Socio-Political Development Needed To Fight Poverty

Renowned economist Amartya Sen yesterday said food self-sufficiency was neither the only way nor the most economic way of banishing hunger. The real solution would involve the economics of buying and selling as well as the politics of inducing a government to take supportive action, rather than counter-productive restrictions on the availability of food.

Delivering the first Dr Rajendra Prasad Memorial Lecture here, Sen said producing more food was no longer a problem. The real issue was to achieve broader economic, social and political development which would ensure the vulnerable sections an access to food. The Lamont Professor at Harvard University was speaking on hunger in the contemporary world. The lecture series has been organised by the Food Corporation of India on the occasion of 50th year of independence.

Elaborating his point, Sen said food output per head had continued to rise despite adverse conditions in the international grain market. The terms of trade had also remained adverse to agriculture for several years. It would be a great mistake to focus on food production as the central problem. Social development and equality in opportunities was equally important, he said.

Sen delineated several areas which needed attention as these were crucial for ensuring adequate food availability. These include: encouraging general economic growth; expansion of employment; diversification of production; enhancement of medical and health care; arrangement of special access to food on the part of vulnerable mothers and small children; spread of basic education and literacy; strengthening of democracy and the news media AND reduction of gender-based inequalities.

He maintained that there was no the world food problem. Deprivation of food tended to take different forms based on quite disparate causes. The loss of an adequately broad perspective can make it hard to eliminate different types of deprivations that afflict people in the modern world, he said.

Wars and military actions tended to accentuate deprivations. This was happening in some sub-Saharan African countries which have continued to have frequent famines in the recent past. Democratic countries like India, on the other hand, have not had a famine since the independence.

However, large allocations for defence in different countries were adversely affecting the availability of resources for making food and social services available to people. Even India and Pakistan were spending incredibly large sums on defence. A reduction in these expenses could spare money for creating conditions conducive to improve the availability of food as also the overall quality of life, he said.

Sen criticised the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) for viewing hunger only through the glasses of food production. This was perhaps because the FAO was responsible for both production of food and banishment of hunger. These were actually two different aspects and a single agencies could not do justice to both simultaneously.

On the whole, Sen sounded an optimistic note, maintaining that there was little factual basis for pessimism on this front. Nor is there any cogent ground for assuming the immutability of hunger and deprivation, he stated.

Referring to the general assumption that nothing much could be done to remedy the desperate food situation, Sen remarked: Implicit pessimism often dominates international reactions to these miseries in the world today and this can itself lead to fatalism and the absence of serious attempts to remedy the miseries that we see.

Encouraging general economic growth, Expansion of employment, Diversification of production, enhancement of medical and health care, Arrangement for access to food of vulnerable mothers and small children, Spread of basic education and literacy, Strengthening of democracy and news media, Reduction of gender-based inequalities.