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World hunger is the result of politics + Rule Consequentialism (SEP update)

#1
C C Offline
John Gray: World hunger is the result of politics, not production
http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/book...production

EXCERPT: “If you had asked most mainstream development experts in the year 2000 to name those factors they thought would most imperil their efforts to reduce poverty globally in the new millennium, it is highly unlikely they would have mentioned a sudden radical spike in the price of the principal agricultural commodities, and the staple foods made from them, on which the poor of the world literally depended for their survival.”

By 2006, as David Rieff goes on to show, prices of wheat, rice, corn and soybeans began to rise steeply on world markets. In Egypt, the price of bread doubled in a matter of months, and by some measures the food bill of the world’s poor rose by roughly 40 per cent. The result, in 30 of the world’s worst-affected countries, from Ethiopia to Uzbekistan, was a rash of bread riots. Food prices peaked in 2008, but rose again, almost as sharply, in 2010 and 2011, and the rising cost of bread was among the triggers of the Arab spring.

Why were the experts so unprepared? One reason is that most of them believed that a formula for ridding the world of poverty had been found. All that was needed was the will to apply it, and this determination already existed in the many transnational institutions and NGOs dedicated to eliminating hunger. As Rieff writes, “The consensus in the development world is that the early 21st century really marks the ‘end-time’ for extreme poverty and hunger.” The Reproach of Hunger challenges this consensus, showing it for what it is – an ideology that simplifies the causes of extreme poverty and systematically underestimates the difficulties of eradicating it.

Rieff’s insight that the development consensus is ideological in nature is crucial for understanding the flaws in current thinking about hunger. The movement against global poverty imagines that it transcends political divisions yet it demands deep changes in the prevailing world order. Some in the movement want to insulate food from global markets; others favour “philanthrocapitalism” – a benignly transformed utopian variation on the existing economic system. But what all versions of the ruling consensus on hunger have in common is that they promote a radical political programme yet refuse to think politically about the limits of what can be achieved.

Chronic malnutrition and famine cannot be understood, let alone prevented, if they are detached from the realities of power. Consider the role of war. As Rieff writes, “While there have been famines in times of peace, there have been few major wars without famine.” Somewhere between 50 and 72 million people died on account of the Second World War. Roughly 20 million deaths were caused by hunger [...]

Going further back, the Great Irish Famine of 1845-50 and the Great Bengal Famine of 1943-44 were both artefacts of imperial rule. The Soviet famine under Lenin in 1920-22 occurred during a civil war, but the famine in Ukraine in 1932-33 was a direct result of Stalin’s policies of collectivisation. The Chinese famine of 1958-62, which Rieff describes as “probably the most lethal single event in history”, was caused largely by Mao’s disastrous rush to industrialisation. Summing up, Rieff writes: “To the extent that one can view the last part of the 19th century as the age of imperialist famines, it is equally appropriate to view much of the 20th century as the age of socialist ones.”

All these famines were a result of the exercise of power. None of them came about because of the gap between food production and a rising population postulated in the theories of Thomas Malthus. Yet the clergyman-economist, whose forebodings are dismissed nowadays by citing the enormous increases in agricultural productivity achieved over the past decades, may yet have a point with regard to the future. “The stark fact is that to avoid famine recurring throughout a world that now has seven billion people and will almost certainly add two billion more by 2050, and possibly another billion in the two decades after that, agricultural production will have to increase unceasingly,” Rieff writes....

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Rule Consequentialism

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/conseq...lism-rule/

EXCERPT: The theory of morality we can call full rule-consequentialism selects rules solely in terms of the goodness of their consequences and then claims that these rules determine which kinds of acts are morally wrong. George Berkeley was arguably the first rule-consequentialist. He wrote, “In framing the general laws of nature, it is granted we must be entirely guided by the public good of mankind, but not in the ordinary moral actions of our lives. … The rule is framed with respect to the good of mankind; but our practice must be always shaped immediately by the rule.”

Included:

1. Utilitarianism
2. Welfare
3. Other Goods To Be Promoted
4. Full Rule-consequentialism
5. Global Consequentialism
6. Formulating Full Rule-consequentialism

7. ...


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