Understanding global security - Peter Hough

ECONOMIC THREATS TO SECURITY
governance, however, and all three explanations can variously be applied to the
situation in states where famine is occurring. The food supply in countries can fall
below the level sufficient to meet demand because of poor harvests, or the population
can grow at a rate that the food supply is unable to match.
Overpopulation is a condition that has certainly affected most of the principal
arenas of famine over the last century, such as in China and India where it has
prompted domestic political action to curb population growth. A provocative argument
from prominent American economists the Paddock brothers in the late
1960s went as far as to argue that India and other countries prone to famine had only
themselves to blame and should be left to suffer for their own and everyone else’s
good. Overpopulation added to endemic poor government meant that, for some
states, food aid was a waste of time and that they should be considered to form a
‘can’t be saved’ group and ignored by the USA and other benefactors. ‘Waste not the
food on the ‘can’t be saved’ and the ‘walking wounded’. Send it those nations which,
having it, can buttress their own resources, their own efforts, and fight through to
survival’ (Paddock and Paddock 1967: 229).
The ecologist Garret Hardin advanced a similar idea in formulating the analogy
of lifeboats in an ocean to characterize states in a world where food supplies
will eventually be used up in the face of population growth. Hardin’s thesis argued
for the application of ‘lifeboat ethics’ to combat this, which essentially argued that
international action to tackle famine was folly as wealthy countries would risk sinking
their own ‘lifeboats’ in doing so. Better to let the overcrowded lifeboats of the Third
World sink than ensuring that we all drown (Hardin 1996). Such apocalyptic views
of the global security implications of overpopulation were common in the 1970s and
can be dated back as far as the eighteenth century and the works of Thomas Malthus.
They are, though, rarer today since the central plank of the Malthusian and Neo-
Malthusian prediction, that world population will come to exceed world food supply,
has not happened and does not look likely to do so. The demand for food continues
to increase in the less developed world and natural disasters continue to blight many
of the same countries, creating food shortages, but most contemporary analysts of
famine emphasize distributive factors in their explanations of particular cases.
Modern governments can insure against future crop shortages by stockpiling
reserves of food and protecting the price of agricultural products.
The leading writer in this approach to explaining famine is economist Amatya
Sen (see Box 4.1). Sen expounds the ‘entitlements approach’ in which he argues that
all individuals should by rights be able to expect to be protected from famine by their
government, regardless of changes in food supply or population. In a convincing
application of the democratic peace argument to economic rather than military
security Sen uses evidence to propose that:
no substantial famine has ever occurred in any independent and democratic
country with a relatively free press.
[. . .]
Even the poorest democratic countries that have faced terrible droughts
or floods or other natural disasters (such as India in 1973, or Zimbabwe and
Botswana in the early 1980s) have been able to feed their people without
experiencing a famine.
(Sen 1999: 6–7)
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