'How much poorer do we need to be?'
asked Ravi, a harassed and emaciated young autorickshaw driver I recently
met in Bangalore. He was shocked to find out he did not qualify as 'BPL'
(Below Poverty Line), and therefore won't get what he had hoped for at
the ration shop. As he put it, he and his wife work 'all the time' and
yet with two ailing parents, they were barely surviving. I suspect our
barely surviving millions live with the same anguish I saw in Ravi's eyes:
am I poor enough to qualify? Will I get a BPL card? Worse still, our Ravis
(or their overworked wives and ailing parents) have absolutely no voice
in determining those 'qualifications' they are required to meet. Being
human is not enough; being citizen is not enough; being poor and hungry
are not enough either. They have to be exactly as poor and hungry as the
government requires them to be.
This, in essence, is the human face of 'targeting'. Under targeting, the
state establishes criteria to determine which groups 'truly deserve' whatever
benefits it chooses to offer. Universal regimes, on the other hand, give
benefits to the entire population as a matter of right. Remember how the
IMF championed targeting during the glorious days of structural adjustment?
It went from country to country forcing states to dismantle universal
social policy regimes and wreaked havoc on the poor.
It is disconcerting, to say the least, that targeting seems to be the
officially favoured approach with respect to the Right to Food. With the
pervasive nature of hunger and malnutrition in India today, one might
wonder how a universal right to food can even be in question. Should every
Indian not have a right to be free from hunger and food insecurity? Should
anything less suffice? I suppose when a government needs court orders
to get rotting grains to its starving citizens, and a veteran minister
'mistakes' a supreme court order for a casual suggestion, nothing can
be taken for granted. And now comes the PM's rebuke
to the SC for its alleged intervention in policy-making. But what
about the gross failures of policy-making that made the court's intervention
necessary in the first place? A targeted approach to food security, based
on a myopic premise of 'resource efficiency' will be yet another addition
to that long line of policy failures.
What's wrong with targeting?
The argument for targeting is potentially very seductive. Here is how
it goes. If it could, the government would feed every hungry person. But
it can't. It has only a limited amount of resources, which it cannot 'fritter
away'. Neither does it have enough grain (barring what is in the warehouses)
nor does it have enough money (barring the revenues it 'foregoes' from
the corporate sector). More importantly, the rich would abuse the government's
goodwill and grab even these scarce resources. It must choose therefore
to feed only those who are the 'most deserving'. And how does it do that?
Choosing between the rich and poor would be relatively easy. But in India's
vast and growing landscape of hunger, targeting means choosing between
the destitute, the poor, and the barely surviving; or if you like, the
starving, the chronically hungry, the malnourished, the anaemic and the
food insecure.
While planners and technocrats see important differences between these
categories of people, the truth is that all of them need food support.
None of them earn an income that can buy a basic, nutrition-adequate food
basket. The real question before us is why this is the case: why is it
that so many people get so little value for their work that they must
go hungry?
Naturally, where the need for support is so pervasive, targeting constitutes
a rather difficult exercise: an exercise that involves some serious questions
of justice and democracy.
For one, can a right based on 'targeting' be considered a 'right' at all?
It certainly cannot qualify as an inalienable right as human rights should
be, and would contradict the International
Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. By vesting in the
state the authority to determine who is entitled to that right, it reduces
the 'right' to a matter of discretion, or at best a a highly tenuous and
negotiable moral obligation. Is it really so different from you and I
trying to help someone in need when we feel have some money to spare?
Legislation based on such an unclear distinction between rights and discretion
can be rather dangerous, particularly where so many lives hang in balance.
Second, targeting involves very serious questions of justice. How can
the state justly choose the 'most deserving'? How does it determine what
is a just distribution of food? As Amartya Sen has warned, consensus on
such questions of justice is difficult to reach and require reasoned public
discussion. 'Reasoned' discussion however, is rendered difficult, if not
impossible, when unequal power relations exist. Some have the power to
unfairly influence public discourse while others are marginalized. Most
importantly: can the question be settled justly if the poor and the hungry
are systematically excluded from these discourses? As of now, the vital
norms that determine the lives of the poor are almost entirely set by
others. This itself is a kind of injustice, of having to live by norms
we have not participated in establishing - but others have established
for us. It violates a basic principle of self-determination. It reflects,
as well, a structural deficit of democracy, particularly unacceptable
from elites who regularly milk the democracy cow for electoral gains or
for glory at the global stage.
A targeted approach to food (or basic needs) is both unjust and undemocratic
in this sense of denying self-determination. A universal approach avoids
the injustice of violating self-determination. However, a universal approach
may err in that it treats unequals as equals, by giving the hungry and
the non-hungry the same right. But so does electoral democracy in deeply
unequal societies. Are we ready to let the poorest have guaranteed rights
to political representation as well? Given the paucity of honest politicians,
how about guaranteeing two honest politicians per poor person at three
rupees a piece?
Absurdities aside, surely the way to reduce the conflict between democracy
and inequality is to reduce inequality rather than dilute democracy. The
same goes for a right as vital as the right to food - the solution is
not to restrict the right but to remove the constraints that prevent it
from being enjoyed equally by all. A targeted approach takes these constraints
as given. It allows the state to constantly invoke those 'constraints',
negotiate its targets and manoeuvre its obligations to the hungry. The
state still retains the power to decide who it wants to feed and when.
The citizens' right to food becomes a residual of state power.
But most critically: targeting removes from public scrutiny - and the
purview of legislation - the fundamental reasons as to why the state's
constraints come to exist in the first place. Why
indeed is there not 'enough' money or 'enough' grain? Could
we have more money, for example, by reducing write-offs to business? Could
we have more grain by reversing policies which force farmers out of farming?
It is precisely in this potential to raise these questions that the greatest
strength of universalism lies. By giving every citizen a right to food,
it creates and obligation for the state to reorder its priorities, rather
than constantly pleading resource constraints. It reduces the state's
wiggle room to play with hunger. In sum, it gives the public greater ammunition
to scrutinize how governments define their constraints and priorities.
Universalism and beyond
A major caveat, however. If our goal is to really get to the root causes
of hunger, then even a universal right to food will not do: we must insist
on a broad understanding of that right as well. In the current discussions,
'Right to Food' means the right to consume a certain amount of food. No
more. But the right to food can go much further than that. As the global
peasant movements demand, the Right to Food must also include the right
to determine how food is produced. These movements point to a deeper,
structural injustice: the majority of the world's hungry are those who
produce food - but are powerless to determine how food is produced or
consumed. Right now, the power to determine food production resides with
large agribusiness or with governments. Both are focused on growing 'more'
food: one for profit and the other for political power, and with terrible
consequences.
This is why rich governments are engaging in land grab of massive proportions.
According to a recent report, some 125 million acres (roughly equal to
Sweden) has been grabbed by rich countries for outsourcing agricultural
production:
''Visit a supermarket in Abu Dhabi and you'll be greeted by row after row of picture-perfect produce .. It's likely those rows of shiny vegetables and fruit came from an improbable source: Ethiopia, a country practically synonymous with famine. Yes, Africa, where one in three people is malnourished, is now growing tomatoes and butter lettuce for export... Ethiopia's biggest greenhouse farming operation is kept hidden from curious, or hungry, eyes...'' (See 'Famine-ridden Ethiopia: What's the new global source for fresh, shiny produce?')
Some eighty Indian companies, allegedly with support from the Indian government, are active in this area as well. In 2009, a Bangalore-based company with large agricultural projects in Ethiopia claimed to hold ''one of the largest agriculture land banks in the world''. As Kenya's Daily Nation reported in June 2009:
''India leads the "land grabbing" race and so far Indian agricultural investment has been more than $2.5 billion. India's total investment in Ethiopia was $300 million three years ago and has now grown to $ 4.3 billion. It is double the amount of Western aid offered to Ethiopia'' (See 'Amid hunger, foreign companies in race to 'grab' Ethiopia's arable land')
Equally remarkable developments are occurring in the area of genetic engineering, the other much-loved 'solution' to hunger. For example, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Monsanto and USAID have teamed up to take genetic engineering to new heights. The Foundation has invested $23.1 million in 500,000 shares of Monsanto stock. But there is more:
''They also need the power of U.S. government funding. That is where the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Casey-Lugar come in. USAID is now headed up by former Gates employee Rajiv Shah. The Casey-Lugar Global Food Security act ties foreign aid to GMOs. When the Gates Foundation places a bet, they like to hold all the cards.'' See 'Monsanto in Gates' Clothing? The Emperor's New GMOs')
In this perverse race to grow more food, a justiciable Right to Food,
interpreted narrowly, can become a dangerous double-edged sword. It may
well lend legitimacy to these anti-people pro-profit growth strategies,
which governments will support in the name of fulfilling the right to
food.
Therefore, along with laws that govern food distribution, we also need
laws that govern food production. We need laws that prevent profiteering
from food and land and from vesting all food-related decisions with corporations.
Right to Food must also mean that food producing communities have the
right to determine how food is to be produced. This is what global social
movements are calling food sovereignty, and this is what people in some
of the world's poorest countries are struggling for. Haitians,
for instance, began to mobilize for food sovereignty even before
they had recovered their loved ones from the January earthquake. Bolivia,
Ecuador, Mali, Senegal and Venezuela have put food sovereignty in their
constitutions.
In India, Kerala's Food Security Action Scheme appears to go beyond the
narrow notion of food security towards a more comprehensive strategy.
The 2008
legislation which aims to prevent paddy-producing land and
wetland from being diverted to other uses, particularly construction,
is an important piece in this strategy. The Action Scheme also calls explicitly
for rejuvenating fallow land so as to increase agricultural production.
In a fascinating experiment which encourages women to take up agriculture,
the state's anti-poverty mission, Kudumbashree, has brought some 65,000
acres of land under cultivation. The cultivators are groups of women who
jointly lease land, cultivate it, decide how much of their produce they
wish to consume and sell the surplus to local markets. As I travelled
through Kerala to meet Kudumbashree farmers, I was struck by the changes
it has already brought about in women's lives. Most are/were agricultural
labourers but now see a possibility of becoming independent producers.
For them, the act of farming seemed to deliver a much stronger, more palpable
food security that came from having control over their production and
their produce. Their biggest problem is indeed the oldest one: of not
owning land. As this experiment clearly indicates, the right to food cannot
be realized without opening up these classic (and unsettled) questions
of land ownership and agrarian relations.
While many would agree that these questions have serious implications
for food security, they will immediately warn against 'trying to load
too much on to a single act' (the proposed Food Security Act that is).
The question is not 'how much' but 'what'. Laws/rights are manifestations
of social relations. They can either simply legitimise unequal social
relations or open up possibilities for changing them.
Universalizing the right to food opens up possible - albeit not unequivocal
- paths to challenge the unequal social relations which govern the food
economy. A targeted approach on the other hand provides a tool to manage
and legitimize those inequities. And it gives states and policy-makers
the moral impunity to do so, in the name of serving only the 'truly deserving'.