View previous stories
	Amartya Sen: Poverty and the Tolerance of the Intolerable by Jonathan Derbyshire LSE, Prospect Magazine & agencies   Last night, Professor Amartya Sen, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, delivered the Prospect/Joseph Rowntree Foundation anti-poverty lecture in front of an audience of several hundred people at the London School of Economics, with many more watching the live stream online and following #LSEpoverty on Twitter.   Sen took as his title “Poverty and the Tolerance of the Intolerable”. No country in the world, he declared, is “free from poverty”, though in India, the country of his birth, where there is a “massive disparity between the privileged and the rest”, extreme deprivation is particularly deeply entrenched.   India, he said, is an example of a country with a large middle class which is able to tolerate, with something approaching equanimity, the serious poverty in its midst.   Although the situation in India is extreme—Sen referred to the “special nature of the neglect of its poor” —there is no reason for those of us elsewhere in the world, especially the developed world, to be complacent.   “Blaming the victims” of poverty, he observed, is as common today as it was in the era of the Poor Law.   How is it, Sen asked, that a society is able to avert its gaze from, or else accept as a “fact of life”, the kind of deprivation that robs human beings of the very “social qualities” that make us the sort of creatures we are? To illustrate the damage that poverty does, Sen recalled his own experience, as a child of almost ten, of the Bengal famine of 1943.   He remembered giving a banana to a malnourished woman and child. The woman burst into tears as she instinctively started to feed herself before offering the fruit to her child. “We are no longer human beings,” she cried.   Tolerance of destitution on a mass scale is a phenomenon that “demands explanation”, though none of the frequently canvassed explanations that Sen went on to consider is, he thought, at all satisfactory.   In the first of these explanations, tolerance of the intolerable is said simply to be a matter of “ignorance”. In the second, it is asserted that poverty is ineluctable and irremediable; as the Gospel According to St Matthew puts it, “Ye have the poor always with you.”   Proponents of this explanation, said Sen, tend to present themselves as hard-nosed “realists” about poverty. The third explanation turns on an account of human nature: human beings are self-centred creatures who do not, and perhaps should not, care about the fate of others.   This argument invokes a “moral contingency that makes poverty tolerable to those of us who do not suffer from it”. In other words, there is no duty on the non-poor to relieve the suffering of the poor.   Examining the first explanation, Sen suggested that, in the Indian case at least, tolerance of the intolerable was a consequence not so much of ignorance as of skewed priorites. The interests of India’s growing middle class have a “huge hold”, he argued, over the priorities of the national media. The result is a “crowding out of discussion of the nature, extent and remediability” of poverty and deprivation.   What about the ineluctability argument and the belief that the poor will always be with us? These are hard to defend on purely empirical grounds, Sen said. After all, there have been many successful large-scale attempts elsewhere in the world to significantly reduce poverty—not least in China, with which India compares unfavourably.   And as for the final explanation—the claim that there is a “moral disconnect” between the privileged and the destitute—Sen noted that it is often wrongly attributed to the putative father of free-market economics, Adam Smith. Smith, he reminded the audience, was the author not only of The Wealth of Nations, but also of the Theory of Moral Sentiments, the first sentence of which reads as follows: “How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.”   If, as Sen insisted, none of these arguments is sufficient, on its own, to explain tolerance of extreme poverty, how are we to account for their enduring appeal? (They form part, he said, of a hard-to-dislodge “theory of poverty”.) The blame, he concluded, must lie with “fallacious reasoning”. And remedying the prevalence of that requires renovating the “practice of democracy” itself.   * Listen to a podcast of Amartya Sen’s lecture on “Poverty and the Tolerance of the Intolerable”: http://richmedia.lse.ac.uk/publiclecturesandevents/20130122_1830_povertyToleranceIntolerable.mp3
	New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition in Africa raises concerns by FIAN International, agencies   May-June 2012   Two weeks before the G7 Summit of June 4, 5 in Brussels, FIAN International raises grave human rights concerns about the G8 initiative "New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition in Africa" in a policy paper published today.   Titled "G8 New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition in Africa: A Critical Analysis from a Human Rights Perspective", the policy paper argues that this initiative ignores general human rights principles and contradicts a human rights-based framework in key issues relevant for those most affected by hunger and malnutrition: small-scale food producers.   FIAN calls on the G8 governments to stop this public-private partnership initiative that includes more than 150 companies - among them the biggest transnational corporations in the food and agriculture sector.   Moreover, FIAN highlights the G8 initiative also ignores general human rights principles, like effective participation, and lacks human rights risk analyses and reference to adequate accountability mechanisms.   FIAN criticizes the G8 initiative as bluntly equating the opening of agriculture and food markets to foreign investors with combating hunger and malnutrition. An explicit expression of this erroneous understanding is the "success" indicators of the initiative: in most of the New Alliance Cooperation Frameworks for countries, the World Bank Doing Business Index and "increased private investments" are the key indicators. This alone shows the initiative is excessively biased towards the corporate sector.   FIAN"s policy paper directly contrasts policy actions of the G8 initiative in four key areas: seeds, land, social protection/income, and nutrition with a human rights framework. The results speak for themselves:   For example, where the UN-Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food asks governments to implement farmers rights (as defined in the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources), the G8-led initiative pushes for the "implementation of national seed regulation" for greater private sector involvement.   Similarly, where the human right to adequate food and nutrition includes improved access to land for small-scale food producers "to feed oneself" and for those groups directly affected by land grabbing, the corporate-driven agenda of the G8 initiative is concerned about an easy and cheap process of land allocation for investors.   An increase of private sector involvement is furthermore evident in the area of social protection - an area which has traditionally been the sole responsibility of the state. The role of the state in relation to social protection is reduced through the creation of a climate beneficial to foreign investment by formulating corporate-friendly policy frameworks and opening up social protection-related areas to private investors.   Also, the income-generating measures propagated by the G8 need to be assessed carefully due primarily to the fact that the strategy of the Alliance is geared toward land acquisition for private corporations focusing on large-scale, capital-intensive, and extensive agriculture which requires reduced labor input.   Furthermore, the G8"s simplistic understanding of the nutritional dimension of food production has resulted in the proposal of a limited economic model. It neglects the fact that food and nutrition security does not simply entail the increase of caloric intake, but rather a consistent access to diverse and nutritious diets (in terms of quantity and quality), culturally-adequate food, the recognition of the important role of protecting women"s rights and their nutrition, as well as access to basic public services to ensure nutritional well-being and human dignity.   In conclusion, FIAN"s policy paper fundamentally questions the legitimate role of the G8 in regards to food security and nutrition. It reiterates the demand that G8 countries implement the decisions by Committee on World Food Security (CFS), such as the Guidelines on the Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests, and do not sideline and weaken the CFS as the foremost legitimate and democratic multilateral governing body on food security and nutrition with such an initiative.   http://www.fian.org/news/article/detail/new_alliance_for_food_security_and_nutrition_in_africa_raises_concerns/ http://www.wdm.org.uk/food-and-hunger/call-g8-civil-society-organizations-their-governments-new-alliance-food-security-and# http://www.fian.org/news/newslist/ http://www.fian.org/library/right-to-food-journal/
	View more stories