News: Questions of the day

From the June 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Questions of the day

As a socialist party we are actively involved in the work of urging the working class to ask themselves questions about their present living arrangements. One of the questions we need to ask ourselves is why we are all working so hard, when it is so blatantly unnecessary given the potential of today’s technology. A list of these socialist questions was asked by Tracey Chapman in her song Why? One of the most tragic is: Why do babies starve when there’s enough food to feed the world?

Why do babies starve when there’s enough food to feed the world?

Why do babies starve when there’s enough food to feed the world?

Are babies really starving? Is there really enough food to feed the world? These stories are not something socialists make up. They are facts about the world we live in. The Daily Monitor of Addis Ababa, for example, recently reported that Ethiopia has too little food to feed its people, but too much food for its farmers to stay in business.

Because farmers had plenty of grain, competition bought the price of food down. This made what the paper called consumers (as if they’re a different class to the producers) “happy”, it said. But the paper was subsequently surprised to discover that, as it turned out, this was no great thing after all. “Market forces played their foul game,” they said. Farmers were not earning enough from the sale of their commodity to pay off their loans for fertilisers and seed.

“When rich countries overproduce, their governments buy up the product and dump it in the ocean – or they just donate it to needy countries, which destabilises their struggling economies. When a poor country overproduces, it’s left with piles of rotting food in a hungry land,” the paper said.

The best that even the most radical commentators can do in such a situation is wring their hands in despair, for it seems to them a really insoluble contradiction. For us, however, the solution lies with ourselves and our own struggles to assert our needs, including the need to eat the food that we, as a class, produce. The framework for a successful conclusion to these struggles – for bread, and for roses – is the social ownership of what is socially produced. As long as food is produced for sale on the market, rather than directly for eating, there can be no lasting solution to the problem of hunger in the Third World.