social problem unit 1 qu.iz

34 contexts.org

the scarcity fallacy by stephen j. scanlan, j. craig jenkins, and lindsey peterson

For the first time in human history, the world is home to

more than one billion hungry people. New data from

the United Nations suggest that a higher proportion of

the Earth’s people are hungry now than just a decade

ago, the reverse of a long and otherwise positive trend. Ph o to b y G et ty Im ag es , C h ri st o p h er Fu rl o n g

35winter 2010 contexts Contexts,Vol.9,No.1,pp.34-39. ISSN1536-5042,electronic ISSN1537-6052.©2010AmericanSociologicalAssociation. All rights reserved. For permission to photocopy or reproduce, see http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/ctx.2010.9.1.34.

The conventional wisdom is that world hunger exists primarily

because of natural disasters, population pressure, and shortfalls

in food production. These problems are compounded, it is

believed, by ecological crises and global warming, which

together result in further food scarcity. Ergo, hunger exists sim-

ply because there isn’t enough food to go around. Increase

the food supply, and we will solve the problem of hunger on

a global scale.

Scarcity is a compelling, common-sense perspective that

dominates both popular perceptions and public policy. But,

while food concerns may start with limited supply, there’s much

more to world hunger than that.

A good deal of thinking and research in sociology, build-

ing off the ideas of Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen,

suggests that world hunger has less to do with the shortage

of food than with a shortage of affordable or accessible food.

Sociologists have found that social inequalities, distribu-

tion systems, and other economic and political factors create

barriers to food access. Hunger, in this sociological conception,

is part of the broader concept of “food security,” which the

World Bank describes as the inability to acquire the food neces-

sary to sustain an active and healthy life. A central sociological

element of this is “food poverty.”

the (recycled) rhetoric of scarcity The idea that hunger is due to scarcity has roots in Thomas

Malthus’s classic 1798 book An Essay on the Principle of Pop-

ulation. Malthus predicted widespread

suffering and death from famine would

result from the planet’s inability to feed

itself, stemming from its failure to cope

with exponential population growth.

Malthus turned out to be wrong—food

production grew much faster than pop-

ulation—but his arguments have been recycled over generations,

and today, especially with ongoing threats to Earth’s carrying

capacity, they have come to define conventional wisdom on

hunger in the mainstream media and general public as well as

for policymakers.

Food scarcity has long been the focus of agencies such as

the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the U.S.

Department of Agriculture, and the U.S. Agency for International

Development. Each uses some version of the scarcity argument

to shape food security and development policies in collabora-

tion with global agribusiness and food scientists. In such

arrangements, concerns about hunger are viewed as produc-

tion, marketing, and logistics problems that have solutions in

the market-based policies of the global food system.

Fighting hunger from this approach means the top priority

is reducingscarcity.This ismostoftenaddressedby increasingfood

yields with new technologies and by shipping food to more

places more efficiently. The underlying goal in this approach is

tofacilitatewhathasbeencalledthe“supermarket revolution”—

a term used by the World Bank to describe the growing reliance

of global citizens on large-scale agricultural industries and com-

modity chains to obtain their food.

This supermarket model has created steady growth in the

global import and export of food. But it can also produce its

own problems and be counter-productive. What’s worse is that

the increased prices that often accompany market-based pro-

duction make food less affordable for those in need. Further-

more, increased production may do nothing at all to guarantee

more food. For example, the market model has increased use

of crops for biofuel, which shifts agriculture away from produc-

ing food. In an oft-cited Washington Post editorial, Earth Policy

Institute president Lester R. Brown noted that the same amount

of grain needed to fill an SUV’s 25-gallon gas tank with ethanol

could feed a single person for a whole year.

The bigger problem with emphasizing food supply as the

problem,however, is thatscarcity is largelyamyth.Onapercapita

basis, food is more plentiful today than any other time in human

history. Figures on the next pages reveal that over the last sev-

eral decades food production (represented here in a common

staple, cereals) and the average daily food availability per capita

havegrown,outpacingwhathasbeenthemost rapidexpansion

ofhumanpopulationever.DatasuchasthesefromtheFAOreveal

that even in times of localized production shortfalls or regional

famines there has long been a global food surplus.

The problem is ensuring access to this food and distributing

it more equitably. A 2002 New York Times headline proclaiming

“India’s Poor Starve as Wheat Rots” dramatically, if tragically,

illustrates this point. Starvation amidst plenty has occurred in

many a famine, as in Bangladesh in 1974 or Ethiopia in the

Pallets of canned goods at a food pantry in the Bronx.

Ph o to b y G et ty Im ag es , Sp en ce r Pl at t

Sociological research suggests that world hunger has less to do with the shortage of food than with a shortage of affordable or accessible food.

1980s. Even Ireland during the Great Famine exported vast

quantities of food. Hunger in contemporary world societies is

often no different. Markets are overflowing and even when

shortfalls occur in emergencies, the global surplus is more than

adequate to address such concerns.

Crop science can produce more food, and transportation

and storage improvements can distribute greater amounts of

it, but these don’t guarantee access for all—a scenario that

became quite evident with the 2007 global food crisis and

spikes in food prices. Indeed, the global supermarket revolu-

tion can actually be devastating and counterproductive on the

local level when prices increase and make food unaffordable

for hundreds of millions of people.

Scarcity, in short, isn’t the problem, and giving it undue

attention reinforces many of the myths that get in the way of

understanding hunger. In World Hunger:

Twelve Myths, food scholars Frances Moore

Lappé, Joseph Collins, and Peter Rosset have

elaborated on this, addressing the problems

of misplaced focus. Blaming population

growth, food shortages, or natural disasters

sidetracks attention from the challenges of

the global food distribution system, the

authors argue. They warn that free markets,

free trade, food aid, or even green revolu-

tion technologies, for example, can all be

barriers to obtaining food when inequalities

are deeply ingrained. Rather than food

scarcity, then, we should focus our attention

on the persistent inequalities that often

accompany the growth in food supply.

beyond scarcity The basic statistics about world hunger

are staggering—and revealing. Some 96

percent of hungry people live in developing countries and

according to Unicef nearly a quarter of them are children. The

U.N. World Food Programme notes that in developing coun-

tries, the poorest citizens spend upwards of 60 percent of their

income on food. By way of contrast, according to a New York

Times editorial the poorest Americans only spend between 15

percent and 20 percent on food. With declining disposable

income, those who already may eat only two very simple meals

each day now may have to cut back to one.

These statistics reveal a clear link between poverty and

hunger. Two-thirds of the countries in the world with the most

severe extreme poverty—rates greater than 35 percent—also

have child hunger rates of 35 percent or more. As evidenced by

the prevalence of hunger in the world’s 77 low-income food

deficit countries (LIFDCs) as designated by the FAO, poverty is

inseparable from hunger and should thus be considered its pri-

mary root cause. No wonder the 2000 U.N. Millennium Summit

concluded that the most serious problem confronting the world

ispersistentpovertyand itsconnectiontohunger.Theprevalence

of hunger in LIFDCs is particularly impor-

tant because these countries are not only

among the world’s poorest by World Bank

classification standards but are also net

importers of basic foodstuffs because they

are unable to produce amounts to meet

theirownneeds.Thismakes themmoreat

risk in that they lack sufficient foreign

exchange inthe internationalmarketplace,

something further exacerbated by global

pricespikes like thoseexperienced in2007.

Asevidenceof theprevalenceof food inse-

curity inLIFDCs,23ofthe25countrieswith

the highest rates of child hunger in the

world are also designated as LIFDCs (the

exceptionsbeingBurmaandMaldives)and

theycontinuetobepredominantwelldown

this list. Without guaranteed entitlements

orotherassistance,hunger iscertaintoper-

sist among these most vulnerable nations,

36 contexts.org

200

400

600

800

1000

1200 million

c.1996 c.2001 200920082007c.2004c.2002c.2000c.1999c.1998c.1997

Estimated hungry population in the world

Source: U.N. Food & Agriculture The time periods are three-year reporting periods as presented by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization’s State of Food Insecurity (SOFI) from various years, with the exception of 2007–2009, which are from press releases specific to those years. The trend line is a two-year moving average for these figures. Missing years indicate periods where SOFI didn’t report clear estimates.

Estimated percentage of the world that is hungry

c.1996 c.2001 200920082007c.2004c.2002c.2000c.1999c.1998c.1997

Source: U.N. Food & Agriculture

12.5

13.0

13.5

14.0

14.5

15.0

15.5 percent hungry

The Turkana tribe in Kenya distributes food aid from Oxfam with a democratic voting process.

Ph o to b y G et ty Im ag es , C h ri st o p h er Fu rl o n g

37winter 2010 contexts

where addressing it is least affordable.

Moreover, most of the LIFDCs are in Sub-Saharan Africa,

where very little progress on hunger has been made over the

last couple of decades—children, for example, fare only slightly

better now than in 1990, child hunger having declined only

0.5 percent. In contrast, the remaining regions of the world

have made much larger gains; East Asia and the Pacific, for

example, have reduced child hunger 16 percent. Stagnation

in the African subcontinent can be attributed directly to its per-

sistent and pervasive poverty and underdevelopment, which

creates further problems with conflict, health crises, and polit-

ical instability, among other problems that contribute to hunger.

The developing world isn’t alone in its hunger and poverty,

though. Demand on food pantries in the United States is

increasing according to a 2009 survey of

food banks by the organization Feed-

ing America (formerly America’s Second

Harvest). Evidence of poverty and loss

of employment income as a primary

cause of food insecurity can be even

more evident in stark contrast to the

relative well-being of U.S. citizens or elsewhere in the indus-

trialized world. Here, food scarcity isn’t even (or shouldn’t be)

a consideration. In difficult times and tight budgets, as free-

lance journalist and senior fellow at the policy and advocacy

organization Demos, Sasha Abramsky, found in Breadline

U.S.A., families keep gas in the car to get to work, prescriptions

filled, and the heat and lights turned on but often cut their

food budgets, with the hope public or private assistance will

help put dinner on the table.

Poverty, though, is only one form of inequality. Gender,

ethnic, and other types of stratification have contributed con-

siderably to hunger as well. Women are disproportionately

likely to suffer from hunger, and in fact constitute approxi-

mately 60 percent of the world’s hungry. This is particularly

troubling given that women do as much as 80 percent of the

world’s agricultural labor, working land that in more than a

few places they may not be legally entitled to own.

As we have found in our own work, countries with more

gender inequality (especially in education) have the greatest

degree of child hunger. Gender inequality also influences

women’s health and access to contraception as well as limits

their opportunities in society, potentially condemning them to

lives where childrearing is their only opportunity for social sta-

tus. In this context, large numbers of children may not be a

cause of scarcity so much as a consequence of poverty and

powerlessness.

Ethnic inequality can also contribute significantly to world

hunger, especially in countries with marginalized minorities

and a history or present situation of ethnic violence. Such

“minorities at risk,” as social movements scholar Ted Gurr calls

them in People versus States, have long been threatened with

hunger. Eritrea, Indonesia, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, and the Sudan

are among many such places. While contributing to rampant

militarism and armed conflicts, ethnic discrimination also silently

marginalizes minorities to less desirable lands and occupations.

The effects of ethnic discrimination then go beyond immedi-

ate violence, creating market disruptions, dispersed labor, and

land degradation that destroys what for many is their only

chance to produce or earn money for food.

Further exacerbating the effects of these social inequali-

ties, international food aid—initiated by the US government in

the 1960s to remove surplus grain from domestic markets and

assist military allies—has long been ineffective and misdirected.

According to Public Law 480, U.S. aid must travel in U.S.-

flagged vessels and depends on market surpluses. The results,

critics contend, is that the major beneficiaries are not those in

need of food but U.S. shipping companies, agri-business, and

countries with geopolitical value for the United States.

2600

800

2800

3000

1961 1985 20031995 200019901980197519701965

Global daily caloric availability per capita

2400

2200

Source: U.N. Food & Agriculture FAOSTAT database

15,000,000

800

20,000,000

25,000,000

1961 1985 20072000199519901980197519701965

Global population and cereal production

5,000,000

10,000,000

Global cereals production (100s of metric tonnes)

Global population (1000s of people)

Source: U.N. Food & Agriculture FAOSTAT database, U.S. Census International database

Scarcity, in short, isn’t the problem. Giving it undue attention reinforces myths that get in the way of understanding hunger.

Studies of who gets food aid partially support this criticism.

In an article in Food Policy aid specialists Daniel C. Clay, Daniel

Molla, and Debebe Habtewold, for example, found no relation-

shipbetweenneedandfoodaid inEthiopia.Foodaidwas instead

allocated to areas where organizations had stable operations,

to favored ethnicities, and to female and aged heads of house-

holds regardless of need. Tina Kassebaum, a senior research sci-

entist at Strategic Research Group, has found that program aid

(bilateral U.S. donations) is unrelated to a country’s share of child

hunger, while emergency/project aid (multilateral World Food

Programme donations) is targeted at needy countries.

Making matters worse, emergency food delivery, which has

become one of the most visible forms of assistance to those in

need of food, has been corrupt on many fronts in recent years.

According to Michael Slackman at the New York Times, in Egypt,

the government subsidizes flour so that it can be baked into

breadandsoldcheaply tothepopulation.However, theaid is rou-

tinely diverted into the black market and sold at a much greater

profit while corrupt inspectors are bribed to certify that it has

gone to assist the hungry. In the Democratic Republic of Congo,

a 15-year civil war has been fought between the remnants of the

Hutu guerrilla force that perpetrated the 1994 Rwandan geno-

cide and other parties. In refugee camps, food is often used as

a weapon—camp guards allocate it to those who will keep

order, not to those most in need, while also having connections

to widespread use of rape. Grim reports such as these have

appeared in media outlets such as The Guardian, The Gazette

(Montreal), and the New York Times who further note a key tac-

tic in this battle has been attacking food aid and relief convoys,

leading to threat and withdrawal of relief agencies, thus further

compounding hunger as refugees and internally-displaced per-

sons flee for safety, left to fend for themselves. Similar patterns

have occurred in Darfur and other conflict-ridden zones.

Some argue that corruption is a product of scarcity, and

that if food did not have to be delivered to areas where it was

in short supply such fraud would not exist. This argument is

true to a point, but such disruptions in the food distribution

chain are much more attributable to conflict and inequality,

with power and powerlessness at the core of the problem.

Corruption is simply another barrier to access—especially in

times of acute conflict. Indeed, the poor and powerless are

ultimately those most affected by these failures in the systems

designed to help them.

Poverty, inequality, conflict, and corruption are all crucial

contributors to world hunger, then. But what may be even more

important and difficult to understand is how these can all fit

together, reinforce one another, and even intensify the impacts

of more basic food crises or the limits of various natural

resources—that is, of scarcity itself. Environmental scarcity can,

for example, be both a cause and a consequence of the inequal-

ities associated with hunger. Entrenched poverty can contribute

to further conflict and environmental destruction. This limits food

access and reinforces a feedback cycle causing more conflict,

which in turn creates more scarcity, and so on. As we’ve learned

from Oxford economist Paul Collier’s The Bottom Billion, hunger

can be a product of a vicious cycle in which violent conflicts

borne of corrupt and repressive government, poverty, and eth-

nic marginalization reinforce one another.

addressing hunger Addressing world hunger is difficult and complex. To do

it properly, we must get beyond the limited rhetoric of scarcity

and instead focus on the inequalities, social conflicts, and

organizational deficiencies at its roots.

To get at inequality, policy must give attention to demo-

cratic governance and human rights, fixing the politics of food

aid, and tending to the challenges posed by the global political

economy. At the very least, food must be upheld as a human

right. In Freedom from Want, for example, political scientist

George Kent places hunger squarely in

the discussion of politics and the global

human rights system. In his view, for

hunger tobeadequatelyaddressedthere

must be worldwide recognition of food

as a fundamental human right bound up in international law. It

is only in this way that that both moral and legal accountability

for failing to meet the needs of those not empowered to ensure

their own food security can be established. Connecting this to

our own work, we have found that democratization and

increased protection of political rights reduces child hunger, par-

alleling a reduction of ethnic and gender inequality. Recognition

of this fundamental human rights premise could elevate hunger

to a higher level in international discussions and ultimately ren-

der it a non-issue, safeguarding it from the negative impacts of

inequality, conflict, and politics.

Upholding this principle would also protect vulnerable

38 contexts.org

“Eating is a right!“ declares a young woman on the eve of 2009’s World Food Day.

Ph o to b y A FP /G et ty Im ag es , Fr ed

D u fo u r

At the very least, food must be upheld as a human right.

citizens in industrialized countries who are finding it increasingly

difficult to afford food as prices increase, real wages decline,

and unemployment grows. Moreover, plans emphasizing nutri-

tion and health, such as school feeding programs or those that

target women, infants, and children, could be justified on the

grounds of human rights and equal protection for the deserv-

ing poor entitled to assistance.

Asecondfocusshouldbeensuringthat international foodaid

actually gets to those in need, overcoming the problems of inef-

ficiency and corruption that have long plagued such efforts. For-

tunately, the news here is not all negative. Over the last decade

international aid has moved toward less politicized emer-

gency/projectaid.Studiesoftheimpactofthiskindoffoodaidhave

revealedarelatively favorablepicture,Still, thiskindofaid,atbest

atemporarycorrective,canbeimprovedbyattendingmoredirectly

to the underlying conditions of poverty and inequality.

There is, for example, a longstanding debate over in-kind

aid versus cash assistance. Oxfam International argues that the

developed world should not dump cheap, subsidized food aid

that undermines local food production and markets in the devel-

oping economies it purports to help. A better solution would be

to provide direct cash assistance to promote food purchases in

localor regionaleconomies.Recognizingthatmanypoordepend

onlandfor their income,suchanapproachwouldchannelmoney

to those who need it most, rather than to global agri-business

and shipping companies profiting from food aid politics (this is

amoreecologically soundpracticeaswell). If reformedandeffec-

tively managed with minimal corruption, this approach could

have a huge impact at minimal cost.

Leading up to the 2009 G-20 meetings in London, World

Bank president Robert Zoellick noted that it would cost less

than one percent of the current U.S. stimulus package to save

a generation around the world from poverty and its conse-

quences, including hunger. An influx of money could stabilize

hundreds of countries throughout the world, not just with

regard to hunger but politics and social conditions as well.

Fiscal challenges are further complicated by the fact that

they are intricately connected with the global political econ-

omy, a third focus area. A number of ideas exist for making

the globalized world more equitable so that ending hunger is

a significant positive outcome. Strategies should empower soci-

eties and individuals to become more food-sovereign (able to

exercise power over their food decisions).

Promoting sustainable agriculture with an emphasis on

local food systems and empowering farmers to compete in

their own markets is one such dimension. It will reduce ecolog-

ical scarcity and go far toward ensuring food security, and ulti-

mately food sovereignty, while having the added benefit of

injecting additional money into local communities.

Effective long-term solutions through development of pro-

duction capabilities, however, won’t succeed unless ethnic and

gender inequality are reduced or better yet, eliminated. Freeing

ethnic minorities from the fear they will face violence if they

come to aid distribution stations or, better yet, providing them

with the tools to produce their own food and economic suste-

nance, will contribute greatly to reducing hunger. Too, providing

women with control over childbearing, giving them access to

education, allowing them the right to own land and businesses,

and facilitating their economic activities with micro-credit and

other innovations will significantly reduce hunger. Investing in

the well-being of women and reducing gender inequality not

only can improve their lives but benefit entire countries.

The challenge, in short, is to create a more equitable and

just society in which food access is ensured for all. Food scarcity

matters. However, it is rooted in social conditions and institu-

tional dynamics that must be the focus of any policy innovations

that might make a real difference.

recommended resources Laurie DeRose, Ellen Messer, and Sara Millman, eds. Who’s Hun- gry? And How Do We Know? (United Nations University, 1998). A social scientific treatment of the causes and conceptualization of hunger as well as appropriate responses to it.

Food and Agricultural Organization of the UN. The State of Food Insecurity in the World (FAO, various years). An annual assessment of world hunger, including the latest figures and most recent policy discussions.

Amartya Senn. Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford University Press, 1981). A presentation of “enti- tlement failure,” the seminal theory for understanding global hunger as connected problems of distribution, access, and the human causes of famine.

James Vernon. Hunger: A Modern History (Belknap Press, 2007). A useful historical account of evolving conceptions of world hunger.

Stephen J. Scanlan is in the department of sociology and anthropology at Ohio

University. He studies comparative social change with an emphasis on food insecurity

and development.J.Craig Jenkins and Lindsey Peterson are in the department of

sociology at The Ohio State University. Jenkins specializes in conflict and its effects on

social change,while Peterson studies stratification,movements,and political sociology.

39winter 2010 contexts

Sorting at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines.

Ph o to b y A FP /G et ty Im ag es , R o m eo

G ac ad