Hunger. Martin Caparros. Editorial Planet. 610 pgs. Book Chronicle.

The mechanism

El Hambre de Martín Caparrós is a worldwide reportage in which, through reports and chronicles and interviews made in Africa, Asia, Argentina, the United States, the chronicler gives an account (he realizes, we, the readers), of the different experiences of Universal Hunger. And of the paradoxes of its causes. And of the struggle for life. But without the sum of voices that gives the global dimension of the story, the collection of data and testimonies (in the first person, from people of different cultures, ethnic groups, nationalities, people located in all strata of their societies) without this crossing of testimonies with statistics of a world counted by the meters of globalization, without the critical reading of the effect of those data and those figures in the existential and factual human life (the stomach of each one), the book would not have the same effect. And the effect is the fiber that touches us and leads to nausea, to colic: a progressive indignation, violent at every time impotent, that we pretend when we realize that everyday life is anomalous, that buying an iPhone is pure slavery, that a Russian (construction) worker who buys a magazine like Shock in the corner supermarket is pure eternal luxury of Lipovetsky, that everything cheap you eat is ruining a peasant somewhere in the world. Those, the shocking findings of the reader, due to the juxtaposition of contradictions proposed by the chronicler, become revelations and shame. It is the choir of voices confronted with the interpretation of data from which the disturbing effect of this dialectic book springs. Overall, all the chapters seek to answer a fundamental question: What is the mechanism that makes it possible for Hunger to exist in this world that has it all for everyone? And the derivatives: Causes? Guilty? Where they are? How is it possible with current science and technology, with current wealth figures, with current food production, the world let (let us) go, or let go, starvation (to) more than a billion people?

The cases

Niger, in Africa: Hunger in Sahel, the capital of Niger, comes from many sources: the climate, the poor harvest, the lack of water that kills animals, the government's indebtedness with investment funds, with the World Bank for times of drought. While loans are approved or disapproved to further indebt the country with foreign debt, animals are concentrated in water wells that evaporate and hospitals are filled with malnourished children. Niger's portrait is one of malnutrition; physiologically, here it is explained in an obscene, direct, surgical way, what El Hambre is. What is it to stay in the bones. What is it to feel hungry until you no longer feel it because your body no longer belongs to you, it is alienated. What happens when the body devours itself. There a woman explains to Caparrós the difference between rich and poor with this equation: some work with their hands, others with their money. The paradox is: the one who works the most is the poorest. There, in Africa, children are the promise of the future: there are many for one to survive and manage to feed the others. There, the climate (whose struggle determines, according to Caparrós, the civilizing process) continues to kill people (while the same aggressive summer in the United States only serves to change the air conditioners of the peasant farmers of the plains). With slight variations, the struggle for life is the same in Mali and Nigeria. But not the same as agrarian life in America. Then come the figures to contrast the agricultural subsidies of the governments, the degrees of technification of the land, with the figures and with the final destinations of the crops. In Niger they cultivate like five thousand years ago, with the wheel of the zodiac, and they live like ten thousand years ago, and the harvest is not enough. In the United States, the technique and agrochemicals and transgenics produce surplus food that is used to fatten pigs. Very different, in its behavior, is El Hambre en Biraul. The fourth part of India. There coexists a population that exceeds the entire sum of those who lived from ten thousand years ago to the twentieth century. A thousand people per square kilometer in one of the most fertile places on earth, says Caparrós. Half of that overpopulation endures hunger. We remain like this, seeing distorted by the atrocious contrast: while in one latitude people endure hunger because there is nothing to eat, in another they endure it because there is not enough for everyone to eat or because it is enough but there is nothing with buy to eat better. There are several digressions made by the chronicler-historian to examine emblematic cases of famines of the past: the famine in the Ukraine due to Stalin's decision (nine million dead), the famine in communist China due to Mao's omission and enthusiasm ( ten million dead), England's industrial famine as the engine of Victorian labor (perhaps an accumulation that modern subjects will enjoy, but which was somewhat contrary to the bliss of save the queen! for the colonial subjects of the epoch). As if each political and economic model brought incorporated to its artifact, a device to provoke Hunger. Or as if Hunger were another element of social control. It is also possible, says Caparrós, Hunger in prosperity, living in the cornucopia of abundance. Here, paradoxically, he moves to the antipodes of India and observes (demonstrates) that The Hunger of the poor in the United States is rich in carbohydrates and sugars. Hamburgers, ice creams and fried foods in packages are the cheapest food that can be afforded by those at the bottom of the pyramid. The effect is not the same: there the children do not devour themselves, but rather become adults, contract diabetes or their hearts burst. Obesity is the disease of the poor in rich countries. Obesity as a result of satisfying unsatisfied hunger. Another case, another form, of Hunger, is a few blocks from Caparrós' house in Buenos Aires. This is the case of the people who live from the Ocho de Mayo garbage dump, derived from José León Suárez (greetings to Walsh). The hunger in Argentina, which sells its soybeans to Chinese pig farmers, can be traced to the type of waste from the social layers. And there is the hunger in Sudan or Madagascar that comes from the war, or from the usufruct control of rented land. , when not sold, to foreigners in exchange for foreign debt and free trade agreements. There are more, many more cases, individualized by life chronicles. The voices of the protagonists of El Hambre are metonyms: a head (a stomach) will be worth the hunger suffered by millions. A story for the story of thousands. The hunger of Kadi's malnourished baby that will be carried dead on his back at the end of the interview. Mai's hunger that doesn't wonder about tomorrow, because hunger has to be satiated today. Rahmati's hunger that would change if she had a cow. Urban and gender hunger in Geeta, who lived on the streets of Bombay and stopped eating when she was a child so that the men of the house could eat. The hunger of Mohamed who pedals a rickshaw 50 kilometers a day in exchange for 2 dollars because he decided to leave his town to live in his sublimated city: Dhaka. Abdel's hunger in Kamrangirchar who works twelve hours making plastic pots for a little rice. The hunger of the textile workers of Bangladesh where those t-shirts that we wear are made, those shoes that appear in the MTV videos, those thousands of seams that define the design of our blue jeans and vests and shawls from Zara's (Fallabella) whose salary is paid at $40 a month. The hunger of the Chinese who are slaves to a rich man and aspire to be rich also by emulating the same investment methods with which they have been enslaved. Fatema's hunger that she hasn't eaten what she likes most for years, masapán balls, and that she works half her life in a factory and her only happiness consists in remembering the hours of love that she spent with her dead husband. (20,000 million dollars in exports. 4 million workers. 90% women: Bangladesh). The insatiable hunger of Dick, in Chicago, who eats macaroni and cheese and breads in a Salvation Army home. Eating charity flour allows you to stay fat. The hunger sated with addictive doses of carbohydrates of 25 million diabetics. Most are poor in a rich country. Obesity sycophants, because poisonous cheap food is the only thing you can afford. For them, to satisfy hunger is to never finish satisfying it. On the other hand, the hunger of Lorena, or Nohelia, or César, or la Flaca, in the Ocho de Mayo neighborhood of Buenos Aires, which is a mountain of garbage, is satiated with waste and food that has expired and wasted by the another part of society. The hunger of Saratou, who is happy with the goat that Caparrós gives him, in exchange for a decorated plate, is only a lifesaver that costs the same as the two croissants that the chronicler will eat in Paris later, and will serve to satisfy himself with a little milk (the same one that her breasts don't produce and that's why she can't feed her dying baby). Many cases. So many stories that resemble almost nothing, but that resemble so many others. All made up of a chain of injustices, or implacable justice: these contradictions that demonstrate what is close to almost everyone but that we hardly see when it is not ours: The Hunger of others.

Euphemisms, statistics and the devil's dictionary

In the devil's dictionary that is the statistical joke of those who rule the world, hunger is defined as "food insecurity." The figures are: 1.4 billion people suffer from hunger and are perhaps going to die from diseases caused by the physiological consequences of hunger: malnutrition, starvation, obesity. One (and a half) in seven. Or two to round up because the figure continues to increase every day. Against this "food insecurity" is fought. How do you fight? With millionaire items that are millionaire alms from the countries that consume most of the raw materials (the powers that usufruct all the slavery of the earth and their delegates). Who fight? The organization of nations. Doctors Without Borders, Fao, United States, France, Unicef, WHO, Bill Gates, Slim, G8, Brics (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa). The real dimension of alms called "humanitarian aid" serves as placebos to lighten the burdens of conscience of the powerful. Assisting but not changing the order that causes widespread famine, keeps the conscience clean and maintains the hierarchy, the planetary order. Below, some of the euphemisms of that dictionary of the devil that Caparrós has baptized as the international language of humanitarianism, or “bureaucratés ”:“Threshold of the extreme” (exit the,): False reductions in misery.“Third world, first world”: delimitation of the economic borders of the real world.“Humanitarian aid”: donations whose 70% must be transported by law in the North American merchant fleet (which keeps 40% of the donations (992,000 million dollars). “Clientelism”: distributing part of the national wealth in small doses of alms to postpone and contain social outbursts. “Inclusion”: where a fifth of the world's population is left over, where the hungry are "disposable", they are not needed either as workers, or as labor, or as cannon fodder, a beautiful way of saying we include you exc fighting among the world's dispossessed. “Hue”: variable in statistical poverty gauges whose subtle change in number strikes the stomach or spells death for millions of starving people. “Food”: contains several meanings. Currently it is one more form of financial speculation where what is bought and sold are the hypotheses of the crops and not the crops themselves. In an existential way, it expressly refers to two classes: those who are rich and those who are not. “Assistanceism”: giving miseries to the poor in exchange for not seeing them; use them to channel resources in exchange for not helping them to use legal or political tools or activists that allow them to change their material reality. "Garbage": produce garbage. And live from what is dug up in the garbage. “Garbage”: do without the goods that others need (half of the food that the world produces is not eaten, it is thrown away). “Inequality”: the distribution of wealth in unequal proportions. “70 million”: the number of rich people. “33,000 million”: dollars, it is understood, which is the figure that should be allocated (constantly?) to eradicate the current hunger in the world. (The same number of profits produced by the cosmetic industry). “99%”: the concentration of wealth is enjoyed by 1% of the population, who are not the 99% (Caparrós cites Stiglitz). “Market”: regulation of prices. “Development”: accumulation of wealth. “Underdevelopment”: concentration of poverty. (More of this language in the chapter: From Hunger, inequality, 4)

Progress and other black jokes

Roughly (there can be no other to summarize the ideas -one for each line- contained in this 600-page allegation) the topics examined, questioned and destroyed are: overpopulation, overproduction, consumption, class abysses, distribution of wealth , land appropriation, government manipulation, financial speculation. The sum of these factors results in the causes of Hunger. In this exhibition are the origins and the explanation that today there is enough food to feed seven times the current population and that in the long run half live in poverty and a third of those who live in poverty will die of starvation or death. Hunger-derived diseases. One of the hypotheses is the social disaster of human Hunger is due to human progress. But if the blame cannot be placed on the shoulders of technical development, because transgenics, agrochemicals and machines (alienations of capitalism aside) allow (here I salute the environmentalists) that agriculture produces ten times what the same land and the rudiments allowed in other ages, then it will be another piece that fails in the chain and prevents the production made with this technique, with these chemicals, with these genetic "improvements", from being used to cover the basic food needs of the people of this time. To closely observe the “free” market, Caparrós attends the Chicago Stock Exchange to talk with those responsible for the Food Investment Funds. They are the guys who decide at lunch the price of what you eat the day after breakfast (whether you have breakfast cereal, or Bimbo bread, or North American wheat tortillas instead of Mexican tortillas, or imported milk, or Vietnamese coffee). The major paradox here is the perfect ignorance of the final effect of the investment chain among those who speculate with our stomachs: they say they are buying a hypothetical crop that will happen in three years. They will then resell it for a slightly higher price than they bought it for, this to another investor interested in selling it for a slightly higher price (which varies if a hurricane or war approaches or there is a sudden higher demand from Chinese pig farmers), and these new owners sell it in turn to another investor who ventures to buy the hypothetical crop that will be (it is a hypothesis) going up and down in the figures of the stock market in the three years that are missing for the plants to grow, flourish and the grains exist (producers were given an estimated advance as a loan on the future harvest). For them this changes the whole dynamic of the food market. It improves the economic cost of production and regulates prices by preventing everything from being in the hands of a single owner, a single speculator. At the end of the chain of collective speculation, the price of things improves, but whoever cannot pay the value added to the product, hold on. Hunger. It would seem that Caparrós's book is the story of misery. But the background is the story of the accumulation of wealth, the reversal of this accumulation and its effect on humanity. They tell us that the market is global, but they do not tell us that it is unique, and that it is dominated by the four capitalist partners who indebt governments to dominate, to control sovereignty, land, consumption; the same ones that buy private armies like Monsanto, or the presidents who own oil companies that declare wars for the national security of their citizens and actually go for oil. They tell us that the lack of food is not the cause of hunger but the lack of money to access food or the way to produce it, so they are not to blame but the poverty of others (caused by their wealth).

voices of the tribe

If you walk into a junk store depressed and walk out happy with a melted Styrofoam Buddha, it's either because happiness is highly overrated or because you lack self-esteem. I thought that my happiness was a lot of Chinese trinkets and friends until I discovered in the center of Bogotá the sales of the La Central bookstore in Madrid with everything for two dollars and the illustrated Bodhisattva of Hindu stores. It is a bit obscene to read this book in the morning (I read it in a long month) and have prefabricated waffles for breakfast bathed in maple syrup and cereal (frugal breakfast where almost all the ingredients are imported, even the pseudo-Colombian coffee comes from Vietnam). It's also kind of obscene to discover yourself wearing Nike or Converse shoes and wrap yourself up in a Zara's vest bought in Falabella or a thermal shirt that my roommate suggested she had stolen from a lover's wardrobe, or have an Ipad, or any fancy high-end phone by slave assemblers from China, South Korean children or seamstresses from Bangladesh. This, of course, reading this, this book and being moved, is a way of pretending that you care about the origin of misery, the origin of the things around you, and the cities full of industrial proletariat. Or better yet: read Hunger and discover little by little that everything around us makes us guilty of the hunger of others, that's where this shame comes from, this shame. slave who provides with his (my) labor power the happiness of someone somewhere in the world. This, of course, is only a hypothesis: I imagine that I work in a Chinese trinket factory for four dollars a day. I think about what would make me happy. I imagine that my happiness as an industrial slave lies in something, owning an object that comes from the next country, from South Korea. Suppose I save a third of my starvation wages to buy an iPhone and listen to music while walking through the thick curtain of smog in Beijing. That makes me happy. Would I change that happiness to know where that happiness comes from with a battery and a high-definition camera? The happiness in this house, in which I live and write, is made up of Chinese trinkets. And of books. Caparrós calls this guilt complex as initiated into global outrage (one who begins to ask questions that make his own consumption stagger), these assumptions and burdens of conscience, “Voices of the tribe”. They are voices of bewilderment, almost all of them. Voices that pretend that they (we) care about the chains of exploitation, the chains of slavery, the poverty of others, The Hunger. Almost everything that surrounds us, almost everything we eat, almost everything we think we possess, originates from in the hunger of another. What makes it bearable is that we do not know the entire chain, of value, of production, of the effect. Not knowing it is what makes us live in peace. No guilt. And so human.

Visions of human misery

Still, traveling to see the hunger of others is like studying psychology to psychoanalyze your mom. How to tie your tubes to adopt seven children of all races. Like learning to fly planes to commit suicide with all the passengers inside: a Roman job with an absurd purpose; going too far to find something that may be right around your house, or at the corner supermarket. It may be that, in the end, The Hunger, or what has moved you to undertake the journey to see the hunger of others, turns out not to mean what you thought, or to be a vain effort. My reading of The Hunger coincided with Alexandra's correspondence David Neel to India in the early 20th century. If you travel to unravel poverty you will see it in everything. David Neel went to India a hundred years ago to research the origins of Buddhism. She also saw the poverty of the time, but for her, for the people with whom she spoke, poverty does not have the same meaning. It is one of the ten thousand things of Hinduism. People starve because of what other people do, is David Neel's observation. And it is the same thing that Caparrós observes a century later, only that Caparrós does not care. The Hunger that David Neel observes is transitory, only a part of life, of lives, and instead The Hunger that Caparros points out seems permanent static, immovable, monolithic. A few years ago my friend Litos told a kid from the center of Bogotá that it must be very difficult to live on the street like him, but the kid smiled, stared at her with his liver-like eyes and replied: “I it is not difficult to live on the street; the difficult thing is: to live”. To dry. Life is not just looking for what to eat, but it is also that: the need to eat and not being able to.

Conclusions

The problem with thinking about solutions globally is that it leaves aside the way of looking for an individual or local solution. Caparrós makes his "proposal" at the end of the book. The proposal includes the political path, but the political path does not work because the world is moved by the market and not by politics (it has been demonstrated in the previous five hundred and fifty pages), or it is the policy of the owners of the market that imposes the policy to the other countries that are his pantries. Caparrós shows himself to be someone touched by these issues, someone who has always had the secret intention of changing the material conditions of his society, with ideas, with proposals, with solutions that include a census, which They include an assessment of the problems in order to think of solutions. I see at least two problems with these alternatives: they are solutions for the future and not for the present, and the individual and local route has been discarded. The Caparrós proposal is not to settle, to oppose, to react, to demand structural changes, not placebos. Each era is thought by its contemporaries (those who are alive at a certain time) with its problems and solutions. In Unforgettable Years, John Dos Passos' magnificent travel book through Iran and Georgia and Africa, he recounts his time in the Republic of Trascaucasia. There he meets a community, the Torasiví, followers of communism who had just defeated, with the red army, the burzoi, soldiers from Georgia. Dos Passos understands between them two dimensions of life: on the one hand he imagines the revolutionized, collectivized world, which is the world seen with the enthusiasm of his hosts, and on the other he describes that this enthusiasm of the past (because he is narrating the trips from the future) that his enthusiasm was then an error of perspective. He more or less says this: “The houses I saw had been looted. There was no trace of the furniture. He attached great importance to the theory that the revolution had freed humanity from the tyranny of things. Personally, I had decided long before to get rid of all my possessions. It took me years to learn that when a man loses what belongs to him, he also loses his freedom." Later he adds: “I found the conversation with the Tovarishí who knew a few words of French, Italian or German exciting. They were still in the first enthusiasm of the communist experience. It was a new life. Society had to be cooperative like a hive, comme les Abeilles, die biene. Everyone was talking about bees. They were laying the foundations: food and schools, peace and freedom for everyone, except for the damned burzoi who were giving them so much trouble. In the summer of 1921 it would have been difficult to find a single veteran who did not agree with that program.” [Seix Barral-Oveja Negra 1984] Feudalism, communism, industrialism once seemed to be the solution, but later generations would see them as the origin of the problems of the past thrown on the present that was the future. John Berger In that beautiful book entitled Puerca Tierra, he offers this path: the resistance of the peasant class, which was the only self-sufficient one in other ages. Today the figure of the peasant is about to disappear, which was the base of the pyramid of classes that we were taught in all the schools of the world so that it would be clear to us where we were standing in the distribution of pleasure and consumption and work ( and they are threatened by the agrarian modernization that simplifies human labor, by monocultures that extort the soil and that generally occupy the most fertile lands and belong to an owner -which is a foreign country- and the concentration of the world's urban population ). Staying in that small redoubt, or moving to it, that dream of bucolic hippies, or resisting the temptation to occupy a space in the modern megalopolis, to become self-sufficient, to produce for domestic consumption, is the Berger alternative.

omissions

A notable omission from the book in my opinion has to do with education. Is there social advancement with education? Does studying make the difference between remaining poor or modifying that conditioning? According to society? In the countries where Caparrós was, in the sectors where he interviewed his protagonists of El Hambre, it seems that there is a determinism: you are born poor and you remain poor and you will inherit poverty. Examining the way in which someone who had all the conditions to continue in the traditional family misery transforms it through education, could be a reversal of poverty, that determinism of El Hambre. (And yet statistics and reality say that it is not : educated people are not needed. With those that exist, there are plenty. Cities full of industrial, intellectual proletariat, with rows of unemployed people who know the same thing for whom there is no work. Technical development destroys work and creates simulacra of employment, and in the best of cases, education is another investment fund, another business). Another omission is the model of the city as a human failure. consumption changes of humanity Monsanto is the highest expression of the advances of human agriculture because the modification of seeds in transgenic seedbeds and fertilizers increased production tions per hectare at exponential levels capable of covering all the needs in less land, and although Caparrós questions the patent monopoly system derived from this miraculous company, he omits information on the biological effect of the genetic modifications that erode the land, that sterilize the other plants. (If it is assumed that technification will increase exponentially with humanity, because techniques also evolve, and although it has still passed the test of a century of interventions on the soil, there are already lands ruined by monocultures).

my corner store

I think solutions. To my life? For my family? For my society? For the humanity? Let us limit ourselves to our miserable existences. The only way to free yourself from economic oppression is not to cooperate with the chain: neither with the market, nor with consumption, nor production; nor give away my work even if I have to accept hunger for dignity, nor buy what is imported (and sabotage everything else). So I go to the corner store to see how to start. Noticed. Twenty-five years ago (you can remember for generations) in the neighborhood store you could get Quipitos, Costeñita, Zenú Salchichón, Familia toilet paper, Clubsoda, Clubsocial, pastilla sweets, rice, cocadas, banana, pelao corn arepa, tamales , potatoes, Hipinto soft drinks, Rum Napoleon, Brandy Domeq, Cigarettes Pielroja Quinado wine Sanzón, Chocorramos, Vikings. In the same store, today, you can get Bimbo bread, Scott paper, imported cookies of various brands, Lacto-whey instead of milk, Doritos and other packages, Club Colombia Beer, Cool cigarettes, Belmont, Oldpar Whiskey, Salchichón Salsán, soft drinks , packets of potatoes peeled and cut and ready to fry, oil by the spoonful, shampoo pads, cat food and soil, Dubonet wine, Manichewitz, etc. An entire era could be seen by the type of packaging in its stores. Or because of the existence or non-existence of neighborhood stores. Now I go into the chain supermarket, which is buying neighborhood stores to put in express soda and toilet paper dispensers. To watch. At the checkout, a boy dressed in work clothes, grease stains, worn leather shoes, buys cigarettes and picks up a Shock magazine. What is the use of buying Shock magazine from a man who works in a mechanic shop, a magazine that tells him about things he doesn't have, that he craves, that shows him a face of unattainable beauty? Why do I buy what I buy, those dried tomatoes, that bottle of olive oil? Arcadia magazine? This book? In an interview Caparrós said that buying an iPhone is violence. In the light of this book, the sarcasm that he falls in love with is understood. Pero si compro un Iphone no estoy pensando en quién se muere de hambre, sino en la funcionalidad de esa cámara que me permitiría hacer películas o cortos cinematográficos en video en pequeños formatos para el medio digital, etc.Entonces. To do? ¿Cómo oponerse? ¿Cómo no participar de la cadena absurda del valor agregado de casi todas las cosas si para eso habría que estar desnudo, cultivar tu propia huerta, fabricar tus muebles, ordeñar tu vaca?¿Hay una forma de hacer que el valor de las cosas sea el justo? ¿Que la vida sea justa?Una elección, en una compra, también es una elección política.Y es justicia.La liberación personal también es una liberación colectiva.¿Qué puedes hacer tú?

Acusadores de la humanidad

Caparrós queda situado con esta obra exhaustiva en el primer reglón de los acusadores de la humanidad. Un lugar que ya han ocupado Thomas Bernhard, John Berger, Sartre, Vasili Grossman, Céline, Karl Kraus, Dalton Trumbo, John Reed, Henry Mencken (en el siglo XX), pero que antes fue ocupado por Swift, Marx, Moro, Shakespeare, Víctor Hugo, Diógenes. Gente que ha filtrado las metáforas de una época y las ha convertido en un texto implacable de los actos de seres humanos contra los de su propia especie. Un recordatorio para amnesia global: pudimos luchar contra el hambre, la nuestra, la de aquellos que vendrán, y no lo hicimos.

—-Nota: la única falla editorial que tiene el libro es la falta de un diccionario del diablo como índice onomástico, aunque sea de eufemismos y protagonistas que permita volver sobre categorías, cifras, detalles. Es un libro vasto que invita al regreso. Clásico ya de la no ficción. De inicios de siglo.