On Saturday afternoon, images went viral of burning humanitarian aid trucks full of food on the Venezuelan border — set alight by informal, pro-government militias called colectivos that are loyal to Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, the authoritarian leader clinging to power. Juan Guaidó, whom many countries now recognize as the constitutionally designated interim president of Venezuela, had sought to enable the trucks to enter the country.
By inviting in international aid, Guaidó was attempting to address Venezuela’s severe shortages of food and medical supplies, which have reached crisis levels under Maduro. Yet the invitation also dramatically escalated the two men’s conflict for control of the country — putting Maduro in the position of either very publicly rejecting much-needed aid or allowing his rival to invite trucks into the country against Maduro’s explicit orders.
In the short run, Maduro won the food fight by sending the food up in flames. In the long run, Saturday might turn out to be a turning point in Venezuelan history, leading to hemorrhaging domestic and international legitimacy, and perhaps ultimately Maduro’s downfall.
Guaidó has closely tied together his struggles to bring democracy and food to Venezuela. Seldom in recent years has the democracy-food linkage been so stark.
But what does democracy have to do with food? Did authoritarianism cause hunger in Venezuela? In one sense, the answer is clearly “yes”: Maduro is an authoritarian leader, and he has failed to address the humanitarian crisis.
More generally, though, it doesn’t seem obvious at first glance that democracy would boost the caloric intake of the poor. No rational government, either democratic or authoritarian, should want its people to starve. Even if we ignore humanitarian concerns, hunger is bad for the labor force and can trigger political instability. And defenders of Latin America’s authoritarian regimes historically argued that they were better at public administration than democracies. Put rational incentives and technical competence together, and one might even imagine authoritarian regimes as cornucopias of plenty.
This makes it all the more surprising that the Nobel Laureate economist Amartya Sen famously asserted the opposite in his 1999 book, Development as Freedom. Reflecting on differences between democratic India and authoritarian Bangladesh, he proclaimed that ‘’No famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy.” Democracy did not cure hunger, he said, but it beats authoritarianism.
What helps democracies avoid famine? Three closely related features may be key: free media, competition for leadership, and mechanisms for peaceful transitions of power. First, a free press — including social media today — is more likely to call attention to developing trouble spots. Second, leaders who must routinely compete for votes are more likely to deploy resources to those trouble spots. Third, when things go terribly wrong, elections provide citizens a way to replace an incompetent administration presiding over an incipient crisis.
In other words, Sen suggested that, compared to their democratic counterparts, authoritarian rulers are more likely simply to ignore widespread starvation. Though the phrase “Let them eat cake” is likely apocryphal, it might capture something real about authoritarian regimes’ weak incentives to address hunger.
Yet the authoritarian caloric disadvantage might be even worse than Sen described. A regime such as Maduro’s administration might actually weaponize hunger to stay in power, rather than simply ignore it.
In many developing countries — both democratic and authoritarian ones — politicians sometimes use and abuse food for political ends. What scholars call “clientelism” involves giving people material goods, ranging from bags of rice to jobs, in exchange for their support. During Mexico’s 2012 election campaign, for instance, the Institutional Revolutionary Party gave voters gift cards to a major supermarket chain, a gambit that apparently boosted the party’s vote totals.
Just like in Mexico, Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chávez, have used food giveaways to shore up popular support. But in Venezuela’s authoritarian context, clientelism has acquired a more menacing hue.
Taken to its worst extreme, food-based clientelism could force hungry citizens to behave like suppliant, sycophantic subjects. But free and competitive elections blunt clientelism’s most pernicious potential effects. In democracies, voting is still secret and free, so citizens can punish politicians they perceive as exploitative. And if multiple parties get involved in clientelism, citizens can shop around for the best deal. Perhaps as a result, clientelistic politicians rarely threaten to withhold material goods from citizens in democracies; they tend to use food as a carrot, rather than a stick.
By contrast, political leaders in Venezuela’s chavista regime withhold food distribution (and other goods) from citizen opponents. This strategy is effective because of ongoing shortages that result from grave economic mismanagement, as well as the government’s refusal to accept international aid. With opposition parties unable to access similar resources, citizens cannot shop around for better deals. And like the authoritarian regimes Amartya Sen studied, the government has little competitive incentive to address the problems of the citizens who go hungry.
In this context, as Saturday’s events suggest, food security and democratization must advance together. It is hard to see how to promote either one without the other.
Democracies can escape endemic clientelism. Over the past two decades, critical public policy reforms have taken root in Latin America, as many democracies have established nonclientelistic social programs that promote food security for all citizens, regardless of party affiliation. Perhaps Venezuela will soon join them.