The second World Food Summit held in Rome from June 10 to 13 has failed, as was generally expected, to address the real issues that hunger causes in the Third World simply because the international community (meaning industrialised West) lacks the will and commitment to see an end to the world hunger.

The summit participants of 180 countries merely professed to pursue the goal set in the first summit held in 1996 to halve the number of the hungry — from 800 million to 400 million — by 2015.

Most of the speeches were based on hypocrisy to show sympathy for the hungry who, to most of the speakers and their community, are as good as dead. The summit, attended by 4,000 delegates and 35 heads of state or government, heard Kofi Annan, the UN chief and the chief guest, saying: “In a world of plenty, ending hunger is within our grasp. Failure to reach this goal should fill everyone of us with shame.” An interesting aspect of Annan’s remarks is that the UN itself admits that it will take at least 60 years to reach even a modest target.

The hard fact is that hunger, like poverty, is essentially a man-made problem, not even dependent on vagaries of weather. Incredible though it may look, it is abundance not scarcity that describes world’s food supply situation. Enough wheat, rice and other grains are available each year to easily feed every human being with 3,500 calories a day.

The US grows 40% more food every year than it needs. But it would not rush surplus food to famine areas simply because it won’t bring profits. Providing food to the hungry is not a humanitarian act; it is an ideological issue which demands that a sizable population in the impoverished countries must remain hungry, poor and malnourished. So, it is the big powers, the multinational corporations and the institutions run by them such as the IMF and the World Bank that collectively decide as to who should eat and who should starve.

The politics of hunger became evident from the fact that on the opening day of the summit the United States stood alone among all nations of the world in blocking discussion on the draft text of a declaration that participating governments were to sign at the end of the summit. First, the US wanted all references to “food as a human right” to be deleted, and second, it wanted strong language to convey that genetically modified (GM) crops are a key way to end hunger. And for the purpose delegates and ministers from other nations were subjected to “immense” pressure to back the US stance.

The Third World nations organized in the Group of 77 wanted mandatory language on the “Right to Food”, while Europe and Canada held out for the compromise of a voluntary Code of Conduct. No other nation felt strongly that GM crops should receive prominence. Canada was too harsh in attacking the United States saying Washington’s farm subsidies posed an obstacle to the fight against global hunger. Later in the day, the US negotiators backed off from their harsh stance, accepting “with reservations” watered-down language on the right to food.

As pointed out by John Vidal of The Guardian, the current food scenario is characterized by two paradoxes. First, the world has never grown so much food before; there is no overall scarcity; and food has seldom been so cheap. The simple equation in the politics of food today is that hunger equals poverty. What we see today is the relatively new phenomenon of increasing hunger amid ever-greater plenty. The second paradox is that the farmers in the poor countries are, in this time of global plenty, abandoning agriculture because they just cannot compete with the heavily-subsidized foods which are flooding in on the back of the WTO rules. In Pakistan, many farmers, according to John Vidal, have reportedly burnt their harvests in desperation because the prices they can fetch are too low. In Indonesia, as the farmers bring their rice to the market, the government imports it from Vietnam.

If one looks at the problem intrinsically, one finds hunger is a form of torture that takes away one’s ability to think, to perform normal physical actions, and to be a rational human being. It is a social disease linked to poverty. But the corporate sector in food business seeks to ensure that hunger persists throughout the world because only then they are able to market their products and earn huge profits.

Of the 830 million hungry people worldwide, a third of them live in India. Yet in 1999, the Indian government had 10 million tons of surplus food grains. In the year 2000, that surplus increased to almost 60 million tons — most of it left in the granaries to rot. Instead of giving the surplus food to the hungry, the Indian government was hoping to export it to make money. It also stopped buying grain from its own farmers, leaving them destitute. The farmers, who had gone into debt to purchase expensive chemical fertilizers and pesticides on the advice of the government, were now forced to burn their crops in their fields.

At the same time, the government of India was buying grain from Cargill and other US corporations, because the aid India receives from the World Bank stipulates that the government must do so. As a result, today India is the largest importer of the same grain that it exports. Similarly, in 1985, Indonesia received the gold medal from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization for achieving food self-sufficiency. And by 1998, it had become the largest recipient of food aid in the world. It is not that there were no more crops in Indonesia. The reason was that the US and Australia were to unload their surplus wheat under the conditions agreed to by Jakarta to get “food aid.” It is interesting to note that Indonesians don’t eat wheat.

Another irony is that more than half of the countries that suffer from child malnutrition also export food. The case in point is Ethiopia’s famine during the 1980s. Many may not be aware that, during that famine, Ethiopia was exporting green beans to Europe.

What has happened during the past decade is that after the end of the cold war, aid turned into a device for finding new markets for US agribusiness, and now for dumping foods containing genetically modified organisms (GMOs), which are being rejected by consumers in the West because they know so little about their long-term effects on humans and the environment.

A disturbing aspect of the situation is the fact that food aid is not usually free. It is often loaned, though at a low interest rate. When the US sent wheat to Indonesia during the 1999 crisis, it was a loan to be paid back over a twenty-five-year period. By using this tool, food aid has helped the US take over grain markets in India, Nigeria, Korea, and elsewhere. Secondly, it is used as a political tool, as in North Korea, where famine was deliberately allowed to aggravate to bring the country to its knees before food assistance could be sent.

Food aid is a euphemism for food business. In Somalia and Ethiopia, during the famine of 1980s, the food aid arrived very late, after the rains were over and crops were ready. It was procured from big transnational corporations of Canada and America. The result was that the Ethiopian farmers were deprived of their livelihoods as their produce was dumped in the market at low prices and the people were forced to buy imported food at high prices which not many could do.

According to Anuradha Mittal, co-director of the Institute for Food and Development Policy, the hard fact is that destroying local agricultural infrastructures is a central function of food aid. Once the local farmers have been driven out of business, the people of the region become dependent on the West for survival. Equally disturbing is the fact that the big corporations want to increase their control over the world food supply by marketing genetically engineered crops.

In 2000, US Congress approved a budget that included an estimated $30 million to promote biotechnology in the Third World. The US is already sending genetically modified food to the Third World nations without the consent of the people there. In late 1999 and early 2000, when the Indian state of Orissa was hit by floods, the US sent food aid which contained GMOs but the Indian government was kept in dark about that. Mozambique, the Philippines, Bolivia, and many other nations have received similarly tainted shipments of food aid.

Recently, when Sri Lanka adopted a law banning imports of genetically modified foods, it was threatened by the US, and pressure has since been put on the government to remove the restrictions.

Small wonder, hunger is also being used to promote biotechnology. Suddenly, transnational corporations like DuPont, Monsanto, Novartis, and Syngenta are casting themselves as poor-friendly corporations. Now they claim that biotech food can end world hunger and the civic groups which oppose GM foods are dubbed as selfish people who do not want hunger to end by denying the Third World the benefits of modern technology which.

Food is both personal and political. Food unites families and communities and the festivals on the eve of harvest seasons are about sharing and strengthening the communities. And food is political: The French Revolution wasn’t driven just by the ideals of liberty, freedom, and egalitarianism. It was driven by the fact that there wasn’t enough bread in Paris.

In the seventies, there were riots in Peru because the World Bank demanded an increase in the price of bread. In the 1990s, the Zapatista uprising and the protests in Bolivia were spurred by food shortages and privatization of the basic necessities of life. The same has been true in Pakistan and India. In 1995, villagers in Mexico stopped trains to loot them - not for gold, but for corn.