Last Friday I had to get up before dawn to be on time for the annual Harvard conference on gender. Not that gender interests me much, but this year the topic was food and that day Sidney Mintz (a famous anthropologist who wrote on sugar produced by slaves in the plantations of the Caribbean was instrumental in creating the working class in industrial Britain) and Amartya Sen (Indian economist who received so many awards that maybe only the Nobel Prize is worth mentioning) were about to talk.



During the break after first panel, which was dedicated to discussing Mintz’s book “Sweetness and Power”, I was sipping black tea with lemon, while leaning against the wall, and observing professors in grey suits chatting about food, when I saw him. Amartya Sen. I have no idea how I recognized him, since I had never seen him before, nor read any of his works in reality. Maybe it is the effect of browsing through Wikipedia the previous night to get the basic information on him. I must have seen his photo somewhere there. Anyway, I was not sure it was him, but I liked him. He was friendly with everybody, greeted everybody and smiled while climbing the stairs to the auditorium. I followed this Indian in light grey suit and glasses. His panel was dedicated to nutrition and famine.

Basically, Sen argues that famine in contemporary world is a consequence of bad economic policy and not caused by food shortage as a result of some natural disaster, such as draught. Bad economic policy means that society is divided by structures of inequality that perpetuate poverty. People simply can’t afford to purchase food after their own security nets have been torn away by state reforms – like forced implementation of World Bank-pushed adjustments to free-market economy in Sierra Leone, described in Peter Griffiths’ “The Economist’s Tale”. Even during the famous Irish Potato famine food was shipped from Ireland to England where people were able to pay more for it, not that Ireland had completely no food.



This idea raises many questions about the meaning of humanitarian aid. If the problem is not lack of food, would tones of rice bags marked with symbols of the Red Cross or United Nations or World Food Program change anything? Yes, maybe they will feed the starving for a week, a month, even a year. But it is not sustainable. It will not eliminate the reasons they are starving, only create a part of society continuously dependent on foreign donations. And when the pictures of kids with swollen bellies, who are too weak to chase away the flies, will stop appearing in the media, donor organizations will simply move away to another “crisis zone”. Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Niger, Somalia, Chad… Many tables and graphs with statistics only prove that most people that die of famine don’t die in famine that we hear about in the media. Most die in everyday famine, in famine-related poverty, silent and unobserved. Sen even told a story about a woman who, during a famine, says to a girl: “Be careful! Famine will be over!”.

Then somebody stood up and asked whether the solution could be increased investments in research and an invention of some climate-and-insects-resistant crop, which could feed the world. Sen just smiled as that somebody completely missed the point. He then answered: “I am not against food as such, but…” And he repeated that the food is not the problem, so it can’t be the solution. Any study of hunger and any attempt to help should see the peculiarities – who starve and why. Famine is not democratic, it does not effect the whole country the same way, maybe certain groups even benefit from it… Therefore, no generalizations can be made, as only locally-oriented interventions might work.

But not only local is important. The main moral is that, if the problem is identified correctly, it is easier to find a solution. P. Griffiths says that “Free Market (with capitals) is a political dogma, not an economic one”. Similarly, David Harvey (another anthropologist from CUNY) claims that, although neo-liberalism is not a result of “the imposition of some model orthodoxy by some hegemonic power, such as US”, it is still political as serving class interests and again political because not really economic – all alone it failed to produce economic growth both in the US and in Britain. Naturally, then, if the roots of the problem are political, so should the solutions be: aid workers and researchers that dwell in small villages in the middle of the jungle trying to “develop” the underdeveloped, villages that are too far from the centers where power actually resides, are dealing with the symptoms, not the causes, which are to be found in the president’s palace or the ministry headquarters.

I left. A little sad, but with some hope. And then I bought a cheap chicken burger at “Wendy’s”, which made me think I still belong to the part of the society that is rather privileged. However, irony suddenly reshaped my face as I remembered the anecdote Minu once cited. One guy asks his friend as he looks at a parking lot full of the most swanky and expensive cars: “What’s going on in that building?” His friend looks at him and says: “It’s a conference on poverty”.