Understanding global security - Peter Hough

ECONOMIC THREATS TO SECURITY
Box 4.1 Amartya Sen
The winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1998, Sen is an Indian academic
from Bengal who experienced the 1943–44 famine first hand as a young boy. He was
born on a university campus to Bangladeshi parents (his father was a Chemistry
lecturer) and has graced most of the leading universities of the world in a glittering
academic career. Sen has lectured in Economics at Cambridge, Oxford, the London
School of Economics and Harvard and his research has focused on the economic
dimensions of poverty, famine and human rights. As such Sen’s work has found
influence outside of the confines of Economics and he is revered in political science
for his contribution to bringing a much neglected ethical dimension to the ‘miserable
science’.
Democratic governments are compelled to be responsive to the needs of ordinary
people whose security is imperilled, whether directly or indirectly through the
pressure of the media or other concerned citizens, in a way in which tyrannical
dictators or neglectful colonialists are not. Democracy saves people as well as
empowers them and the spread of democratization in the world will help in the fight
against famine. Food shortages will still occur from time to time but these can
normally be planned for by governments and when they cannot be dealt with the
international community can step in. Countless lives in North Korea would have been
saved were it not for the fact that the state has cut itself off from the rest of the world
and proper help has not been possible. Being part of the global economy would have
saved the lives of many North Koreans. Being a democratic state within the global
economy would have saved more still.
Global policy on famine relief
The principal instrument for coordinating famine relief at global level is the UN’s
World Food Programme (WFP) a hybrid of the Food and Agricultural Organization
(FAO) and World Health Organization (WHO). Created in 1963, initially as an ad
hoc three-year project, the WFP has evolved into the ‘food arm of the UN’ (WFP
2002a: 1) with all of the characteristics of an IGO. Based, like the FAO, in Rome, the
WFP is governed by an executive board and served by a permanent secretariat. The
executive board votes on where to allocate food aid from an annual budget of around
$1.5 billion. Through the course of its working life this food aid has increasingly been
targeted at countries suffering food shortages, due to the effects of natural disasters
or conflict rather than for general development purposes (see Figure 4.1).
The stated aim of the WFP’s work is ‘eradicating hunger and poverty. The
ultimate objective of food aid should be the elimination of the need for food aid’ (WFP
2002b: 1). In reality, though, the WFP is a global emergency service and the broad
aim of achieving ‘food security’ – ‘access of all peoples at all times to the food needed
for an active and healthy life’ (FAO/WHO 1992) – is a more profound goal beyond
the beyond the reach of its budget and operations.
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