A. Hunger and denial of the right to food

To be hungry and to be denied the right to food represents the denial of one of the most basic human rights. It also affects many other human rights, such as the right to life, to health, to livelihood. The following cases speak to this denial of the right to food and the nature of hunger.

1. 'Households regularly skip meals'
(Bela Bhatia and Jean Dreze, 'Starvation and the Right to Food in Jharkand', http://www.righttofoodindia.org/data/bhatiadreze.pdf Accessed on 3 June 2004.)

A fact finding team visited Kusumatand village, Manatu block, Palamau district, Jharkand in India in late June and early July 2002 to investigate three starvation deaths that had been reported in May. The team observed that the entire hamlet was in a state of permanent semi-starvation. Most people survived on small quantities of broken rice, supplemented with whatever wild food was available in the season, such as mahua, saag or gethi (local root). The team reported that at the time of their visit many people were eating lumps of plain saag without rice. Twenty out of 21 randomly selected households reported that they had to regularly skip meals. Most households drank contaminated water from shallow wells—a sample from one of the wells was full of worms.

The residents of Kusumatand were all landless or virtually landless and survived on seasonal labor migration and whatever other casual labor they could find. Households reported that their expenditure on non-food items was nil in an average month—clothes were bought once a year if at all and luxury items such as tea or bidis was done without. Only seven of the 21 households owned a blanket or quilt.

The children in the village were rarely seen running or playing. Instead, they tended to stand by listlessly, ill-clad and undernourished. At the time of the team’s visit, many children were suffering from conjunctivitis, possibly due to contaminated water. There were no health facilities in the village and most children were unvaccinated. While private treatment was available in Manatu, few could afford it. In such a situation it is not surprising that the villagers

frequently perish from the combined burden of malnutrition, weakness and hunger-related diseases. This, it appears, is what happened to Sundar Bhaiya, Kunti Devi and Basanti Devi ?the three victims of ‘starvation deaths? These deaths ?can be seen as the extreme manifestation of a much larger problem of endemic hunger in the area. In each case, the tragedy began with chronic hunger and exhaustion, followed by a prolonged period of precarious survival on wild food, culminating in a brief and fatal illness ?Even today, the surviving members of these families live in dreadful poverty and could die any day of starvation-induced illness.

Consider for instance the surviving members of Kunti Devi’s family. Her husband, Bageshwar Bhuiya, suffers from TB and is unable to work. His illness goes untreated because he has no money and the staff at the local health centre charge patients for TB drugs that are supposed to be available for free. The burden of looking after him and his six children falls on his mother, a courageous 70-year old widow who walks to Manatu from time to time to glean broken rice from the local rice mill. Aside from the little rice she brings from the mill, which is barely fit for human consumption, the family survives exclusively on wild food. The house collapsed a few months ago and the family had to take refuge in a corner of Bageshwar’s brother’s house. Except for one cooking pot and a few rags, the family owns absolutely nothing ?not even a blanket or a single pair of chappals (Bhatia & Dreze).

Although India has a food assistance system, it was paralyzed not only in the village of Kusumatand, but in the entire block. The fact-finding team noted that a survey of 36 villages in Manatu showed that not a single BPL (below poverty line) family in those villages had received grain from the system for the last two years. And this in spite of the fact that the Food Corporation of India (which has about 65 million tonnes of wheat and rice lying in storage) has a warehouse across the road from the block office in Manatu.

2. 'Even officials steal rice and cooking oil from government warehouses'
(Elizabeth Lee, 'I can¡¯t even feed my children: More voices of the hungry nation', article2, vol. 2, no. 2, April 2003, pp. 39-54)

Burma is a country where people are struggling daily to obtain enough food to eat. This situation has been linked to military rule and the agricultural policies of the state.

Rice is the staple food of people in Burma, but from the middle of 2002 there were reports of a domestic rice shortage. Poor weather conditions had damaged the rainy season crop, but the government forged ahead with exports, even raising its target. The result was that

The people in Mergui (Beik), Tenasserim Division are running out of staple rice supply and they have to survive by drinking rice porridge. Rice merchants are hoarding their stocks in other villages and rice vendors are only stocking a small amount of rice in their shops and charging people more than the normal price. The people of some quarters in Mergui have to be content with broken rice soup (quoted in Lee, 40).

With the value of the Burmese currency plummeting, the cost of feeding a family is rising, with the result that many families in once relatively prosperous urban areas are spending 70 per cent of their household income on food. The looting of rice has become common, with even officials stealing rice and cooking oil from government warehouses.

The government needs rice just as much as the people, to feed the army and provide subsidized rice and other basic goods to the civil service and army families, which are major incentives for persons becoming soldiers, teachers and government clerks. Subsequently, the government continues to pressure farmers to grow dry season paddy crops in areas where there is not enough rainfall or irrigation to do so. When the farmers have failed to do so, their land has been confiscated. Land confiscation is often arbitrary, but it does have the backing of the law. In some cases local landholders have been pushed off their farms to make way for big commercial croppers, while in other instances the army has taken over land for its own use or for anti-insurgent activities. Not only does such land confiscation drastically curtail the right to food, but it also increases internal displacement, forced migration and labor. In fact, it has been noted that among those with the least to eat are those who are internally displaced. While some of these people go to the relocation sites set up by the state, others hide in the mountains and jungles. According to one such woman,

The suffering endured by our people here is very hard. Every village is suffering. The enemy entered our area and tortured us hard, but we couldn’t do anything. We fled to the jungle. Some people have run out of paddy and rice. We run to borrow it from other people. If we can borrow it we can eat, but if we can’t then we don’t eat for two or three days. The [army] people came down and burned all [of] our paddy and rice in our village. We have to suffer hard. We are one of the groups which has had to flee to stay in the jungle (quoted in Lee, 49).

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The right to food is one of the most basic human rights, without which there can be no right to life. The right to food is about freedom from hunger, which can be interpreted in two ways. One is the more immediate way, where people are suffering from hunger and do not have enough food to eat, i.e. food scarcity. The second way is to look at a broader context, examining the factors that contribute to not only a person having a lack of food, but also the type of food that is available and the conditions that determine this availability, including water and land—in other words, what is known as food security. While it is the broader context of food security that is the ultimate concern, this concern must begin with the narrower, more immediate situation, where people are suffering from a lack of food.

B. Why food?

Hunger is man's first and most tenacious enemy, a primal threat to human security that attacks both the individual and society alike. Hunger taunts the stomach and disturbs the mind. Hunger evicts families from their customary homes and sentences them to new lives as refugees. Hunger divides communities into the fed and the unfed, or the overfed and the malnourished.

Hunger distorts the marketplace. It transforms the humblest sack of rice or beans into a delicacy priced beyond the means of an average wallet. It refutes the farmer's fundamental economic formula: land plus labour plus a modicum of good fortune equals food. Replacing it is a more vicious theorem: labour produces, but neither producing food nor possessing it guarantees that one will eat. For its part, luck abandons the hungry.

Hunger corrodes the machinery of the state. Taxes, flowing ever upward, are paid in paddy. Soldiers receive their wages in paddy, or just as frequently in permission to take what they wish with impunity. Civil servants respond to the call of hunger by appropriating the functions of office to serve their own gnawing pangs—a special fee here, an added service there, the expedition of paperwork, the granting of a permit. It intrudes on the classroom and corrupts the largesse of teachers, transforming a profession of giving into a corps of takers forced by their empty stomachs to accumulate whatever they can from the state and students alike.

Hunger is both highly personal and thoroughly social. It is physiological and economic; emotional and mechanical; simple and complex. Because it is natural, hunger is everywhere a native, capable of appearing in every hamlet and town, but nowhere a citizen to be named, apprehended, and called to account for its crimes and prejudices. Hunger preoccupies its victims with implications—they must find food, take to the road, borrow a cupful of grain, ration their meals, bury their stores, seek a bribe, avoid the taxman, tell lies at the checkpoint, hide their chickens, eat quickly and move on, feed the children first—rather than its origins. And why bother searching for causes, when hunger, our familiar enemy, is simply the absence of food? (Chris Cusano, 'The making of a people’s tribunal? article2, vol. 2, no. 2, April 2003, p. 35).

Inherent in the protection of the right to food is the protection of human dignity and equality. The right to food is a measurement of the equality of human beings; denial of the right to food negates a person’s very humanity and dignity, thereby establishing their inequality. This is illustrated by the billions of people daily denied access to adequate food and water, while a minority of the world’s population lives with an oversupply of food. These inequalities relating to food and water have an explicit link to authoritarian rule:

It is not possible for a government to win popular consent until it has satisfied its people’s basic nutritional needs. Therefore, societies where large numbers of people are going hungry are inevitably ruled without popular consent and participation, perhaps even by force, and without democracy in spirit or in structure (Editorial board, 'The Permanent People's Tribunal on the Right to Food and the Rule of Law in Asia', article2, vol. 2, no. 2, April 2003, p. 2).

Genuine democracy is thus essential for the legitimate guarantee of the right to food. Similarly, effective rule of law is also necessary, without which there can be no equality before the law. Ineffective rule of law also means that law enforcement agencies have become instruments to perpetuate inequality, including the unequal distribution of food and water. This is done through state approved violence. Torture, detention and extrajudicial killing become normalized, preventing people from the enjoyment of their rights as well as closing avenues for redress. In this sense the struggle for food and the struggle for justice is one: “The fight against torture, illegal detention, extrajudicial killing and other violations of civil and political rights is essential to create and maintain the space necessary to struggle for adequate food and water?(Editorial board, 'The Permanent People's Tribunal on the Right to Food and the Rule of Law in Asia', article2, vol. 2, no. 2, April 2003, p. 4).

C. Questions For Discussion

1. Discuss situations where you know there to exist food scarcity or food insecurity while answering these questions:
a. Who are the people suffering in these cases (indigenous peoples, laborers etc.)?
b. Who is immediately responsible for the relief of these people? What are the relevant domestic laws that can be applied in this situation?
c. What is presently being done to help the people and to address the systemic problems that cause hunger?
2. What is the link between access to adequate food and military rule; between right to food and right to land; between food scarcity and working children?