The Benefits of World Hunger. Satire or not?

An old article from the UN Chronicle – The Benefits of World Hunger has been getting much attention lately, and I partly reproduced it below, and you will understand why. Emphases added. 

We sometimes talk about hunger in the world as if it were a scourge that all of us want to see abolished, viewing it as comparable with the plague or aids. But that naïve view prevents us from coming to grips with what causes and sustains hunger.

Hunger has great positive value to many people. Indeed, it is fundamental to the working of the world’s economy. Hungry people are the most productive people, especially where there is a need for manual labour.

We in developed countries sometimes see poor people by the roadside holding up signs saying “Will Work for Food”.

Actually, most people work for food. It is mainly because people need food to survive that they work so hard either in producing food for themselves in subsistence-level production, or by selling their services to others in exchange for money.

How many of us would sell our services if it were not for the threat of hunger? More importantly, how many of us would sell our services so cheaply if it were not for the threat of hunger?

When we sell our services cheaply, we enrich others, those who own the factories, the machines and the lands, and ultimately own the people who work for them. For those who depend on the availability of cheap labour, hunger is the foundation of their wealth.

Much of the hunger literature talks about how it is important to assure that people are well fed so that they can be more productive. That is nonsense. No one works harder than hungry people.

Yes, people who are well nourished have greater capacity for productive physical activity, but well-nourished people are far less willing to do that work.

For those of us at the high end of the social ladder, ending hunger globally would be a disaster. If there were no hunger in the world, who would plow the fields? Who would harvest our vegetables? Who would work in the rendering plants? Who would clean our toilets?

We would have to produce our own food and clean our own toilets. No wonder people at the high end are not rushing to solve the hunger problem. For many of us, hunger is not a problem, but an asset.

Source: The Wayback Machine

Any reader aware of the current high food prices, impending economic recession, breakdown of the supply chain, attempts to close farms, culling of millions of poultry, and deaths of thousands of cattle must be upset by now after reading the article. 

To add irony, the paper was published by the United Nations – the agency that is supposed to protect against world hunger. The UN removed the report on July 6 due to public outcry and explained that it was satire.  

This article appeared in the UN Chronicle 14 years ago as an attempt at satire and was never meant to be taken literally. We have been made aware of its failures, even as satire, and have removed it from our site.

— UN Chronicle (@_UNChronicle) July 6, 2022

But is it satire? Let us know more about the author and his works. Is he a monster who wants people to get hungry?

George Kent is the author. From The Benefits of World Hunger article,

George Kent is a professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Hawaii. He works on human rights, international relations, peace, development and environmental issues, with a special focus on nutrition and children. He has written several books, the latest is Freedom from Want: The Human Right to Adequate Food.

Looking at his previous publications on Research Gate, we see the following: 

He wrote a favorable book review about Gender, nutrition, and the human right to adequate food: toward an inclusive framework. 

Mr. Kent is a proponent of breastfeeding and human milk banking.

He wrote about the Conflicts of Interest in the WIC program. 

Conflicts of Interest occur when there is a risk that a primary interest of an individual or agency might be unduly influenced by other incompatible interests.

The U.S. government’s Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, commonly known as WIC, supports feeding with infant formula on a large scale, providing more than half the formula used in the U.S. at no cost to the families.

That is a conflict of interest because promoting the use of infant formula benefits corporations while putting infants at significantly higher risk to their health when compared with breastfeeding.

Apparently, he is for breastfeeding, which is better for infants than formula feeding. 

In another article, Mr. Kent critiques the Chilean government for prioritizing formula feeding over breastfeeding. 

In Mr. Kent’s book review of The Hidden Structure of Violence: Who Benefits from Global Violence and War by Marc Pilisuk and Jennifer Achord Rountree. We can see that the idea about The Benefits of World Hunger came from this review:

The media report on violence but offer shallow explanations, telling 

us that bad people do these things for bad reasons. They do not see

the invisible structure that propels this behavior.

 

Marc Pilisuk and Jennifer Achord Rountree lift the veil on The Hidden Structure of Violence. I have admired Pilisuk’s work for decades.

 

I appreciate him even more in my current role as Adjunct Professor at Saybrook University in California, where I work with him in Saybrook’s program on Transformative Social Change.

 

The book surveys the large-scale violence that has troubled human relationships since time immemorial. War and environmental destruction, though obviously harmful, are not the results of simple mistakes.

 

It is important to understand that such harmful actions persist because those who perpetrate such actions reap the benefits, but others reap the harms.

 

We commonly talk about hunger and poverty in the world as if all

of us want to see them abolished. Why are they so persistent?

 

The basic answer is that hungry people work cheap, and those who are powerful do not care much about their well-being.

 

Hunger and poverty are useful to many people, enriching employers and  ensuring that consumers can buy goods at low prices.

 

Hunger and poverty persist because the people who have the power to solve these problems are not the ones who have the problems.

 

Decision-makers who launch harmful actions must anticipate net benefits to themselves, even if the actions result in deep harms to others. 

 

In warfare, it may be that for foot soldiers “the potential gain

for any of the participants was small compared to the costs,” but for the commanders who send them to battle, the expected gain outweighs the expected harm.

 

The powerful enjoy most of the benefits while the weak suffer most of the harms. Both war and economic exploitation enhance the power of the powerful at the expense of the weak. 

The major obstacle to solving the hunger problem is simple: we do not care enough. Most countries have the capacity to ensure that all of their people are adequately nourished, but they do not do that.

 

In terms of material resources, the world as a whole could ensure that everyone is adequately nourished, but it does not do that (Kent 2008). There is a failure of will, not a failure of capacity.

 

Collectively, we simply do not care enough about the poor and hungry among us.

Take away lesson

I conclude that the article, The Benefits of World Hunger is satire. When it was first published in 2008, there was no looming global famine. At that time, it could be easily interpreted as a spoof.

However, anyone reading it in 2022 will feel mocked and be righteously indignant. 

It is a good idea to mark any work as satire so that readers in the future will not misinterpret it. 

Evaluating any article deeper and finding out what the author is really like is always proper. In this case, it is easy to jump on the social media bandwagon and be angry, but you may miss the actual context of The Benefits of World Hunger.

Truth heals. Lies kill. Don’t Get Sick!

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