Category Archives: food

A Natural History of ‘Food Riots’

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by Crystal Bartolovich, 2010

In the first half of 2008, ‘food riots’ were much in the news. The streets of the global South and the television screens of the North were filled with angry protesters as the price of grains on world markets doubled or even tripled, pushing staples out of the reach of vast swathes of populations already struggling to get by. Nearly all commentators agree that the price rises that led to these disturbances were an effect of global forces, not merely local ones,such as drought or corruption, on which such unrest is typically blamed. Competition for oil, the cost of commercial seed, fertiliser and pesticide, speculation in commodities markets, shifting of grains to use for fuel rather than food, or for livestock rather than people, all have been identified as culprits. Thus, food riots raise anew – and emphatically at a global level – the question of the limits of the market in mediating the distribution of the most basic resources. At the same time, they remind us that food is still – despite the shift to ‘immaterial labour’ in many sectors of the post-Fordist economy and the continuing decrease in the percentage of the human population engaged in agricultural labour – a particularly volatile site of social struggle over concrete planetary resources. Not only does the concept of sugar not taste sweet, as Althusser was fond of saying, but you can’t put an advertisement for it in your coffee.1 Even as virtualisation technologies become ever more sophisticated, the World Food Program reminds us that 25,000 people still die in the physical world every day from hunger.2 In this context, food riots can be seen as a critique of the current determination of global priorities for the dissemination of resources, the development of technologies and the deployment of labour, as well as the failures of the market in establishing them justly. As such, they are a praxis whose theoretical implications – in addition to their practical ones– must be recognised.

Crises in the Food Commons: A conversation with best-selling writer, and valued comrade, Raj Patel

Church Land Programme
Monday 28 February 2011

Crises in the Food Commons

A conversation with best-selling writer, and valued comrade, Raj Patel

CLP is thrilled that Raj has managed to find some time to spend with us on 16th March while he is in South Africa for the "Time of the Writer Festival". With the working title "Crises in the Food Commons", Raj will link up his interest in the ongoing uproar about food prices and global food rebellions with forthcoming work about the Black Panthers movement and food sovereignty – and possibly test "some new ideas around education for commoning" he says. Over the years, Raj has been an indispensable resource for us, and many others, thinking politically about a range of issues around land, food, markets, politics and the emancipatory trajectories in the movements and militants that shape and resist them.

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Ending Africa’s Hunger

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http://rajpatel.org/2009/11/02/ending-africas-hunger-2/

Ending Africa’s Hunger

Raj Patel, Eric Holt-Gimenez & Annie Shattuck

September 2, 2009

More than a billion people eat fewer than 1,900 calories per day. The majority of them work in agriculture, about 60 percent are women or girls, and most are in rural Africa and Asia. Ending their hunger is one of the few unimpeachably noble tasks left to humanity, and we live in a rare time when there is the knowledge and political will to do so. The question is, how? Conventional wisdom suggests that if people are hungry, there must be a shortage of food, and all we need do is figure out how to grow more.

This logic turns hunger into a symptom of a technological deficit, telling a story in which a little agricultural know-how can feed the world. It’s a seductive view, and one that appears to underwrite President Obama’s vision for ending hunger. In an interview with an African news agency, he shared his frustration over “the fact that the Green Revolution that we introduced into India in the ’60s, we haven’t yet introduced into Africa in 2009. In some countries, you’ve got declining agricultural productivity. That makes absolutely no sense.”

In a squat beige Seattle office building, the world’s largest philanthropic organization has been thinking along the same lines as the president. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, with an endowment of more than $30 billion, has embarked on a multibillion-dollar effort to transform African agriculture. It helped to set up the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) in 2006, and since then has spent $1.3 billion on agricultural development grants, largely in Africa. With such resources, solving African hunger could be Gates’s greatest legacy.

But there’s a problem: the conventional wisdom is wrong. Food output per person is as high as it has ever been, suggesting that hunger isn’t a problem of production so much as one of distribution. It’s true that African soil fertility is poor, though, which might explain why President Obama feels that the continent needs a Green Revolution.

At best, however, the first Green Revolution was an ambiguous success. As John Perkins writes in his magisterial Geopolitics and the Green Revolution, it was instigated by the US government not out of a direct concern for the well-being of the world’s hungry but from a worry that a hungry urban poor might take to the streets and demand left-wing changes in the Global South. The term “Green Revolution” was coined by William Gaud, administrator of USAID in the late 1960s. Referring to record yields in Pakistan, India, the Philippines and Turkey, he announced, “Developments in the field of agriculture contain the makings of a new revolution. It is not a violent Red Revolution like that of the Soviets, nor is it a White Revolution like that of the shah of Iran. I call it the Green Revolution.” Steeped in the cold war, the first Green Revolution was designed to prevent any other revolutions from happening.

The Green Revolution appeared successful because the global quantity of food produced increased dramatically. From 1970 to 1990 the amount of food available per person rose by 11 percent, and more than 150 million people were lifted from the ranks of the world’s hungry. But most of that rise was driven by transformations inside China. Subtract China from the picture and the heyday of the Green Revolution saw global hunger increase by 11 percent. In South America, hunger grew by nearly 20 percent despite impressive gains in output driven, in part, by improved crop varieties. Those varieties required large landholdings in order to be economically efficient, which meant that the peasants working that land had to be kicked off. Those displaced peasants migrated to the hillsides and tropical forests, doubling the area of cultivated land–in other words, the increase in food came not only through technology but also simply by having food growing on a greater area.

Beyond the massive displacement of peasants, the Green Revolution wrought other social damage–urban slums sprawled around cities to house displaced workers, pesticide use went up, groundwater levels fell and industrial agricultural practices began racking up significant environmental debt. Today, because of the Green Revolution’s catastrophic economic and ecological consequences, even its strong advocates in India have recommended that up to 70 percent of farmers farm organically.

The architects of Africa’s new Green Revolution at the Gates Foundation are sensitive to these flaws. In an interview, Roy Steiner, deputy director of agricultural development, was well versed in the history, emphasizing that the Gates Foundation’s agricultural priorities are directed at small farmers (known as “smallholders”) and women. The past offered some salutary lessons, he said, because “if you look at the depletion of water tables and the overuse of fertilizer, a lot of that has to do with very poor policy choices. It pushed a certain mode of agriculture that we know now was an overuse.”

Nonetheless, the Green Revolution being prepared for Africa bears more than a passing resemblance to its predecessor. For starters, in the 1960s the push for a Green Revolution was accompanied by fears about national security and stability; the recent global spate of food rebellions, in dozens of countries from Egypt to Haiti to India, has made food a security concern once again. Furthermore, the first Green Revolution was made possible through the philanthropy of a billionaire American family–the Rockefellers; the second is bankrolled by Gates. This is not a superficial coincidence: the destinies of millions of the world’s poorest farmers are again being shaped by the richest Americans, and philanthropic choices are very different from democratic ones.

One of the most important choices involves the role of technology. At the Gates Foundation, Roy Steiner emphasized that “we believe in the power of technology.” It’s a belief with clout: about a third of the foundation’s $1.3 billion in agricultural development grants have been invested in science and technology, with almost 30 percent of the 2008 grants promoting and developing seed biotechnologies. Through a range of investments, the Gates Foundation is turning its faith into reality. This reliance on technology to address a growing political and social problem loudly echoes the thinking behind the first Green Revolution.

Why Africa Is Hungry and Knowledge Is Never Neutral

Some of the changes made possible by Gates’s funding are welcome. An African Centre for Crop Improvement has been set up at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, which is designed to change the way African agricultural scientists work. Rather than carting them off to Europe or North America, where they learn about the pressing agricultural issues facing French or American farmers, the new center encourages African scientists to face African challenges while based in Africa. Other Gates investments are geared toward training more women PhDs and providing an infrastructure to source food aid locally.

These are valuable efforts, but one might pause to ask why the need for such philanthropic intervention arose in the first place. The faltering quality of African agricultural research institutions, and the decline in government spending on agriculture, is a result of the budget austerity imposed by international financial institutions, such as the World Bank, in the 1980s and ’90s. As Filipino scholar-activist Walden Bello has noted, Africa exported 1.3 million tons of food a year in the 1960s, but after being subject to international development loans and free-market fundamentalism, today it imports nearly 25 percent of its food. In a 2008 report, the Bank’s internal evaluations group lambasted the policies that led to this situation. What the Gates Foundation is doing is using its private money to fund activities that once were in the public domain and were, albeit imperfectly, under democratic control.

The preference for private sector contributions to agriculture shapes the Gates Foundation’s funding priorities. In a number of grants, for instance, one corporation appears repeatedly–Monsanto. To some extent, this simply reflects Monsanto’s domination of industrial agricultural research. There are, however, notable synergies between Gates and Monsanto: both are corporate titans that have made millions through technology, in particular through the aggressive defense of proprietary intellectual property. Both organizations are suffused by a culture of expertise, and there’s some overlap between them. Robert Horsch, a former senior vice president at Monsanto, is, for instance, now interim director of Gates’s agricultural development program and head of the science and technology team. Travis English and Paige Miller, researchers with the Seattle-based Community Alliance for Global Justice, have uncovered some striking trends in Gates Foundation funding. By following the money, English told us that “AGRA used funds from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to write twenty-three grants for projects in Kenya. Twelve of those recipients are involved in research in genetically modified agriculture, development or advocacy. About 79 percent of funding in Kenya involves biotech in one way or another.” And, English says, “so far, we have found over $100 million in grants to organizations connected to Monsanto.”

This isn’t surprising in light of the fact that Monsanto and Gates both embrace a model of agriculture that sees farmers suffering a deficit of knowledge–in which seeds, like little tiny beads of software, can be programmed to transmit that knowledge for commercial purposes. This assumes that Green Revolution technologies–including those that substitute for farmers’ knowledge–are not only desirable but neutral. Knowledge is never neutral, however: it inevitably carries and influences relations of power.

The first Green Revolution spawned and exacerbated many social divisions, especially around access to land and resources, since the scale required by Green Revolution technologies meant that it was systematically biased against smallholders. The Gates Foundation is clearly aware of the importance of smallholder agriculture; but a leaked internal strategy document suggests that something else is more important: “Over time, this [strategy] will require some degree of land mobility and a lower percentage of total employment involved in direct agricultural production.” “Land mobility” is an Orwellian term meaning the land stays where it is but the people on it are driven off. The foundation stands behind this idea, saying that peasants will head to cities “because there are a lot of them who don’t want to be farmers [and] people make their own choices.”

This idea of choice is an integral part of the conventional wisdom about agriculture in Africa. At least until the financial crisis, it was true that young men tended not to want to remain in agriculture if they could avoid it; but that choice was conditioned, in part, by policies that underinvested in rural areas compared with urban ones. One of the consequences of the financial crisis has been to change that field of choices. For the first time in years, men who had migrated to the cities find there’s less opportunity in urban than in rural areas.

They’re returning to family land that has been farmed by women, who have developed rich knowledge about agriculture. The technologies that the Gates Foundation funds, like hybrid seed and synthetic fertilizer, require much less know-how than some of the diverse traditional systems managed by women. In many African cultures, women grow the majority of food, but men control access to cash. Rather than supporting and building on women’s agricultural knowledge systems, cash-based agricultural technology allows men with the economic wherewithal to displace women as farmers.

African farmers’ organizations have repeatedly rejected this high-tech approach to agriculture and instead are making their own choices. Since AGRA announced its plans in 2006, groups representing the largest farmer federations in Africa have come together in a series of meetings to organize support for African agroecological solutions to the food crisis.

Despite institutional neglect, ecological farming systems have been sprouting up across the African continent for decades–systems based on farmers’ knowledge, which not only raise yields but reduce costs, are diverse and use less water and fewer chemicals. Fifteen years ago, researchers and farmers in Kenya began developing a method for beating striga, a parasitic weed that causes significant crop loss for African farmers. The system they developed, the “push-pull system,” also builds soil fertility, provides animal fodder and resists another major African pest, the stemborer. Under the system, predators are “pushed” away from corn because it is planted alongside insect-repellent crops, while they are “pulled” toward crops like Napier grass, which exudes a gum that traps and kills pests and is also an important fodder crop for livestock. Push-pull has spread to more than 10,000 households in East Africa by means of town meetings, national radio broadcasts and farmer field schools. It’s a farming system that’s much more robust, cheaper, less environmentally harmful, locally developed, locally owned and one among dozens of promising agroecological alternatives on the ground in Africa today.

It was innovative ecological technologies like push-pull (and not traditional Green Revolution approaches) that were praised by a recent international effort to assess the future of agriculture. “The International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development” (IAASTD), a report modeled after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, took more than four years to complete and relied on the expertise of more than 400 scientists. It was adopted by fifty-eight countries in the global North and South (though not the United States, Canada or Australia). The IAASTD found that a focus on small-scale sustainable agriculture, locally adapted seed and ecological farming better address the complexities of climate change, hunger, poverty and productive demands on agriculture in the developing world. That report–the most comprehensive scientific assessment of world agriculture to date–recommended development strategies that are in large part the opposite of those backed by the Gates Foundation.

The Gates Foundation acknowledges the relevance of the IAASTD’s insights. But it continues to invest heavily in biotech solutions to the problem of hunger and gives short shrift to the agroecological approaches recommended by the report. What’s more, there’s empirical reason to doubt whether biotech can deliver what Gates is hoping for. Genetically modified (GM) seeds are expensive, proprietary and contribute to the corporate monopolization of the world’s seed supply. Despite extraordinary restrictions on research into the effects of GM products–the industry refuses to allow independent researchers to study patented seed–evidence is finally emerging of the significant environmental and health risks they pose, prompting the American Academy of Environmental Medicine earlier this year to call for an immediate moratorium on GM food.

Prestigious research organizations like the Union of Concerned Scientists have demonstrated that GM crops (which are legal for commercial use in only three African countries) do not increase intrinsic yields, and, in the developing world especially, can increase costs and risks to smallholders, with mixed, often negative effects on their incomes. Although the Gates Foundation has promised crops genetically engineered for drought tolerance, these crops have yet to outperform traditional varieties, according to an assessment by the Australian government. The foundation has also spent more than $111 million to “biofortify” (genetically engineer) crops to have a higher vitamin content, despite past technical and cultural failures that indicate a diverse diet goes much further than genetically engineered supplements in supporting good nutrition.

Africa’s New Poster Child: The Malawi ‘Miracle’

One place where the new Green Revolution has gotten a head start is the small East African nation of Malawi. After a severe drought in 2003, more than a third of the country needed food aid to survive. Bucking advice from the World Bank, the country began giving out vouchers on a large scale for subsidized fertilizer in 2005. The rains returned, yields rose, Malawi began exporting grain and the international community declared the hunger crisis over.

The Gates Foundation has been aggressively supporting the funding of fertilizer in Africa through grants to establish a network of private agro-input dealers. While the program doesn’t explicitly subsidize the price of fertilizers to farmers, it encourages national policies to increase fertilizer availability. If the problem for African farmers is soil fertility, funding fertilizer seems unimpeachable. A closer examination of the data raises some troubling questions, though. It isn’t clear whether it was the fertilizer or the rain that caused yields to increase. Worse yet, according to sources in Malawi, hunger has not abated at anywhere near the levels believed by the international development community.

Indeed, there’s reason to think that fertilizer subsidies may render societies more vulnerable to famine. Roland Bunch, a former agronomist at World Neighbors and author of Two Ears of Corn, a handbook on people-centered agricultural development, explains the problem. “The indirect effects of subsidized fertilizer are that farmers stop amending their soils with organic matter because it is easier to apply fertilizer. When the subsidies dry up–as they invariably do–farmers are left with soils that are so inert that they can’t even grow a good green manure to restore fertility. At that point, with neither chemical fertilizer nor green manures being feasible, we could easily witness a famine across Africa like nothing we have ever seen before.”

This is a concern echoed on the ground. Rachel Bezner Kerr, a professor at the University of Western Ontario, has been working in Malawi for more than a decade. She says that Malawi’s fertilizer subsidies are “masking food security problems for the long term.” Bezner Kerr works with a project in Malawi that takes a different approach to soil health by relying on local farmer experimenters. One village headman has, for instance, encouraged his village to adopt ecological agriculture, which not only improves yields but produces a diverse diet that has improved the health of the community’s children, at a fraction of the cost of Gates’s genetically engineered nutrition projects. Much like push-pull, the result of that project, which spread to more than 7,000 households, is that families–and the soil–are better off.

When asked about how AGRA affects projects like hers, Bezner Kerr says, “When farmers get vouchers [for fertilizer], they wonder, Why incorporate crop residues? If AGRA is putting all that money into fertilizer, it is taking away from efforts like ours.” Like Bunch, she’s concerned about the economic as well as the environmental sustainability of fertilizer giveaways. “What happens when AGRA leaves?” she asks.

Is Bill Gates Africa’s Latest Strongman?

The Gates Foundation responds to criticism of its funding decisions by saying that it is learning all the time, with a state-of-the-art system that will soon let the project officers seek feedback through the cellphones of more than 10,000 farmer stakeholders. It’s unusual in the world of foundations to have such a strong commitment to correcting mistakes. In its flexibility and openness to reform, the Gates Foundation seems ready to depart from the trajectory of the first Green Revolution.

Stung by widespread criticism over its Green Revolution approach, AGRA representatives have begun participating in public consultations with NGOs and African farm leaders. While this dialogue is an important step, the farm leaders are unhappy about being consulted so late in the game. The UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier De Schutter, recently convened a dialogue on AGRA. There, Simon Mwamba of the Eastern and Southern Africa Small-Scale Farmers’ Forum expressed this frustration in no-nonsense terms: “You come. You buy the land. You make a plan. You build a house. Now you ask me, what color do I want to paint the kitchen? This is not participation!”

Nnimmo Bassey, director of Environmental Rights Action in Nigeria, suggests, “If the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations wish to extend the hand of fellowship to the African continent, they should move away from strategies that favor monoculture, lead to land grabs and tie local farmers to the shop doors of biotech seed monopolies.” This is feedback that can’t so easily be shot back to base through a cellphone.

The calls from African organizations to be able to set the agenda for their own agricultural development are heard only faintly in the United States. That’s largely because when it comes to African hunger, prejudices about the incompetence of African farmers and the marvels of biotechnology do a lot of the thinking for us. But the Gates Foundation isn’t a victim of poor reasoning. It actively promotes an agenda that supports some of the most powerful corporations on earth. Far more than the peer-reviewed IAASTD study, Gates’s strategy reflects another report, funded by the foundation itself: “Renewing American Leadership in the Fight Against Global Hunger and Poverty” from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Knocked out in a couple of months by a small team led by a Gates Foundation senior fellow and stacked with staff from institutions receiving substantial Gates money, the report, while rightly calling for renewed investment and education, again ignores the structural and political causes of Africa’s hunger, ascribing it to a technical deficit. The report concludes that the United States needs to “reassert its leadership” in “spreading new technologies,” because it will increase trade and “strengthen American institutions.” Worse, the council’s solutions–with classic Green Revolution hubris–ignore the successful endogenous solutions that have been spreading across the continent for three decades.

Rarely in the history of philanthropy has one foundation–or more correctly, one man–had this kind of power. When Obama made his remarks on the Green Revolution, one Seattle Times journalist suggested that “President Obama and other world leaders seem to be taking their cue from the Gates Foundation.” It’s not hard to see the paths through which the thinking in Seattle might have made it to Washington, DC. Many AGRA and Gates Foundation employees are former industry and government insiders. Rajiv Shah, a doctor with no previous agricultural experience who was headhunted by the Gates Foundation, is now at the Department of Agriculture, as under secretary for research, education and economics, and also chief scientist.

The foundation’s reach extends far beyond Washington. With billions committed to agricultural development, the Gates Foundation has a financial heft equal to that of a government in the global North. In 2007 the United States contributed $60 million to the system of international public agricultural research centers. Gates has pumped $122 million into the system in the past eighteen months alone and given a total of $317 million to the World Bank.

Africa’s Green Revolution has another similarity with the first Green Revolution: the technological preferences of the philanthropist shape the approaches on the ground. For the Rockefellers, that meant agricultural technology based on industrial chemistry and oil. For Gates, it’s about proprietary intellectual property. Africa’s Green Revolution is, in other words, just a new way of doing business as usual.

In its push for technological solutions, its distaste for redistributive social policy and disregard for extant alternatives–as well as in the circumstances that have made food an international security concern–this Green Revolution looks very similar to its predecessor. The biggest issue, however, isn’t one of commission but of omission. Just as in India, where peasant demands for land reform in the 1960s that might have led to more sustainable and durable progress (as such reforms did in China, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea) were ignored, African farmers advocating their own solutions to the food crisis are being marginalized. In particular, the vocally articulated demands–for agroecological alternatives, state support for farmer-led research, for land reform, for women’s rights in agriculture, and for sharing access to water–all fade into the background when Gates’s answers are amplified.

It will take a suite of policies, addressing both the technical and sociopolitical reasons for hunger in Africa, to make lasting change. Technologies for development need to be accompanied by other, political reforms, including canceling debt, removing food and agriculture from the World Trade Organization, investing heavily in farmers’ organizations and their proven sustainable agricultural technologies, and supporting the peer-reviewed approaches generated by the science of agroecology.

Models for this kind of change already exist. In Mali, peasant movements have successfully persuaded the government to adopt as a national priority the idea of “food sovereignty,” a shorthand for the democratization of the food system. Similar efforts are happening at regional and local levels in other countries. But for those initiatives to register in the United States, the conventional wisdom regarding the Green Revolution needs to be replaced. The tragedy here is not that Africa hasn’t had a Green Revolution but that the mistakes of the first may be repeated once more, and that one foundation has the power to make the rest of the world bend to its misguided agenda.

Pambazuka: Hungry for a voice: The food crisis, the market, and socio-economic inequality

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Hungry for a voice: The food crisis, the market, and socio-economic inequality
Jacques Depelchin (2008-12-04)

http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/52480

In an article exploring the history of socio-economic inequality, Jacques Depelchin calls for an interpretation of the current food crisis over the historical longue durée. As a direct consequence of an entrenched, centuries-old capitalist system, the author argues, the market as a ‘modernising’ force has consistently enriched the lives of a few while impoverishing a poor majority. Understanding the food crisis, Depelchin contends, rests first and foremost on re-considering humanity’s relationship to nature and championing historical narratives true to the voices and experiences of the global poorest of the poor.

In order to live, one needs to eat; and in order to live, one needs more than just food. In a world ruled by worshippers of the market, it has come to be accepted that principles of justice and solidarity shall take second place to everything else. Indeed, that is why one hears more and more often of the distinction between justice and social justice – as if calling for the former will not automatically cover those most affected by the growing disappearance of justice and equality.

Given the current mentality, dominated by greed, selfishness, and selfish charity, it is worth remembering a few cautionary principles: beware of the names given to a problem or a disease or a person without the consent of that person. Always remember the Arawaks and those who welcomed Christopher Columbus and his party on what Columbus called Hispaniola. The Arawaks soon died of hunger and disease after welcoming the Europeans. Always remember those who resisted the conquest of their land because they were defending much more than their land. To remember requires much more than mining memories and archives, it will take listening with loving attention to the voices which tend to be ignored, to poets, to those who did die of hunger, to those who would like to speak for themselves as they are, whoever they are (Pygmies, !kung, or Hazabe).

As Ernest Wamba dia Wamba has pointed out, at times like these it is crucial to hear the thinking of ordinary people (e.g., people living in forests or deserts), on how they have understood food security. For example, among the Kongo in the Democratic Republic of Congo, earth is a package of food and medicine provided by God so people can face hunger and illness. During slavery (in the USA), slave masters sometimes wondered how Africans survived without access to what the masters considered food. It did not occur to the latter that the Africans managed to invent more nutritious food than their masters.

The food crisis is not just about food, it is about understanding humanity and its relation to nature. How the issue is framed or problematised shall determine the process of rethinking and finding a solution which is satisfactory, primarily to those who have suffered the most from the predatory nature of the current and triumphant economic and financial system. For Wamba dia Wamba, ‘it is the destruction of Mother Earth and the building of walls between people and Mother Earth which is at the centre of the food crisis. In the process Mother Earth is transformed, sterilized and turned into the mother of profits for the rich. For the victims it is unconscionable that food should be destroyed in order to increase prices, make people suffer while generating huge profits for the destroyers of Mother Earth.'[1]

SETTING THE PARAMETERS

The current food crisis in the midst of a multiple crisis should provide a wake-up call for all those who are trying to provide solutions by focusing only on food. At first glance, there are at least two competing narratives; one set by those who have run the world and their allies, and the other by those who are expected to submit and accept the word of the self-appointed masters of the world. Formally speaking, the former set their own agendas, among other places via the G8 and the yearly Davos meetings. Those who are expected to submit are reduced to using the United Nations and its specialised agencies, and the World Social Forum. Soon the Security Council and its permanent members will be changed, but it will not matter since the G8 and Davos meetings have ensured that the decisions which do matter to them will no longer be taken within the UN system.

In other words, it is not only in justice, health or, more prosaically, air travel, that the class system has imposed itself; there is justice and health for the poor and justice and health for the rich. Indeed, if one looks more carefully, it is not difficult to detect that the super rich would like to separate themselves from the rest. But, no matter how hard they would like to distinguish themselves from the rest of humanity, there is only one humanity. Splitting it apart – as the atom was split – willl yield worse results than the process which led to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Still, more than 50 years later, how many are willing, like Dwight McDonald, to see the dropping of those atomic bombs as the modernisation of Auschwitz and Dachau? Given what happened in the Second World War, (and, more importantly, in the centuries leading up to it), shouldn’t one ask if the current crises are the by-product of the same competition-to-death mentality which gave rise in several countries with the most advanced economies to political leadership that saw nothing wrong with getting rid of, once and for all, any racially defined group (be it Africans, Asians, Armenians, pygmies, Jews, Tutsi, Hutu)? Asking the question does not mean that one knows the answer. When one can see that the mindset of those genocidal times is still vibrant, it would be irresponsible not to ask questions like, who are the slaves, who are the Jews, who are the colonised? Asking these questions will help uncover, along the way, how poverty and hunger are created, who named them and why they are so named?

The mindset which has trampled humanity under different names – slavery, colonisation, holocaust, apartheid – has not retreated; it has grown like a cancer, destroying the living principle. At the same time, it passes itself off under names which disguise its lethal, predatory nature, such as bio-technology, which presents itself as promoting life when it is engaged in the process of killing, brutally, softly, and all the ways in between. Bio-technology is a misnomer; given the antecedents, its proper name should be thanato-technology: to live on planet earth according to death principles. The chain toward self-destruction has no end: to rape, to enslave, to colonise, to seek the final solution, to bantustanise, to ethnically cleanse a country. Humanity has yet to see the end of its genocidal tendencies and sequences. Under the previous submission processes, the responsibility could be traced back to some sort of state authority, but with submission to the market’s rules, responsibility and authority seems to be nowhere and everywhere.

Peoples and nations have been enslaved and colonised by other nations, but at the core of the process, the rules of the market have reigned supreme. The capitalist market has superseded all previous conquering, enslaving, and colonising mechanisms. Indeed, unlike the empires of old, the market (as guided by capitalist principles) has modernised (automated) the mechanisms of domination in ways imperial powers could never have dreamed of achieving. Through market mechanisms, a few former slaves or a few former colonised could become part of the ruling cliques, and in so doing move away from the miseries of hunger and poverty. In times when denunciations of corruption have become a perpetual mantra, the sweet murmurs of the market and the promise of greater wealth to be made through its labyrinths, gag and/or muffle the few voices trying to change course. Before trying to restrict the food crisis to the last few decades and to the usual culprits, one should revisit the histories of those who (since the inauguration of capitalism a few centuries ago) died of hunger in times when the words food crisis were not even uttered.[2] At least not in the manner one hears them today.

Increasingly, food is only accessible through the market, as is work, education, health, justice, birth, the right to exist, the right to breath clean air, and the right to drink to clean water. Everything which goes into making life worth living, into making a human being worth being a human being, is only accessible through mechanisms controlled by a few individuals, but above all by a mindset which is accountable to nobody. The market fundamentalists might say that this is an exaggeration, that they are just as interested in the above objectives as anyone else. As fundamentalists who have benefited from the market, understandably, their primary objective has been, is, and will be to maintain the prism of the market as key determinant in assessing life’s value. If the food crisis is not problematised from within this situation, the histories of those who were famished because of who they were (i.e., dispensable), then the exercise is more than likely to only provide solutions beneficial to the so-called discoverers of hunger and famine. Historically, the discoverers have never seen themselves, at least initially, as the possible and probable source of problems of a socio-economic nature which are now affecting more than 90% of the world’s population.

By discussing the current food crisis from the perspective of the last few decades, these very short-term analysts, consciously or unconsciously, are saying that the problem is momentary and conjunctural. It is neither and has been in the making for a very long time.[3] Sometimes, like now, the time span can be even shorter because of the emphasis on the concomitant financial, energy, and ecological crises. This essay would like to address the current food crisis from a perspective which goes back at least to 1491. As Ch. Mann has pointed out, 1492 as the starting point of a post-1492 narrative tends to give the impression that prior to 1492 there was nothing worth remembering. The dominant mindset which emerged out of the so-called discoveries emphasises only the positive aspects, to the exclusion of any aspect which might blemish its record.[4]

The term consciousness of evil is one which has been used to describe what happened during and after the Second World War. Fifty years later, one has slowly but irresistibly, slid into a situation leading to the eradication of people who stand in the way of the total and complete triumph of the will of the richest people of the earth. When Native Americans were driven out of their land, when they lost the material basis of their way of living, they died of hunger and disease. Centuries later, on a bigger scale, masses of people are being starved, while a few are stuffing themselves, to death.[5] Some, because they are not eating the proper food, others because they just overeat, excited, driven by never ending advertising campaigns. This killing, anti-humanity mindset has reached such a level of intensity that those who are its victims fail to grasp that they do not have to submit to it. All it would take is affirming humanity and the living principles.

THE CURRENT FOOD CRISIS SEEN FROM THE STARVED

From way back, if one is willing to listen carefully to the historical echoes of those who screamed against inhumanity, one can hear something like the following:

When people were punished through starvation they protested, but who were they? Slaves. They responded: We are not slaves, we are Africans who were enslaved. For having spoken they were killed.

The generic human being protested. The screams were heard, but she was a colonial subject. She was jailed, raped, sent to exile only for having spoken when she was supposed to keep silent.

The human being protested babies, children, old men and women. Protested. Followed by animals, birds, nature. Life protested against death. To no avail. The market must prevail, keeps prevailing, is kept prevailing. The most powerful so dictated.

The habit of not listening to human beings less powerful. The habit of raping with impunity. Led to humanitarianism, a discovery aimed at covering up crimes against humanity. By those who had refused to listen to humanity. And lost their humanity.

From Columbus to today, the discoverers have not changed. They changed tunes to reinforce their mindset, leading one to ask: was their discovery of humanitarianism a diversion or a negation of their own humanity?

Or are they saying there is a humanity? To be understood, represented, or defended – by them or their agents – through humanitarianism, charitably. And there is a humanity, a humanity against which no crime must be committed.

They discovered themselves as the best representatives of humanity. But they are disconnected from humanity. They have never known starvation. The only thing they understand is how to make money out of their discoveries. Whatever their names: land, slaves, colonies, poverty, misery, hunger.

The history has been known for a long time, but it keeps being pushed back, even when, one should say especially when, it manages to free itself from the shackles of the dominant mindset. An enslaved person who frees herself without waiting for the master’s abolition or a colonised people which decolonises itself before it is considered appropriate by the coloniser shall be ‘taught a lesson’. From Saint-Domingue/Haiti to Indochina/Vietnam, to Cuba, to Kenya, to the DR Congo, to Mozambique, the lesson has been drilled with all the means at the disposal of the dominant mindset: from extreme violence to extreme seduction. The objective is the same: to ensure that fear and/or shame will keep the descendants of those who tried the impossible (and succeeded) to never ever try again to free themselves. More on shame further below.

IDENTIFYING AND ADDRESSING THE DEEPEST ROOTS OF THE FOOD CRISIS

If the current food crisis is going to be resolved for the benefit of those who have been most affected by its unfolding, and in a way that those who have most suffered from hunger participate in the thinking of how to remove hunger, then the food crisis must be examined far and away beyond the rattling of statistical tables which reveal nothing more than the obvious – that the poorest of the poor[6] have been getting poorer and poorer for the benefit of the richest of the rich. For as long as humanity has existed the former have risen against the latter, but one must resist the temptation of accepting the idea that emancipatory politics will always fail. Closer to us in historical time, one must also resist the temptation of accepting the notion that thoughts expressed by highly educated intellectuals count more than the thoughts of uneducated or poorly educated peasants. Being uneducated does not mean that one is incapable of thinking. The Africans who overthrew slavery in Saint Domingue/Haiti thought better from within their situation than those who predicted that they could not possibly achieve such a feat. It is not difficult to imagine the slave owners (and the Enlightenment philosophers) saying to whoever would listen: what do the slaves know about freedom?

Yet, these were the very people who, having dared against all odds and all predictions of failure, left us with lessons on how to achieve freedom. But again, the lessons retold by the discoverers and their descendants and their allies shall always differ from the ones recounted, remembered by the so-called ‘discovered’ and their descendants and their allies. More often than not, one finds among the latter the most vociferous distorters of the histories and lessons emerging from battles against those who defend submission to the dominant mindset. For example, listening to the history of Haiti as recounted by C.L.R. James or, more recently, Peter Hallward is not the same as hearing it from Alex Dupuy.[7] The richest of the rich have multiple ways of enforcing their views, but so too do the poorest of the poor, provided they are convinced that they can.

For any human being, suffering can reach unbearable points. But at the same time, over and over in history, people have shown a heroic capacity to resist and rise above the most extreme forms of torture, especially when people are motivated by a political understanding of their situation disconnected from the idea that the way out can only be through the dominant mindset way of thinking.

Again if one looks at the history of Haiti, it is easy to understand why the slave and plantation owners would seek, by any means necessary, to prove that the Africans who overthrew slavery on Saint Domingue should never have tried: financial, economic, political, religious, cultural, and intellectual means were used to convey the message that the inhabitants of Saint Domingue would have been better off had they not risen against slavery. In a nutshell, everything has been done to ensure that other enslaved Africans (or any subsequent enslaving system) reconsider emancipatory politics as a viable option.

The history of Haiti is one of the most exemplary for both sides of the ideological fence separating emancipatory and consensual/submissive/abolitionist politics.

CONVERGENCE BETWEEN FEAR OF ONE’S HISTORY AND FEAR OF HUNGER

From the historical record, it is known that the turnover ratio of Africans in Saint Domingue was very high. Supply was cheap and less costly than seeking to improve maintenance. It was cheaper to get fresh bodies and use them to death. The demographic ratio was also favourable to the Africans, free and enslaved ones. From the beginning to the end of the 18th century, the number of Africans went from around 2,000 to about half a million. As in any such situation, a range of possibilities must have been discussed: improve the conditions of work/treatment, including better food; or get rid of the system altogether.

However, before going further in our examination, it is important to connect the history of Africans in Saint Domingue and Africans from one of their geographical points of origin: the Kongo Kingdom. Only 85 years (about three generations) separate two events related to the overthrow of slavery. On 2 July 1706, Kimpa Vita (some times known as Dona Beatriz) was burned at the stake for having tried to convince the Kongo King to put an end to the activities of the Portuguese slave raiders/traders. This was not just a one-person enterprise. Those who agreed with her denunciations rallied behind a movement known as the Antonian movement, so called because Kimpa Vita said that she had received her message from St Anthony. Little is known about the movement following the death of Kimpa Vita, but it is not unreasonable to surmise that memories of the movement survived and may have influenced those who, in 1791, in Saint Domingue, decided and vowed to end slavery. And, it would not be unfair to presume that, as a principle, humanity has genes which are allergic to any form of slavery. From within humanity there are always going to be those pushing for emancipatory politics.

The Africans who ended up in Saint Domingue lived in a most fearsome situation. In order to understand their determination to do away with slavery, one should try to understand what slavery was about.[8] The latter is almost impossible, regardless of the descriptions available either through historical, fictional, or cinematographic accounts.[9] The use of an entire continent as a hunting ground for enslaving people is the kind of trespassing of humanity which, because it has remained unacknowledged, opened the door to further trespassing, not just in terms of the number of people maimed, slaughtered, and raped but also because it further reinforced the mindset based on the notion that competition-to-death, by any means, is the most efficient way of organising any economy. One shall never stress enough that unless the enormity of what happened is eventually understood, it will be impossible to do anything with regard to the current challenges faced by humanity.[10]

Out of this mindset has grown a habit of minimising or erasing what the industrial enslavement of an entire continent has done. Such a process of slowly building a mindset aimed at minimising, muffling, or eradicating the efforts of those who, long before it was so proclaimed by the ‘discoverers’, stood up against a crime against humanity, ends up distorting any attempt to rise up against some of its most damaging consequences. This minimising of slavery and its consequences has been repeated at every subsequent transition (e.g., the end of the colonial period and the end of apartheid).

When the French government passed the legislation recognising slavery as a crime against humanity (Loi Christiane Taubira, 2001)[11], it was done in a way which was aimed at shielding those who collectively benefited from slavery. How else should one interpret the French government behaviour toward President Jean Bertrand Aristide (JBA) in 2004. The kidnapping was carried out by the American military in collaboration with the French and Canadian governments and their allies, including the Central African Republic.. The whole episode reminded one, more than 200 years later, of the kidnapping of Toussaint l’Ouverture.

It might be asked what is the meaning of this long detour into the history of Haiti for the purpose of confronting the current food crisis? It has to do with resisting the attempt to frame the food crisis from the perspective of those who want to benefit the most from it. In its most simplistic terms, the food crisis is being analysed and explained within the parameters put in place by a dominant mindset which has its deepest roots in how it organised the pauperisation of those who had defeated the biggest scourge of those times. Indeed it was more than a scourge, it was the embryo of what was to become known under globalisation two centuries later.

The Africans, then, understood their situation without political or charitable representatives. Their understanding and thinking of how to get out of their situation was arrived at through their own thinking and, certainly, without the help of the Enlightenment philosophers. 1789 had taken place and helped bring forward the idea, at least among some, that if the banner of Liberty, Fraternity and Equality was going to have any meaning, then it had to lead to the complete and total abolition of slavery. Massive efforts took place, not just from France, but also from England and Spain to try and reverse what the Africans had done. The abolition of slavery in French-controlled territories would not take place till 1848. A date which also coincides with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But as stated above, these rights apply differently whether one belongs to humanity (first class) or to humanity-existing-through-humanitarianism (second and third classes).

Will the food crisis be resolved according to the discriminatory perspective above or according to an understanding that there is only one humanity? In other words, will the question of how to eradicate hunger and poverty be posed by those whose dominant mindset has generated massive hunger and poverty, or will the poor and the hungry frame the questions and provide the answers without the humanitarian or charitable advice of the ‘discoverers’ of poverty and hunger?

It is not difficult to see that the food crisis is connected to other crises – economic, financial (the so-called credit crunch), and climatic change. It is also clear that all institutions have been mobilised, from those with apparently appropriate knowledge on the issue (e.g., the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), and government ministers) to personalities like the former UN Secretary General Kofi Anan, who understand the seriousness and gravity of the crisis. But when all of these specialists meet and discuss, the voices of peasants, the voices of those who do produce food, either for themselves and families or for corporations, are rarely, if ever heard. Moreover, how can people whose mindsets are responsible for the food crisis be expected to provide satisfactory answers? How can people who see nothing wrong in their mindset be expected to get rid of, or distance themselves from, the very way of thinking which has brought the inhabitants of the planet face-to-face with permanent disaster?

The fear at work in the minds of the above group is not the same as the one to be found among those who belong to the most vulnerable inhabitants of the planet. A mind which does not have to worry about eating three meals a day, nor about providing food for all members of its family, can be at peace while those who go hungry on a daily basis often resort to suicide as the solution to their daily miseries (Raj Patel, 2007). An inconvenient question arises which is not unlike the one which arose with regard to the HIV/AIDS epidemic: could it be that the richest of the rich would rather let the hungry die than discuss with them the best way to resolve the crisis?

FEAR AND SHAME: CONSCIOUSNESS OF EVIL OR CONSCIOUSNESS OF SHAME?

In addition to fear there is shame. While psychologists have studied how to detect people who are lying, there has been little interest on trying to understand why and how, individually and collectively, human beings are eager to hide anything which might be shameful. The fear of having a shameful act revealed to all provides a powerful incentive to hide.[12]

How a segment of humanity has treated others in the past can lead to a sense of shame and the desire to ask for forgiveness. Unfortunately, one is not operating under conditions which are levelled: those who know from their own historical records that they have perpetrated shameful acts are not eager to bring them to the surface. What was done to Africans and to Native Americans by other people in the name of a way of thinking – an ideology, a religion – has been felt unevenly all over the world. In some cases, such as France towards Africans and slavery, it has been has acknowledged that slavery is a crime against humanity, but little has been done to reverse associated direct and indirect consequences. Indeed, a belated apology has often been used as the most efficient way of preserving the gains acquired through the crime.[13]

Once a taboo has been trespassed, it becomes extremely difficult if not impossible to overcome its direct and indirect consequences. With regard to food, in a world in which people should not go hungry, people do go hungry precisely because it has become acceptable, in a mindset dominated by a dictatorial free market system, that some people are going to die of hunger. The accepted norm, under the present mindset, is that hunger cannot be eradicated, regardless of the efforts. The fact that humanity has been able to eradicate certain diseases, including hunger, is not seen as the proof that hunger could be banned.

WHY ARE THE HISTORIES OF SAINT DOMINGUE/HAITI MORE EMBLEMATIC THAN EVER?

In their self-congratulatory march to the top, the richest of the rich have always feared what the poorest of the poor would or could do if they were to understand their own situations without outside interferences. Along the way, the former segment of humanity has resorted, directly or indirectly, to fearsome practices in order to submit and/or obliterate those they considered less than human.[14] The process of how Haiti has been impoverished following 1804 is pertinent to how to think about the current food crisis.

Haiti, for example, used to be self sufficient in rice, while the DR Congo used to export cassava and many other food commodities. Both countries now have to import thanks to a process which involved the World Bank economists and the US government’s common strategy of liberalisation. The process of turning self-sufficient economies into dependent ones has been documented ad infinitum.[15] Aid and charity complement each other as the remedy to the predatory extremes unleashed by the dictatorial rule of competition.[16]

Succeeding where success was not expected, as the Africans did in eradicating slavery, could have inflicted a serious blow to the system.[17] Those who had most benefited from slavery had to impose their own timing: it took another half-century for France to abolish slavery. Timing was crucial in order to tame those who had thought, back then, that slavery was indeed a crime against humanity. Again, as with abolition, the timing for the recognition had to be imposed by those who had most benefited from the crime itself. It was only in 2001 that France finally passed a law recognising slavery as a crime against humanity.[18]

While working in Mozambique between 1979 and 1986, I once had a poster against apartheid: ‘Apartheid is a Crime against Humanity’. Looking at it a visitor asked what it meant. I remained speechless, thinking it was self-explanatory. How long will it take for the South African government to acknowledge apartheid as a crime against humanity? Or, is it that, in the name of Truth and Reconciliation, the multiple roots of the crime shall be silenced?

From 1962 to 1974, the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (Frelimo) succeeded, against all odds, in putting an end to Portuguese colonial rule. Such a success, as in Haiti, had to be reversed. The context, in Mozambique, was dominated by the Cold War. Frelimo had been supported by the USSR, the People’s Republic of China, Cuba, Vietnam, the German Democratic Republic, but also by people from Western countries like Italy, Holland and Sweden. As Henry Kissinger stated during a visit to southern Africa in April 1976, communism had to be defeated in the region.[19] Not long after that one of the most vicious civil wars aimed at what looked like a process of ‘teaching Frelimo a lesson’ began to unfold.

The consequences of the war have been so devastating that, in the name of the peace achieved in 1992, it has become preferable not to speak about the war. So much so that the silence around the civil war is now being extended to the war against the colonisers, as if that was the war which should never have taken place. Again, it is difficult not to think of Haiti and what the Africans did to slavery. Today’s elite in Haiti acts as if it wishes slavery had not been abolished, at least not in the manner it was done between 1791 to 1804. Today’s elite in Mozambique prefers to focus on how to become as rich as possible and as quickly as possible, and, it is possible that some of them might even be inaudibly saying to themselves that had it not been for Frelimo, they would be much better off today.[20]

Both Haiti and Mozambique are most talked about as very poor countries. Thanks to outside donors, anti-poverty programs do help the poorest of the poor overcome hunger and other problems. It is understandable that those who suffered the consequences of war (especially the civil war (1980–1992)) would rather not face that situation again. A question arises though: should the fear of what happened during colonial rule, or after, lead to the fear of politics – that is, thinking for oneself on how best to get out of a given situation? Moreover, should the fact that the Soviet Union and all its allies ‘lost’ the Cold War lead Mozambicans to the conclusion that anything which resembles, directly or indirectly, socialism and/or communism must be banished forever?

The process of enforcing only one way of thinking with regard to colonial rule and its demise has followed the same pattern as the one which has been observed in Haiti: everything must be done so that a different way of organising society, production, and distribution does not emerge. Differences will be acceptable if they are not antagonistic towards the dominant way of thinking.

CÉSAIRE, POETRY, POLITICS, AND HISTORY

When Aimé Césaire passed away recently it dawned on many people, including myself, that someone very special had lived among us who had not been heard or understood as he should have been.[21] This has happened before and will happen again. Later on, some shall describe him as a prophetic voice. He always insisted, without saying it in this manner, that he was not a politician and that his politics were in his poetry.[22] To a specific question by Françoise Vergès on the relationship between his poetry and politics he points out the following: ‘La poésie révèle l’homme à lui-même. Ce qui est au plus profond de moi-même se trouve certainement dans ma poésie. Parce que ce ‘moi-même’, je ne le connais pas. C’est le poème qui me le révèle et même l’image poétique.’ (Aimé Césaire. Entretiens, 2005:47) (‘It is poetry which reveals the human being to itself. What comes from deepest within myself can be found in my poetry. Because even this self of mine, I do not know. It is the poem which reveals it to me, even the poetic imagery. [My translation])

Using statistical data to demonstrate the insanity and the injustices behind the current food crisis will not make a dent in the consciousness of those who are responsible for it. For someone like Césaire – and Françoise Vergès is right to emphasise this point (Césaire. Entretiens, 2005:111-136) – the immensity of the wound inflicted by one segment of humanity onto another, through slavery and later compounded by colonisation, has never been assessed. Such an assessment is deliberately avoided because of the fear and shame of what would happen to all those who only know one truth, one history: the history, the truth of humanity seen through the eyes and the mindset of those who have enslaved, who have colonised. The resulting shock of discovering what had been hidden could be overwhelming to those who are unprepared.

From within this kind of historical narrative, the dominant mindset is bound to present access to food, health, education, and justice as something which is easily available to anyone provided it is so desired. To paraphrase Françoise Vergès, the dominant mindset (in France) is convinced that the 1848 abolition of slavery was France’s gift to the Africans. This paternalistic mindset is as deeply embedded today as it was in 1848. Enslavement to the dominant system is being carried out with different means, but the results are just as devastating on humanity as a whole. The direct and indirect consequences of slavery and colonisation have never been dealt with. As a result, one hears calls to the poor to change their attitude. It is very easy to promote the idea that the poor are poor because they want to be poor. Just as it is easy to accuse peasants of laziness. No one among the richest of the rich ever accuses the land stealer, the bankers, the speculators of being lazy, even though, most of the time, their robbing is conducted from comfortable offices.[23]

From Aimé Césaire’s poetry one has heard, but not yet learned, that living is an art. The food speculators, the financiers, the colonisers, the enslavers, and all those who have never seen anything wrong in their mindset, or in living as an accounting exercise, may praise our beloved Césaire and even quote from his poetry, but they will do so from within the accounting mindset, willing to accept him paternalistically, just as they accepted the abolition of slavery in 1848. As stated in the preamble, the food crisis is one of the multiple manifestations of humanity approaching a dead end.

More and more of humanity’s members are beginning to sense that when living principles determined by human beings are being superseded by principles anonymously determined by a deity called the Market, then something, somewhere, has gone wrong. When food, such as corn or maize, is being produced for reasons other than feeding people, then, surely, it is a sign that the segment of humanity which promotes such a diversion has modernised, exponentially, as with what happened during the Second World War. For the sake of defending or promoting a mindset, masses of people are being reduced to a status of non-existence.

FREEDOM WITHOUT EQUALITY AND FRATERNITY IS FREEDOM TO ANNIHILATE

The market, unfettered of any rules based on equality and fraternity between all segments of humanity, can only lead to annihilation of humanity. This is not a prediction. It is happening as surely as the melting of the ice caps at both poles, as surely as global warming is progressing. How does one reverse a mindset which has taken hold not just of the speculators, bankers, political, and religious leaders, but of ordinary people around the world? How does one defeat the deeply rooted tendency of thinking that the task at hand is impossible?

For one, the voices which have been saying the same things for centuries must be heard, and acted upon. It is not enough to say that humanity is one if, at the same time, one refuses to listen to some of the voices, regardless of the reasons. When the crisis is as serious as the current one, regardless of the angle from which it is tackled, is it not wise to acknowledge that every single member of humanity has a say. Should one not call and encourage the tiniest voices to rise? Isn’t the wisest course to accept, in the face of inconvenient truths, the inconvenient truths uttered for the past centuries by the poorest of the poor?

When confronted with the systematic denial of one’s humanity, there is only one possible course: to stand up against such a denial. It is crucial that resistance against the dominant mindset be conducted from within the principles aimed at a different mindset. It must be firmly grounded on solidarity. The only force to be used shall be the force of art, poetry, and science at the service of humanity.

Artists, poets, and scientists must eat too. Freedom by itself does not feed, but freedom with equality and fraternity can. Artists, poets, and scientists do not have to congregate in places designated by the market promoters. In such places, all voices shall be heard, provided respect for basic principles to be agreed upon by those who insist on the necessity to change the mindset. Among the principles, the following ones could be considered:

• Food producers and the poorest of the poor must be heard in their own voices
• The multiplicity of the voices calling for emancipatory politics must be accepted
• No representation shall be accepted
• Each voice must heard from where it is, as it is.

These are, by no means, the only principles one could highlight.

HEALING FROM FEAR AND SHAME

The transition from apartheid, even with the help of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), has not lived up to its heralded promises. The recent (May 2008) pogroms against the poorest of the poor by other poorest of the poor has revealed the shortcomings of the TRC as a panacea, on the one hand, and on the other, has brought out very sharply the shortcomings of the African National Congress (ANC) as the governing party as well as the government with regard to educating and informing the population about the international support without which apartheid would not have been defeated. In that process of informing and educating, the role of ordinary Africans who risked their lives and generously gave all they could, should have been highlighted. This failure, however, must be shared by most African governments because of their common tendency to disregard the role of ordinary people in the making of their histories. The failure to inform and educate must also be shared by those who, during apartheid, remained silent and profited. As has been remarked, sometimes listening to what happened during apartheid in South Africa, it sounds as if everyone was a resistant to it.

As with all previous major transitions (from slavery to post-slavery, from colonialism to post-colonialism), the defeated side quickly reorganises itself with the objective of minimising losses. In that process they are helped by their previous enemies (now referred to as adversaries). As in Nkrumah’s famous motto, the defeated side is convinced that once the political kingdom has been seized, the rest will follow. Yet, in social and economic terms, they find themselves suddenly far from the very individuals and groups who have made it possible to seize the kingdom, and, much closer to their previous enemies whose main thinking was focused on how to keep the economy going as well as before. And, one might add, as fast as possible, if possible, faster than before.

In South Africa, the fear of the new government was to show that things in the country would from then on be different from what had happened in the rest of the continent. That fear led the ANC leadership to move away from the Freedom Charter, but even from creative principles to provide the poorest of the poor with genuine rewards and, more importantly, a say in transforming politics.

To have a say in transforming politics meant, among other things, as pointed out by the members of AbahlalibaseMjondolo, to speak for themselves and not be represented by politicians. The poorest of the poor who live in shacks in Durban, Johannesburg, and Cape Town see themselves as the ones who are really defending the principles contained in the Freedom Charter. Democracy means that everyone thinks, that everyone deserves respect and dignity. Freedom must mean that when decent housing, and decent living conditions are not provided for the poor, they are the best qualified to make sure that their voices are heard, clearly without translators or intermediaries, be they lawyers, municipality leaders, university lecturers, politicians.[24]

The similarities between what the poorest of the poor and peasants are suffering across the world call for a reinforcement of already existing links, and for greater sharing of the stories and histories of resistance against what Amit Bhaduri has referred to as the TINA syndrome (There Is No Alternative to globalization)[25]. This syndrome is not new. The imposition of colonial rule was presented as an altruistic exercise bringing civilisation to Africa. Forced labour was presented as an educational exercise.

Emancipatory politics must go hand in hand with emancipatory historical narratives and move away from narratives framed by the so-called success stories of globalisation told from the perspective of multinational mega corporations and financial institutions at their service.

Author’s p.s. 6 October 2008 – This essay was drafted sometime in June–July 2008. The question of naming remains as crucial as ever. The so-called financial crisis is not just about finances, banking, and credit. And it is not just about the deregulation of the banking industry. More and more it looks like a deregulation of all the principles which, one would have thought, have made humanity what it is. The reluctance to face history and humanity, as such, in all of its dimensions and complexities, is more entrenched than ever. Only Mr Market counts, but even it, or so it seems, has grown tired and would like to rest.

* Jacques Depelchin is a CAPES fellow at the Universidade Federal da Bahia.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/

Notes

[1] Personal communication from Professor Ernest Wamba dia Wamba, 27 October 2008.
[2] At one time, during its triumphant emergence, the Roman empire tried to resolve its food crisis by conquering Egypt.
[3] Fernand Braudel, and many others since, have rightly insisted on approaching history from a long-term perspective. Unfortunately, such an approach has tended to favour the questions emerging out of the dominant narrative. In the issue of Pambazuka News 383 focused on the food crisis, the length of time was even shorter, being limited to the 1970s. If one is going to make sense of the food crisis today, but also try to understand other food crises in the past (e.g., the potato famine in Ireland in the 19th century), the framing of how the crisis has unfolded should be as deep and wide as possible.
[4] For example, Howard Zinn in his People History of the United States can only go as far as providing an inventory of the slaughter of the Native Americans and the Africans. For him 1776 is still the event. And as the subtitle indicates, the starting point of his narrative is 1492.
[5] See Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved, The Hidden Battle for the World Food System
[6] The history of how the poorest of the poor reached this stage has been observed across the planet and for centuries and generations: from food producers, they were forced off their land and reduced to search for work in an environment in which there was only work for a few.
[7] C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins; Peter Hallward, Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment, Verso. 2007; see also Peter Hallward’s review of Alex Dupuy’s The Prophet and Power: Jean Bertrand Aristide, the International Community and Haiti, Rowan and Littlefield, 2007. http://tinyurl.com/5rgyx6
[8] The importance of this cannot be overstressed in view of the tendency within the dominant mindset to downplay the horrors of slavery. See J. Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800. Cambridge University Press. 1998.
[9] In His Black Jacobins, C.L.R. James did try. Fiction writers have tried, from Ayi Kwei Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons to Toni Morison’s Beloved. Haile Gerima in his movie, Sankofa, offered a harrowing view of what it was like. Still, when all is said and done, I would argue that no one, to this day and with my greatest respect for the above writers, has come any way near to measuring what slavery meant both individually and collectively. I have to assume that such measurement, not just in physical terms, shall one day be possible. This hope rests, in part, on the realisation that someone somewhere did achieve that impossible act, but that it has not been recorded in the form and/or in the place where it would get noticed. There are exceptions, most notably Aimé Césaire (2005)
[10] A point cogently made by Françoise Vergès in Césaire (2005).
[11] Its application officially began on 10 May 2004.
[12] In recent times, it has been possible to see how difficult it is to accept that people in very powerful positions can lie. In earlier times, Hitler and his acolytes found out that a lie repeated a thousand times became a truth.
[13] France, among the nations most involved in transatlantic slavery, has probably taken the boldest step by declaring, through the Loi Taubira, that slavery a crime against humanity. However, this bold step has triggered a sort of blowback against it, particular by historians. See Pierre Nora’s ‘Liberté pour l’histoire’ in Le Monde (10.10.08) and Christiane Taubira’s response a few days later: ‘Mémoire, histoire et droit’ in Le Monde (15.10.08).
[14] A few months ago (in May 2008), in South Africa, the poorest of the poor (so-called indigenous South Africans) went on a rampage against poorest of the poor foreigners. This has been the most recent and exemplary illustration of how entrenched the competitive mindset is. It also reveals the structural shortcomings of the transition from apartheid to post-apartheid founded on the erroneous notion that colouring the richest of the rich in black would radically transform the economic/financial tenets of apartheid days.
[15] One of the most interesting accounts has been given by John Perkins in his Confessions of An Economic Hit Man. See also Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved.
[16] That it does not have to be so has long ago been proved. See, for example, Marcel Mauss’s essay Essai sur le don (1924). And also the website of Revue du M.A.U.S.S. http://www.revuedumauss.com
[17] What was feared was the effect it could have on other Africans wanting to get rid of slavery in other parts.
[18] In 2006, 40 members of the French National Assembly called for the abrogation of the Loi Taubira. See http://tinyurl.com/69m675
[19] Glijeses, Piero. Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976.
[20] Such inaudible murmuring may even come from the mouths of bona fide veterans of the armed struggle. See Duarte Tembe’s book on Samora (Maputo, 2000). And also the interview given to the weekly Savana (Ericinio Salema and Paola Rolletta) on 6 July 2008. It can be viewed at: http://tinyurl.com/6jhq5e
[21] Obviously there are exceptions to this deficiency. There is a difference between knowing someone was special and having understood the true worth of the person. See for example Daniel Maximin’s Préface to Césaire’s Ferrements et autres poèmes (Editions Points, 2008).
[22] Aimé Césaire, ‘Calendrier laminaire’, in Moi, Laminaire. In Anthologie Poétique, Paris, Imprimerie nationale, 1996, pp. 233-234; and Aimé Césaire, Nègre je suis, nègre je resterai. Entretiens avec Françoise Vergès. Paris, Albin Michel, 2005, pp. 47–50.
[23] There are exceptions. Karl Marx being the most prominent one with his reference to ‘coupon clipping capitalists’.
[24] In his most recent intervention, S’bu Zikode has made these politics very clear. See S’bu Zikode’s speech at the Diakonia Economic Justice Forum, 28 August 2008: http://www.abahlali.org/
[25] http://www.india-seminar.com/2008/582/582_amit_bhaduri.htm