[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Let Them Eat Cash

[Bill]

Can Bill Gates turn hunger into profit?

by Frederick Kaufman

Harper's Magazine Report (June 2009)


The latter-day emperors arrived in Rome. Presidents, prime ministers,
plutocrats, puppets, dictators, and thugs left their limousines across the
street from the Circus Maximus and paraded into the High-Level Conference
on World Food Security and the Challenges of Climate Change and Bioenergy.
That was quite a bit to consider in one conference, but as the number of
starving people on earth rose toward one billion, famine pushed aside all
other concerns.

On the first day, Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, echoed the wisdom
of Thorstein Veblen as he blamed world hunger on "conspicuous
consumptions", which have "put all nations in the world on the verge of
destruction". Such practices, declared Ahmadinejad, were satanic.

Mahmoud al Habash, the Palestinian minister of agriculture, articulated a
different perspective. "The main reason for the world food problem is
political", he said, "The rich countries want to control the world". The
way to end world hunger, explained al Habash, was to end the occupation of
the West Bank.

The Pope sent an envoy with blessings from the Almighty, and a few words
of advice. "Feed the hungry", said His Eminence Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone.

During the three days of the hunger summit, more than a thousand reporters
filed stories they culled from more than a hundred hunger speeches and
hunger news conferences, a vast testament to the involuntary urge of
non-hungry people to say something in the face of hunger, to explicate
starvation, to offer a solution. The conference in Rome may have inspired
the greatest mass recital of famine narratives in human history, and as I
downed my espressos in the mornings before the assembly I'd read the
latest installments.

The stories varied in focus and emphasis but employed the same basic plot
points: biofuel production, caterpillar plagues, commodity speculation,
crop disease, drought, dwindling stockpiles, fear, flood, hoarding, war,
and an increasing world appetite for meat and dairy had bubbled into a
nasty poison. Every day, another 25,000 people starved to death or died
from hunger-related disease: every four seconds, another corpse. Rising
prices for corn, cooking oil, rice, soybeans, and wheat had sparked riots
in Bangladesh, Cameroon, Cote d'Ivoire, Egypt, Ethiopia, Haiti, Indonesia,
and nineteen other countries. Not to mention Milwaukee, where a food
voucher line of nearly 3,000 people descended into chaos. ("They just went
crazy down there", said one witness. "Just totally crazy".)

Oddly enough, almost none of the food riots had emerged from a lack of
food. There was plenty of food. The riots had been generated by the lack
of money to buy food, and therein lay what may have distinguished today's
hunger from the hunger of years past. Therein lay the substance of the
Rome conference.

In 1798, Thomas Malthus predicted that population growth would ineluctably
outpace food production, a prediction yet to be proven correct. For much
of the past century, global crop production has actually outpaced global
population growth. Even so, people continue to starve to death.

In 1971, when starving children from Bangladesh to Biafra became the topic
of dinner-table conversation across America, 961 million people in the
developing world went hungry. That year, the Rockefeller and Ford
foundations had joined forces with the United Nations, the World Bank, and
other organizations to fund research in high-yield varieties of rice and
wheat; this research, along with expanded use of fertilizers, pesticides,
herbicides, and irrigation, and subsequent changes in agricultural
methodology - collectively dubbed the Green Revolution - more than doubled
cereal production in Asia over the next quarter century. Today, there is
enough production capacity to feed the planet - enough, in fact, to feed a
planet with double the population.

The world population has, of course, already nearly doubled since 1971,
and the proportion of people who are hungry has fallen considerably.
Despite the undeniable magnitude of this achievement, the Green Revolution
is far from complete. In fact, just two decades after they launched it,
the agrocrats were blindsided by an astonishing reversal: the real number
of hungry people in the developing world began to climb again, from 823
million in the early 1990s to 907 million in 2008. And since 2003, the
overall proportion of hungry people is also on the rise. Which leads to
the inevitable conclusion: Malthus was correct to predict that as time
went on, more people would starve to death. He just got the mechanism
wrong.

Lack of money, not lack of food - that was the new answer, and at the Rome
hunger summit, money solutions abounded. Rent support, social security,
and subsidized electricity had become part of the debate. One group of
delegates advocated price-fixing and tariffs; another argued for free
markets and the abolition of tariffs. Decrease exports, demanded some;
increase exports, pleaded others. Subsidize the rice trade; tax the rice
trade. Purchase more grain from abroad; purchase less grain from abroad.

Despite such an abundance of divergent tactics, the general understanding
at the summit was that the old model of hunger management no longer
worked; that the age of shipping surplus rice and wheat across the oceans
was over; that handing out candy bars and sacks of flour was not a
long-term solution; that direct food assistance was dead; that now was the
time for a new conceptualization of the old problem.

Everyone could agree that when the price of your daily bread topped your
daily salary, all the agricultural methodology in the world would not make
a difference. Money, on the other hand, could help. But how much money?
And what, precisely, should we do with it?

In his opening address, the director general of the Food and Agriculture
Organization of the United Nations made it simple. Dressed in flowing blue
robes, Jacques Diouf assured the assembly that his organization could take
care of the problem for $30 billion a year. At which point Diouf requested
donations.

Later that afternoon, the president of Senegal put the problem more
bluntly. "This concept of assistance is now out of date", declared
Abdoulaye Wade. "Don't tell us what to do", he continued. "We know what to
do. You will see. We will change everything." Which was how Wade requested
$800 million for his own country's use, no questions asked.

"Modern agriculture requires capital and technology", noted Uganda's
minister for water and the environment. "And for these inputs we need both
local and foreign investors". Perhaps the latter-day emperors were right.
Nothing improved the human condition like cash. Which meant that the only
way to understand world hunger would be to follow the money.


Although food and coin made a nice pair, there was a certain irony to the
betrothal, considering that years before the debut of shekels and bullion,
there were plenty of bananas and coconuts. Indeed, many anthropologists
who study pre-industrial societies have asserted that instead of slogging
through a short, brutish life of paleolithic poverty, so-called savage
hunter-gatherers ate better than we eat, worked less than we work, slept a
lot more than we sleep, and spent a great deal of their time hanging out,
doing nothing. "The amount of hunger", Marshall Sahlins wrote three
decades ago in his book Stone Age Economics (1972), "increases relatively
and absolutely with the evolution of culture". Indigent or not, peckish
primitives found ready supplies of mollusks, moths, and caterpillars.
"Hunters", concluded Sahlins, "keep banker's hours".

Perhaps there really was a golden age of plenty, a time and place removed
from everything we know of the world, a time without money, a time without
hunger: the ever fruiting plains of Avalon and Eden, the big rock-candy
mountain, and Cockaigne, where fish and fowl begged to be eaten and the
rivers flowed with wine. Explorers who have sought such lands of primal
satiation have more often than not found themselves floating around the
South Pacific. Here they discovered Tikopia, an island where the natives
feast all visitors with roi, upupu, and oka, rich and fragrant dishes
concocted from great piles of almonds, cassava, breadfruit, sago, taro,
and yams - all pounded together and slow-cooked over hot rocks until the
ingredients have coagulated into a thick, sweet pudding. There's plenty
for everybody.

Tikopia was living, breathing, ethnological proof of prelapsarian
satiation. Then, half a century ago, the island hit a spot of bad luck.
Back-to-back cyclones laid waste to huts, trees, and tubers. The almonds,
cassava, sago, taro, and yams disappeared into the sea, along with every
last betelnut and breadfruit. The big rock-candy mountain transformed into
a wasteland, and the emaciated natives, once renowned for their generosity
and kindness, turned kinsman against kinsman, tribesman against chief.
"Nearly everyone was stealing", reported the anthropologist James
Spillius, "and nearly everyone was robbed".

Indeed, even the most bucolic of the loinclothed set don't always like to
share, particularly around dinnertime. "Broil your rat with its fur on",
goes the Maori proverb, "lest you be disturbed by someone". And the Bemba
have a special name for the person who sits in your house and says: "I
expect you are going to cook soon. What a fine lot of meat you have
today!" That person is called a witch.

Of course, as Stone Age economies progress toward cash economies, warlocks
and devils become poor people - which may be a step in the right
direction. Perhaps the radical anthropologists of the 1960s had let
politics slip into their fieldwork, and had been wrong to vilify modern
markets. Perhaps the Congolese Pygmies, the Komu-Konda, and the Wugukani
worked harder than we do, for much less. Not to mention the various and
sundry other savages of Africa and Melanesia, whose famished gullets drove
them to sorcery, senilicide, and cannibalism.

But what about all those other golden ages, particularly the ones that
featured money? When classical Athens descended into one of its periodic
food shortages, long-forgotten celebrities like Xenokles and Archestratos
would bestow hundreds of thousands of medimnoi of grain upon the suffering
city-state and make things right. Like their modern equivalents, the
ancient celebrities were rewarded with prime-time bronze statues, names
carved in marble, and front-row seats at the games.

Of course, there was plenty of grain hoarding and price gouging, too. A
couple thousand years ago, a Greek shipping merchant named Dionysodorus
was hauled into court for promising to deliver grain to Athens but instead
selling it to Rhodes, where buyers had offered more drachmas. In 323 BC
the penalty for breaking grain contracts during a hunger crisis was death,
but Dionysodorus, like many an ancient merchant, almost certainly managed
to evade his mug of hemlock.

The standard reaction of the Roman plebeian in times of food shortage was
to rush the Palatine and threaten to burn the grain-rich senators alive.
"It is most unjust that the hunger of one's own fellow-citizens should be
a source of profiteering for anyone", lamented the Roman consul Antistius
Rusticus - but nobody listened to him. When severe food shortages struck
during the Middle Ages, merchants set up stalls in the open market and
purveyed chops and steaks of human meat. During Eastern Europe's great
hunger of 1032, parents sold their children.


On the third morning of the Rome hunger summit I sat in the back row of
the Iran Room, where the United Nations held its press conferences, and
listened to the remarks of Josette Sheeran, executive director of the
World Food Program. The WFP is the largest humanitarian organization in
the world, part of the elite club of NGOs that have spent billions trying
to end world hunger. Sheeran had just completed her first year as
executive director of the WFP, and already rumor had it she might be next
in line for president of the United Nations. "High food prices and
increasing demand present a huge, historic opportunity", said Sheeran.

The World Food Program had been recycling agricultural surpluses and
sending them across the world since 1962. Now, Sheeran declared, the
program was facing the biggest challenge in its history, and if her
organization and the famine-relief industry in general did not take
immediate action, the number of hungry people in the world would soon
double. "The bottom billion will become the bottom two billion", said
Sheeran. It was the 1970s all over again. By percentages, as bad as it
got. By real numbers, beyond the beyond.

The press scribbled in their notebooks and tapped their laptops. And
Josette Sheeran smiled. An ex-journalist, she had learned the subtleties
of media relations at the Washington Times, the conservative daily
broadsheet founded and bankrolled by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon's
Unification Church. Sheeran joined the church in 1975 and could boast a
classic 1970s de-programming story wherein her father - the former mayor
of West Orange, New Jersey - stormed a church-run school and tried to
rescue his daughter. The attempt failed, and Sheeran remained a member of
the church for more than two decades, even as her spiritual leader
declared, "I will conquer and subjugate the world" and, "I am your brain".
She reached a pinnacle of sorts as the managing editor of the Times. Then,
having exhausted the social, political, and professional possibilities of
Moon's church, Sheeran left the paper, converted to Episcopalianism, took
a job as an undersecretary of state for the George W Bush Administration -
and, finally, decided to feed the hungry.

Sheeran was now directing the World Food Program's $6 billion budget. She
commanded their vast fleets of barges, camels, donkeys, planes, trains,
trucks, and elephants. When Sheeran finished her remarks I followed her
out of the Iran Room and asked if she could explain what she had meant
when she said, "High food prices and increasing demand present a huge,
historic opportunity". Where was room for opportunity in high food prices
and increasing demand? Were not high food prices driving riots and famine
across the globe? Were not there more hungry people than ever before?

"There was a time when we did not know how to produce enough food in the
world", Sheeran said, and gave me a dazzling smile. "Now we do". Of
course, every hungercrat at the Rome conference understood there was
enough food for everyone, even if the fact of food paled before the
privilege of purchasing it.

As Sheeran began the narrative of how the World Food Program would
eradicate world hunger, we were joined by her second in command, Nancy
Roman, the WFP's director of communications, who observed Sheeran the way
campaign managers monitor their candidate. "This is not your grandmother's
food aid", Sheeran quipped as Roman kept watch.

In the beginning, most of the contributions to the World Food Program came
in the form of food, but as the years went by a growing proportion of the
contributions came in the form of cash. Originally, the organization had
focused on delivering its rice and beans directly to those who had the bad
luck to inhabit the most cursed spots on earth. But as grain surpluses
went down and the price of shipping went up, the WFP took the logical step
of purchasing food supplies from sources closer to the famine, in many
cases even from within the borders of the affected country. Thus did the
WFP purchase 18,000 metric tons of corn and beans from Rwanda last year,
for $6.3 million, and 210,000 metric tons of food from Uganda, for $55
million. Which made these countries' respective presidents, Paul Kagame
and Yoweri Museveni, happy to cooperate with the WFP's designs for the
future.

In fact, World Food Program plans called for the presidents of Rwanda and
Uganda to travel to New York just a few months after the Rome hunger
summit. There, at United Nations world headquarters, presidents Kagame and
Museveni would welcome the WFP's newest program. And on that morning,
Josette Sheeran revealed, the African presidents would be joined by none
other than Bill Gates.

Gates, Sheeran explained, was going to help the WFP expand its program of
local purchasing to small farmers and grain traders in the farther reaches
of their client nations. Such purchases, as logistically difficult as they
might be, would increase and support the agricultural efforts of these
so-called smallholders. "This is the next wave of the story", said Sheeran.

Grain purchases from small farmers and traders would put cash into the
hands of hundreds of thousands of people and encourage farmers to plant
and harvest more and more food. In addition, the WFP would put these
farmers in contact with other groups, who would in turn help them acquire
better seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides, more advanced irrigation
systems, larger warehouse facilities, and improved access to roads. Thus
could a poverty-stricken peasant move from being a recipient of food aid
one year, to creating a bit of surplus the next, to making a profitable
business out of it a few years down the line - and supplying food for
others.

In order to realize these plans, the World Food Program would guarantee a
market where none might now exist. They would do so, in part, by "forward
contracting", whereby the WFP would promise to purchase a certain amount
of a farmer's output, at a certain price, either one, two, or three years
down the line. Such guarantees would give small farmers the incentive to
plant more crops, since they could count on an eventual market for their
goods. A WFP contract might even help farmers get credit from the local
bank, or perhaps a bit of crop insurance.

Josette Sheeran told me the acronym for her pilot program: P4P, which
stands for Purchase for Progress. The $76 million program would be funded
by the Howard G Buffet Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,
and the government of Belgium. In its first year of forward contracting,
P4P would commit the World Food Program to purchasing 40,000 tons of food
from 350,000 small farmers. "We are studying a proposal with Bill Gates on
a way to do the contract", Sheeran said.

P4P was designed to mimic sophisticated global markets. Along with its
purchase guarantees, P4P included plans to support countrywide commodity
exchanges, which the WFP hoped would develop along the lines of the
Chicago Board of Trade. (In Ethiopia and Uganda, exchanges have already
opened.) In the new paradigm, the smallest farmer can benefit from the
biggest market.

In some cases, P4P would not purchase a farmer's grain immediately but
instead would encourage him to warehouse his product and receive a
receipt. More mysterious than rice or millet, this slip of paper presented
a number of intriguing possibilities. First of all, the receipt allowed
the farmer to register with his countrywide exchange, a place in the
capital city where all the grain from all the country's farmers could be
bought and sold. Henceforth, the rural farmer could follow fluctuating
prices with the technology of his mobile phone. The once indigent peasant
could become a commodity trader and peg his sale to any time of the year.
In this way, he could forecast, model, and leverage more financing. No
matter that commodity speculation and grain hoarding had helped trigger
the world food crisis. No matter that the recent Agribusiness
Accountability Initiative declared that massive and unregulated
commodity-market speculation "has pushed the prices of wheat, maize, rice
and other basic foods out of the reach of hundreds of millions of people
around the world".

Of course, the WFP would take no responsibility for market peaks, valleys,
doldrums, and crashes. The happy news was that the solution to world
hunger would no longer have to be about the food. It could be about the
money. And I imagined the sowers and reapers of Africa, Asia, and South
America transformed into a massive cartel of grain dealers - leveraging,
diversifying, and cornering markets, driving the price of rice arid beans
as high as the market could bear. The peasant-turned-trader could wait as
long as he liked to go to market and, while he waited, place bets on which
way the market would move. He could hoard in the great tradition of grain
dealers, hedge in the great tradition of bankers, and eventually pull in
enough profit to render obsolete every guarantee and support of the World
Food Program, quit farming, and go into insurance and banking for himself.

Thus the new paradigm. Thus the end of world hunger. And thus the end of
my conversation with Josette Sheeran, who had to run to her next meeting.
Nancy Roman stayed behind, so I asked her about rising food costs and all
those riots. Higher wheat and rice prices could conceivably help farmers,
higher grocery bills might benefit agribusiness, and speculation in
commodity markets might be a boon for investors of all shapes and sizes -
but how did such financial fluctuations affect the urban underclass of
Nigeria and the rural poor of Guatemala?

"Listen", said Nancy Roman, "speculation always drives up the cost of
everything. Housing, telecommunications, shoes .."

Before she joined the WFP, Roman had been president of the G7 Group. She
had made her living explaining Washington policy to hedge-fund managers,
and as a result she could situate virtually any political or social
phenomenon within easily comprehensible financial constructs, and she
could explain why, in the midst of the world food crisis, the Ospraie
Special Opportunity Fund and the BlackRock Agricultural Fund had gone on
their latest buying sprees, snapping up grain silos, grain elevators,
fertilizer-distribution centers, and huge tracts of land. Indeed, as the
world's best and brightest focused on food security, the solution to the
age-old problem of hunger appeared increasingly to coincide with the
age-old techniques that the best and the brightest themselves employed to
ensure their own security. The solution to world hunger was more
investment all the way up and all the way down the line, and all
investments were speculative.

"What people are uncomfortable about is when you speculate about food",
continued Roman, "something so fundamental to life. When you're
speculating on something that is the essence of life, when you're
speculating in that space ..." and here she stopped. She gazed across the
pressroom and she frowned.

"People don't like that", she said.


In good times and in bad, it's hard to say no to money - which can foster
dependency like nothing else. Of course, the purpose of transforming the
international food-aid business into an international-business business is
to foster entrepreneurial independence, not subservience. So in order to
be truly transformative, the money gift cannot simply be a gift and
nothing but a gift. If that money is not to create a perpetual state of
subordination, the money gift must create business. As in P4P, the cash
might impel small farmers to purchase more loans, more pesticides, more
seeds, more land; to buy low and sell high.

Of course, when money has been deployed as a spur to action, the
deployment becomes entangled in ideology. The money may eventually spark
the widest variety of political and economic reactions. For example, Maori
warriors believe that all gifts ultimately accrue to the giver, so that if
you give a hungry man a fish he may rightfully gut and cook and eat the
fish, but the spirit of the fish, its hau, will eventually become restless
and return to the giver of the fish. And if the gift happens to be the
guaranteed-grain-purchase formulae of the World Food Program, the hau will
journey through the spirit land of giftdom until it returns to its
nativity, the warm, rich, capitalist womb of Bill Gates.

Along the same lines, Claude Levi-Strauss noted that the Nambikwara
chieftains of the Brazilian Amazon proved their chieftainship through
generosity. By distributing food and other goods, the big man retained and
increased his power. Thomas Hobbes made "gratitude" his fourth Law of
Nature: "No man giveth, but with intention of good to himself". And the
Eskimo have a proverb: "Gifts make slaves as whips make dogs".

In Niger, following a spate of local purchases like those promised through
P4P, millet prices rose by thirteen percent in local markets, followed by
a seven percent uptick in the national average. Guaranteed sales had
increased consumer prices, which would eventually send more people into
poverty and starvation. The money gift triggered all manner of unforeseen
consequences.

It may be best not to know the ultimate effect of your gift. Such
knowledge might compromise the ideological romance that made the gift
possible in the first place. Thus did a frenzy of cash pledges mark the
end of the hunger summit in Rome, although no one at the conference really
understood what would be done with their money. Ed Schafer, the United
States secretary of agriculture, led the flurry with an announcement that
the United States Department of Agriculture would donate $5 billion over
the next two years. French President Nicolas Sarkozy announced that his
country would donate one billion euros. "Dying people are not happy
people", noted Sarkozy.

After Sarkozy, the International Fund for Agricultural Development
announced a gift of $200 million. The World Food Program mobilized $750
million, and Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank, pledged $1.2
billion. The African Development bank pledged $1 billion; Spain pledged
$773 million; the United Kingdom, $590 million; Japan, $150 million;
Kuwait, $100 million; Venezuela, $100 million; the Netherlands, $75
million; and New Zealand, $7.5 million. On the last day of the hunger
summit, the Islamic Development Bank chipped in $1.5 billion.

"For what?" asked one hungercrat I met in the hallway. "It is unclear".


As the New York P4P press conference approached, I began to consider a
question for Bill Gates. Why, despite our spending more money than had
ever been spent to solve the problem of world hunger, and why, despite
everybody's best efforts to reconceptualize the problem - why were more
and more people going hungry? Perhaps Gates would consider the paradox
that our efforts might be exacerbating the problem, that all we were doing
was wrong. Obviously, this was not the kind of thing I could vet
beforehand with a publicist, or send over to media at gatesfoundation.org
expecting a response. The nature of the question seemed to defy reason.
Which was why I went to visit Amartya Sen.

As a nine-year-old boy, Sen witnessed the Bengal famine of 1943, the last
Indian famine, which occurred only four years before the end of the Raj.
Between two million and three million people died, and Sen watched them
drop in the streets. This was the famine that occasioned Winston
Churchill's remark that the famine was of no great account because the
Indians would simply "breed like rabbits".

When Sen grew up he became a professor of economics and philosophy. His
specialties included the economics of poverty and famine, and many of his
26 books and 375 articles deal with these subjects.

For much of his career, Sen focused on the fact that during the worst
period of the Irish famine of the 1840s, "ship after ship sailed down the
Shannon, bound for England, laden with wheat, oats, cattle, hogs, eggs,
and butter". Similarly, during the Ethiopian famine of 1973, food moved
out of the hardest-hit Wollo province and headed toward more affluent
purchasers in Addis Ababa. Such uncanny food "counter-movements" led Sen
to the insight that if governments were to intervene in such situations,
famines would not be so very difficult to prevent, "The rulers", he wrote,
"never starve".

Sen had crunched the hunger numbers as no one else had done before, not
just for Bengal in 1943 and Ireland in the 1840s but also for Ukraine in
the 1930s, China in the 1950s and 1960s, Ethiopia in the 1970s, Bangladesh
in 1974, Somalia and Sudan several times over. In 1982 he published a book
called Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation that
transformed the field. Other books followed, including Inequality
Reexamined and Rationality and Freedom. In 1998, Sen was awarded the Nobel
Prize in Economics.

He lives in one of those quaint shingle-style houses a few blocks from
Harvard Square, and on the rainy day I came to visit I found him dressed
in an Oxford button-down, a gray sweater vest, a pair of khakis, and
baby-blue socks. First we ate, then we talked. His daughter served baked
fish in mustard seeds, and after lunch, since Sen was recovering from
surgery, we retired to his living room and he reclined on the pink couch,
a yellow coverlet tucked under his chin, his head and his knee propped up
on an elaborate arrangement of seven pillows. Next to him sat a pitcher of
ice water, a bottle of Evian, a box of Kleenex, a pair of crutches, two
phones, and two assistants.

"When people think they believe in this or that", said Sen, "I'm not
sure". He paused for an enormous period of time. He moved the pillows,
straightened the coverlet, and glanced at the two watercolors that hung
above the fireplace, portraits of Willard Quine and John Rawls. Old
friends of his. And it occurred to me that Sen was not an economist so
much as a philosopher, and that the solution he had found to world hunger
had been the outcome of a purely rational analysis, the same approach
Descartes employed to cast a cold eye on the nature of his own existence,
and that Socrates used to face death without flinching.

"I believe in reason", said Sen. "There are those who want to repress
reason. Christian, Muslim, and Hindu fundamentalists, and those who pick a
totem market economy, the liberal economic state. These are all
anti-reason.

He paused again and closed his eyes. I knew that Sen had written the
introduction to a book on AIDS in India that had been funded by the Gates
Foundation, and I wondered if the affiliation would cloud his perspective,
but after a few minutes he began to expound upon the relationship of
market-based movements of food to demand and purchasing power, and to
explain that none of these forces necessarily have anything to do with who
gets enough to eat and who doesn't. In fact, there was no fixed relation
of any sort between food and famine. Some famines, like Bangladesh in
1974, occur in years of peak food availability.

In the midst of a severe hunger crisis, agricultural subsidies do not make
much of a difference. And in the face of famine, a reliance on market
economies is as ineffective as a reliance on loaves and fishes or manna
from Heaven. Even so, said Sen, famines are not terribly difficult to
avoid. Prevention requires the speedy implementation of emergency
income-creation and employment programs, in combination with the broader
social infrastructure of representative democracy and a free press, which
happens to be the best early-warning system. Famine happens when rulers
are alienated from those they rule, he explained, and a functioning
democracy is a simple way to remove such alienation. Famine happens when
there is no free press, because rulers tend to feel embarrassed when
photographs of starving children appear on the front page.

New formulations of the hunger problem were not necessary. Sen had
discovered the solution and he had gone over it many times, in abstruse
tables for Econometrica, in articles for the Handbook of Mathematical
Economics, and in features for Granta. He had explained the solution in
his hundreds of essays and dozens of books in thousands of seminars and
public addresses, yet his endlessly rehearsed points had not been enough.
The world remained irrational, and people starved.

Of course, no other hunger narrative had ever succeeded either. Nor had
any institution in the world been able to end world hunger. "No one
organization alone can do it", Sen said. "None of the organizations alone
can".

I asked if the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization was up to
the job.

"No", he said, and closed his eyes. "That I profoundly doubt".

What about Bill Gates and the World Food Program?

"It can do a lot of good", he said. "But it's not the way of solving the
problem".


"Nothing but money is sweeter than honey", Benjamin Franklin famously
remarked. The portliest founder understood that market dynamics reflect
appetites, and were thus driven more by the irrational gut than the
rational mind. Unreason may not seem so unreasonable when you are dying of
hunger, but full stomachs also make their demands and possess their
involuntary ideologies.

Even the most well-intentioned, well-fed capitalist may fail to recognize
that his own actions are causing the very problems he most sincerely wants
to solve. After all, it is rational to invest in a commodity when its
price rises, even if corn costs do happen to push up feed prices. Chickens
eat chicken feed made from that corn, so the price of a dozen organic eggs
hits $6.39. "All indications are that soaring feed costs are going to
force livestock and poultry producers to raise prices", said Joel
Brandenberger, president of the National Turkey Federation, "or risk going
out of business". Bill Roenigk, chief economist of the National Chicken
Council, predicted that "food inflation is poised to begin and continue
for many, many months". All of which impelled Iowa Senator Charles
Grassley to wax rabid and liken the American grocery lobby to the Nazi
Party. "They have to have an excuse for increasing the price of their
food", said Grassley. "It's another Adolf Hitler lie".

As food prices rise, profit margins recede, and Sara Lee Corporation makes
the front page of the Wall Street Journal with a $695 million quarterly
loss. Meanwhile, in El Salvador, the government suggests that hungry
people simply tighten their belts.

Was anyone or anything immune from hunger's plague of unreason? Were
academics like Amartya Sen the only ones with the proper analytical tools
to withstand the onslaught of hysteria? Was there any evidence, in all of
human history, that those who lived the life of the mind might rise above
their intestines?