The Third Freedom: Ending Hunger in Our Time.

The Third Freedom: Ending Hunger in Our Time by George McGovern Simon & Schuster. 173pages. $22.00.

In the years immediately following India's independence, poverty was so abject in my part of the country that poorer people could not afford to buy wheat to satisfy their hunger. Instead, they bought coarser and less nutritious grains like millet. The subsequent years have seen an improvement in the purchasing power of the average person to the extent that millet and other coarse grains have almost disappeared from the local marketplace. But hunger has not quite done the same disappearing act all over India or in the rest of the world. About 800 million people are hungry worldwide--more than 200 million of them from India. In such countries as Somalia, Afghanistan, and Haiti, the vast majority of the population is underfed.

Two new books, one by former Senator George McGovern and the other by Food First and the International Forum on Globalization, attempt to trace the causes of global hunger and propose solutions--albeit from different perspectives.

McGovern takes the title of his book from the "Four Freedoms" enunciated by President Franklin Roosevelt in his 1941 State of the Union address. FDR'S Third Freedom referred to freedom from want. McGovern thinks that, with the right measures, hunger can be halved within fifteen years and eliminated by 2030. He rightly points out that there has been progress in reducing world hunger, noting that by the late 1990s it had been reduced by 50 percent over the past quarter-century. He cites polls to show that a vast majority of Americans think it should be a top priority of the U.S. government to end hunger at home and abroad.

The 1972 Democratic Presidential candidate has a long history of trying to end hunger, a record he emphasizes with justifiable pride. He headed the Food for Peace program under President Kennedy. He was instrumental in getting the U.N. World Food Program started with crucial financial support from the United States. He also helped set up the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs. He is currently the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. agencies on food and agriculture in Rome. He accepted the post under President Clinton and was reappointed to it by President George W. Bush.

But his long and close association with government makes him place too much faith in the benign intentions and overall efficacy of U.S. programs abroad, a faith that is debatable, at best.

For instance, he extols the virtues of the Alliance for Progress and Food for Peace programs that the United States set up: "I shall always be proud to have been the Food for Peace director in the Kennedy Administration during 1961 and 1962. In his soon-to-be-published biography of me, Professor [Thomas] Knock concludes that I `had coordinated the feeding of more hungry people than any other individual in American history.'"

But as Stephen G. Rabe points out in The Most Dangerous Area in the World: John E Kennedy Confronts Communist Revolution in Latin America (University of North Carolina, 1999), the Alliance for Progress was by most accounts a failure, with per capita agricultural production falling and little progress being made on other social indicators. One of the reasons for the failure of the program was its timidity on land reform, a subject that McGovern neglects.

McGovern also praises the Public Law 480 program passed by Congress to send farm aid to other countries. But as even he points out, the program was often perverted to suit U.S. ends. When the United States offered aid to India in the mid-1960s under this program, it stipulated that India adopt free market policies.

Make no mistake, McGovern believes in free trade and free markets. He sees the World Trade Organization as a way for the developing world to lessen poverty and hunger, provided they are given able advice by "experts" on how to navigate the system in the best way. He lauds Clinton's Secretary of Treasury Robert Rubin: "I wish he were still in government. But perhaps he and others would be willing to give some of their time and counsel to developing countries."

I hope not. It was Rubin's "counsel" to several Asian countries to open up their currency markets that helped bring on their currency and economic crises a few years ago. This, in turn, led to a big increase in poverty and hunger in the region.

McGovern is also credulous when it comes to biotechnology and genetically modified crops. He cites approvingly the creation of a variety of rice called Golden Rice, which is genetically modified to provide Vitamin A to the Third World. But critics have questioned the efficacy of Golden Rice, pointing out that there are better means than the rice to deliver Vitamin A to people, since the Vitamin A amount in the rice is not enough to remedy Vitamin A deficiency. Some of the Vitamin A dissolves in oil. And the availability of this rice depends on its acceptance by farmers and the efficiency of the public distribution system--problems plaguing the availability of food in the first place.

The subject of biotechnology is a tricky one and, to his credit, McGovern acknowledges the criticisms. But, in the end, he pulls out a tattered trump card to end the discussion. "Some would be so cruel as to suggest that my grandchildren [who oppose biotechnology] are smarter than their grandfather--that they might even be smarter than Dr. [Norman] Borlaug [Nobel Prize-winner and the father of the Green Revolution]. I come back at them with the eternal response of old people to young people: `Where is your respect for the wisdom of us old guys?' But usually I reply with an answer that carries more weight with grandchildren: `The jury is still out on genetic farming. Let's wait for the final verdict.' I don't add what I'm thinking: `And then you'll see that I am right and you are wrong!'"

McGovern's bias stops him from deeply exploring other causes of global hunger, such as the unequal distribution of resources and the subversion of the food system to profits.

Curiously, he heaps encomiums on Dwayne Andreas, head of the giant and felonious agribusiness company Archer Daniels Midland. "Few, if any, Americans have a wiser view of the themes treated in this book than does Dwayne Andreas." (ADM and several high-ranking executives, including Andreas's son, were convicted in the 1990s of international price-fixing.)

McGovern does criticize U.S. policy on occasion. He disapproves of the Clinton Administration's decision to dismantle welfare and blames that, along with the Reagan Administration's curtailment of food stamps, for widespread hunger in this country.

"This is the first time in American history that hunger and poverty have not significantly diminished during a sustained period of economic growth," he writes. "The problem is that most of this new wealth has gone to the wealthiest Americans. While unemployment is low, many jobs do not pay a wage adequate to feed a family. Indeed, the degree of income disparity in America--the gap between the rich and the poor--is the largest in any Western industrialized nation and is comparable to that of many Third World countries.... We are also the only industrial nation that permits millions of its poor to go without adequate food."

McGovern's heart is in the right place, and many of his proposals are unassailable. He desires an increase in the aid of developed nations to the rest of the world, citing with concern the 16 percent decline in aid-giving in the last decade. And he wants the United States to contribute $1.2 billion annually to a $5 billion global program to combat world hunger.

He also wants the United States to invest $5 billion each year to tackle the problem of the thirty-one million inadequately fed people in this country. He aims to extend worldwide the programs he helped establish in this country. He wants to set up a universal school lunch program to feed the 300 million hungry school-age children and replicate the U.S. nutritional program for low-income women, infants, and children. He wants the United States to establish an organization of retired farmers, modeled on the Peace Corps, that can advise farmers in other countries. He asks that the United Nations establish food reserves and that developing countries improve their agricultural and food distribution practices.

He also says that war is a significant cause of large-scale hunger and calls for strengthening of global institutions such as the United Nations and the World Court. He seeks a reduction of 10 percent by governments in their spending on weapons.

In addition, he advocates more democratic participation and self-governance by local communities around the world as a way to counter inefficient and corrupt Third World governments.

And McGovern rightly places a lot of emphasis on female empowerment and education, noting that it reduces the birthrate and leads to better-fed children.

"If we can find ways of persuading our Third World brothers to undo the bonds now blocking the potential contributions of their girls and women, we can end hunger in our time," he says. "If these bonds are not loosened, then world hunger will linger on, taking its terrible toll on men and women, boys and girls, for generations to come."

In doing so, he follows the lead of Nobel Prize-winner Amartya Sen, whose work, including that on discrimination against girls, he quotes repeatedly.

McGovern also has an enlightened view of population growth and its contribution to the hunger problem: "Some will contend that poverty is caused by excessive population growth. But high fertility rates in poor countries are at least as much a reflection of poverty and inequality as the cause of them. So long as the financial security of the mother is dependent largely on her surviving children, she will agree to have or seek to have more children as her old-age insurance. If an uneducated woman has few or no opportunities for paid jobs, and her power and influence are based on the number of her offspring, especially males, then the birthrate will be high for both social and economic reasons."

But a major problem with McGovern's book is his unwillingness to think through the implications of his own observations.

For instance, he says that there's enough food to provide a healthy diet to everyone on this planet and that 78 percent of the world's hungry children live in food-surplus countries. But he fails to call for a fundamental redistribution of resources in order to feed the hungry. If the substantial majority of hungry kids live in countries having food surpluses, what chance is there of a serious reduction of hunger just through tinkering with market mechanisms and providing some government programs?

McGovern does acknowledge that "a keener sense of social and economic justice across the whole spectrum of society in the developing countries is crucial to ending poverty and hunger." He also cites a U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization study that in thirty-nine of fifty-five countries surveyed small landholders produce more food per acre than larger landholders. But he doesn't go any deeper.

He says East Asia's export-oriented growth was responsible for its rapid development. But he also mentions the state's protectionist and interventionist role--including radical land reform--in the region's success, though he says that this isn't a viable long-term strategy for countries. Again, he is not willing to consider the efficacy of land reform (admittedly unlikely in this neoliberal era) in lessening the numbers of destitute and hungry landless peasants in developing countries.

McGovern ends with a plea to the readers to do their utmost to end global hunger. "No war in all of history has ever killed so many humans and spread so much suffering and disease in any year as world hunger now does annually," he writes. "So if we cannot resolve all of humanity's problems, let us resolve to end at least one by the year 2030--human hunger. If we fail to do this, we will stand condemned before the bar of history. In that case, shame on you and shame on me. If there is a scale of divine justice in the universe, we would deserve to choke on our food even as we listen to the cries of the starving."

McGovern does not seem to be familiar with the work of Food First (also known as the Institute for Food and Development Policy), an Oakland, California-based organization, since he doesn't cite it even once in his book. This is a pity because he could use the group's work and perspective to enlarge his own. Views from the South offers a collection of essays from scholars and activists around the world, and it serves as a necessary complement to McGovern's way of dealing with the problem of hunger.

One of Food First's basic positions is that the world has enough to feed everyone and that what is needed to feed the hungry is a redistribution of resources. The organization also sees the global economic system as an unjust one, operated by the rich countries to serve the interests of the dominant lobbies and corporations in their countries. The essays in this book, which deal with the World Trade Organization and its effects on the developing world, including agriculture, offer variations on this perspective. The collection is a bit rigid, though, since alternative perspectives on how to end hunger are not considered.

The arcane nature of the WTO makes the book heavy going, and the writing is top-loaded with acronyms and details. But the book lays bare the workings of the WTO and its detrimental effects on the poor.

An important point made in these essays, one that McGovern hardly refers to, is that agribusiness corporations such as Monsanto and Cargill have been major backers of the WTO process and stand to benefit hugely from its implementation. The WTO's protection of intellectual property rights also could potentially force farmers to pay for using everything from seeds to indigenous herbs and plants, enriching the transnational corporations that have been granted the patents on these products.

In one essay, Filipino economist Walden Bello argues that only the largest farmers in the Third World will stand to gain from the access to Western markets that the WTO facilitates. "The vast majority of unorganized small farmers specializing in corn, rice, and other food crops are hurt by the trade-off, for the quid pro quo is precisely the liberalization of their markets for staples and other basic foods," he writes.

Vandana Shiva, an agricultural expert from India, has perhaps the most forceful essay in the book and the one that deals most directly with the WTO's impact on agriculture and hunger. She sometimes goes overboard with her rhetoric, calling the system "robbery" and "economic hijack" and the "equivalent to the ethnic cleansing of the poor, the peasantry, and small farmers of the Third World." She accuses agribusiness corporations of practicing "genocide" in their pursuit of profits and of being "peddlers of death." She says: "Free trade is not leading to freedom. It is leading to slavery. Diverse life forms are being enslaved through patents on life, farmers are being enslaved into high-tech slavery, and countries are being enslaved into debt and dependence and destruction of their domestic economies."

But Shiva argues persuasively that the process of globalization has led to a shift from the production of food for domestic consumption to export crops.

This has resulted in a rush of imports that have hurt local farmers. She cites how importing subsidized soybeans has destroyed Indian soybean farmers by crashing the market. She gives the example of the suicides of hundreds of farmers a few years ago in the state of Andhra Pradesh in India, many of whom grew pesticideladen cotton crops and then committed suicide when the crops failed to produce expected yields. She also refers to the ecological and social damage done by commercial shrimp farming in the coastal regions of India.

Shiva, however, paints too rosy a picture of the current state of small farmers in India, which isn't exactly ideal. What the WTO will do is to probably make a bad situation even worse.

Anuradha Mittal, policy director of Food First, shows in her essay how free trade has led to increased immiseration, inequality, and hunger in the United States. As she puts it, trade agreements "have created a globalized South. The world is becoming one--characterized by increasing income inequalities, poverty, and hunger."

Mittal proposes a host of measures to reform the global food system, including debt cancellation and making trade agreements subordinate to human rights and national constitutions. She ends by calling for a new ethic grounded in the "universalism set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights."

These two books offer different approaches to the problem of global hunger. But the real question is whether the political will exists to implement the solutions offered in these books.

At present, the answer seems to be no. But that shouldn't stop us from working toward a time when hunger, like millet from my village's marketplace, will have disappeared from the face of this Earth.

Amitabh Pal is Editor of the Progressive Media Project.