Thank you very much. And thank you, Liz, for for inviting me.
And it's it's great to be back in Oxford.
So let me dive straight into my to my issues, which are really that the the the Russian invasion of Ukraine has changed the world in many ways,
very few of them for the better, as some massive secondary impacts are unfolding around the world,
many of which we are only just beginning to get our arms around.
We haven't yet fully grasp what they mean, but it's also intensified a whole lot of things which were already there,
but perhaps not quite as apparent as in focus as they might be.
And what I'm going to focus on is, is,
is the the world food crisis and and use that a little bit as a lens into some of the issues that Ben Freeman has has just raised and also
touched very slightly upon some of the a couple of the issues that that Dr. Robyn Williams raised earlier on in that extraordinary introduction.
So last June the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres cited figures of 276 million
people worldwide who he called were food insecure and he warned of global famine,
multiple famines, he said, around the world.
And his solution was to that in that particular presentation at the UN was to stabilise global food markets.
The figure of the food insecure is still has risen in the last year.
It's now about 345 million according to the UN.
Those are the people who essentially cannot obtain the the essential food items for for for a healthy life.
Now, one of the reasons for this, of course, as we all know, with the spike in food prices,
a new food supply bottlenecks because Russia's invasion of Ukraine disrupted food supplies not only from Ukraine,
but also from southern Russia and the UN's World Food Program,
before the invasion was already facing a 44% increase in costs because food prices were already going up and fuel prices were going up.
In response to this Guiterrez with the Turkish President,
Recep Erdogan launched what they called the Black Sea Grain Initiative to enable grain ships to sail safely out of Ukrainian harvest.
There needed to be not only demining and escorts and so on,
but as well as an agreement from both sides in the war and also from southern Russian ports.
He called it the Black Sea Grain Initiative, and he said it was the greatest achievement of his time as UN Secretary-General.
It was an achievement, but it's not going to solve the world food crisis.
In fact, it's hardly going to make a dent in it. That situation is a lot more complicated.
Let me just make a couple of of of definitional points and then and then I'll play what I'm going to say.
The first is it's important to distinguish between food insecurity, chronic hunger, inability of people to obtain enough food and famines,
which are those fortunately rare, exceptional episodes of mass starvation, which are also episodes invariably of societal collapse.
And there are various definitions which we could go into, but I won't tell you with those now,
in the spirit of a procession of, of, of threefold approaches, there are three component parts to famine and food security.
And that's how I'm going to frame my remarks. The first first is food availability,
which is what policymakers invariably focus upon food availability and supply through through logistical bottlenecks.
The second is, is what my former professor here, who was here, Amartya Sen, called called food entitlement, the ability of people,
especially the poor and marginalised, to obtain enough food through that the fruits of their own labour or welfare handouts or whatever.
And the third is what I call starvation crimes.
And the the core definition here is the war crime of starvation as defined in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court,
which is the deprivation of objects indispensable to survival for a civilian population.
And of course, war and objects. And this starvation in this legal sense is not just food.
It is objects indispensable to survival, which include water, medical care, shelter.
They could include electricity, communications, maternal care for children.
We don't know exactly how far this concept goes.
It has not yet been tested in court, but there is. It's an issue of of increasing legal academic scholarship in the last few years.
One of the interesting things about the the Rome Statute definition is that under pressure from the United States and the Greek and the U.K. as well,
the maritime powers, sanctions and blockades were not included in the prohibition.
And that's a point about which we might which we might return to.
So food availability is very quickly dealt with.
Scholars of famine have shown time and time over the decades that a food availability decline is neither necessary nor sufficient for famine.
But commentators and policymakers have a reflex, a rudimentary error.
They shout famine whenever there is a disruption. Yes, you can.
It creates hardship. A food supply disruption, a drought, an interruption to supplies does create hardship.
But it is a political decision where and on whom that hardship will fall and it doesn't have to fall.
So the disruption in the Black Sea grain supply, some 20% of the world's internationally traded grain was a major disruption to world wheat supply.
Whether or not it caused acute food insecurity and famine, that was a political decision.
And it's interesting that the best indicator of food availability is food prices.
And staple food prices around the world have been rising over the last three and a half years.
And shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, they hit a level of 171% above the standard from earlier, from about ten, 15 years ago.
But it's interesting and they've since dropped back. The things like the Russia,
like the Black Sea Grain Initiative and the availability of wheat harvests in the southern hemisphere pushed that level down.
But it's notable that even with those with the current spike,
about 130% of what it was 10 to 15 years ago, the spike in food prices is still foodstuffs.
Foodstuffs, basic foodstuffs today are still cheaper than almost any time in the 20th century.
So this isn't to say that the Ukraine war is irrelevant to the world hunger question.
Quite the contrary. The links, however, are rather more complicated.
So the second part, which I will expand upon a bit more, is food entitlement, the ability of poor people to buy food.
And with economic crises rippling around the world already happening with the COVID and
the COVID lockdowns and the disruptions in global supply chains and so on due to COVID.
Unemployment is up. Wages are down. And that's a direct product of how economies are organised.
And what we are seeing is, is, as I'm sure everyone is familiar with the globalisation and security driven deep globalisation,
which is accelerating the problems of food entitlements around the world,
accelerating the problems of unemployment, of precarious employment, of, of, of access to sufficient food.
So there are many reasons why we might want to pursue globalisation was not an unalloyed good
but to do to globalise in such a way as to build what are selectively war economies is I think,
the worst possible reason. Now the term war economy was used during the first and Second World Wars to denote the the the redesign of a
market or capitalistic economy under central control in order to provide for the enormous economic costs of war.
And that invariably, in the first part of the 20th century,
involved major increases in taxation, state direction of essential activities and rationing.
Now, what we've seen in war economies in Western nations over the last 20 something years with the global war on terror,
the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere, is a different kind of war economy.
And a war economy in which there are burdens,
but the burdens are not allocated by taxation or ration or in the central direction of, of, of, of how market economies work.
The in fact, taxes are being reduced. In fact, the very opposite of rationing is being pursued.
And the way in which the the the the burden is being allocated is almost entirely
through monetary policy and most recently through interest rate rate hikes.
And one of the most striking things about this is that while central banks back in the aftermath of World War Two,
in the era of Keynesianism, was specifically designed not only to control monetary policy,
but in order to prevent exactly the sorts of crises that were generated by austerity and mass unemployment in the interwar period,
which were recognised as a major factor in World War Two.
And indeed the Federal Reserve in the United States has expanded in its terms of reference,
actually includes reference to the point that has been forgotten.
It is entirely now managed through through interest rates and through the bond market and stock market management.
And that shifts the but it shifts the burden domestically.
And whenever we hear a policymaker, an economist, celebrating the fact that wages have been kept down because that keeps down inflation,
anyone who's familiar with basic principles of food economy knows that means poor people don't have enough to eat.
And is that to be celebrated? I suspect not.
And of course, internationally, what that means when as interest rates go up, all those countries in across the global south,
which that have borrowed in dollars, are facing increasingly unsustainable debt and greater austerity.
Now, this is happening in the context of of of an emerging geostrategic rivalry which was already in
place before the Russia the Russia Ukraine war erupted before the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Sort of put the spark to this. And those countries led by China in the Global East, including many in the Middle East,
they don't have the exorbitant privilege of having their own currency as the global reserve currency.
So they don't have the privilege of being able to manage their monetary policy in such a way that boom or bust,
they get the benefit of, of, of, of capital flows in their favour.
And so the way the Chinese are doing this is rather different is through what one might call commodity encumbered by trying to take control,
direct control of primary commodities like oil, like key minerals, like like farmland and so on.
And China has its own debt traps to finance massive infrastructure investment around that south.
And countries find themselves getting into debt with China. And then the debt trap closes and they find themselves losing key parts of that,
their national infrastructural endowment to the economy, to Chinese ownership on very unfavourable terms.
And meanwhile, they're still integrated into global supply chains.
They continue to dominate the global market in most manufactured goods.
And the combination of China's vast industrial capacity and the fact that for developing countries
so coal to get on the lower ranks of development now needs such technological proficiency,
unlike, say, 20 or 30 years ago, that it's extraordinarily hard to do so.
What we are finding is that more and more countries in the global south find themselves unable to get on the escalator.
And indeed, due to these other factors, including population growth and so on, they are on the down.
And in this during the neoliberal era, there was, I think, a well-presented fiction.
But the Global South would get on with sense that the austerity was a time limited suffering,
a time limited precarity before some form of gainful employment would spread across the developing world.
I think as we see a return to a sort of I think, if you like, a rival war, a kind of economy driven by a spirit of mercantilism.
This the burden. Is being shifted to the global south and that opportunity perhaps of usury in the past,
but at least no illusion is that at least we now have the candour and the fact that no such illusions are being peddled.
Those countries are simply be hung out to dry. So the third element is starvation crimes in the Global South.
Starvation as political or military decision.
As military decision, which was and has been the major cause of food insecurity globally, but of famine specifically over the years.
Whereas, in the peace conference, Oxfam was founded in the 1940s, as in response to a war famine in Greece,
which was imposed and in fact in a collusive manner by the Germans and the allies.
And war famines historically have been the norm.
If we look at the pattern of of of famines as they have unfolded, the great majority of modern famines are caused by violations,
by acts of starvation in the course of war, or indeed by military dictatorships who have no interest in the welfare of that people.
But leaders who pursue policies either deliberately to starve people or recklessly to do so.
Aware that pillage, obstruction of relief and a host of other military actions will reduce people to starvation.
We've seen starvation crimes in the Ukraine. The war crime of starvation, as I said, is depriving civilians of objects indispensable to survival.
And we saw that most particularly in Mariupol.
And that's sadly indicative of war tactics that we've seen resurgent around the world in many places Myanmar, Yemen, Nigeria.
But the key point I want to make is that the environment of this with this global geostrategic rivalry, this competition for political will,
political dominance in the context of Ukraine is creating an environment in which there is impunity for starvation crimes.
And I want to give two examples. The first is Ethiopia.
Starting in November of 2020, the Ethiopian government inflicted a campaign of starvation with it,
using an unparalleled in my and my experience array of weapons of war intended to try to starve the people into submission.
There's a very interesting echo in the Ethiopian war with what Williams was talking about in Russia.
It's a former Orthodox Christian Orthodox empire with both pretensions to imperial domination over its own subordinate nations and nationalities,
but also a deeply held view that it is a victim and that its people.
It is perfectly correct for its citizenry to to volunteer,
to be martyred in huge numbers in the course of the crisis, in the survival and indeed the greatness of the country.
But the and this led to two to a sort of competing victimology on both sides of of of this war.
But there's no doubt that the principal victims should, purely in terms of numbers and the extent of atrocities,
where the people of Tigray, whose whose plight was shut off,
shut off from the eyes of the world by a complete blockade of information, including,
I may say, shamefully, the United Nations collected very little information.
And what little information it did collected did not publish to the extent that the the
the normal procedures of diagnosing famine by collecting indicators about malnutrition,
mortality and food supply were not undertake, even though the United Nations Security Council had in 2018 passed them.
What we at the time we hoped was a landmark Resolution 2417 on conflict and food security,
obliging the UN Secretary General to alert the Council whenever a conflict threatened to cause food insecurity.
The UN Security Council was not elected. The UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres failed in that obligation to the one member state of the security.
Representative, the Security Council, Ireland that really tried to raise this didn't get anywhere.
It wasn't Gutierrez's fault, at least not his sole fault.
I believe he could have done a lot more. But it was indicative of the way in which a conflict elsewhere in the world was paralysed.
International action to address it was paralysed by what?
The broader context of of of rivalry and the specific context of of of the conflict over Ukraine.
I think I think there is a moral failing of the UN leadership there,
but a wider principle of of the subordination of of multilateral norms and principles to transactional diplomacy.
And Sudan, the country on which I have been working now for 39 years, is an even more egregious example.
We are seeing in the last ten days, two weeks,
the emptying of a capital city of some 7 to 10 million people and the imminent threat of of of mass starvation
not pursued deliberately as a policy by either of the two men whom I characterised just recently as as mobsters.
This is really a gangland shootout among kleptocrats.
But we've no interest. No, no, no civilian interest at all.
But the implications of of of a city, 7 to 10 million people who are residents of a city, of course,
entirely dependent upon modern infrastructure and imported food,
evacuating that city and the city, that that is more than half of the economy of the country.
The humanitarian consequences are going to be absolutely calamitous.
Now, Bennett earlier mentioned divestment overture for some 20 years ago.
There's a sequel to that, which is, I think, very significant,
which is some four years ago when there was a long awaited democratic transition, this beautiful, exemplary,
non-violent uprising by the civilian population,
led by many women that decorated the walls around the Ministry of Defence with these
wonderful murals celebrating freedom and that the regime of Omar al-Bashir fell,
it collapsed, something that the United States had been wanting since 1990,
when this man supported Saddam Hussein's invasion of Iraq and then subsequently invited Osama bin Laden as an honoured guest,
as well as these other atrocities such as those in Darfur. Now,
one of the features of of the economy of of the political economy that grew up
in the shadow world of sanctions and divestment was a kleptocratic economy.
It was an economy run, as I said, by rival mobsters, military men who controlled the economy, crony capitalist, illicit activities.
General Hemmati, the head of the paramilitary force, the Rapid Support Forces,
is a major gold trader, illicit gold trade to Russia and the United Arab Emirates.
Russia also has investments on the other side is not just a one sided thing.
When these men were controlling not only that the are the guns, but they were controlled in money.
And shortly after the overthrow of of of of the that kleptocratic military regime with the junior kleptocrats still in charge.
My old friend, senior economist at the United Nations, Abdalla Hamdok, was named to the position of of of prime minister, civilian prime minister.
And I discussed with him the prospects of what he could do.
And in that discussion, we agreed that one likely scenario was that he would end up as the cashier in a corner grocery corner
grocery store selling soap and matches while the mobsters cut their joint deals in the back room.
And that's pretty much what happened.
And one of the reasons it happened was, I'm afraid the Trump administration decided that it would rather deal with the mobsters in the backroom.
It says it had delegated its policy for the whole of the Middle East and North Africa to its friends and allies in the Middle East.
That was Tijani and that was Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Trump's and I quote favourite dictator.
That was Benjamin Netanyahu, who decided that, yes, it would be appropriate for the US to lift its sanctions on Sudan.
But first there had to be recognition of Israel and he dealt directly with general help from the other mobster in charge now.
And the other two were Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Now all these four countries. Had one thing in common. They didn't like democracy.
And so poor old Abdalla Hamdok was run, hung out to dry.
He was given no debt relief, no sanctions relief.
And at the end of the day, he was precisely the man sort of painting the signs on on the cornerstone.
While it's run by the mobsters who then took over, they launched a correction months ago.
Now they're fighting among themselves. And sadly, what we see now is, is a rush by some of those in power.
I mean, Finance Secretary Anthony Blinken has woken up to this and he says he's doing the right thing,
but that there is an enthusiasm for for cutting a deal between the warlords.
The Saudis are in there doing in an immediate sense, the right thing.
But one of the suggestions has been that the former director of the World Food Program,
David Beasley, be the the the mediator, David Beasley just so the 24th of February.
So just a few months ago, I can't say wined and dined because they didn't drink alcohol, but he met with these two kleptocrats.
He was seen and he was given an award by them. And his his his approach to humanitarian diplomacy has been to deal with the power brokers.
What we see in Sudan today is actually real humanitarian action, such as it is,
is in the hands of those local resistance committees that actually staged the revolution some 40 years ago.
The ones who are keeping, to the extent the power, the water,
the communications safety of civilians has been kept on ISS by these civilian commissions.
It is those people with whom we should be working, so we shouldn't give in to the reflex of this transaction from politics.
But I fear that what we are seeing in this current post invasion of Ukraine world is exactly that reflex.
We must deal, of course, we have to deal with those who have power, but we should not do so in just a second.
Jettisoning Principle. So my concluding remark is that we must be candid about this.
If you listen to world leaders speech about global hunger and famine, I can give you the script in 2 to 3 lines.
It starts off by talking about all these factors about armed conflict and hunger,
about the criminality of those who inflict starvation, about poor people not having enough food.
But when they get onto action, it is they just get craned on ships.
That's the easy part we need. And then when they get to the question of access, it is let us negotiate humanitarian access with the powers that be,
even though we know these people are dishonest and will defraud you.
We need to get into that hard task of dealing really with humanitarian action.
Can working too. And it can only work if it is run on an inclusive and consultative and essentially democratic principle.
And it can only work if we recognise at the highest levels of multilateralism that there has to be
a right to food and the right to be protected from the deprivation of these starvation criminals.
You.