Rice Price Triples in 1 Year. World War 2 Bengal Famine Remembered

Gideon Polya, “Rice Price Triples in 1 Year. World War 2 Bengal Famine Remembered”, MWC News, submitted 28 may 2008.

Rice Price Triples in 1 Year. World War 2 Bengal Famine Remembered

It was reported this week that the global rice price has tripled in one year, reinforcing fears that the World may witness a re-run on a huge scale of the catastrophic World War 2 Bengal Famine in which 6-7 million Indians starved to death under the merciless British when the price of rice quadrupled – those who could not pay for food were forced to starve in the midst of plenty.

The world is in the grip of a global food price crisis that, according to the UK Government Chief Scientific Adviser, Professor John Beddington FRS, threatens “billions” of people in the developing world with famine. Prices for major food commodities such as wheat, rice, corn and soybean have doubled in the last year or so. This year the price of rice has doubled in 3 months.

Food prices in US dollars have been driven upwards through a combination of factors, notably: (1) the anti-humanitarian (and net CO₂ polluting), legislatively-mandated diversion of food for biofuel (impelled by greed, global warming considerations, peak oil, increased oil prices, economics, US, EU and UK legislation); (2) the US dollar decline (driven by factors such as the US credit crisis, US recession and US bankruptcy from the Iraq War); (3) oil price impact on agriculture costs (oil prices have nearly quadrupled in US dollars since the invasion of Iraq); (4) anthropogenic global warming from carbon dioxide (CO₂) pollution led by the US, Canada, Australia and the US-aligned Gulf States (and consequent intensified droughts in Australia and the CIS); (5) increased demand for food (notably meat) from the rapidly developing Asian giants China and India; and (6) fear, speculation and unilateralism (e.g. constraints on rice exports) (see “Global food crisis. US biofuel & CO₂ threaten billions” on MWC News: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/21277/42/ ).

While food stocks are presently the lowest for decades, the real killer now as in the World War 2 Bengal Famine is the PRICE – those who cannot afford the doubled or tripled price of food will simply starve unless governments intervene to save them.

Felicity Lawrence in the UK Guardian has reported (Wednesday May 28 2008; http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/may/28/food.philippines1?gusrc=rss&feed=environment ) the alarming news that “The price of rice has reached record highs in recent months, moving from $327 a tonne a year ago to $1,000 a tonne last week … Rice differs from other agricultural commodities such as corn, wheat and soya, in that very little is traded internationally. Just 7% of the global harvest, about 30m tonnes a year, goes on to the world market.” The price of rice has risen in part because of the huge increase in the price of oil (and hence increased agricultural production and transport costs); the impact of price rises for other grains; the effects of export bans by major rice-producing countries; recent climate change-related adverse events notably storm surge disasters in Bangladesh (November 2007, Cyclone Sidr) and Myanmar (May, 2008, Cyclone Nargis), these being major rice producing countries; and commodity speculation (informed by all of the foregoing).

What will hopefully save the impoverished billions of the Developing World reliant upon rice as a staple will be ACTION taken by Indigenous Governments to prevent mass starvation by ensuring the RIGHT of their subjects to food - or “entitlement” to use the term employed by 1998 Economics Nobel Laureate and famine expert Professor Amartya Sen (Harvard University) (see: Dreze, J. and Sen, A. (1989), Hunger and Public Action (Clarendon, Oxford) ; Sen, A. (1981), Poverty and Famines. An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Clarendon Press, Oxford).; and

Sen, A. (1981), Famine Mortality: A Study of the Bengal Famine of 1943 in Hobshawn, E. (1981) (editor), Peasants In History. Essays in Honour of David Thorner (Oxford University Press, New Delhi)).

At this time it is useful to remember what happened during the man-made Bengal Famine of World War 2 to cause the deaths of 6-7 million people in Bengal and the neighboring provinces of Bihar, Orissa and Assam.

Prior to World War 2 and indeed for 2 centuries of British rule in India (1757-1947), most of the Indian population lived on the edge. This sustained, remorseless POLICY of the British was evidently designed to maximize taxation revenue as well as to keep a huge population too weak to revolt. It resulted in a succession of horrendous famines from the 1769-1770 Bengal Famine (10 million victims, one third of the Bengali population) through until the 1943-1945 Bengal Famine (6-7 million deaths). The excess deaths (avoidable deaths, deaths that did not have to happen) associated with British rule in India totalled 1.5 billion, most of these deaths being from deprivation and deprivation-exacerbated disease (see “Shocking, non-reported Commonwealth Games statistics” on MWC News: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/5668/26/ ).

Thus in a speech to the House of Commons in 1935, Winston Churchill declared: “In the standard of life they have nothing to spare. The slightest fall from the present standard of life in India means slow starvation, and the actual squeezing out of life, not only of millions but of scores of millions of people, who have come into the world at your invitation and under the shield and protection of British power.”

Prior to World War 2 grain imports into India declined substantially and in 1942 Japan captured Burma, a major source of rice. However a series of factors further contributed to a market perception leading to hugely increased rice price rises (an eventual quadrupling): a storm that decreased local production; a fungal pathogen outbreak that similarly diminished production in a particular area; British seizure of food stocks in particular areas; the British boat seizure policy designed to prevent boats falling into Japanese hands (but with catastrophic effects on fishing and rice distribution); and the 1941 divide-and-rule policy giving provinces autonomy over food stocks.

An important factor was the drastic decrease in Indian Ocean shipping ordered by Churchill in 1943 in response to huge losses of Allied shipping in the Atlantic due to insufficient air protection - Churchill had mistakenly taken the advice of Lindeman to use the air force to bomb German cities rather than to protect Allied shipping as advocated by other scientists (for a detailed account see Snow, C.P. Snow’s classic “Science and Government” (The New English Library, London, 1961)).

However the crucial factor was the reality that Calcutta was a major industrial city of the British Empire and the British Government protected food availability for industrial workers, soldiers and other public servants. A cashed up Calcutta effectively sucked food out of a starving, rice-producing countryside in what Professor Amartya Sen has described as an “economic boom famine” (today the Asian giants and the First World similarly have the money to buy grain for food, grain-fed meat and biofuel in a global market place).

There was actually plenty of food available in India – indeed Professor Sen has calculated that the rice supply was greater in the famine year of 1943 than in the non-famine year of 1941. What killed these 6-7 million Indians was the PRICE and a merciless, racist, colonial régime that effected a sustained, remorseless scorched earth policy over several years. Indeed Colin Mason in his “A Short History of Asia. Stone Age to 2000AD” (Macmillan, London, 2000) has suggested that this was a deliberate policy to forestall Japanese invasion of India from Burma and analogous to the successful British scorched earth campaign against the French in the Spanish Peninsular campaign in the Napoleonic Wars.

Behind the horrendous statistics lie the appalling physical realities of starvation that have been graphically recorded (for details and documentation see: Greenough, P.R. (1982), Prosperity and Misery in Modern Bengal: the Famine of 1943-1944 (Oxford University Press, Oxford & New York) and “Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History. Colonial rapacity, holocaust denial and the crisis in biological sustainability. (G.M. Polya, Melbourne): http://janeaustenand.blogspot.com/ ). An awful aspect was the large-scale civilian and military sexual abuse of starving women and girls that involved some 30,000 victims in Calcutta alone and perhaps hundreds of thousands overall in the affected provinces.

In January 2008 I took part in a BBC radio broadcast about the Bengal Famine together with 1998 Economics Nobel Laureate Professor Amartya Sen and other scholars. This program was part of s series entitled “The things we forgot to remember”: http://www.open2.net/thingsweforgot/bengalfamine_programme.html . Little did I realize that within 6 months the price of rice would have doubled and indeed tripled over a one year period. I had published a book a decade earlier about this catastrophe entitled “Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History” in response to the extraordinary “rubbing out” or “whitewashing” of the British Bengal Famine atrocity from British history – and my bottom-line argument in relation to this holocaust denial and holocaust-ignoring was “history ignored yields history repeated”.

My final comments in the BBC program were made from a scientific, procedural perspective: “This isn’t simply an argument about rubbing out history. Scientists can help society through what is called rational risk management. It successively involves A, getting the accurate data. B, doing a scientific analysis. And then C, recognising this, taking action, changing the system, whether it’s a national system or a global system, to avoid a repetition. ”

Professor Amartya Sen’s concluding comments were powerful, authoritative, humanitarian sentiments that are acutely relevant to today: “I think the fact that famines happen when they’re so extraordinarily easy to prevent – nothing in the world is easier to prevent – affects me. Being a Bengali I can’t say that it adds especially to that because this seems to me to be a basic human sympathy at seeing suffering all across the world which are completely needless.”

There IS a global food crisis that is in part driven by US, UK and EU biofuel laws that mandate feeding food to cars and trucks in a world in which 4 billion are malnourished; by racist, colonial resource wars (e.g. the Iraq War) that have been associated with a 4-fold increase in the price of oil in US dollars; and a global market that is just as merciless as the World War 2 Calcutta food market under the racist, laissez-faire British colonialists. However what has changed from World War 2 Bengal is that TODAY Indigenous Governments can institute urgent measures to protect their populations.

Fundamental to current responses is the civilized recognition of the “entitlement” of all human beings to basic physiological survival. While “competition” is obviously “good for business” as the rabid neocons endlessly tell us, at situations of very low income there must be a safety net to ensure basic human survival. What will hopefully save the people of South East Asia, South Asia and China from the global food crisis is that these rice-consuming regions are made up of rice-producing countries with Indigenous Governments with a generally much higher commitment to the Indigenous citizens than that of their former colonial masters. However this optimism cannot mask the acute seriousness of the general global food crisis with Spaceship Earth facing a growing climate emergency and sustainability emergency due to greed-driven, man-made greenhouse gas pollution and consequent catastrophic global warming.