Though systematic development programmes have been implemented for decades in almost all developing countries, poverty is still prevalent with around 830 million poor people living in Asian countries alone in the mid 1990s (Rosegrant and Hazell, 2000). This fact of development failure has been felt to be so embarrassing that the United Nations has called for hastening global efforts towards poverty alleviation with the objective of halving global poverty by 2015.

Given such an outcome, it makes sense to take food security as a crucial development goal for developing countries. Food security means secured access to food for every citizen at all times (Reutlinger, 1987). That poverty is a standing block preventing people from having sufficient access to food means food security cannot be achieved in the developing Asia-Pacific region without the effective alleviation of poverty. This view is akin with that of Sen (1982).

In his seminal study about the link between poverty and famine, Sen has strongly criticized food self-sufficiency programmes pursued in many developing countries as misconceptions of the causes of mass starvation experienced previously in different parts of the region such as India in 1947 and Bangladesh in 1974. Sen confirmed these experiences were not due to food shortages, but that mass poverty resulting from the rapid degradation of exchange of entitlement experienced by lower classes of these countries was the primary cause of these tragedies. Their lack of income prevented them from accessing food whose supply was actually in surplus in their country.

According to Sen, it is not food self-sufficiency but poverty alleviation that is the effective way to achieve food security in developing countries. Other scholars have convincingly argued that food self-sufficiency programmes implemented in developing countries are not pro-poor. The green revolution technology upon which the success of making rapid increases in food production in this region is reliant is inherently biased against the poor, and this inherent characteristic is often accentuated by biased government policies supporting its implementation (Griffin, 1974). As a consequence, rapid increases in food production in this region have been counter-balanced by a rapid decline in employment opportunities for the rural working class (Grabowski, 1989). This loss of employment opportunity is the primary cause of their inability to buy sufficient amounts of food even though there is a surplus and prices have also become cheaper.

Food self-sufficiency is still, however, widely perceived as a pre-condition for prosperity in developing countries. In many of these countries, such as Indonesia, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Cambodia and Myanmar, food self-sufficiency programmes still indeed focus on rice. This is clearly in contradiction with the UN call to hasten global efforts to halt poverty in developing countries. Such contradictive behaviour by the governments of developing countries is not without good reasoning, however. For many developing countries, food self-sufficiency programmes are not merely a way to increase food production, but, more importantly, a strategic instrument for creating and maintaining domestic political stability (Manning, 1988). Political stability becomes then a key for governments to perpetuate their political control (Hutagaol and Adiwibowo, 2000). Insting that the government of developing countries prioritize poverty alleviation in their development programmes, including food production programmes will presumably require the development of mechanisms through which poor people can participate effectively in designing development programmes in their own countries. This is about a political democratization process which should be further promoted in developing countries if the MDG regarding poverty alleviation is to be realized by 2015 ˇ

Written by Parulian Hutagaol, Associate Project Leader of AGRIDIV Project, UNESCAP-CAPSA, Bogor, Indonesia.

(References available upon request)