In 1971, two musicians- George Harrison and Ravi Shankar- organized the 'Concert for Bangladesh'. Wikipedia says 'The event was the first-ever benefit of such a magnitude,[ and featured a supergroup of performers that included Harrison, fellow ex-Beatle Ringo Starr, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Billy Preston, Leon Russell and the band Badfinger. In addition, Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan – both of whom had ancestral roots in Bangladesh – performed an opening set of Indian classical music. The concerts were attended by a total of 40,000 people, and the initial gate receipts raised close to $250,000 for Bangladesh relief, which was administered by UNICEF.
Sadly, by the time the great Bangladesh famine of 1974 occurred, there was 'compassion fatigue'. The private sector could not mobilize the public to provide resources for people the public no longer cared about. Supply, in order to cover its costs, must find adequate demand for itself otherwise it can't be supplied.
Back in 1986, Amartya Sen- whose ancestral home is in Bangladesh and who had jumped on the famine bandwagon some years previously for careerist reasons- reviewed a book by Bob Geldof for the LRB-
Famine and Fraternity
Amartya Sen
Is that it?
by Bob Geldof and Paul Vallely.
The death of somebody one loves is unbearable not only because of its devastating impact on one’s life, but also because it is excruciatingly difficult for one to accept the victim’s own loss of everything he or she had.
Death is bad. We should abolish it. On the other hand, it should be remembered that Sen is an atheist. The rest of us think that people we love go to Heaven when they die.
If one feels lacerated and burnt, this partly reflects the primitive agony of seeing the victim’s incomparable tragedy.
The dude lost his property. Worse yet, he lost his job. It is deeply unfair that dead people aren't allowed to keep their jobs and their property. Tell you what, let's build nice pyramids for them.
The ‘self-regarding’ element in one’s grief at the death of a loved person is thus supplemented by an ‘other-regarding’ element concerning that loved person, even though the two elements may be extremely hard to disentangle.
Nonsense! We grieve because our loved one is no longer with us. We don't think the fellow is miffed that he has lost his job and his property and, worse yet, he isn't being invited to dinner parties.
The death of somebody one did not know appears to us as a different type of phenomenon altogether.
Not necessarily. We grieve if we see a picture of a cute baby who was killed in a horrible car accident.
We can read about victims of accidents or epidemics or famines with comparative equanimity, and we are evidently able to turn rapidly to the next news item, perhaps the latest cricket score.
Not if those accidents or epidemics or famines could become a feature of our own life. If I read about a mystery virus killing thousands in China, I start to worry. It won't be long before that epidemic reaches my neighbourhood.
There is nothing perplexing in this contrast as far as the self-regarding element in grief is concerned, since our lives may not be at all affected by the deaths of distant and unknown people.
Why not? If it could happen to them why could it not happen to us?
But there is something that needs explaining in the altogether unmoved way we seem to be able to view the ‘other-regarding’ element when the victim has no relationship with us.
Sen has already provided the explanation. We are not concerned with people we don't know for the same reason they are not concerned with us. However, if they are dropping dead like flies because of something which might also cause us to drop dead like flies, then we are likely to be concerned.
A quite separate point can be made about the manner in which the misfortunes of others provide us opportunities to advance ourselves either economically or reputationally.
To accept the legitimacy of this question is not the same as presuming that our agony at the dead person’s own tragedy must be independent of the personal relationship.
No one makes any such presumption. It is obvious that you care more about your mummy than some lady living far far away. But the question is not 'legitimate'. It is stupid. We care about those we actually care about not people of whose existence we had been wholly unaware.
There may be nothing perplexing in the fact that our ability to sympathise with, and grieve at, someone else’s tragedy may plausibly be diminished by distance.
Try phoning your boss and saying you can't come into work because you've just found out that somebody else's Mummy, in a country far far away, has died.
But there is something extraordinary in the almost total absence of sympathy and grief with which we are able to absorb massive news of premature deaths of victims far away.
What would be more extraordinary is if people were allowed to bunk off work so as to grieve for any and everybody who has died in the last week.
The varying intensity of our concern may not, in itself, compromise our humanity, but the near-absence of any concern for distant victims would do exactly that.
No it wouldn't. We say that a person shows great humanity if we find that he is doing much for others in a self-less manner. If such a person says he feels nothing when he hears of millions dying in far away places, we don't say he is inhumane. We say that he is more spiritually advanced and has foreknowledge of God's plan for the immortal felicity of those whom we feel sorry for.
It is arguable that our indifference to distant deaths is part of a mechanism that ensures our own viability, which might otherwise have been strained by constant grief at ever-occurring tragedies, causing fruitless anguish in situations in which we can do nothing to prevent these tragedies.
Arguably, a theist would be indifferent to his own death. Yet he may grieve that someone whom he loved and who gave him strength has been taken back to Abraham's bosom.
This view makes grief essentially an ‘intermediate product’, in which the end-product would be some helpful assistance that we may provide, spurred on by that grief.
No. The relevant 'intermediate product' is not grief or rage. It is making a plan and putting together the resources to put that plan into effect.
This is not a point of view that is easy to accept (grief can scarcely be only instrumental to action),
then why mention it? The thing is silly. It is obvious that a Doctor doesn't need to feel grief or rage or anything at all in order to properly diagnose and cure a medical condition.
even though some versions of the utilitarian philosophy have tended to push us in that direction.
Utilitarianism doesn't say we need to spend a lot of time crying and wailing.
But even within its own general terms, the special use of this view to explain non-grief at distant suffering is defective in its taking for granted that our ability to affect distant tragedies is very nearly nil.
This is a defective view. It is obvious that a man with a plan- e.g. B.R Sen as head of FAO- doesn't need to weep and wail in order to implement a plan such that food surplus countries send food to famine stricken places.
In fact, in most cases, victims of famines and epidemics suffer and die over a longish time and can be substantially helped by others in their life-and-death battles.
Which is why B.R Sen- who was a distant relative of Amartya- organized the first World Food Conference and helped popularize the view that nobody in the world needed to go to bed hungry.
Indeed, there are many different ways in which we can help in tragedies occurring in distant places.
B.R Sen along with many others- including the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations- helped make this a reality. Sadly, after Sen retired the 'Club of Rome' and the Green lobby tried to revive the notion that 'basket-case' nations should be abandoned to Malthusian famines. This harmed Bangladesh which suffered a big famine in 1974.
The nature of our indifference to distant suffering and death may be broadly explainable in one of two different lights.
No. The fact that we are too busy just trying to survive does not mean we are 'indifferent' to anything. It is all very well for idle talkers to accuse each other of ignoring the manifold sufferings of Lesbian goats in Guatemala but most people have no choice but to keep their nose to the grindstone.
One is unconcern, and the other ignorance.
But the charge of indifference arises out of idleness and one-upmanship amongst useless tossers. Why is Professor Smith not supporting Lesbian goats in Guatemala? Is he in the pay of the Nicaraguan junta? Cancel him now!
The former hypothesis suggests that we really do not – possibly cannot – care about the suffering and death of people not connected with us,
unless we are sending them money or harassing Professor Smith to marry a Lesbian goat so as to defy the machinations of the Nicaraguan junta.
and while bonds of kinship, neighbourhood, class, community or nationhood may make us concerned, our common humanity is not, in itself, a potent force in generating solidarity.
Yes it is. Herbert Hoover got to be POTUS because of his work for those afflicted by famine.
The other hypothesis attributes the explanation to our ignorance.
Or to our suspicion that the 'chuggers' who try to get us to denote to the cause of Lesbian goats are stealing the money
We are myopic, and may not know exactly what happens far away.
Or we may know exactly what happens there but still go along with a charity scam because it is in our interest to do so.
Even when we do know it in vague terms, we may not fully understand the nature and extent of the tragedy. But most important, we may fail to understand that we can make a difference – that we can effectively help.
Equally, any money we donate may end up harming those it is meant to help. Last year, USAID and the World Food Program suspended food aid to Ethiopia because of a massive food diversion scandal in which UN employees (who have diplomatic immunity) were involved. It can happen that food meant for the starving is taken by the militias who are killing those starving people.
The difference between these two points of view – unconcern and ignorance – may have far-reaching consequences in understanding what we are, and also in influencing the way we think about moral and political questions.
Nonsense! We prefer to remain ignorant of things which are of no concern to us.
In recent developments in moral and political philosophy, concepts of community or nationhood have figured prominently in some influential non-universalist approaches to the understanding of obligations and imperatives.
The underlying notion of 'oikeiosis' was known to the ancient Greeks. One might say the 'uncorrelated asymmetries' (e.g. the fact that you love your mummy more than some random lady) dictate eusocial 'bourgeois strategies. Sadly, Sen hadn't learned this from Maynard Smith.
Even in the universalist contractarian approaches,
Sen is taking a dig at Rawls. Why did that fucker not agree that US citizens should tax themselves to the hilt so as to transfer income to poor Bengalis?
notions of equality or justice or fairness have frequently been seen in terms of hypothetical contracts between people living in the same society and tied to each other by bonds of an implicit political community.
But those societies would collapse if they adopted the Rawlsian solution- viz. prioritize the needs of the worst off- because everybody would quit work so as to appear as abject as possible. A Social contract is an 'incomplete contract'. If it isn't incentive compatible, it will collapse or remain purely cosmetic.
Some of the biggest advances in our understanding of the idea of justice in recent decades have come from powerful political and moral analyses within this approach.
No. Rawls was a lunatic. He didn't get that we are all already behind a 'veil of ignorance' because we don't know if we might be knocked down by a bus tomorrow. The solution is to buy insurance not vote for a crazy Socialist state.
The most notable example is the great contribution to the theory of justice presented by John Rawls, who pioneered the revival of the contractarian approach, but has increasingly stressed the universalist concerns of a Kantian concept of ‘the person’ (especially in his 1980 Dewey Lectures*).
Rawls taught a course with Arrow and Sen. Neither pointed out to him that in the real world there is Knightian uncertainty. Regret minimizing means people invest in 'hedges' of various sorts.
The Kantian concept of 'the person' is as a rational being whose "nature already marks [him] as an end in itself, that is, as something that may not be used merely as a means and hence so far limits all choice (and is an object of respect)'. This means you shouldn't hire a guy to teach you stuff because then you are using him as a means to an end. Also you must not wank because they you are using your dick as a means to an end rather than an end in itself. The same goes for shitting. Naturally, the nutter Rawls would be attracted by such crap.
The recent emergence of the so-called ‘Bob Geldof phenomenon’ is a matter of some relevance for these arguments.
Geldof was Irish. The terrible 'potato famine' is remembered by the Irish diaspora. Also, it must be said, the Republic of Ireland, as well as various Catholic charities in which Irish people play a prominent part, has always shown great sympathy with the 'Global South'. Thus Geldof was both an 'anti-establishment' figure as well as a representative of a country and a community which retained memories of a horrific 'political' famine.
Of course, the primary importance of this phenomenon lies in the substantial funds that these efforts have been generating. The Live Aid concert last summer produced a stunning $70 million or more. The more recent Sport Aid seems to be producing a larger fund still.
Private enterprise, it seemed, could rival the aid programs of governments. True, British government aid to Africa was about 265 million pounds back then. However, Geldof's point was that he would ensure that our money would go directly to the hungry rather than end up financing white elephant projects for the urban elites.
Properly expended, these resources can help in reducing suffering and death in Africa. Even though the beneficiaries form a fairly small proportion of the total number of victims (as is bound to be the case, given the size of the suffering population), the achievements are by no means inconsiderable.
There was a political aspect to this. Geldof was showing that the youth of Thatcher's Britain, even if they were earning big bucks in the City, rejected a callous 'Social Darwinism' which was (wrongly) associated with Thatcher and Reagan.
There is also the achievement of producing spectacular social events – in particular, ‘the biggest concert the world has ever seen’.
The artistes who participated did well out of it. Nothing wrong with a bit of 'enlightened self-interest' though, I imagine, their motivation was humanitarian.
Geldof is understandably proud of this, as can be spotted easily enough in his eminently readable autobiography Is that it?
The Irish do take pride in good things that they do. Nothing wrong in that at all.
Geldof quotes Yeats: ‘I carry from my mother’s womb/A fanatic heart.’The preceding lines are-
Out of Ireland have we come / Great hatred, little room / Maimed us at the start.
He clearly does. It enlivens his contrary childhood in Dublin; drives him through passion and love (and the years with Paula Yates); moves him to New Wave music (and the Boomtown Rats); makes him travel across the world with devouring eyes.
What was the alternative? Join the IRA? Become a skinhead and beat up Pakis? Geldof had enraged the Church by speaking disparagingly of nuns in a TV interview. Apparently, this meant his band could no longer play in Ireland. By doing the Christian thing, Geldof rehabilitated himself.
And then it engulfs him in the extraordinary moral enterprise of getting rock music and showbiz to tackle hunger and famine in Africa, while ceaselessly lecturing the political leaders of the world (Mrs Thatcher retaliated with what Geldof describes as ‘her death-ray glare’). It is an exciting story, well told.
My memory is that if fizzled. The kids who had found 'I don't like Mondays' exciting had gotten jobs and were paying taxes. They didn't mind buying an expensive CD or tea-shirt or even making donations to impress their girl friends. But they didn't think St. Geldof had any magical solution. He was a gobshite and sooner or later some nice African President would kick his fucking head in.
Bob Geldof the man is interesting enough. The ‘Bob Geldof phenomenon’ is even more so. The public response to the extraordinary events organised by that ‘fanatic heart’ has been spectacularly warm and involved.
The music was good just as the jokes on the 'Secret Policeman's Ball' were good. I wanted to buy the T-shirt but my g.f advised me not to. I was rather thin back then and looked like I might myself be a beneficiary of Geldof's famine relief scheme.
The phenomenon also raises deeply interesting questions about the nature of human ties,
The comedians had gotten the ball rolling by sponsoring Amnesty- which has since turned to shit- Geldof's genius was to jump on the famine bandwagon at exactly the right time. What one can't deny is that 'do they know it is Christmas' was a good song. So was 'we are the world'. Sadly, those with better voices and lyrics did better than those like Geldof whose fanatic heart was not matched by great musical talent.
and ultimately about what kind of social creatures we human beings happen to be.
we human beings like songs with nice tunes. U2 and Queen did very well out of 'Live-Aid'. To be fair, they genuinely were better musicians than Geldof.
The interesting thing is not only that substantial contributions are being made to help relieve the sufferings of distant victims.
In return for great concerts
The really significant point concerns the greater sensitivity to information that the phenomenon has brought out.
No. The US has been by far the largest contributor to food aid- including aid to Ethiopia in the mid Eighties- of all countries. Partly, this was a reflection of the Christian and humanitarian ethos of the American people. However, constitutionally, what permits overseas food aid is the 'General Welfare Clause' of the Constitution. American farmers benefit by having their surpluses dumped on Africa or Asia to destroy the livelihoods of African or Asian farmers. Thus, the 'Geldof phenomenon' was like the PL480 phenomenon. Geldof and his chums gained increased welfare as did subsidized farmers in rich countries. This wasn't 'sensitivity to information' but sensitivity to PR opportunities and a good way to increase the profits for agribusiness. Also, maybe Geldof would get to scold darkies who wouldn't immediately kick his fucking head in.
A sharper understanding of the extent of hunger in Africa and a greater awareness of the possibility of making a difference to the situation through one’s own actions seem to have transformed the way a great many people think about what their responsibilities are.
No. There was a sharper understanding that pop musicians and comedians and sportsmen and so forth can generate publicity for themselves by stunts of this kind. Apparently Geldof did a concert recently for the Ukrainians. Shame he is a shite singer.
The informational process did not begin with Bob Geldof. An earlier departure was the graphic television reporting of Ethiopian famines about two years ago. But Band Aid, Live Aid and Sport Aid have vastly expanded the sphere of involvement.
Geldof responded quite quickly to the first TV reportage. But then the Ethiopian regime had only permitted that coverage so as to get more resources from abroad. Geldof's genius was to get almost every celebrity musician into the same studio.
More exposure has led to more awareness,
Not really. American and British responses to post-war hunger were statistically much more significant.
and that seems to have led to more concern and to a sense of obligation which many people have felt they had to act on.
It was cool to buy the tea-shirt or phone in a contribution so as to impress your g.f.
The appeal is much more direct and is based on more fundamental human links than can be easily accommodated in a model of obligation based on a hypothetical contract covering members of a given community.
No. Geldof & Co. were providing a valuable service. They rightly calculated that though some people would be 'free riders' others would gain utility by knowing they had contributed a portion of their 'consumer surplus'. This is because in later years they would be able to look back on this golden memory- like being at Woodstock- and say self-deprecatingly 'muggins here contributed a hundred smackers! Back then, that was a week's wages!'
Whether the hungry in one country and the affluent in another can be sensibly seen as sharing such an implicit contract seems almost a redundant consideration in the light of the force of direct appeals to our common humanity.
You don't have to put on a concert featuring the world's top pop musicians in order to directly appeal to our common humanity. Sadly, when I do it, I get told to fuck the fuck off by my Mummy.
The ‘Bob Geldof phenomenon’ has also raised sharply some less fundamental but more immediately practical issues.
If you are the Professor of useless shit then everything is always raising fundamental issues of various types.
The point has often been made that the promoters of these global events are long on publicity but short on analysis.
So what? My memory is that the concert was actually quite good.
It has also been pointed out that they have been far less concerned with understanding and explaining the causation of famines and hunger than would be needed if really effective policy intervention were sought.
It was fucking obvious that the famine was the result of a drought.
Bob Geldof himself has been accused of trying to silence criticisms of this kind with the emotional non-sequitur of bellowing: ‘People are dying.’
Sen, during Manmohan's tenure, continually bellowed about how Indians were all very sick and emaciated and illiterate yet the cruel Sardarji was forcing them to work so that India could claim to be an economic super-power. Tagore would not have approved. India should be an economic basket-case and have no power of any sort.
Geldof’s dislike of politics, and his evident inclination to abstain from discussing the relevant social and economic issues, have aroused the suspicion of economic planners as well as political and social activists.
Geldof's persona was that of a foul mouthed gob-shite. But he'd learned his lesson in Ireland. Don't attack the nuns. By all means hint that those darkies running things in Africa are starving their own people.
No doubt there is a good deal of truth in these criticisms. The problem of poverty, hunger and famines is too integrally political and economic for it to be appropriate to abstract from these questions.
Not really. One can end poverty and hunger by giving poor people lots of money and tasty food.
Having expended, as an economist, a good deal of time and effort in trying to analyse the causes of famines and hunger
and failing miserably. The plain fact is famine is caused by a decline in food availability. It is cured by increasing the supply and improving the distribution of food to the very poor.
(and finding these causes to be often very different from the ones that are usually given), I am certainly not unsympathetic to seeking solutions that rely on economic and political change.
Economic and political changes are irrelevant unless they increase the supply of food or move people out of famine afflicted areas.
But at the same time, it is worth asking whether the ‘Bob Geldof phenomenon’ is not, in fact, more deeply political than either its advocates or its detractors accept.
It would have been worth asking these questions if young people in Europe and America had stopped voting for Reagan and Thatcher and Helmut Kohl and so forth. Nothing of the sort happened. You watched Live Aid and saved up for one of them fancy shmancy CD players.
Indeed, it is arguable that, in a broad sense, spreading information about the hungry is itself a political act.
Very true. If I tell my mummy I'm hungry, I am actually Rishi fucking Sunak and live at Number 10 Downing Street. Sadly, Mummy tells me to get a fucking job.
As the nature of the misery is forcefully presented to the general public, the possibility of politically ignoring the question becomes, to that extent, unviable.
Not really. The government may be able to convince the voters that the misery is inevitable or that seeking to alleviate it would lead to a worse outcome for the country.
If the ‘ignorance’ rather than the ‘unconcern’ hypothesis is accepted, the political importance of a powerful exposition of basic facts about distant hunger must be seen as very considerable. The publicist is, in this sense, also the politician.
Only if people like the product the publicist is peddling. Sitars were cool in 1971. By 1974 nobody could stand them. That's why there was no second concert for starving Bangladesh.
The point applies not only in the context of international assistance and of political pressures on the governments in rich, donor countries, but also in assessing the internal politics of the recipient countries themselves.
Sen thinks that people in countries where starving people are dying in the streets don't have information about famine.
I have tried to argue elsewhere that perhaps the strongest influence in preventing the occurrence of famines in India has come from a relatively free press.
Yet East Bengal had two big famines during Sen's life-time even though it had a relatively free press. Being as poor as fuck means some of your people die of starvation even if the newspapers keep printing photos of their wretched state.
As soon as there are any starvation deaths at all, however small the number, the press can spread the news and generate a lot of political disquiet and of pressure to do something about the problem.
The Bangladeshi press spread the news that famine was killing thousands. There simply wasn't enough food coming in to supply the soup-kitchens. The Government did not want to devalue the currency as donors demanded. The press, representing the middle class, did not want devaluation. It was accepted that the famine was Malthusian. Subsequently, the Bangladeshis got rid of democracy and the free press and quadrupled food supply.
Contrary to popular impression, food availability per head in India has not gone up at all dramatically. One reason there have been no famines since Independence is to be found in
American food aid. Bangladesh's problem was that it had sold jute to Cuba thus incurring Uncle Sam's wrath.
the nature of Indian democracy and its political organisation.
If LBJ had refused to give Indira food aid, there would have been tens or hundreds of thousands of famine deaths in Bihar.
The activities of the press and of political parties have played an informing role as well as a political one in making counteracting measures inescapable.
only if Uncle Sam sends food. If it doesn't, the poor are welcome to fuck off and die.
A number of threatened famines have failed to materialise precisely because of this ‘political early warning system’ – in Bihar in 1967-68,
America sent 50 million tons of food to India in the Sixties. By 1974, their patience had worn thin. India would have to feed itself. I recall queuing up at the ration shop when I was 11 years old. Even then, Mum had to pick the stones out of the rice. Within a couple of years, there was plenty of good quality grain in private shops. Partly, this had to do with Indira telling Bengali mathematical economists to shut the fuck up. A Punjabi- like Minhas- she would listen to.
Maharashtra in 1973,
India received about a million tons 'on loan' from the Soviets and also made big purchases on the international market. Still, excess mortality was at least 70,000
in West Bengal in 1978-79.
There probably had been some 300,000 excess deaths because of starvation in West Bengal during the Seventies. The solution to this problem was to make village heads record starvation deaths as 'malnutrition' deaths. One way of solving the problem of starvation is to let the poorest go to the wall. There will be more left over for the rest if this is done.
While such relief has been feasible because of public storage of food grains and other state policies, the political antecedents of an interventionist programme are also quite crucial factors.
Sadly, that 'interventionist' program worsened the underlying problem by reducing incentives for farmers or by promoting subsistence 'involution'.
Despite China’s superior record to India’s in tackling the more chronic aspects of the food problem (in particular, widespread undernourishment),
Chinese eat dogs and cats- right?
China, unlike India, did have an astonishingly major famine during 1959-61, with millions of deaths – nearly thirty million, it is estimated.
which is why its subsequent record was better. The weak had gone to the wall with a vengeance.
The policy mistakes were acknowledged later, but the absence of a free press helped to hide the terrible information and to mute the voice of protest.
Why was a free press absent? The answer was that anyone who said anything Mao didn't like was killed. But this also meant that anyone who confronted Mao about what he was doing to his people didn't live to tell the tale. The problem here is that Mao was a murderous tyrant. It wasn't that Chinese entrepreneurs weren't allowed to set up Newspapers or Radio Stations. Still, it is true that if only Genghis Khan had permitted the flourishing of a truly free press, the Mongols would have been too busy watching TV to conquer half of Eurasia.
The famine continued uninterrupted for three years.
China was very generously giving food aid to its pals around the world while its own people starved.
Anti-famine policies not only require good economic plans of production and distribution, but also the generating of adequate political pressures which will act on the government and the leadership.
Nonsense! Anti-famine policies require a big increase in the supply and proper distribution of food. You can generate as much 'political pressure' as you like but if there isn't enough food, some will starve. On the other hand, if starving people are encouraged to set up their own Television News Channels they may be able to get enough to eat by inviting celebrity chefs to appear on their programs to cook them a nice meal.
The fact that most of the famine-stricken countries have nothing like a relatively free press is a matter of some significance.
Bangladesh had a relatively free press during both its big famines. This was because Bengali journalists don't give a shit about repressive laws. They write what they feel like. The government is welcome to try and make martyrs out of them but more will rise up to take their place. The other side of the picture is that Bengalis know that journalists and academics and politicians talk fanatical bollocks. If there isn't enough food, some will starve. If local politicians keep raping women and grabbing land, they will continue to do so till they are killed. Publishing articles doesn't change anything because everybody already knows the place is a shit-hole.
On the other side, there has rarely been a famine in a country with a free and active press.
Because free and active presses are only found in affluent countries not suffering war or insurrection. One might as well say 'people who own super yachts rarely starve to death'.
The Geldof phenomenon can be more fully appreciated if it is seen in relation to the more general issue concerning the role of the media in preventing hunger and famine.
The media didn't prevent hunger and famine in Africa. It may have made some money for itself by publicizing what happened there.
In 1973, when Ethiopia as well as the Sahel countries was experiencing quite disastrous famines, the food output per head in Maharashtra in India was substantially lower than in Ethiopia or in the average Sahelian country.
Nobody knew what the 'output per head was in Ethiopia or the Sahel.
The prevention of the famine in India was almost entirely due to public action, involving both movements of food grains into Maharashtra, and, more important, the generating of purchasing ability through employment programmes.
Maharashtra had been hit by three successive years of drought. But, it already had a public works program and decent enough politicians- unlike Bihar. Still, drought remains an existential threat to farmers in the region. There is no option but to transfer the rural population to manufacturing industry in urban clusters. Otherwise, they won't have enough drinking water- forget about water to bathe in or to irrigate their crops.
The process of famine relief was ‘activated’ by early information about the food situation and by pressures generated by the news media. As a result, there was, in fact, no famine, despite the unusually low availability of food grains in Maharashtra even after taking into account the food that was actually moved into Maharashtra as a part of public policy. The marshalling of internal distribution within the state of Maharashtra was crucial, and the role of media reports in ‘activating’ these policies was significant.
No. Meteorologists alerted the administration that the monsoon would fail. Politicians lobbied New Delhi to release grain for the public distribution system. The journalists were playing catch up. They attended press conferences given by the authorities and filed stories. Sometimes an editor would sanction a little money for a trip into the countryside where some appropriately emaciated villagers could be photographed. Some enterprising journalist, like Sainath, might be able to produce a best-selling book titled something snappy like 'Everybody loves a good drought'.
It is, of course, important not to overestimate the role that the press can play.
It is pointless to mention the press. Sen does so because when he was young the Commies thought they could make famine a vote winner for their party by using the Media. Then they realized that the job of the Communist party is to create famines so as to kill off the kulak class.
In India, while the news media have been tremendously helpful in the prevention of famines, they have been able to do relatively little in removing the chronic undernourishment from which perhaps a third of the Indian rural population persistently suffers.
So, the Indian news media has been useless. The fact is the District Collector will get blamed if he does not heed the warning signs. Still, if the politicians are useless, there will be excess mortality.
Chronic undernutrition – as opposed to dramatic starvation deaths – is not particularly newsworthy, just as it would not be a natural subject for rock music.
Sen thinks starvation, rather than sex, is a natural subject for rock music.
The dramatic things get the attention both of the media and of the pressure groups: the less sharp but more pervasive phenomenon of undernourishment cannot easily catch the limelight.
Nor can the even more pervasive phenomenon of shit-hole countries being full of very fucking poor peeps.
If, however, it is correct to think that information is both politically and morally extremely important, then the need to give publicity to less dramatic but more widespread misery must be seen as crucial.
For example the misery caused by having to go to work with a hangover.
The politicisation of the issue may be essential for a rapid solution, and may well be deeply dependent on the media.
Politicization can lead to political changes without any economic amelioration whatsoever. The Socialists can come to power and turn food scarcity into a devastating famine. But they may still be re-elected. After all, they managed to shrink the population while pretending to care deeply for the proletariat.
The economic causes of hunger are quite diverse, and the common predicament of the hungry does not indicate a common causation.
No. The causation is 'not enough food'.
Hunger can result from one or more of very many different developments affecting the ‘entitlements’ of potentially vulnerable groups.
Nobody knows their own 'entitlements' let alone those of anybody else. Madoff's investors thought they were entitled to a wealthy retirement. Then they discovered they weren't entitled to shit.
It would be unfair to criticise Bob Geldof (or the ‘phenomenon’) for not going more deeply into the large variety of causes which have been responsible for famine and undernourishment in Africa.
Geldof understood that food ends hunger, money ends poverty. He was a better economist than Sen.
Indeed the causes of famines and starvation are now technically much better understood,
not by Sen
and the crucial lacuna may, at this stage, lie in awareness, emotions and determination.
Rubbish! ICS officers like B. R Sen knew the warning signs of impending famine that they needed to be watch out for. Since then, meteorologists and other sciencey guys have gotten involved. Awareness and emotions and determination don't matter. There are procedures to be followed and, if the politicians don't steal everything, the problem can be tackled properly. You don't need a 'free press'- i.e. Rupert Murdoch- or a bunch of pop stars getting involved.
The ‘Bob Geldof phenomenon’ has certainly contributed to drawing our attention to a number of very basic questions.
Geldof drew the attention of rock music fans to a famine in Africa. They bought the CD and the T-shirt and may have pledged some money. But something similar happened with the 'Concert for Bangladesh'. It is interesting that George Harrison showed more interest in Sen's ancestral homeland than he did himself. It was only after settling in the UK that Amartya started gassing on about famine. Even there, his current wife was ahead of him.
They include a re-examination of the moral nature of human concern,
There is no need to 're-examine' this. Humans are concerned with the sufferings of other human beings because human morality works in that way. There is a reputational benefit, if nothing else, from such concern which, presumably, has survival value for our species.
the political role of information,
Information may be used by politicians but they may also propagate 'fake news'. A free press may assist them in doing so.
the social role of the media,
the media makes money from society. It must entertain or inform or at least appear cool and trendy.
and the power of public pressure.
which comes down to a willingness to spend money.
These questions may well make us think again about morality and politics in general.
only in the sense that they may well make us into pussy cats.
The Geldof phenomenon fits into a much larger story.
Sadly, it is not a story Sen understands. Enlightened self-interest led certain pop-stars and other celebrities to take a certain stand in the mid-Eighties. One motivation was to distance themselves from racist 'skin-heads' and show they were equally concerned for Black as well as White people. This was a good thing. As a matter of fact, it turned out that neither Reagan nor Thatcher was for the apartheid regime. Once the Cubans left Angola, the US supported majority rule. Clinton, who played the sax, was hailed as America's first Black president. Tony Blair became Murdoch's pick for 10 Downing street. Geldof could pick up the phone and call Tony any time. This is also the reason we now think Geldof and Bono were gobshites. That was the 'larger story' but that story is over.
‘Is that it?’ Bob Geldof has asked. In a sense, it is. But there is also a lot more.
No there isn't. Cash transfers are better than complicated Aid programs. Famine is averted by making more food available. A free Press just means Newspapers and TV Stations are profitable. It doesn't mean journalists have magical powers. As for Bengali economists, they are useless. Still, if they can pretend to be Mother Theresa, why not let them also pretend to breast feed billions of starving darkies?
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