Our Parliament passed a Food Security Bill recently, mandating some kilos of food grains for every person below the poverty line, one free meal a day to every poor pregnant woman, fair compensation for farm land, and other measures to reduce hunger. The papers immediately reported strong disapproval from “the market”, our most sacred cow, and from those Western governments that know what’s best for us. The recent legislation of those governments shows little concern for the hungry. The American food stamps programme, which was meant to eliminate starvation, ran for just 15 years before Ronald Reagan started cutting funds and set a tradition for his successors to follow. In the UK, hunger is becoming a reality for even the employed poor as many families cannot make a living wage and the food banks they relied on are being shut down.
In India, it looked for a while as if the Green Revolution and wider opportunities had changed life for everyone. There seemed to be milk everywhere, fruits, vegetables, and sacks of lentils, rice and sugar piled high in the shops. The middle-aged middle class could comfortably reminisce about the years of rationed rice and sugar. Then the food became prey to lopsided trade agreements, international seed patents, falling prices, new crop pests and diseases in place of the old, aggressive land acquisition for industry, and overwhelming debt. For small farmers there are no good times, and scarcity and hunger are visible again.
When Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo wrote about the desperate poor in the 19th Century, they put a face to hunger to help eradicate it. We have our own robust literature of hardship, and one of its foremost writers was Kamala Markandaya. In A Handful of Rice , set in mid-20th Century Madras, Ravi, drunk and belligerent, breaks into a tailor’s house, but instead of being turned over to the police he is tied up and scolded. At some point in their long night and morning the tailor’s wife gives him breakfast, and their relationship changes. A few chapters later an apologetic Ravi is working as apprentice to the tailor and on his way to marrying the tailor’s daughter. The man’s fortunes slowly creep up and rapidly slide down again. Ravi had left his village hoping to escape the rural impoverishment Markandaya wrote about in Nectar in a Sieve . But even after years of working in the city he can only dream about sometimes eating a second helping. His wages will never keep up with the price of rice, and his hunger leads to anger and despair.
Markandaya’s novels are not even 60 years old, and the realities on which they are based have not faded from the minds of at least older readers. This year, Jack Monroe, a young Englishwoman, began a blog about feeding herself and her son on 10 pounds a week. A new literature of hardship is germinating, and it may remind readers and governments that the problem of hunger has not been solved.
