RIGHT now, four countries stand on the verge of famine, the first time any country has been in this position for seven years. 

In Yemen, an estimated 130 children die of malnutrition and related illnesses every day — and this looks set to rapidly escalate as the British-backed and Saudi-led coalition attacks the port of Hodeidah, on which the country depends for almost three quarters of its food requirements. 

Indeed, the looming famines in all four countries — Yemen, South Sudan, Nigeria and Somalia — can all be traced back to one common cause: Western-backed aggression and destabilisation. 

The result is that the world is now, in the words of former UN humanitarian chief Stephen O’Brien, “facing the largest humanitarian crisis since the creation of the United Nations.”

Oxford University has a particular role in this crisis: it churned out the very people whose policies created it. 

Boris Johnson and Theresa May, armourers-in-chief of the Yemen genocide; David Cameron and William Hague, architects of the destruction of Libya, the spillover from which catalysed the Boko Haram insurgency in Nigeria; Tony Blair, adviser to the South Sudan government on the eve of its self-destruction. All are products of Oxford University.

So there was a part of me that was more than a little disappointed that none of today’s mass starvations — for which this hallowed institution bears so much responsibility — were discussed at a conference named Global Hungers late last month.

As the day progressed, I began to wonder — are we going to address any of this? Or just engage in academic meanderings about the multiplicity of metaphors provided by the term hunger?

In times past, I would have been tempted to condemn the whole exercise as bourgeois naval-gazing, and this entire article might have been little more than an indictment of ivory-tower detachment from the real world.

But this would be narrow-minded and unfair. 

Most, if not all, of these speakers were, after all, serious activists, with a deep commitment to social justice. The vast majority are from formerly colonised nations in which imperial famines have been seared into the national psyche, and in some cases the speakers’ personal histories as well.

Gayatri Spivak told us that her “earliest memory” is of the Bengal famine of 1943, while Robert Young, whose own family migrated to England from Ireland in the 1840s, reflected that “I am the product of one of those hungers.” 

There is an entire symposium dedicated to literary representations of the Bengal famine of 1943; and other talks specifically address the links between hunger, neoliberalism, imperialism and modernity.

In fact, as the day unfolded further, and my initial frustrations gave way to a little more humility, I began to realise that my urge — as a privileged Westerner — to “do something to help” may itself be part of the problem. 

In a fascinating psychoanalytic perspective on societal treatment of the poor and marginalised, Honey Oberoi Vahali reminded us that identities — class, gender, national and others — tend to require the creation of an Other, onto which we project all those aspects of ourselves which we do not wish to see. 

The Other of capitalism is, of course, the poor: an essential part of capitalism which is, nevertheless, split off and portrayed as something separate and external to it, and onto which all the failures of capitalism are projected. 

Yet the poor may also symbolically represent the impoverished part of ourselves which we, as individuals, do not wish to recognise, because it is too painful: that is to say, we project our own, emotional and psychological, impoverishment onto the poor.

Spivak, however, made the point that “hunger” is also functional — ideologically speaking — to capitalism, serving to reinforce the “saviour” complex of the world’s wealthy by giving them a “social purpose” through which to justify their exploitative mode of existence. 

Hunger is, she said, a “big oratic word that steps forward when we need to be reminded that globalisation is the world’s benefactor,” providing a backdrop for the “moral bragging of the self-styled philanthropists.” 

Hunger is yet another resource to be plundered by capital, this time not in the direct creation of surplus value, but rather in the preservation of the self-image of the capitalist.

The “symbolic meaning” of hunger and poverty, then, cannot be so easily dismissed, as it is precisely the desire to preserve a self-image of superiority that drives our societies’ treatment of the poor — whether through contempt or pity. 

And the conference’s call — issued by participants from across the Global South — for a little more self-reflection on these issues on the part of the world’s would-be “saviours” — deserves to be heeded.