Gandhi, Galtung und Globalisierung (English shop)

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It is now a good 30 years since India’s eminent economist Amartya Sen taught us that it is not only a question of how much food is produced. Hunger also exists when there is more than enough food available for purchase in shops and markets. Even when these are overflowing with food, people in the immediate vicinity can die of hunger if they do not have the money to buy food.

Sen’s entitlement approach has contributed to the fact that today we no longer define food security solely on the basis of food production: famines are not fates sent by God, not “natural disasters”. Hunger is the result of social structures. Hunger is not simply there; hunger is made. To put an end to hunger it is not enough simply to produce more food (difficult as this alone already is); rather, hunger will only disappear if the social structures are changed that prevent people from growing or buying enough food for themselves.

India is today experiencing an economic boom such as it has never seen in its now more than 60 years of independence. And yet more hungry people live in this country than anywhere else in the world.

In this book, hunger is regarded as the most obvious failure of development. Hunger is a symbol of a society’s inability to provide all its citizens with at least the bare necessities of life. The book is a critique of social structures and processes in India that give priority to modern, urban India and in doing so exploit rural India and the people who live there. The book is a fragment, an attempt to question what an economic system is supposed to achieve, and how India has fared in this respect in more than 60 years of independence. Ideas of Johan Galtung and Mohandas Karamchand (M.K.) Gandhi are addressed in order to offer alternatives to conventional economic theories.

Alternatives not in order to reach a mass consumer society by paths other than those already taken, but ways to reduce the violence, environmental destruction and disregard for human dignity that arise from economic processes.

The book also remains a fragment because it cannot develop any concrete utopia of how India could do better than it is doing. Unease with the economic, social and political development taking place does not lead to proposed solutions, or at least to an attempt to outline an alternative development strategy. The complexity of the subject matter and the dimension of the problems do not permit this. What is intended, however, is to prompt readers to reflect on what the economy is supposed to achieve, and where limits would have to be set for our own consumer societies.