LET THEM EAT CASH Can Bill Gates Turn Hunger into … · HARPER’S MAGAZINE/JUNE 2009 $6.95 LET...

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JUNE 2009 $6.95

◆

◆

LET THEM EAT CASHCan Bill Gates Turn Hunger into Profit?

By Frederick Kaufman

MY GREAT DEPRESSIONTen Dispatches from the Near Future

Kevin Baker, Thomas de Zengotita, Ruben Bolling, Jamaica Kincaid,Colson Whitehead, Simon Critchley and Tom McCarthy, David Rees,

Sherman Alexie, Ben Marcus, Ben Katchor

Also: Werner Herzog and Stanley Crouch

L I T T L E D R O P S O F WA T E R : A S T O R Y B Y K U R T V O N N E G U T

June US SUBS cover Final2rev 4/28/09 11:24 AM

The latter-day emperors arrived inRome. Presidents, prime ministers, plu-tocrats, puppets, dictators, and thugsleft their limousines across the streetfrom the Circus Maximus and parad-ed into the High-Level Conferenceon World Food Security and the Chal-lenges of Climate Change and Bioen-ergy. That was quite a bit to considerin one conference, but as the numberof starving people on earth rose to-ward one billion, famine pushed asideall other concerns.

On the first day, Iran’s president,Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, echoed thewisdom of Thorstein Veblen as heblamed world hunger on “conspicu-ous consumptions,” which have “putall nations in the world on the vergeof destruction.” Such practices, de-clared Ahmadinejad, were satanic.

Mahmoud al Habash, the Palestin-ian minister of agriculture, articulateda different perspective. “The main rea-son for the world food problem is po-litical,” he said. “The rich countrieswant to control the world.” The way toend world hunger, explained alHabash, was to end the occupation ofthe West Bank.

The Pope sent an envoy with bless-ings from the Almighty, and a few wordsof advice. “Feed the hungry,” said HisEminence Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone.

During the three days of the hungersummit, more than a thousand reportersfiled stories they culled from more thana hundred hunger speeches and hungernews conferences, a vast testament to

the involuntary urge of non-hungrypeople to say something in the face ofhunger, to explicate starvation, to of-fer a solution. The conference in Romemay have inspired the greatest massrecital of famine narratives in humanhistory, and as I downed my espressosin the mornings before the assemblyI’d read the latest installments.

The stories varied in focus and em-phasis but employed the same basicplot points: biofuel production, cater-pillar plagues, commodity speculation,crop disease, drought, dwindling stock-

piles, fear, flood, hoarding, war, andan increasing world appetite for meatand dairy had bubbled into a nastypoison. Every day, another 25,000people starved to death or died fromhunger-related disease: every four sec-onds, another corpse. Rising pricesfor corn, cooking oil, rice, soybeans,and wheat had sparked riots inBangladesh, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire,Egypt, Ethiopia, Haiti, Indonesia, andnineteen other countries. Not to men-tion Milwaukee, where a food vouch-er line of nearly 3,000 people de-scended into chaos. (“They just wentcrazy down there,” said one witness.“Just totally crazy.”)

Oddly enough, almost none of thefood riots had emerged from a lack offood. There was plenty of food. Theriots had been generated by the lackof money to buy food, and therein laywhat may have distinguished today’shunger from the hunger of years past.Therein lay the substance of theRome conference.

In 1798, Thomas Malthus predict-ed that population growth would in-eluctably outpace food production, aprediction yet to be proven correct.For much of the past century, globalcrop production has actually outpacedglobal population growth. Even so,people continue to starve to death.

In 1971, when starving childrenfrom Bangladesh to Biafra became thetopic of dinner-table conversationacross America, 961 million people inthe developing world went hungry.

REPORT 51

LET THEM EAT CASHCan Bill Gates turn hunger into profit?

By Frederick Kaufman

R E P O R T

Illustrations by Raymond Verdaguer

Frederick Kaufman is the author of AShort History of the American Stomach.His last article for Harper’s Magazine,“Wasteland,” appeared in the February2008 issue.

Kaufman Final2Rev2 4/27/09 6:38 PM Page 51

That year, the Rockefeller and Fordfoundations had joined forces with theUnited Nations, the World Bank, andother organizations to fund researchin high-yield varieties of rice andwheat; this research, along withexpanded use of fertilizers, pesticides,herbicides, and irrigation, and sub-sequent changes in agriculturalmethodology—collectively dubbed theGreen Revolution—more than dou-bled cereal production in Asia overthe next quarter century. Today, thereis enough production capacity to feedthe planet—enough, in fact, to feed aplanet with double the population.

The world population has, of course,already nearly doubled since 1971, andthe proportion of people who are hun-gry has fallen considerably. Despite theundeniable magnitude of this achieve-ment, the Green Revolution is far fromcomplete. In fact, just two decades af-ter they launched it, the agrocratswere blindsided by an astonishingreversal: the real number of hun-gry people in the developing worldbegan to climb again, from 823million in the early 1990s to 907million in 2008. And since 2003,the overall proportion of hungrypeople is also on the rise. Whichleads to the inevitable conclusion:Malthus was correct to predict that astime went on, more people wouldstarve to death. He just got the mech-anism wrong.

Lack of money, not lack of food—that was the new answer, and at theRome hunger summit, money solutionsabounded. Rent support, social secu-rity, and subsidized electricity had be-come part of the debate. One group ofdelegates advocated price-fixing andtariffs; another argued for free marketsand the abolition of tariffs. Decreaseexports, demanded some; increase ex-ports, pleaded others. Subsidize the ricetrade; tax the rice trade. Purchase moregrain from abroad; purchase less grainfrom abroad.

Despite such an abundance of di-vergent tactics, the general under-standing at the summit was that the oldmodel of hunger management nolonger worked; that the age of ship-ping surplus rice and wheat across theoceans was over; that handing out can-dy bars and sacks of flour was not along-term solution; that direct food

assistance was dead; that now was thetime for a new conceptualization ofthe old problem.

Everyone could agree that when theprice of your daily bread topped yourdaily salary, all the agriculturalmethodology in the world would notmake a difference. Money, on the oth-er hand, could help. But how muchmoney? And what, precisely, shouldwe do with it?

In his opening address, the directorgeneral of the Food and AgricultureOrganization of the United Nationsmade it simple. Dressed in flowingblue robes, Jacques Diouf assured theassembly that his organization couldtake care of the problem for $30 bil-lion a year. At which point Diouf re-quested donations.

Later that afternoon, the presidentof Senegal put the problem more blunt-ly. “This concept of assistance is now

out of date,” declared AbdoulayeWade. “Don’t tell us what to do,” hecontinued. “We know what to do. Youwill see. We will change everything.”Which was how Wade requested $800million for his own country’s use, noquestions asked.

“Modern agriculture requires capitaland technology,” noted Uganda’s min-ister for water and the environment.“And for these inputs we need bothlocal and foreign investors.”

Perhaps the latter-day emperorswere right. Nothing improved the hu-man condition like cash. Which meantthat the only way to understand world

hunger would be to follow the money.

Although food and coin made anice pair, there was a certain irony tothe betrothal, considering that yearsbefore the debut of shekels and bul-lion, there were plenty of bananas andcoconuts. Indeed, many anthropolo-gists who study pre-industrial societieshave asserted that instead of sloggingthrough a short, brutish life of pale-

olithic poverty, so-called savage hunter-gatherers ate better than we eat, workedless than we work, slept a lot more thanwe sleep, and spent a great deal of theirtime hanging out, doing nothing. “Theamount of hunger,” Marshall Sahlinswrote three decades ago in his bookStone Age Economics, “increases rela-tively and absolutely with the evolutionof culture.” Indigent or not, peckishprimitives found ready supplies ofmollusks, moths, and caterpillars.“Hunters,” concluded Sahlins, “keepbanker’s hours.”

Perhaps there really was a goldenage of plenty, a time and place removedfrom everything we know of the world,a time without money, a time withouthunger: the ever fruiting plains of Ava-lon and Eden, the big rock-candymountain, and Cockaigne, where fishand fowl begged to be eaten and therivers flowed with wine. Explorers who

have sought such lands of primalsatiation have more often thannot found themselves floatingaround the South Pacific. Herethey discovered Tikopia, an islandwhere the natives feast all visitorswith roi, upupu, and oka, rich andfragrant dishes concocted fromgreat piles of almonds, cassava,

breadfruit, sago, taro, and yams—allpounded together and slow-cookedover hot rocks until the ingredientshave coagulated into a thick, sweetpudding. There’s plenty for everybody.

Tikopia was living, breathing, eth-nological proof of prelapsarian satia-tion. Then, half a century ago, the is-land hit a spot of bad luck. Back-to-backcyclones laid waste to huts, trees, and tu-bers. The almonds, cassava, sago, taro,and yams disappeared into the sea, alongwith every last betelnut and breadfruit.The big rock-candy mountain trans-formed into a wasteland, and the ema-ciated natives, once renowned for theirgenerosity and kindness, turned kins-man against kinsman, tribesmanagainst chief. “Nearly everyone wasstealing,” reported the anthropologistJames Spillius, “and nearly everyonewas robbed.”

Indeed, even the most bucolic ofthe loinclothed set don’t always like toshare, particularly around dinnertime.“Broil your rat with its fur on,” goes theMaori proverb, “lest you be disturbedby someone.” And the Bemba have a

52 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JUNE 2009

MALTHUS WAS CORRECT TO PREDICT

THAT AS TIME WENT ON, MORE PEOPLE

WOULD STARVE TO DEATH. HE JUST

GOT THE MECHANISM WRONG

Kaufman Final2 4/22/09 9:02 AM Page 52

special name for the person who sits inyour house and says: “I expect you aregoing to cook soon. What a fine lot ofmeat you have today!” That person iscalled a witch.

Of course, as Stone Age economiesprogress toward cash economies, war-locks and devils become poor people—which may be a step in the right direc-tion. Perhaps the radical anthropologistsof the 1960s had let politics slip intotheir fieldwork, and had been wrong tovilify modern markets. Perhaps theCongolese Pygmies, the Komu-Konda,and the Wugukani worked harder thanwe do, for much less. Not to mentionthe various and sundry other savagesof Africa and Melanesia, whose

famished gullets drove them to sorcery,senilicide, and cannibalism.

But what about all those other gold-en ages, particularly the ones that fea-tured money? When classical Athensdescended into one of its periodic foodshortages, long-forgotten celebrities likeXenokles and Archestratos would be-stow hundreds of thousands of medim-noi of grain upon the suffering city-stateand make things right. Like their mod-ern equivalents, the ancient celebritieswere rewarded with prime-time bronzestatues, names carved in marble, andfront-row seats at the games.

Of course, there was plenty of grainhoarding and price gouging, too. Acouple thousand years ago, a Greekshipping merchant named Dionysodor-us was hauled into court for promisingto deliver grain to Athens but insteadselling it to Rhodes, where buyers had

offered more drachmas. In 323 B.C. thepenalty for breaking grain contractsduring a hunger crisis was death, butDionysodorus, like many an ancientmerchant, almost certainly managedto evade his mug of hemlock.

The standard reaction of the Ro-man plebeian in times of food shortagewas to rush the Palatine and threatento burn the grain-rich senators alive. “Itis most unjust that the hunger of one’sown fellow-citizens should be a sourceof profiteering for anyone,” lamentedthe Roman consul Antistius Rusticus—but nobody listened to him. When se-vere food shortages struck during theMiddle Ages, merchants set up stallsin the open market and purveyed

chops and steaks of human meat. During Eastern Europe’s great hunger

of 1032, parents soldtheir children.

On the third morning of the Romehunger summit I sat in the back row ofthe Iran Room, where the United Na-tions held its press conferences, andlistened to the remarks of Josette Sheer-an, executive director of the WorldFood Program. The WFP is the largesthumanitarian organization in the world,part of the elite club of NGOs thathave spent billions trying to end worldhunger. Sheeran had just completedher first year as executive director of theWFP, and already rumor had it shemight be next in line for president ofthe United Nations. “High food pricesand increasing demand present a huge,historic opportunity,” said Sheeran.

The World Food Program had beenrecycling agricultural surpluses andsending them across the world since1962. Now, Sheeran declared, the pro-gram was facing the biggest challenge inits history, and if her organization andthe famine-relief industry in generaldid not take immediate action, thenumber of hungry people in the worldwould soon double. “The bottom billionwill become the bottom two billion,”said Sheeran. It was the 1970s all overagain. By percentages, as bad as it got.By real numbers, beyond the beyond.

The press scribbled in their note-books and tapped their laptops. AndJosette Sheeran smiled. An ex-journalist, she had learned the subtleties

of media relations at the WashingtonTimes, the conservative daily broad-sheet founded and bankrolled by theReverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unifi-cation Church. Sheeran joined thechurch in 1975 and could boast a clas-sic ’70s de-programming story where-in her father—the former mayor ofWest Orange, New Jersey—stormed achurch-run school and tried to rescuehis daughter. The attempt failed, andSheeran remained a member of thechurch for more than two decades,even as her spiritual leader declared, “Iwill conquer and subjugate the world”and, “I am your brain.” She reached apinnacle of sorts as the managing editorof the Times. Then, having exhaustedthe social, political, and professionalpossibilities of Moon’s church, Sheer-an left the paper, converted to Epis-copalianism, took a job as an under-

REPORT 53


secretary of state for the George W.Bush Administration—and, finally,decided to feed the hungry.

Sheeran was now directing theWorld Food Program’s $6 billion bud-get. She commanded their vast fleets ofbarges, camels, donkeys, planes, trains,trucks, and elephants. When Sheeranfinished her remarks I followed her outof the Iran Room and asked if she couldexplain what she had meant when shesaid, “High food prices and increasingdemand present a huge, historic op-portunity.” Where was room for op-portunity in high food prices and in-creasing demand? Were not high food

prices driving riots and famine acrossthe globe? Were not there more hun-gry people than ever before?

“There was a time when we didnot know how to produce enoughfood in the world,” Sheeran said, andgave me a dazzling smile. “Now wedo.” Of course, every hungercrat atthe Rome conference understoodthere was enough food for everyone,even if the fact of food paled beforethe privilege of purchasing it.

As Sheeran began the narrative ofhow the World Food Program woulderadicate world hunger, we werejoined by her second in command,Nancy Roman, the WFP’s director ofcommunications, who observedSheeran the way campaign managersmonitor their candidate. “This is notyour grandmother’s food aid,” Sheer-an quipped as Roman kept watch.

In the beginning, most of the con-tributions to the World Food Pro-

gram came in the form of food, butas the years went by a growing pro-portion of the contributions came inthe form of cash. Originally, the or-ganization had focused on deliveringits rice and beans directly to thosewho had the bad luck to inhabit themost cursed spots on earth. But asgrain surpluses went down and theprice of shipping went up, the WFPtook the logical step of purchasingfood supplies from sources closer tothe famine, in many cases even fromwithin the borders of the affectedcountry. Thus did the WFP purchase18,000 metric tons of corn and beans

from Rwanda last year, for $6.3 mil-lion, and 210,000 metric tons offood from Uganda, for $55 million.Which made these countries’ re-spective presidents, Paul Kagameand Yoweri Museveni, happy to co-operate with the WFP’s designs forthe future.

In fact, World Food Program planscalled for the presidents of Rwandaand Uganda to travel to New Yorkjust a few months after the Romehunger summit. There, at UnitedNations world headquarters, presi-dents Kagame and Museveni wouldwelcome the WFP’s newest program.And on that morning, Josette Sheer-an revealed, the African presidentswould be joined by none other thanBill Gates.

Gates, Sheeran explained, was go-ing to help the WFP expand its pro-gram of local purchasing to smallfarmers and grain traders in the far-

ther reaches of their client nations.Such purchases, as logistically diffi-cult as they might be, would in-crease and support the agriculturalefforts of these so-called smallhold-ers. “This is the next wave of thestory,” said Sheeran.

Grain purchases from small farm-ers and traders would put cash intothe hands of hundreds of thousandsof people and encourage farmers toplant and harvest more and morefood. In addition, the WFP wouldput these farmers in contact withother groups, who would in turnhelp them acquire better seeds,

fertilizers, and pesticides, more ad-vanced irrigation systems, largerwarehouse facilities, and improvedaccess to roads. Thus could a poverty-stricken peasant move from being arecipient of food aid one year, to cre-ating a bit of surplus the next, tomaking a profitable business out of ita few years down the line—and sup-plying food for others.

In order to realize these plans, theWorld Food Program would guaran-tee a market where none might nowexist. They would do so, in part, by“forward contracting,” whereby theWFP would promise to purchase acertain amount of a farmer’s output,at a certain price, either one, two, orthree years down the line. Such guar-antees would give small farmers theincentive to plant more crops, sincethey could count on an eventualmarket for their goods. A WFP con-tract might even help farmers get


Kaufman Final2 4/22/09 9:02 AM 4

credit from the local bank, or per-haps a bit of crop insurance.

Josette Sheeran told me theacronym for her pilot program: P4P,which stands for Purchase for Progress.The $76 million program would befunded by the Howard G. Buffet Foun-dation, the Bill and Melinda GatesFoundation, and the government ofBelgium. In its first year of forwardcontracting, P4P would commit theWorld Food Program to purchasing40,000 tons of food from 350,000 smallfarmers. “We are studying a proposalwith Bill Gates on a way to do thecontract,” Sheeran said.

P4P was designed to mimic so-phisticated global markets. Alongwith its purchase guarantees, P4P in-cluded plans to support countrywidecommodity exchanges, which theWFP hoped would develop along thelines of the Chicago Board of Trade.(In Ethiopia and Uganda, exchangeshave already opened.) In the newparadigm, the smallest farmer canbenefit from the biggest market.

In some cases, P4P would not pur-chase a farmer’s grain immediatelybut instead would encourage him towarehouse his product and receive areceipt. More mysterious than rice ormillet, this slip of paper presented anumber of intriguing possibilities.First of all, the receipt allowed thefarmer to register with his country-wide exchange, a place in the capitalcity where all the grain from all thecountry’s farmers could be boughtand sold. Henceforth, the ruralfarmer could follow fluctuating priceswith the technology of his mobilephone. The once indigent peasantcould become a commodity traderand peg his sale to any time of theyear. In this way, he could forecast,model, and leverage more financing.No matter that commodity specula-tion and grain hoarding had helpedtrigger the world food crisis. No mat-ter that the recent Agribusiness Ac-countability Initiative declared thatmassive and unregulated commodity-market speculation “has pushed theprices of wheat, maize, rice and otherbasic foods out of the reach of hun-dreds of millions of people aroundthe world.”

Of course, the WFP would takeno responsibility for market peaks,

valleys, doldrums, and crashes. Thehappy news was that the solution toworld hunger would no longer haveto be about the food. It could beabout the money. And I imaginedthe sowers and reapers of Africa,Asia, and South America trans-formed into a massive cartel of graindealers—leveraging, diversifying,and cornering markets, driving theprice of rice and beans as high as themarket could bear. The peasant-turned-trader could wait as long ashe liked to go to market and, whilehe waited, place bets on which waythe market would move. He couldhoard in the great tradition of graindealers, hedge in the great traditionof bankers, and eventually pull inenough profit to render obsoleteevery guarantee and support of theWorld Food Program, quit farming,and go into insurance and bankingfor himself.

Thus the new paradigm. Thus theend of world hunger. And thus theend of my conversation with JosetteSheeran, who had to run to her nextmeeting. Nancy Roman stayed be-hind, so I asked her about rising foodcosts and all those riots. Higherwheat and rice prices could conceiv-ably help farmers, higher grocerybills might benefit agribusiness, andspeculation in commodity marketsmight be a boon for investors of allshapes and sizes—but how did suchfinancial fluctuations affect the ur-ban underclass of Nigeria and therural poor of Guatemala?

“Listen,” said Nancy Roman, “spec-ulation always drives up the cost ofeverything. Housing, telecommunica-tions, shoes . . .”

Before she joined the WFP, Ro-man had been president of the G7Group. She had made her livingexplaining Washington policy tohedge-fund managers, and as a re-sult she could situate virtually anypolitical or social phenomenonwithin easily comprehensible fi-nancial constructs, and she couldexplain why, in the midst of theworld food crisis, the Ospraie Spe-cial Opportunity Fund and theBlackRock Agricultural Fund hadgone on their latest buying sprees,snapping up grain silos, grain eleva-tors, fertilizer-distribution centers,

and huge tracts of land. Indeed, asthe world’s best and brightest fo-cused on food security, the solutionto the age-old problem of hunger ap-peared increasingly to coincide withthe age-old techniques that the bestand the brightest themselves em-ployed to ensure their own security.The solution to world hunger wasmore investment all the way up andall the way down the line, and all in-vestments were speculative.

“What people are uncomfortableabout is when you speculate aboutfood,” continued Roman, “somethingso fundamental to life. When you’respeculating on something that is theessence of life, when you’re speculat-ing in that space—” and here shestopped. She gazed across the press-room and she frowned.

“People don’t like that,” she said.

I n good times and in bad, it’shard to say no to money—whichcan foster dependency like nothingelse. Of course, the purpose of trans-forming the international food-aidbusiness into an international-business business is to foster entre-preneurial independence, not sub-servience. So in order to be trulytransformative, the money gift cannotsimply be a gift and nothing but agift. If that money is not to create aperpetual state of subordination, themoney gift must create business. Asin P4P, the cash might impel smallfarmers to purchase more loans, morepesticides, more seeds, more land; tobuy low and sell high.

Of course, when money has beendeployed as a spur to action, the de-ployment becomes entangled in ide-ology. The money may eventuallyspark the widest variety of politicaland economic reactions. For exam-ple, Maori warriors believe that allgifts ultimately accrue to the giver, sothat if you give a hungry man a fishhe may rightfully gut and cook andeat the fish, but the spirit of the fish,its hau, will eventually become rest-less and return to the giver of thefish. And if the gift happens to be theguaranteed-grain-purchase formulaeof the World Food Program, the hauwill journey through the spirit landof giftdom until it returns to its

REPORT 55


nativity, the warm, rich, capitalistwomb of Bill Gates.

Along the same lines, Claude Lévi-Strauss noted that the Nambikwarachieftains of the Brazilian Amazonproved their chieftainship through gen-erosity. By distributing food and othergoods, the big man retained and in-creased his power. Thomas Hobbesmade “gratitude” his fourth Law of Na-ture: “No man giveth, but with inten-tion of good to himself.” And the Es-kimo have a proverb: “Gifts make slavesas whips make dogs.”

In Niger, following a spate of localpurchases like those promised throughP4P, millet prices rose by 13 percent inlocal markets, followed by a 7 percentuptick in the national average.Guaranteed sales had increasedconsumer prices, which wouldeventually send more people intopoverty and starvation. The mon-ey gift triggered all manner of un-foreseen consequences.

It may be best not to know theultimate effect of your gift. Suchknowledge might compromise the ide-ological romance that made the giftpossible in the first place. Thus did afrenzy of cash pledges mark the end ofthe hunger summit in Rome, althoughno one at the conference really un-derstood what would be done withtheir money. Ed Schafer, the UnitedStates secretary of agriculture, led theflurry with an announcement that theUnited States Department of Agri-culture would donate $5 billion overthe next two years. French PresidentNicolas Sarkozy announced that hiscountry would donate one billion eu-ros. “Dying people are not happypeople,” noted Sarkozy.

After Sarkozy, the InternationalFund for Agricultural Developmentannounced a gift of $200 million. TheWorld Food Program mobilized $750million, and Robert Zoellick, presi-dent of the World Bank, pledged $1.2billion. The African Developmentbank pledged $1 billion; Spain pledged$773 million; the United Kingdom,$590 million; Japan, $150 million;Kuwait, $100 million; Venezuela, $100million; the Netherlands, $75 million;and New Zealand, $7.5 million. Onthe last day of the hunger summit, theIslamic Development Bank chippedin $1.5 billion.

“For what?” asked one hungercrat I met in the hallway. “Itis unclear.”

As the New York P4P press con-ference approached, I began to con-sider a question for Bill Gates. Why, de-spite our spending more money thanhad ever been spent to solve the prob-lem of world hunger, and why, despiteeverybody’s best efforts to reconceptu-alize the problem—why were more andmore people going hungry? PerhapsGates would consider the paradox thatour efforts might be exacerbating theproblem, that all we were doing waswrong. Obviously, this was not the kindof thing I could vet beforehand with a

publicist, or send over to [email protected] expecting a re-sponse. The nature of the questionseemed to defy reason. Which was whyI went to visit Amartya Sen.

As a nine-year-old boy, Sen wit-nessed the Bengal famine of 1943, thelast Indian famine, which occurredonly four years before the end of theRaj. Between 2 million and 3 millionpeople died, and Sen watched themdrop in the streets. This was the faminethat occasioned Winston Churchill’sremark that the famine was of no greataccount because the Indians wouldsimply “breed like rabbits.”

When Sen grew up he became aprofessor of economics and philoso-phy. His specialties included the eco-nomics of poverty and famine, andmany of his 26 books and 375 articlesdeal with these subjects.

For much of his career, Sen focusedon the fact that during the worst pe-riod of the Irish famine of the 1840s,“ship after ship sailed down the Shan-non, bound for England, laden withwheat, oats, cattle, hogs, eggs, andbutter.” Similarly, during the Ethiopi-an famine of 1973, food moved out ofthe hardest-hit Wollo province andheaded toward more affluent pur-chasers in Addis Ababa. Such uncan-

ny food “counter-movements” led Sento the insight that if governments wereto intervene in such situations,famines would not be so very difficultto prevent. “The rulers,” he wrote,“never starve.”

Sen had crunched the hunger num-bers as no one else had done before,not just for Bengal in 1943 and Ire-land in the 1840s but also for Ukrainein the 1930s, China in the 1950s and1960s, Ethiopia in the 1970s, Bangla-desh in 1974, Somalia and Sudan sev-eral times over. In 1982 he publisheda book called Poverty and Famines: AnEssay on Entitlement and Deprivationthat transformed the field. Other booksfollowed, including Inequality Reex-

amined and Rationality and Free-dom. In 1998, Sen was awardedthe Nobel Prize in Economics.

He lives in one of those quaintshingle-style houses a few blocksfrom Harvard Square, and on therainy day I came to visit I foundhim dressed in an Oxford button-down, a gray sweater vest, a pair of

khakis, and baby-blue socks. First weate, then we talked. His daughter servedbaked fish in mustard seeds, and afterlunch, since Sen was recovering fromsurgery, we retired to his living roomand he reclined on the pink couch, ayellow coverlet tucked under his chin,his head and his knee propped up on anelaborate arrangement of seven pil-lows. Next to him sat a pitcher of icewater, a bottle of Evian, a box ofKleenex, a pair of crutches, two phones,and two assistants.

“When people think they believein this or that,” said Sen, “I’m notsure.” He paused for an enormous pe-riod of time. He moved the pillows,straightened the coverlet, and glancedat the two watercolors that hung abovethe fireplace, portraits of Willard Quineand John Rawls. Old friends of his.And it occurred to me that Sen wasnot an economist so much as a philoso-pher, and that the solution he hadfound to world hunger had been theoutcome of a purely rational analysis,the same approach Descartes employedto cast a cold eye on the nature of hisown existence, and that Socrates usedto face death without flinching.

“I believe in reason,” said Sen.“There are those who want to repressreason. Christian, Muslim, and Hin-


WHY, DESPITE OUR SPENDING MORE

MONEY THAN HAD EVER BEEN SPENT TO

STOP WORLD HUNGER, WERE MORE AND

MORE PEOPLE GOING HUNGRY?


du fundamentalists, and those whopick a totem market economy, theliberal economic state. These are allanti-reason.”

He paused again and closed his eyes.I knew that Sen had written the in-troduction to a book on AIDS in In-dia that had been funded by the GatesFoundation, and I wondered if the af-filiation would cloud his perspective,but after a few minutes he began toexpound upon the relationship ofmarket-based movements of food todemand and purchasing power, and toexplain that none of these forces nec-essarily have anything to do with whogets enough to eat and who doesn’t. Infact, there was no fixed relation of anysort between food and famine. Somefamines, like Bangladesh in 1974, oc-cur in years of peak food availability.

In the midst of a severe hunger cri-sis, agricultural subsidies do not makemuch of a difference. And in the faceof famine, a reliance on marketeconomies is as ineffective as a relianceon loaves and fishes or manna fromHeaven. Even so, said Sen, faminesare not terribly difficult to avoid.Prevention requires the speedy imple-mentation of emergency income-creation and employment programs,in combination with the broader socialinfrastructure of representative democ-racy and a free press, which happens tobe the best early-warning system.Famine happens when rulers are alien-ated from those they rule, he explained,and a functioning democracy is a sim-ple way to remove such alienation.Famine happens when there is no freepress, because rulers tend to feel em-barrassed when photographs of starv-ing children appear on the front page.

New formulations of the hungerproblem were not necessary. Sen haddiscovered the solution and he hadgone over it many times, in abstrusetables for Econometrica, in articlesfor the Handbook of MathematicalEconomics, and in features for Gran-ta. He had explained the solution inhis hundreds of essays and dozens ofbooks in thousands of seminars andpublic addresses, yet his endlessly re-hearsed points had not been enough.The world remained irrational, andpeople starved.

Of course, no other hunger narrativehad ever succeeded either. Nor had

any institution in the world been ableto end world hunger. “No one organi-zation alone can do it,” Sen said.“None of the organizations alone can.”

I asked if the United Nations Foodand Agriculture Organization was upto the job.

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

What about Bill Gates and theWorld Food Program?

“It can do a lot of good,” he said. “But it’s not the way of solvingthe problem.”

Nothing but money is sweeterthan honey,” Benjamin Franklin fa-mously remarked. The portliest founderunderstood that market dynamics re-flect appetites, and were thus driven

more by the irrational gut than the ra-tional mind. Unreason may not seemso unreasonable when you are dying ofhunger, but full stomachs also maketheir demands and possess their in-voluntary ideologies.

Even the most well-intentioned,well-fed capitalist may fail to recog-nize that his own actions are causingthe very problems he most sincerelywants to solve. After all, it is rationalto invest in a commodity when itsprice rises, even if corn costs do hap-pen to push up feed prices. Chickenseat chicken feed made from that corn,so the price of a dozen organic eggshits $6.39. “All indications are thatsoaring feed costs are going to forcelivestock and poultry producers to raiseprices,” said Joel Brandenberger, pres-ident of the National Turkey Federa-tion, “or risk going out of business.”Bill Roenigk, chief economist of theNational Chicken Council, predictedthat “food inflation is poised to beginand continue for many, many months.”All of which impelled Iowa SenatorCharles Grassley to wax rabid andliken the American grocery lobby tothe Nazi Party. “They have to havean excuse for increasing the price oftheir food,” said Grassley. “It’s anoth-er Adolf Hitler lie.”

As food prices rise, profit marginsrecede, and Sara Lee Corporationmakes the front page of the Wall StreetJournal with a $695 million quarterlyloss. Meanwhile, in El Salvador, thegovernment suggests that hungrypeople simply tighten their belts.

Was anyone or anything immunefrom hunger’s plague of unreason?Were academics like Amartya Senthe only ones with the proper ana-lytical tools to withstand the on-slaught of hysteria? Was there any ev-idence, in all of human history, thatthose who lived the life of the mindmight rise above their intestines?

From 1919 to 1922, as 5 millionpeople across Russia died of famine,professors at the University of St.Petersburg—some of the most civi-lized and gifted people in the world—began to realize that they were allgoing to starve to death. During thiscrisis the intelligentsia kept a carefulwatch on themselves, as ProfessorPitirim Sorokin reported in his mono-maniacal world history, Hunger as a

REPORT 57

“


Factor in Human Affairs, which hewrote while he was starving. Sorokincategorized world hunger into a strict taxonomy of absolute-deficiency starvation, relative-deficiency starva-tion, individual-comparative starva-tion, social-comparative starvation,and quantitative-qualitative relative-deficiency starvation. So the faculty atSt. Petersburg knew precisely what toexpect: feelings of hurt, weakness,headache, dizziness, and upset stom-ach, followed by nausea and terribleaches in the joints. Later, when un-remitting hunger obscured the clarityof consciousness, they knew they wouldforget where they were, where theylived, and, finally, their names. A dulland hopeless apathy would set in, andthen the infamous “famine psychosis”would reign: depression, paralysis, andan overwhelming sensation of exis-tential emptiness. Pathological ex-pressions of anger and rage would soonfollow, along with hunger delirium andhallucinatory paroxysms like those ex-perienced by Saint Anthony, Saint Ig-natius of Loyola, and Jesus in thewilderness, as Satan tempted him totwist stones into bread.

As the professors quietly awaitedtheir fate, the rest of Russia went mad.In Moscow, a starving husband mur-dered his wife, carved a roast out ofone part of her body, made a soupfrom another, and a jelly loaf from herfeet. In Minsk, two children killedand gradually consumed a third. Inthe village of Esipovka, a woman cutup the body of her seven-year-olddaughter and ate it. “Hunger makes anorm of abnormality,” wrote PitirimSorokin. “Starvation tends to alterour ideology.”

Every evening, the professors wouldseat themselves around the universi-ty refectory for their single daily mealof watery broth flecked with scraps ofpotato peel. As they ate, the biolo-gists among the crowd would grimlyprognosticate how long each couldexpect to survive. The behavioristswould report how many laboratorydogs had died that day, while thephilosophers discussed the growingwave of hunger suicides. Entire fami-lies had ended their lives by carbonmonoxide poisoning, others by in-fecting themselves with spotted ty-phus fever, others by hanging them-

selves or by drowning. “Mostly theconversation turned on who had beenarrested, or had been executed, whohad died,” Sorokin reported. “In one

way or another all becamethieves and swindlers.”

The United Nations had convenedits Sixty-third General Assembly, whichmeant block after block of river-viewhigh-rises cordoned off by riot police,gunships on the East River, frogmen inthe water, helicopters in the sky,SWAT units in SWAT vans, waves ofincensed demonstrators from Chinaand the Upper West Side, and a rain-bow coalition of dark-suited, grim-faced,crew-cut, heavyset men who spoke intotheir lapels. Past the police barricadesthe climate-change, bioenergy, and hunger crowd had magicallyreappeared—the same presidents, primeministers, and assorted excellencies, inaddition to a new entourage whoseidentity badges read, BILL GATES DELE-GATION. Among the representatives of192 member states, the presidents ofRwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda mayhave been happiest of all to see thisnew delegation, for it signified a gift.

I wound through the United Na-tions’ underground maze of baby-bluebarricades, mini-militias, and metal de-tectors until I reached ConferenceRoom 4, one of those vast interiors thatpromised the future of the world in itsbold angles and curves and molded plas-tic chairs bolted to the floor. The burlyguys with automatic weapons were notletting anyone in until the K-9 unithad given the all-clear, so I loitered be-side a huddle of World Food Programunderlings who snapped to attentionwhen Nancy Roman marched into theirmidst, followed by their executive di-rector, Josette Sheeran.

When the hounds headed out ofConference Room 4 the press headedin. We dispersed around the great mod-ernist semicircle of egalitarian unidesk,and I settled less than ten feet fromthe big nameplates. The three Africanpresidents were flanked beyond theempty chair for Bill Gates, their ex-cellencies Yoweri Museveni of Ugan-da, Paul Kagame of Rwanda, andJakaya Kikwete of Tanzania, all in theirgray suits, all attended by bodyguardsand aides.

Yoweri Museveni had been born a

peasant and Paul Kagame had spenthis youth in refugee camps, but todaythey would sit with one of the world’srichest men. Jakaya Kikwete’s grand-father had been a chief, so perhaps hefelt a bit more comfortable than theothers in the presence of power. WhenPresident Kikwete came to Americain 2006 he visited the headquarters ofNASDAQ and appeared on CNBC totout Tanzania as an international in-vestment opportunity. But as businesswith Shell, Dominion Petroleum, andDe Beers increased, Kikwete’s countryveered into what the InternationalFood Policy Research Institute was nowcalling an “alarming level of hunger.”

When Bill Gates and Josette Sheer-an walked up to the dais, deep in con-versation, the flashbulbs lit her reddress and his yellow paisley tie. Silencesettled as Bettina Lüescher, the for-mer CNN International anchor andcurrent World Food Program seniorpublic-affairs officer, took her spot offto the side and soberly thanked every-one for coming. “This is a wonderfulevent,” she observed. Then she intro-duced her boss.

“Thank you,” said Josette Sheeran.She welcomed everyone to the kickoffof Purchase for Progress and then gotright to the point. “Today you see apartnership determined to put hungerout of business.”

Sheeran recited her litany of everworsening facts and figures, includingthe latest hunger statistics, which in-dicated that the number of malnour-ished people had gone up once againand the cost of fertilizer in some areashad risen 400 percent. “Farmers arereeling,” said Sheeran.

ActionAid International, the glob-al anti-poverty organization, had re-cently reported that a full quarter ofthe world’s population were now beingdenied their “right to food.” Thedroughts in Australia and Ukraine haddestroyed harvests. In Nigeria, the priceof gari had doubled. And authoritiesin Bihar, one of India’s poorest states,suggested that everyone switch fromeating rice to eating rats. “Eating ofrats will serve twin purposes,” VijayPrakash, an official from the state’swelfare department, told Reuters. “Itwill save grains from being eaten awayby rats and will simultaneously increaseour grain stock.”



As Sheeran continued from whereshe had left off in Rome, Bill Gatesbegan, as was his habit, to rock in hischair, his eyes fixed somewhere in themiddle distance. He rocked andpicked his ear and nodded andgrinned, and eventually he turned onhis microphone.

“It is an honor to be here with thisgroup,” he said. He looked down thetable and nodded at the African pres-idents, who nodded back.

Then, in the great visionary tradi-tion of the United Nations, Bill Gatesspoke of a world in which the havescan teach the have-nots how to sell.“Ultimately, the goal here is to havethese markets be self-sustaining,” hesaid, noting that most of the world’spoor people happened to be farmers.“Allowing them to participate in thesemarkets is a real win-win.”

Through such received wisdom andclichés did the chieftain display hisgenerosity, and turn wolves into dogs.

“Let me join Josette in expressingmy sincere appreciation to Bill Gates,”said Jakaya Kikwete. “It is our prob-lem,” continued Kikwete. “You arecoming to our rescue.”

Paul Kagame was the next Africanpresident to speak, and the Tutsi gen-eral who had dominated Rwandan pol-itics since the genocide was on his bestbehavior. “We are very happy inRwanda to be associated with this pro-gram,” he droned. “It is our duty asgovernments to make these coopera-tive efforts work.” Indeed, out of a pop-ulation of 9 million, almost 5 millionRwandans are at risk of going hungry.

After his short speech, Kagame yield-ed the floor to Uganda’s president, theelder statesman of the little group.“High food prices are very good for us,”said Yoweri Museveni, who had beencriticized for arresting opposition lead-ers, clamping down on the press, andworking to destroy some of the lastremnants of Uganda’s rain forest in or-der to reward politically connectedplantation owners for whom high foodprices were indeed a very good thing.In the northeast of Uganda more than700,000 people did not have enoughfood. And in the provincial capital ofMoroto, three-quarters of the popula-tion were starving to death. Here, es-calating prices for maize, sorghum, andpulses would not be good news.

“Thank you, Josette,” concludedYoweri Museveni. “She buys a lot offood from us,” he said. “And I saluteMr. Bill Gates.”

Now Bettina Lüescher returned toher microphone and asked if anyonehad any questions. I raised my hand butshe called on someone else. Secondquestion, she looked right past me.Ditto for the third.

“We are running out of time,” saidLüescher. “One last question.”

She gazed at the multitude of handsfrom front to back and all around thearc of the majestic semicircle. Thenshe smiled and said, “Fred.”

I clicked on my microphone andsaid I had a question for Mr. Gates:Despite all he was doing to end worldhunger, might not programs like Pur-chase for Progress in the end perpet-uate market conditions that actuallypromote world hunger?

An uncomfortable silence settledon the room, and for the first time thatmorning Bill Gates stopped smiling.Instead of answering my question heasked one in return, the only indica-tion of his annoyance the fact that hehad forgotten to turn on his micro-phone. “What do you mean by ‘marketconditions’?” he asked.

I had planned my question in ad-vance, but never suspected I would berequired to speak at any length. NowI found myself in front of a micro-phone, in full possession of my ownfamine narrative, a story that had beenaccruing for months. An irresistibleurge took hold, and I launched intothe tale of Dionysodorus the Atheniangrain merchant, Roman mobs rushingthe Palatine, and medieval marketsfor human flesh and living children. Icited Xenokles and Archestratos, theBemba and the Bushmen and theTikopians of the South Pacific. Thehistory of the world was the history ofhungry people, I explained. Money,politics, war—none had ever beenenough to stop starvation. And so onand so forth. Josette Sheeran sat frozenbehind the dais and Bill Gates scowled.

“You should track what the foodoutput has been,” he said, and thistime he remembered to turn on hismicrophone. “The amount of food be-ing produced in the world today ismuch greater than millennia ago.” Hisface had grown florid as he gazed down

from his perch beside the African pres-idents. “Incredible progress has beenmade,” he recited. “You get operatingmarkets, they can feed the world verywell. This money is being spent be-cause it improves the human condi-tion.” And now his smile returned. “Ifyou look at historical figures and donot see a positive trend, you might notchoose to be involved,” he said, “but Ido see a positive trend.”

Gates shook his head and turnedoff his microphone, and BettinaLüescher announced that the newsconference had come to an end. Atwhich point, Jakaya Kikwete switchedon his microphone.

“To assume that what the assistancethat Bill Gates and Howard Buffet areextending to African farmers is doingis perpetuating hunger,” said Kikweke,“that is a big misconception.” The ideathat Bill Gates and the World FoodProgram might actually be increasingfamine had interrogated the veryessence of the gift heading Kikwete’sway: his fertilizer market, his seed mar-ket, his loans, his commodity-optionstechnology, his slice of progress pie.And so the president of Tanzania re-commenced his well-rehearsed paeanto the new era of hunger management.

“I am seeing a lot of sense in whatthey are doing,” Kikwete continued,but no one was listening anymore,not even Bettina Lüescher, who re-peated that the news conference wasover. The press continued theirquest to extract something morefrom Bill Gates, who ignored thenoise. And still Tanzania’s chief ex-ecutive would not stop. Jakaya Kik-wete wanted his money and his mar-kets, and he would keep recitinguntil he got them.

Eventually, the African presidenttired of his speech. The aides and sec-retaries cleared the room, along withthe World Food Program crowd andthe Bill Gates Delegation. And for amoment, Conference Room 4 stoodempty. Then Indonesia’s minister forforeign affairs took a seat at the dais,alongside the prime minister of Den-mark, the president of Poland, andU.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.A new press person announced a newpress conference.

Hunger was over. It was time to dis-cuss climate change. ■

REPORT 59


LET THEM EAT CASH Can Bill Gates Turn Hunger into … · HARPER’S MAGAZINE/JUNE 2009 $6.95 LET...

Documents

Transcript of LET THEM EAT CASH Can Bill Gates Turn Hunger into … · HARPER’S MAGAZINE/JUNE 2009 $6.95 LET...