Jun 22 2014 : The Economic Times (Kolkata)
In The Shadow of El Niño
Vikram Doctor
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Today's leaders are better equipped to handle the meteorological phenomenon unlike their Victorian predecessors who preferred profiteering to famine relief
On February 23, 1900 The Times of India ran a brief item on the increase in exports of hides, bones and horns from drought-devastated Gujarat. A government inspector had taken totals from all the railway stations in the region and come to a total of 139,984 maunds of hides.“Assuming that six hides go to an Indian maund, it is pointed out in the official note that the figures under review must represent a mortality of cattle of more than 800,000,“ wrote the Times, noting that two years back, in 1898, the amount exported was just 6% of this total. The hides went to tanneries and the bones were ground and exported, along with the horns which were used to make glue.
It is hard to underestimate the quantity of misery that underlies this brisk note. Cattle had always been a critical resource for farmers in Gujarat, providing them with dairy proteins in their diet, labour and manure for their fields and perhaps even some surplus income through sale of butter and ghee. In famines many farmers tried to keep feeding their cattle and only let them die in utter extremis.
Tropical Scourge This is the rare fact that Mike Davis does not cite in Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (2002). There can be few other relevant ones not included in this datadriven, yet passionate book. It is packed with tables and maps, and hops from India to China to Brazil and other places in-between, yet makes for gripping reading due to the controlled rage that drives Davis' exploration of how a global climatic event combined with capitalism as practiced by European empires to kill well over 60 million people from 1876 to 1902.
Davis acknowledges that the El Niño Southern Oscillation's (ENSO) impact is now being seen as so huge and wide that it is tempting to go back in history and link it to many historical events, like the French Revolution. But he points out that ENSO's real impact is felt in a fairly well-defined tropical area, and much less in temperate regions beyond (like France). But his point is that it isn't ENSO as much as the response to it which caused “a disaster of truly planetary magnitude, with drought and famine reported as well in Java, the Philippines, New Caledonia, Korea, Brazil, southern Africa and the Maghreb“ quite apart from the epicentres in China and India. ENSO was an enabler, but European empires ruthlessly took up the opportunity.
Davis starts with India where ENSO seems to really flex its muscles first, with failure of the southwest monsoon.
From here the effects fall eastwards, reaching the northeast coast of Brazil as much as two years later. In 1876 the viceroy, Lord Lytton, was a particularly bad choice to deal with problems. He hadn't wanted the job, had no knowledge of India and may have been addicted to opium. But this didn't prevent him being quite focussed on enforcing the economic doctrine of the day, which was a fervent belief in free markets, as long as they worked to the benefit of the British.
Capitalist Conspiracy This wasn't quite how it was expressed.
In the nearly 20 years since the Rising of 1857 the British had been at pains to paint their raj as a force for the benefit of India, compared to the undisciplined looting of the East India Company days.
This was why the telegraph and railways had been built, both of which would assuredly prevent such things like famine deaths by first informing the authorities of the problem and then helping them rush aid there. Indian peasants were being helped to move beyond a subsistence economy by growing cash crops, like cotton, for which Britain provided a ready market.
In 1876 these arguments were shown to be not just hollow, but hypocritical.
Growing cash crops helped the British recover land revenue efficiently, and benefitted traders and moneylenders.
But in a pattern which can still be seen to this day in crops ranging from onions to mangoes, farmers often fail to get the benefits -traders take the bulk of the profit, moneylenders most of what's left and farmers are left more vulnerable for no longer growing even their subsistence crops.
Lytton wasn't just expressing an economic doctrine, but also a broader philosophy that would later try to gain some scientific standing by allying itself with the late Victorian era's great scientific hero, Charles Darwin. Applying his vision of the natural world evolving through a struggle for survival, the social Darwinians, as followers of Herbert Spencer and Francis Galton (Darwin's cousin) would be called, argued that human beings had to struggle and losers were weak and deserved to lose.
Famine relief was seen as a waste because the people who needed it didn't deserve it. “The Gujarati is a soft man...
accustomed to earn his good food easily. Very many, even among the poorest, had never taken a tool in hand in their lives,“ wrote one bureaucrat.
A Few Good Men The older school of British administrators, like the Duke of Buckingham in Madras, tried to resist such policies, but were overruled or eventually fell in line. A striking example was Sir Richard Temple who in Bengal in 1873-74 stopped a famine with rice imported from Burma and doled out in adequate amounts along with dal for protein. But after a viceregal reprimand he changed tacks so completely that when sent as Famine Delegate to South India he decreed a famine ration so small it “provided less sustenance for hard labour than the diet in the infamous Buchenwald concentration camp.“
This was in the camps that the government finally opened. Lytton was forced into this by bad publicity back in the UK.
This came from journals like The Statesman, which deputed a correspondent to cover the famine, but Davis also notes the impact of foreign observers, particularly Americans as missionaries or travellers -like the ex-President Ulysses Grant, whose world tour of 1877-79 ensured his group, including journalists, saw the effects of ENSO in almost every tropical country they visited. They weren't deferential to the British and were truly appalled by what they saw and reported.
The late 19th century ENSO events also resulted in an even more important long-term change -the rise of Indian activists to challenge British rule.
Davis points out how the words of critics like Dadabhai Naoroji, whose paper “The Poverty of India“ came out in 1876, were given weight by the famine, while institutions like the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha, which came up to deal with famine in the Deccan, were radicalized by the poor response of the British into taking a more radical route than first envisaged. AO Hume, a British administrator who retired during Lytton's tenure, was moved to help start the Indian National Congress after seeing first hand the negative effects of the hypocrisies of his peers.
Communists Were no Better Much of this was linked to the relief camps. Pushed into starting them, the government made sure these provided little real relief. The camps became very efficient as places to die, thanks to the diseases that spread among the weakened people and the lack of hygiene (another person Lytton ignored was Florence Nightingale, who had long lobbied for better hygiene in India). Lytton retired in 1880, but his legacy was continued by successors like Lord Curzon, who also had to deal with drought stemming from an ENSO event around 18991900, but again allowed thousands to die due to inadequate relief and unrestricted food trading.
Davis is careful to focus blame on the British and not on ENSO. It is easy to assume -and some of this can be seen as we gear ourselves for the current ENSO -that such an unstoppable force inevitably brings death in its wake. But Davis counters this by looking at ENSO-linked droughts before 1876, going back to Mughal times. All these caused hardship, but not on the same scale since farmers were more self-sufficient, followed traditional water conservation techniques and grew grains like drought-tolerant millets.
Davis may be a bit too lyrical in lauding traditional rural practices. They might have withstood drought better, but probably at the expense of weaker sections, like women and Dalits. And it is Amartya Sen despite being vilified as a doctrinaire leftist, who gently criticized Davis in a generally admiring review of his book.
Sen pointed out that capitalism alone can't be blamed for famines, since some of the worst of the 20th century took place under communist regimes. And he points out that technology like railways can be a force for good -it could, and sometimes did bring food to famine hit areas, so it redoubles the blame on the British that often it did not.
Some Winners If Europeans were directly enabled by ENSO, Americans gained indirectly.
North America benefits from ENSO with better rains, and in the period covered by Davis the US recorded bumper harvests. Railroads helped take these to ports, from where they were exported, undercutting grain markets across the world. This contributed to agricultural depression, though some of this grain did come to India as food aid from American churches (much to their fury, the British taxed it).
Perhaps the most important result of the chaos of this period was that it finally helped meteorologists understand ENSO.
Davis details how by the late 19th century the British had weather stations across the world and the data they produced started to be analyzed by scientists like Gilbert Walker who was appointed director-general of observatories in India in 1904. Explaining the recent monsoon failures was high priority and Walker slowly started to identify the patterns of ENSO, though it would take decades before Jacob Bjerknes at UCLA would put most of the pieces in place.
This understanding is what can change our experience of ENSO today.
Its vast scale is unstoppable, but unstoppable should not mean we are unable to respond. Knowing that it is coming makes it all the more important to be prepared. If India's leaders still fumble in their response to ENSO today their fault will be even worse than the failings of those late Victorian viceroys so devastatingly detailed by Davis.
It is hard to underestimate the quantity of misery that underlies this brisk note. Cattle had always been a critical resource for farmers in Gujarat, providing them with dairy proteins in their diet, labour and manure for their fields and perhaps even some surplus income through sale of butter and ghee. In famines many farmers tried to keep feeding their cattle and only let them die in utter extremis.
Tropical Scourge This is the rare fact that Mike Davis does not cite in Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (2002). There can be few other relevant ones not included in this datadriven, yet passionate book. It is packed with tables and maps, and hops from India to China to Brazil and other places in-between, yet makes for gripping reading due to the controlled rage that drives Davis' exploration of how a global climatic event combined with capitalism as practiced by European empires to kill well over 60 million people from 1876 to 1902.
Davis acknowledges that the El Niño Southern Oscillation's (ENSO) impact is now being seen as so huge and wide that it is tempting to go back in history and link it to many historical events, like the French Revolution. But he points out that ENSO's real impact is felt in a fairly well-defined tropical area, and much less in temperate regions beyond (like France). But his point is that it isn't ENSO as much as the response to it which caused “a disaster of truly planetary magnitude, with drought and famine reported as well in Java, the Philippines, New Caledonia, Korea, Brazil, southern Africa and the Maghreb“ quite apart from the epicentres in China and India. ENSO was an enabler, but European empires ruthlessly took up the opportunity.
Davis starts with India where ENSO seems to really flex its muscles first, with failure of the southwest monsoon.
From here the effects fall eastwards, reaching the northeast coast of Brazil as much as two years later. In 1876 the viceroy, Lord Lytton, was a particularly bad choice to deal with problems. He hadn't wanted the job, had no knowledge of India and may have been addicted to opium. But this didn't prevent him being quite focussed on enforcing the economic doctrine of the day, which was a fervent belief in free markets, as long as they worked to the benefit of the British.
Capitalist Conspiracy This wasn't quite how it was expressed.
In the nearly 20 years since the Rising of 1857 the British had been at pains to paint their raj as a force for the benefit of India, compared to the undisciplined looting of the East India Company days.
This was why the telegraph and railways had been built, both of which would assuredly prevent such things like famine deaths by first informing the authorities of the problem and then helping them rush aid there. Indian peasants were being helped to move beyond a subsistence economy by growing cash crops, like cotton, for which Britain provided a ready market.
In 1876 these arguments were shown to be not just hollow, but hypocritical.
Growing cash crops helped the British recover land revenue efficiently, and benefitted traders and moneylenders.
But in a pattern which can still be seen to this day in crops ranging from onions to mangoes, farmers often fail to get the benefits -traders take the bulk of the profit, moneylenders most of what's left and farmers are left more vulnerable for no longer growing even their subsistence crops.
Lytton wasn't just expressing an economic doctrine, but also a broader philosophy that would later try to gain some scientific standing by allying itself with the late Victorian era's great scientific hero, Charles Darwin. Applying his vision of the natural world evolving through a struggle for survival, the social Darwinians, as followers of Herbert Spencer and Francis Galton (Darwin's cousin) would be called, argued that human beings had to struggle and losers were weak and deserved to lose.
Famine relief was seen as a waste because the people who needed it didn't deserve it. “The Gujarati is a soft man...
accustomed to earn his good food easily. Very many, even among the poorest, had never taken a tool in hand in their lives,“ wrote one bureaucrat.
A Few Good Men The older school of British administrators, like the Duke of Buckingham in Madras, tried to resist such policies, but were overruled or eventually fell in line. A striking example was Sir Richard Temple who in Bengal in 1873-74 stopped a famine with rice imported from Burma and doled out in adequate amounts along with dal for protein. But after a viceregal reprimand he changed tacks so completely that when sent as Famine Delegate to South India he decreed a famine ration so small it “provided less sustenance for hard labour than the diet in the infamous Buchenwald concentration camp.“
This was in the camps that the government finally opened. Lytton was forced into this by bad publicity back in the UK.
This came from journals like The Statesman, which deputed a correspondent to cover the famine, but Davis also notes the impact of foreign observers, particularly Americans as missionaries or travellers -like the ex-President Ulysses Grant, whose world tour of 1877-79 ensured his group, including journalists, saw the effects of ENSO in almost every tropical country they visited. They weren't deferential to the British and were truly appalled by what they saw and reported.
The late 19th century ENSO events also resulted in an even more important long-term change -the rise of Indian activists to challenge British rule.
Davis points out how the words of critics like Dadabhai Naoroji, whose paper “The Poverty of India“ came out in 1876, were given weight by the famine, while institutions like the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha, which came up to deal with famine in the Deccan, were radicalized by the poor response of the British into taking a more radical route than first envisaged. AO Hume, a British administrator who retired during Lytton's tenure, was moved to help start the Indian National Congress after seeing first hand the negative effects of the hypocrisies of his peers.
Communists Were no Better Much of this was linked to the relief camps. Pushed into starting them, the government made sure these provided little real relief. The camps became very efficient as places to die, thanks to the diseases that spread among the weakened people and the lack of hygiene (another person Lytton ignored was Florence Nightingale, who had long lobbied for better hygiene in India). Lytton retired in 1880, but his legacy was continued by successors like Lord Curzon, who also had to deal with drought stemming from an ENSO event around 18991900, but again allowed thousands to die due to inadequate relief and unrestricted food trading.
Davis is careful to focus blame on the British and not on ENSO. It is easy to assume -and some of this can be seen as we gear ourselves for the current ENSO -that such an unstoppable force inevitably brings death in its wake. But Davis counters this by looking at ENSO-linked droughts before 1876, going back to Mughal times. All these caused hardship, but not on the same scale since farmers were more self-sufficient, followed traditional water conservation techniques and grew grains like drought-tolerant millets.
Davis may be a bit too lyrical in lauding traditional rural practices. They might have withstood drought better, but probably at the expense of weaker sections, like women and Dalits. And it is Amartya Sen despite being vilified as a doctrinaire leftist, who gently criticized Davis in a generally admiring review of his book.
Sen pointed out that capitalism alone can't be blamed for famines, since some of the worst of the 20th century took place under communist regimes. And he points out that technology like railways can be a force for good -it could, and sometimes did bring food to famine hit areas, so it redoubles the blame on the British that often it did not.
Some Winners If Europeans were directly enabled by ENSO, Americans gained indirectly.
North America benefits from ENSO with better rains, and in the period covered by Davis the US recorded bumper harvests. Railroads helped take these to ports, from where they were exported, undercutting grain markets across the world. This contributed to agricultural depression, though some of this grain did come to India as food aid from American churches (much to their fury, the British taxed it).
Perhaps the most important result of the chaos of this period was that it finally helped meteorologists understand ENSO.
Davis details how by the late 19th century the British had weather stations across the world and the data they produced started to be analyzed by scientists like Gilbert Walker who was appointed director-general of observatories in India in 1904. Explaining the recent monsoon failures was high priority and Walker slowly started to identify the patterns of ENSO, though it would take decades before Jacob Bjerknes at UCLA would put most of the pieces in place.
This understanding is what can change our experience of ENSO today.
Its vast scale is unstoppable, but unstoppable should not mean we are unable to respond. Knowing that it is coming makes it all the more important to be prepared. If India's leaders still fumble in their response to ENSO today their fault will be even worse than the failings of those late Victorian viceroys so devastatingly detailed by Davis.
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