Famine, Corruption, the Media and Democracy

Alexander Tabarrok

December 2005

Why is there Mass Starvation?

• The answer seems obvious – mass starvation occur because of a mass scarcity of food.

• The obvious answer, however, is wrong.

• Sometimes mass starvation occur when food per capita is low but mass starvation has also occurred when there was plenty of food per capita.

• Many of the biggest mass starvations have been intentional.

• When Stalin came to power in 1924 he saw Ukranians, particulary the relatively wealthy independent farmers known as Kulaks to be a threat.

• Stalin proceeded to collectivize the farms, expropriating the land of the kulaks, killing thousands and sending thousands more to Siberian gulags.

• A short-lived insurrection was crushed by turning all of the Ukraine into a concentration camp.

• While millions starved, food was shipped out of the Ukraine and no food was allowed in.

• Desperate Ukraines ate dogs, cats, bark. Cannibalism was not uncommon.

• At least 4 million died in the Ukraine.

Causes of Mass Starvation

• In China during the “Great Leap Forward,” some 30 million people died of starvation.

• “We walked along beside the village. The rays of the sun shone on the jade-green weeds that had sprung up between the earth walls, accentuating the contrast with the rice fields all around, and adding to the desolation of the landscape. Before my eves, among the weeds, rose up one of the scenes I had been told about, one of the banquets at which the families had swapped children in order to eat them. I could see the worried faces of the families as they chewed the flesh of other people’s children. The children who were chasing butterflies in a nearby field seemed to be the reincarnation of the children devoured by their parents. I felt sorry for the children, but not as sorry as I felt for their parents. What had made them swallow that human flesh, amidst the tears and grief of other parents; flesh that they would never have imagined tasting, even in their worst nightmares? In that moment I understood what a butcher he had been, the man “whose like humanity has not seen in several centuries, and China not in several thousand years": Mao Zedong. Mao Zedong and his henchmen, with their criminal political system, had driven parents mad with hunger and led them to hand their own children over to others, and to receive the flesh of others to appease their own hunger. ”

Wei Jingsheng, quoted in Courtois et al. The Black Book of Communism. Harvard University Press.1999.

China’s Great Leap into Barbarism

Quasi-Intentional and Non-Intentional Causes of Mass Starvation

• When accompanied by other factors, war can disrupt and aggravate the normal channels of supply leading to mass starvation. Often there is a combination of intentional and non-intentional factors at work.

• The basic non-intentional causes of mass starvation is lack of purchasing power or entitlements. i.e. food is available but a certain class of people cannot afford to buy the food. Explaining why varies from case to case.

Source: Sen, Amartya. 1990. Public Action to Remedy Hunger. Arturo Tanco Memorial Lecture given in London on 2nd August 1990, http://www.thp.org/reports/sen/sen890.htm

Mass Starvation in Bangladesh, 1974

• The 1974 famine in Bangladesh was not on the size of the Ukraine or China, perhaps 26,000-100,000 people died of mass starvation but it was probably the first televised starvation and it illustrates many important themes.

• Floods destoyed much of the rice crop of 1974 at the same time as world rice prices were increasing.

• Overall, however, the fundamental problem was not a lack of food per-se as food per capita was in fact at an all-time high in 1974.

• Starvation began before the rice that the floods destroyed would have been available for eating. So what was the problem?

Mass Starvation in Bangladesh, 1974• Before the floods destroyed rice they destroyed livelihoods. The floods

meant that there was no work for landless rural labourers who in ordinary years would have been employed harvesting the rice.

• Without income from work and facing rising world rice prices caused for other reasons there was mass starvation.

• As Amartya Sen puts it:

“A food-centred view tells us rather little about starvation. It does not tell us how starvation can develop even without declines in food availability. Nor does it tell us – even when starvation is accompanied by a fall in the food supply – why some groups had to starve while others could feed themselves…What allows one group rather than another to get hold of the food that is there? These questions lead to the entitlement approach…For example, a barber owns his labour power and some specialized skill, neither of which he can eat, and he has to sell his hairdressing services to earn an income to buy food. His entitlement to food may collapse even without any change in food availabilty…”

Poverty and Famines (1981, 155-156).

• The fact that mass starvation is not primarily about mass scarcity of food tells us something important – mass starvations need not ocurr.

• Clearly, intentional starvations need not occur and we know the solution – avoid totalitarian governments. Totalitarian governments can and have starved their own people (not just historically consider North Korea today, for example). Totalitarian governments also kill their own people. R.J. Rummel estimates that in the twentieth century governments killed or starved some 262,000,000 of their own citizens.

• Unintentional starvations can also be avoided since the main thing that is required is the government will to redistribute wealth or employment, and usually not much is required, to those people who most need it.

Mass Starvation is not Inevitable

Democracy, Media and Mass Starvations

• In this context consider the following:

“…no famine has taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy – be it economically rich (as in Western Europe or North America) or relatively poor (as in post independence India, or Botswana or Zimbabwe.”

Amartya Sen. 2001. Development as Freedom. p.16

“Perhaps the most important reform that can contribute to the elimination of famines, in Africa as well as in Asia, is the enhancement of democratic practice, unfettered newspapers and – more generally – adversarial politics.”

Amartya Sen. 1990. Public Action to Remedy Hunger.

• Democracies for all their problems at least have incentives not to kill or let starve voters or their friends.

• Opposition parties have incentives to bring problems to light.• News media broadcast early warning signs of starvation and they castigate

ruling parties when problems are not solved.

• In The Political Economy of Government Responsiveness: Theory and Evidence from India, Timothy Besley and Robin Burgess test Amartya Sen’s theory of democracy, newspapers and famine.

• India is a federal democracy with 16 major states. The states vary considerably in their susceptibilty to food crises, newspaper circulation, education, political competition and other factors.

• Besley and Burgess ask whether the state government are more responsive to crises when there is more political competition and more newspapers.

• Note that both of these factors are important. Newspapers won’t work without political competition and political competition won’t without newspapers. (Education is also an interesting interaction factor. Note that the state of Kerala is the best educated, has the most political competition and the highest newspaper circulation. It is not the richest state.)

• After controlling for a wide variety of other variables B and B find:

• A 1 percent increase in newspaper circulation is associated with a 2.4 percent increase in public food distribution and a 5.5 percent increase in calamity relief expenditures.

• Greater political competition is associated with higher levels of public food distribution. Public food distribution is also higher in election and pre-election years.

• In addition, government is also more responsive to a given shock when newspaper circulation is higher. That is, when food production falls or flood damage occurs governments increase food distribution and calamity relief more in states where newspaper circulation is higher.

Sex, Lies and Videotape

• We have seen that the media can help to hold government accountable….the government does not like to be held accountable.

• Thus it’s not surpising that governments try very hard to control the media. A fascinating and unusual piece of evidence comes from Peru.

• Vladimor Montesinos Torres was the head of the Peruvian secret-police. With Alberto Fujimori as President, Montesinos ran Peru, methodically bribing judges, politicians and the news media.

• What is unusual is that Montesinos kept detailed accounts of his bribes including thousands of bribe contracts and videotapes.

• By examining the prices of bribes we can see the relative value that Montesinos placed on different sources of potential opposition.

Bribes to Politicians

Between $20,000 and $3,000 per month when official salaries for a Congressman were on the order of $7,000 per month.

Bribes to Judges

Bribes to judges were more irregular and a little bit less on average than to politicians say $5,000 to $10,000 per month.

Bribes to Newspapers were much higher than to politicians or judges - Thousands of dollars per week/per story.

Interesting fact: Montesinos cared about the tabloids read by the masses not about the refined newspapers read by the educated.

Bribes to television channel owners were the highest of all – up to $1,500,000 per month.

• McMillan and Zoido make an important point about checks and balances – they complement one another.

“The news media are the most potent of the democratic checks and balances. This is our main conclusion. Measured by the bribes Montesinos paid, the legislature and the judiciary are far less pressing constraints on the executive branch of government than television. Those other checks and balances obtain their force via the threat of exposure to the citizens, and television gives widest exposure. Our finding applies only to 1990s Peru, of course, but it may extrapolate to nascent democracies elsewhere.

That the news media are the chief watchdog has implications for policy. The checks and balances work as a system, so an independent judiciary and genuine political competition are needed. But measures to safeguard the media’s independence from political influence and to ensure their credibility to the public are perhaps the crucial policies for shoring up democracy. “

Who Owns the Media?• Even better than controlling the media with bribes is censoring, even

better than censoring is owning the media. • In much of the world government ownership of media is common.

For example:“On average, governments in Africa control 61 percent of the

top five (in circulation) daily newspapers and reach 84 percent of the audience for the top five television stations. Seventy-one percent of African countries have state monopolies in television broadcasting.”

Djankov et al. 2003. Who owns the media? Journal of Law and Economics. XLVI: 341-381.

What are the consequences/correlates of government media ownership?

“Government ownership of the press is associated with (statistically significantly) lower levels of poltical rights, civil liberties, security of property, and quality of regulation and higher levels of corruption and risk of confiscation…These results support the public choice view that government ownership of the press restricts information flows to the public, which reduces the quality of the government.

Djankov et al. 2003. Who owns the media? Journal of Law and Economics. XLVI: 341-381.

Isn’t this obvious?• Yes!• But why do we make a big distinction between the market for goods and the market

for ideas?• Consider all the usual stories of why markets need to be regulated and ask whether

they apply to the market for ideas.• Public Goods Yes!• Externalities Yes!• Consumer Ignorance Yes!• Natural Monopoly Yes!

• Thus if you believe the standard market failure stories then you should be in favor of regulating the media but we have just seen that regulating the media is a very bad ideas. Thus the standard stories need to be modified by public choice.

• As Coase says in The Market for Goods and the Market for Ideas:

“It is hard to believe that the general public is in a better position to evaluate competing views on economic and social policy than to choose between different kinds of food.”

• Djankow et al. add:

“Nonetheless, the assumption of benevolent government often stops at the doorstep of the media, perhaps because economists want to protect their own right to supply information

without being subject to regulation.”

• Government wants to control the media because the media can be used to mold opinion and controlling opinion means controlling power.

• What else can be used to mold opinion?• Education!• Lott (1999) finds that the more authoritarian the

government the more likely the government is to own television stations. Also, the more authoritarian the government the more likely it is to invest in public education.

• Importantly, Lott finds no relationship between health care spending and authoritarianism thus supporting the interpretation that authoritarian governments invest in public education in order to indoctrinate.