[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] good evening and welcome to midlibrary. Please take a moment to silence her cell phone if they arrived. This event is being shown by cspan booktv. The microphone will be there and it will not project into this room, so please speak loudly and clearly. Tonights program is a talk based on the book search of hunger, chief justice and money in the 21st century. This is called into question and china levens. Here he discusses pushing the ball of eradicating hunger out of reach. The rise in the price of food staples of the world market, the practice of using corn to make ethanolbased fuel. The Global Warming and its resulting extreme weather pattern with severe droughts particularly in africa and increased function of china and india which produced as the supply of grain for direct consumption by people. Approach of hunger received a stark review at Publishers Weekly which stated the stellar addition to Development Policy literature. David rieff is a cultural critic. He graduated with a degree in history from Princeton University focus on integration, International Conflict and humanitarian humanitarianism. Hes the author of a previous book and a member of the new for the humanities and collaborated as editor with the world policy journal, the new republic and harpers magazine. For New York Times magazine and additionally is the founder of war crimes in the American University in washington d. C. Please give a welcome to mr. David rieff. [applause] thank you very much for coming out in this beautiful weather, Global Warming or no Global Warming. Seems we will get a little bit of what youre strange places. It is always im very old now, but even so it does feels like an obituary to me. But in fact, i have been doing this for a very long time. I started writing migration in the u. S. I wrote to miami for those of you who dont know my work and what about los angeles transformation and the great immigration. I wrote particularly cubanamericans. They have some connections to that world. I became a kind of war correspondence between 1992 in bosnia and 2004 in bag that i pretty much was in all the critic to go places you can think of. The balkans, the Great Lakes Region of africa. Afghanistan, iraq, et cetera. I am much too old to do that now. In any case, i wasnt that interested and didnt feel i had that much to contribute about military question and i was already 40 when i started doing this stuff which is a preposterous age to begin. But i thought i had something to say about the humanitarian side of war. First of all, just in terms of release. So i spent a long time following relief workers around in all of these places and many others. I was in liberia for a bit. And i was in central america. And they did that for a long time. In this book represents for me from emergency relief, humanitarian aid to have more general question about development. The book is about whether the current Mainstream Model development can work and the optimism surrounding it, which i referred to is warranted or not, is justifiable or not. And so, i thought because in the end the darkest masher of poverty is hunger, but i would try to write a book about the development and debate over development over the effort to reduce or end extreme poverty and to end hunger, which are the stated goals of the major unh is to use at many ngos and great philanthropies of the bill and Melinda Gates foundation. And they really believe that this is the first generation in Human History that can end extreme poverty of hunger. I come how come away my temperamental cards on the table. Im sure if he spent 15 years of your one and only life thinking about war and watching horror clothes, youre probably not be most optimistic of people. But i nonetheless found it very startling as they try to begin to think this through and it took me seven years to write this book in endless amounts of travel in all kinds of places, rich and poor alike. Dividend im at a loss to understand. Hunger is then it is along with war the great killer in Human History. That is what it is. There has been a famine every generation as far as most experts believe, whether its the great, the Irish Economic is tori and. The estimate is there probably was in every Society Since the beginning of time the great famine every 30 years. So 5000 years of Human History as we enter that indefinable terms. They invented every society in seemingly with regularity. So why do people think as i read through the literature and talk to people within the u. N. System in many different contexts, why is there so much . I want to does english if youll indulge me between optimism and hope. It is something that should be empirically justifiable. You can hope in the religious sense, hope is a religious idea. You dont have to think that a good outcome is likely to hope for one. But if you are say you are optimistic, you are saying something very different. You are actually saying that you believe a rational person on empirical ground should believe things are going to get better. That is what optimism is. The batter doesnt have to be total. I dont want to caricature of optimism if youll permit me. But you know, optimism you cant just say im optimistic because i want things to be this way or i am optimistic because to abandon optimism is to abandon humanity. Even though a lot of people i suggest of calm to think of that as the division between optimism and hope, the distinction between optimism and hope as less than people see. So why was there this optimism . After all, one reading of the world, one might have thought lead to very pessimistic conclusions. Im not talking so much about wars because wars are not finished over the last hundred years. While i dont agree with that in his argument that the world is Getting Better and better, he is absolutely right that the prevalence has diminished in the last century. He is also right that we made extraordinary progress. We, the human species here, not a particular country or region. There have been great programs made in famine. Feminist leslie told that ever been. Their whole confident in which famine is now unknown, even though it was known everywhere and all civilization since the beginning of time. The historic home of the famine, which is not africa by which you read in asia has not seen a major famine since the chinese famine of 1968 to 1962, which was manmade, not largely speaking a function of the weather, although obviously the weather played a role, but was largely a function of terrible thing when mary decisions made by his colleagues in the peoples republic of china. You know, you are already talking about a famine that in other words have been averted with sounder state policy throughout the murderous industrialization that now and his colleagues decided to impose on the chinese people. I am not diminishing the lethality indeed. The great chinese famine they be the single most lethal event in Human History. It is said somewhere around 40 Million People died. That is in one search. You could say we dont have those anymore. He ran africa, which is some ways has become for all kinds of reasons the last renowned famine. They are less lethal. But give you a classic example. In the 1970s which killed Something Like a quarter Million People. There was another one in 2005 and only 60,000 people died. That is a terrible thing, but it is still a fact that this is a famine in the same place, largely the result of the same climate conditions and confluence of various disasters thanks. And yet, many fewer people died because there are technologies to make, to allow many people, particularly the vulnerable to survive. It didnt exist even 30 years ago. Despite this optimism and the world is a complicated place. There was a great german marxist philosopher in the night and 30s. Some of you assert they know and perhaps some of you know better than i do, he said every document of civilization is also a document of barbary. Now, the record is mixed and it would be foolish in all of this. In labs and controlled environments. Just seeing what a particular germplasm of wheat, for example, does if you raise the temperature pick up and we know yield is false. They dont disappear. Im not talking about the apocalypse here but it seems to me with climate change, anything but resolve. Why are people so confident that as it says, you drive up on first avenue to past the un and you will see banners that organizations put up that say poverty will be eliminated by 2030. Its more sloganeering way of saying it but thats with the gist of the argument is so since we dont know whether we are going to have to degrees celsius if we are lucky or four degrees if the deal falls through, why are people so optimistic . And now is the question i wanted to ask you these are pressing issues. If i can do my kind of global summary, there are 7 billion people in the world today. It is dead certainty that there will be 9 billion by 2050 pickup. That is not any longer and alternate fact. The question then becomes will there be 12 billion in 2100 or will there be actually a stop to this. Will it plateau . If you talk to demographers who are not the happiestpeople , theyve been wrong so often that perhaps they are a little winded but most glasslike demographic prediction have been wrong extrapolating from the present or distant future pickup the classic case is the inventor of demography more or less, the english divine thomas who argued in the early 19th century that because Food Production could only increase arithmetic that the population could increase geometrically that people were going to starve to death in the near future and yet thats not what happened. Its dangerous to talk to demographers but i dont think even the most optimistic among us would suggest that there will be less then 10 billion people by 2100. Thats an increase, in other words you will have a third more human beings on this planet in 85 years then you do now and a steady increase along the way to that so how are you going to feed these people . And how is one going to order the world so that the world doesnt become a place where again, the poor starve and the poor areas, and Global Warming has been very unfair if you will, you cant call a global phenomenon unfair because it gives the agency that obviously of phenomenon cannot have but nonetheless it will be the poor parts of the world, the regions of africa, parts of the near middle east that are likely to be the most affected. In other words, the poorest people are going to get the worst of it the people least resilient toward it are going to get the worst that the situation, just to keep it on food, on their agriculture is going to be the worst affected. So why all this optimism . And i must say, the optimism is pervasive for those of you who made out this go i invite you to go on the websites of any of the major un agencies. Of the world bank, the imf, any major philanthropy. Most of the major relief and Development Ngos in the world. Any government in the global south as well as the global north, its not the optimistic, its not restricted to the rich countries of the global north. It is quite widespread pickup theres an organization based in ghana which the former secretary general of the United Nations, kofi annan is now the president , called the alliance for a green revolution in africa. Thereto you are talking about very smart people who think things are going to be steadily better. So that these disasters are going to be overrated and that, in the end, we are actually going to come out with these goals of ending extreme poverty and hunger. By the way, the definition of extreme poverty is those making a dollar 25 a day or less income of an individual and there are probably 1 billion people like this in the world today. So one in seven of us. Why shouldnt, if these regions, some of which are also the areas that have not begun what is conventionally called the demographic transition, that is to say the fall in birth rates that has come in many parts of the world. Look at mexico. Mexico is a very good example of a country that in 30 years has gone from about five kids per family to more or less replacement level. Mexican birthrates are in freefall and yet again, coming back to my skepticism about what can or cant be predicted, i dont think anyone saw that 30 years ago pickup. It was a roman writer who once said, he wrote somewhere that he didnt understand when two soothsayers met in the road why both didnt burst out laughing. And why the optimism . Again, i freely admit my bias which is that having spent so much time in the parts of the world i spend time in, optimism is hard for me. There was a profile of me once years ago in Time Magazine that was actuallycalled mister pessimism so , be word. Full disclosure, whatever the clichi. Nonetheless, it did seem to me that with, that i couldnt figure out why people felt this way. And so i tried to look at the mainstream view which i tentatively describe and try to understand and then to look at the critics of that view, most of whom can be, some of whom who are freemarket, libertarians. Theres a very good economic economist at nyu called William Easterly who belongs to that school. Theres also a Canadian Writer who is associated, wrote a book that was very controversial that bill gates denounced in the most savage terms called the end of aids whichis a critique of Development Aid in the global south. But the main opposition to this mainstream view, this view that asserts we are going to abolish extreme poverty and hunger by 2030, more or less is to be found among what you might some up as the members of the antiglobalization movement. People who think fundamentally that the problems that capitalism cannot solve the problem its created and that in the end, the slogan of the antiglobalization movement is another world is possible and that without that other world, which is a political and moral transformation, no amount of technological wizardry will solve these problems, will make hungry people have enough to eat or poor people not be poor anymore. So why do all these smart people, i understand the critiqueof the antiglobalization movement and to some extent i share it. In the book i talk about that at some length but why do all these smart people think that hunger is at an end . Or can be ended . Why is jeff sachs written a book called the end of poverty . Why does ban kimoon, the current secretarygeneral of the United Nations continually say, and in this he is firmly seconded by doctor Jim Young Kim who is the head of the world bank, why do these people who are brilliant people think that weve reached this genuinely millennial moment . This moment unknown in all of Human History . Short of abolishing mortality . And obviously there are people who think they may be able to pull that off, they are pretty much ending poverty and its unheardof, Unexpected Development as you can imagine. All the major religious traditions take poverty for granted. The floor will always be with us the bible says. And there are equivalent views in buddhism and of course hinduism actually tells you that you deserve your fate. That youve obviously done the same thing terrible the last time out. At least thats a commonplace interpretation of why people suffer. That you find in india. So why are they so optimistic . And i think there are a couple of answers. The first is that what all these people fear is very smart people. Is to some extent a belief that the great ideological battles of the past are over, or should be over. Its whether explicitly or implicitly, they accept what you might call the francis googly, end of history point of view and at that point ofview says , one mustnt caricature it, hes a very smart guy. Fuji, says basically, not that bad things would no longer happen. Not that weve reached the end of days but that we now know what a Successful Society had to be and that was a liberal capitalist democracy and thats what, he said, so we should all agree and of course he said lots of people who accept this and they would beunsuccessful. I think that view, its the thinking of the Mainstream Development world. I think basically they think that the antiblood globalization people who attack them are crazy. We all agree and weare all on the same page. We want free markets but also safeguards. We want fair taxation but not onerous taxation. We want democratic accountability, property rights, etc. And we all agree on that. If you think back, then what you think is theres no political problem so when the antiglobalization people say this isnt a technical problem, its a politicalproblem. They think there is no political problem. To solve that. And i point you to jeffrey sachs, to the un, to relevant un agencies. The man runs the fda. And certainly if you go on the website of the gates foundation, Ford Foundation, you name it, this is absolutely what people believe. So if you knocked politics out of the equation, its much easier to be optimistic because you just think, oh, these people are not being constructive. I remember once having a debate with a guy at mit who said to me we want criticism but not the kind you give because your criticism isnt constructive. And i said to him, if thats really what you mean youre not talking about criticism. Youre talking about brainstorming which is a very different thing altogether. And sometimes it reminds me, i spent in the late 80s and very early 90s i was going back and forth to cuba, miami, to hume havana and like that and theres a famous speech of Fidel Castros pickup its known, you can find it anywhere in any proper versions in many langua