When will we get freedom from hunger?

SOYMB reads that

India celebrates 63 years of freedom on August 15. The country is home to around 220 million people who are food insecure — the equivalent of the entire populations of UK, France and Germany going hungry.

According to a United Nations World Food Programme report released last year, more than 27% of the world’s undernourished population lives in India. Around 43% of children (under 5 years) in the country are underweight — among the highest in the world, higher than sub-Saharan Africa’s figure of 28% and much higher than the global average of 25%.

More than 70% of India’s under-5 children are anaemic, a figure that actually increased by 6% from 2003 to 2009. In as many as 11 Indian states, more than 80% of children suffer from anaemia. Around 30% of babies in India are born underweight, a direct result of women not getting a proper diet during pregnancy.

It, therefore, comes as no surprise that India held a lowly 65th rank in the Global Hunger Index 2009, which measured the prevalence of hunger in 88 developing countries. The index tagged India’s food security situation as “alarming”.

The numbers of the undernourished seem to have actually swelled in the past decade. The UN’s Millennium Development Goals report released earlier this year says the prevalence of hunger had increased from 20% of the population in 2000-2002 to 21% in 2005-2007. The region’s average was 21% in 1990-92, which means the country made no dent in the size of its hungry population in nearly two decades.

The link between poverty and hunger is obvious. The push towards self-sufficiency in food production through the Green Revolution of the 1960s and 70s made India a food surplus nation in many crops. But there hasn’t been commensurate success in putting money in people’s pockets to buy that food. This has led to the cruel irony of grains rotting in warehouses even as the poor go hungry.

What we said in 1930 before India's independence from Britain is here.
"Indian capitalists want to have the profits of the developing Indian capitalism for themselves...the Indian Nationalist movement represents the interests of Indian capitalists. It is naturally supported by the Indian educated castes, who see the promise of fat jobs in the Indian Army or Civil Service, and in the legal profession."

As we stated in 1930, to the Indian workers we extend our sympathy in the sufferings which fall to their lot. We ask them, however, to recognise that their poverty is the result not of foreign rule — which is merely one of the evil by-products of capitalism —but of the capitalist system itself. Dominion status or Independence for India will not solve any working class problem. It will merely be a substitution of "India for the Indian capitalists" in place of "India for the British capitalists."

To move forward, we, the dispossessed, must now look beyond the artificial barriers of nation-states and regional trading and military blocs, to perceive a common identity and purpose. There is in reality only one world. It is time we reclaimed it.

See also Losing the Jewel