, this is a damning indictment that sets the tone of expectations about the wider misappropriation of government funds. Judicial and political corruption are mutually reinforcing: if the justice system is corrupt, sanctions for bribery and threats to politicians are unlikely to be enforced. In fact, in 2004, an investigation by the Public Affairs Centre concluded thatalmost a quarter of MPs in Indian parliament had criminal charges pending against them, ranging from extortion to murder and rape– and these were only the cases that couldn't be made to 'go away'. Transparency International ranks India the 91st most corrupt out of 178 countries in its2010 Global Corruption Perceptions Index, making it more corrupt than Columbia, Cuba and many countries in sub-saharan Africa as well.The impact of systemic corruption upon access to entitlements for people who are poor is heart-wrenching. While it is estimated that one in five of India's poor have no ration cards at all, it is also estimated that 6 in 10 Below Poverty Line card holders are with people who are not poor.Further researchinto the Public Food Distribution System in India reveals some of the horrifying realities. The system involves the government buying up foodgrains in surplus states and selling it to the poor at reasonable prices through a network of specially set-up fair price shops. The Planning Commission of India estimated in 2004 that rather than reaching India's poor, 57% of foodgrains are 'diverted', with at least 36% being sold on the black market.In 2004, using India's internationally enviableRight to Information Act, oneDelhi-based NGOmanaged to uncover evidence that people running fair price shops were selling on the grain; telling those in need that their food entitlements hadn't turned up; then falsifying their shop records to look as though they had been properly distributed. The NGO organised a public hearing with government officials present and questioned the system in front of the malnourished people victimised by the corruption. The conclusion of the hearing was that in the shops they investigated, 55% of kerosene, 96% of rice and 93% of wheat had been illegally misappropriated.Over the next few months, the same NGO faced threats and attacks on its staff by shopkeepers and those in collusion with them. One activist was told in front of onlookers that she’d be doused with kerosene and set on fire; another, who assisted a lady by entering the fair price shop to help her receive her legitimate entitlements, had a hair cut with a knife; another activist had her throat sliced and nearly died. Nand Nagari Police Station refused to register the crimes and in the end, the NGO approached the Supreme Court to ask what had happened and whether the police were complicit. The head of the Human Rights Law Network reports that court proceedings revealed prominent politicians in the local area had actually been meeting with police to protest against the NGO's activities: part of the problem was that the official responsible for handing out the shop licences was the same person with responsibility for handing out fines. The Supreme Court considered the corruption to be so large-scale that they set up a special Vigilance Committee to investigate what had been happening – first in Delhi and from 2008, all over the country.There has been an enormous political movement in the last few days demanding a new bill tocrackdown on corruption, which has culminated in a number of public demonstrations in Delhi. A close friend of mine who grew up in Kolkata got exasperated and wrote on his facebook status:"This is not a fight against corruption. This is a movement for a legislation against corruption. Legislation does not mean corruption will end. Corruption will end when you, the average Indian, stop paying bribes. So stop all this nonsense about the FIGHT against corruption. The fight is against yourself"The next day, I went to a party where I met one protestor. She said that in the midst of the anti-corruption rally, friends of hers who had been stopped by the police had handed out bribes to make them go away.One root of Indian poverty is agricultural insecurityWe cannot understand who is responsible for poverty in India without first looking at the state of agriculture here, the industry upon which two thirds of Indians depend for a living. The country has become self-sufficient in its production of rice and wheat; and since the 1960s,the rate of food production has increased faster than population growth. Agricultural growth, however, has stagnated at 1-2% despite much higher levels of annual GDP growth; and even more importantly, the overall growth rate hides vast inter-state inequalities in the success of farming. A combination of a shift to an export-oriented market, a fall in world food prices, decreased government spending on agriculture as part of a wider liberalisation policy and falling agricultural wages have rendered the industry less secure for workers.Consequently, farmers in some regions of India are committing suicide in their thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands. The overall number in the country is hard to know because in some cases, for the cause of death to be filed as a suicide, the government requires the deaths to fulfil 43 different indicators. Some figures are now confirmed: With a change in government in Andhra Pradesh, the government no longer denies that 3,000 suicides took place in theRayalseema region of the state. Actionaid has reported thatmore than 240 workers either committed suicide or died from starvationin four tea gardens in West Bengal between 2002 and 2003.Palagummi Sainath– an award-winning rural affairs journalist who has spent the last eighteen years living in the areas he covers; and upon whose statistics I am relying here – has reported that many suicides are committed by swallowing a pesticide calledMonochrotopos. National crime records report the cause of these deaths as 'stomach ache'. Sainath also alleges that if the landowner's son commits suicide after taking over the running of the farm, his death is not counted because he is not legally the landowner. If the farmer's wife commits suicide, it is not counted because the land is in her husband's name– even though studies in India have shown that up to one in three farms are now managed by women.Much of the urban poverty that I witness in Delhi is a direct result of the state of farmers' livelihoods in India, which forces many to flee to cities to seek work; and explains why their wives are increasingly taking over the running of farms. Often, they cannot find it; and join the 21%– one in five – of India's urban population who now live in slums with inadequate sanitation, housing and access to safe drinking water. Neither the police nor the hospitals keep records of the number of people who die on the streets here, like the man that I met on the way from work. However, The Hindu has reported from police data that there wereat least 12,413 'unclaimed' dead bodies– mostly single, destitute homeless people in their 40s – recovered in Delhi between 2005 and 2009 . One way to reverse these horrible statistics is to make the agricultural industry more secure for workers.Another root cause of poverty in India is our actions in Europe and North AmericaA debate raged in the UK papers in the last couple of months about whether the UK government should continue giving£300 million a year in aid to India, given India’s status as a rising power and – among other things – the fact that India spends more than double that each year on itsspace program. Eventually the debate was won by those who emphasised the rich-poor gap in the country and pointed out that India’s eight poorest states have more starving people than Africa's26 poorest nations combined. My own opinion is that the parameters of the debate were utterly wrong. Moral philosophers refer to something called 'explanatory nationalism', which is basically the view that the causes of a country's wealth or poverty depends exclusively on factors that can be found inside the country itself. The usefulness of this view is that it exempts people in other countries from any responsibility for the poverty there. If we choose to donate, then, we are 'helping'. The UK government labels its involvement in poverty alleviation schemes as 'aid' and we frequently call our giving 'charitable'. Anyone reading the UK press could be forgiven for thinking that we are still 'giving' aid to India because we are charitable and India (despite its wealth) is needy.Explanatory nationalism does not apply to our world and it never has. The reality is that we in the West are causally involved in poverty elsewhere, and often in indirect ways that it is not easy to see because the impact is felt abroad rather than at home. When the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food visited India in 2005, heconcludedthat the greater liberalisation of trade in basic staple foods should not be pursued so long as subsidies in the developed countries keep international food prices at artificially low levels . Let's link up the causal chain: So long as we maintain our common agricultural policy, we force down world food prices, limiting the amount that Indian farmers earn and therefore contributing to the circumstances that drive them to commit suicides in their hundreds of thousands.Nor do we protest– or even notice – when our government uses its power advantage to exacerbate the situation for farmers in developing countries through negotiations in global financial institutions. We have forced developing members of the WTO to liberalise in almost every industry that will disproportionatelybenefit OECD countries,while leaving our own agricultural protectionism and agricultural subsidies intact. Our individual contributions to the current environmental crisis leads to thedesertification and land degradationin countries where the majority of that population depends upon that land for their livelihood. Finally, through our purchases, we support multinationals whose activities have contributed to our new world record of 1 billion people living in poverty. Coca Cola, for exmple, is engaged in uncontrolled water extraction inKerala and Tamil Nadu, leading to a shortage of water for the local population nearby. By buying coke, I indirectly contribute to their continued thirst.We speak of aid, when we should really be speaking of our own responsibility for the suffering that we have created; and of reparations, whether financial or otherwise. It might seem preposterous to think that I could have contributed to the death of the man on the bridge, or the suicides of farmers in India. There are so many steps between my decisions - to buy coke, to fail to protest my government's trade position, not to turn the lights off when I left the room growing up - and the gritty condition of their livelihoods; and many other intervening factors as well. Yet this is the reality of the world that we live in now and the connections between places and decisions that exist, regardless of whether or not we choose to make ourselves aware of them.One judge in India said that in a country that produces enough food, every man, woman and child dying from hunger is assassinated. I think the allegation is poignant but too strong: Murder requires murderous intent; and just because individuals make choices that result in one in seven people on our planet suffering from starvation does not mean that we intended that outcome. To paraphraseSchmitz, what individuals consent to are individual transactions, rather than to the order that emerges spontaneously from them. Yet what we cannot deny is that we are able to minimise the forseen consequences of our actions once weareaware. In a world that produces double the amount of food that we need, we are all able, to a greater or lesser extent, to do what we can to ensure that we are not, through our own action or inaction, contributing to the inequalities in the social order that endures.------------------------------I am frustrated by articles that tell the truth about poverty but do not assist people who are reading them in understanding how they are involved or how they can take part in alleviating it. So, if you have read this far and feel moved to action, here are some things that you can do:• Look for the fair trade mark when you shop, so that you don't unintentionally support an organisation that is harming food security. You can find a list of fair-trade retail productshere. If you work for an organisation that might be adversely contributing to poverty, ask them about gaining fair trade accreditationhere.• If you have a bit of money, give to efficient organisations that are working to alleviate poverty in a sustainable way. In Delhi, two of my favourites are theSalam Balak Trustwho work to rehabilitate street children by giving them an education and a livelihood from an early age; andAARTH ASTHA, where VSO has placed me; and who work to improve opportunities for people with disabilities living in poverty by supporting them in becoming self-advocates– for their education, employment and life. (People with disabilities are a marginalised minority in India who live in disproportionate poverty in comparison to the general population and yet are underrepresented among India's poor. Less than one in ten children with disabilities are enrolled infull time education, seven out of ten adults with disabilities areunemployed, and rural religious-cultural attitudes are such that disability is often seen as punishment by God for wrongdoing in a past life).• If you have a bit of time, volunteer for a campaign that promotes food security, trade justice or climate justice. This might involve signing petititions or emailing MEPs or MPs about our country’s trade choices, attending a rally, or otherwise using your professional skills to assist the campaign in influencing change.CARE InternationalandGlobal Exchangeare two NGOs that have been really effective at campaigning for change.• You can join the Indian Right to Food Campaignhereand sign their online petition for food security for allhere.