Starvation comes centre stage, reigniting North-South questions

 2021/11/25

Will Tesla Corporation CEO Elon Musk prove the proverbial wisdom wrong that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to ‘Enter the Kingdom of God’; that is, selflessly part with his wealth to feed the poor and destitute? Thanks to UN Food Program Director David Beasley this crucial question is occupying centre stage in current international conversations on world hunger and connected issues that have made a strong comeback in the wake of the present-day global health crisis.

The background in brief to this re-emergence of world hunger and connected issues as hot talking points is the appeal made by Beasley recently that the world’s billionaires ‘step up now, on a one-time basis’ to help combat world hunger. The appeal was pointedly made to the two richest men in the world currently; Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.

The amount of funds needed to meet the challenge is $6.6 billion but Musk needed to know in detail how the money would be spent. Musk is on record that he would ‘sell Tesla stock right now and do it’, if such a detailed and credible program of spending was conveyed to him. This request has been reportedly met by the WHO chief and it is left to be seen whether the Tesla CEO would rise to the challenge.

For the sake of the starving millions around the world it is hoped that the billionaires in question and many more would provide their largesse ungrudgingly to stave off the spectre of famine and death which is stalking underdeveloped countries in particular at present. And these processes of dying slowly and painfully for want of sufficient food are not only peculiar to the African continent. They are very much present in parts of South and South West Asia, for instance, and beyond.

It ought to be perceived that starvation and famine are not the results of so-called natural causes, although the latter do aggravate these issues. They are mostly man-made and we in Sri Lanka, for example, ought to know. It is now public knowledge that seeming rice shortages in Sri Lanka are caused by parasitic rice millers for whom hoarding and market manipulation are second nature. Governments that are held to ransom by these hoarders are, of course, very much complicit in this process of hurtling populations into starvation and death.

The challenges posed to the world’s wealthy in connection with global famine come close on the heels of broad agreement reached at the recent COP26 Climate Change Conference in Glasgow that the underdeveloped regions should be financially helped out by better off countries to meet their climate-linked challenges.

These initiatives make it plain that the main international policy trend now is to play on the sense of goodwill of the world’s wealthy persons and countries to discharge what have come to be seen as their responsibilities towards the global poor and vulnerable. The question is, how workable is this strategy in particularly the long term? How viable is it to depend on the mere goodwill of the powerful?

These questions throw into relief the sea change that has occurred over the decades in North-South relations. The weakest of the South are compelled by the situation in which they find themselves today to depend on the beneficence of the North for their survival; this is the stark reality. And this is no viable survival strategy since they open themselves to an uncertain existence.

It is not the case that the South’s lot was fundamentally better in the decades of the sixties and seventies, for instance, when the South was more organized as a body of countries, but today the South’s weaker members’ dependence on the North has deepened gravely. There are no collective formations, such as the Non-Aligned Movement, to champion the causes that relate intimately to the South’s survival issues. To the extent to which this is so, the South leads an existence riddled with grave uncertainties.

To be sure, movements such as NAM, have not completely withered but they have lost the authority and influence they once wielded in international politics. So much so, it is correct to say that the most underdeveloped countries of the South have been orphaned and left to be tossed around by the vagaries of international political and economic currents. Thus, they have become crucially dependent on the mere goodwill of the North.

However, movements such as NAM, in their heyday, were seeking the polar opposite to the above in North-South ties. They were demanding ‘Equal Exchange’ in North-South economic relations, for example, as of right. Essentially, the underlying argument in their campaign for equitable relations with the North was that they had suffered immeasurable harm in a number of spheres as a result of colonial domination and they were now seeking to right these wrongs of the past.

Consequently, there was no question of the South seeking the sympathy of the North for the facilitation of its wellbeing. Unequal systems, particularly in the area of international economic relations, had to be rectified in favour of the South. In decades past, UNCTAD, with some success addressed some of these issues.

However, over the past three decades the issues of the South have been allowed to suffer neglect and have been veritably forgotten as a result of the free enterprise system and market economics triumphing over the socialist model of development, in the wake of the radically restructuring impact of economic globalization. Amid these drastic changes, some former developing countries have driven themselves into the select band, as it were, of the most developed economies. The BRICS countries are just one case in point. Thus, keeping together and strengthening collective Southern organizations, such as NAM, is proving an uphill challenge.

Magnanimous gestures by the world’s wealthiest to end poverty and famine would help in the short term but they are no answer to the systemic inequalities that have been bedeviling the world for decades. But in the absence of strong collective bodies among the poor of the world, impoverishment and famine in the developing world would only further entrench themselves.