Views from the South: The Effects of Globalization and the WTO on Third World Countries.

• Author: Pal, Amitabh

Views from the South: The Effects of Globalization and the WTO on Third World Countries edited by Sarah Anderson Food First Books & International Forum on Globalization. 195pages. $12.95.

In the years immediately following India's independence, poverty was so abject in my part of the country that poorer people could not afford to buy wheat to satisfy their hunger. Instead, they bought coarser and less nutritious grains like millet. The subsequent years have seen an improvement in the purchasing power of the average person to the extent that millet and other coarse grains have almost disappeared from the local marketplace. But hunger has not quite done the same disappearing act all over India or in the rest of the world. About 800 million people are hungry worldwide--more than 200 million of them from India. In such countries as Somalia, Afghanistan, and Haiti, the vast majority of the population is underfed.

Two new books, one by former Senator George McGovern and the other by Food First and the International Forum on Globalization, attempt to trace the causes of global hunger and propose solutions--albeit from different perspectives.

McGovern takes the title of his book from the "Four Freedoms" enunciated by President Franklin Roosevelt in his 1941 State of the Union address. FDR'S Third Freedom referred to freedom from want. McGovern thinks that, with the right measures, hunger can be halved within fifteen years and eliminated by 2030. He rightly points out that there has been progress in reducing world hunger, noting that by the late 1990s it had been reduced by 50 percent over the past quarter-century. He cites polls to show that a vast majority of Americans think it should be a top priority of the U.S. government to end hunger at home and abroad.

The 1972 Democratic Presidential candidate has a long history of trying to end hunger, a record he emphasizes with justifiable pride. He headed the Food for Peace program under President Kennedy. He was instrumental in getting the U.N. World Food Program started with crucial financial support from the United States. He also helped set up the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs. He is currently the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. agencies on food and agriculture in Rome. He accepted the post under President Clinton and was reappointed to it by President George W. Bush.

But his long and close association with government makes him place too much faith in the benign intentions and overall efficacy of U.S. programs abroad, a faith that is debatable, at best.

For instance, he extols the virtues of the Alliance for Progress and Food for Peace programs that the United States set up: "I shall always be proud to have been the Food for Peace director in the Kennedy Administration during 1961 and 1962. In his soon-to-be-published biography of me, Professor [Thomas] Knock concludes that I had coordinated the feeding of more hungry people than any other individual in American history.

But as Stephen G. Rabe points out in The Most Dangerous Area in the World: John E Kennedy Confronts Communist Revolution in Latin America (University of North Carolina, 1999), the Alliance for Progress was by most accounts a failure, with per capita agricultural production falling and little progress being made on other social indicators. One of the reasons for the failure of the program was its timidity on land reform, a subject that McGovern neglects.

McGovern also praises the Public Law 480 program passed by Congress to send farm aid to other countries. But as even he points out, the program was often perverted to suit U.S. ends. When the United States offered aid to...