While millions starve, it is a fact that humankind possesses the technical potential to feed everyone. Yet this potential is not being realised because of the restrictions imposed upon production by the present world system of buying and selling. In this system, food (and indeed, anything else) is produced only on condition that a profit will be realised if there exists what the economists call ‘effective demand’ (human need backed up by ready cash).
This point was forcefully made in a BBC Radio 4 International Assignment broadcast of November 11 last. In what turned out to be an astonishingly frank expose of the absurdities and contradictions of the production for profit system, BBC correspondents from all over the world reported on the gathering of the world’s harvests. The presenter began by pointing out that last year’s bad summer may seem to have had a disastrous effect on food production, but that in fact modern techniques were such as to have all but eliminated the consequences of bad or unexpected weather conditions.
Hence, we learned, most parts of the world had had a bumper harvest, and even in South East Asia, where severe flooding had limited rice production, use was being made of the massive crop from the previous year, much of which had not been put on the market.
In America next, farmers had reaped record’ harvests yet faced the problem that with so much food about, prices were being forced down, and they were having to lobby the government to fix higher prices. In view of this, the government had warned them to keep production down for this year (1979). In the meantime, part of the American grain crop had been sold to the Russians, whose own production could easily cover domestic needs but who preferred to leave their own fields fallow and import food more cheaply.
Conversely, many producers the world round had actually grown food but couldn’t afford to put it on the market as the price was too low. They would therefore stock it, hoping for a better price later, let it rot in the fields, or destroy it.
The presenter’s conclusion on all this was that we had a “world bursting at the seams with food, but beset with problems of distribution”. The situation was described as “paradoxical” in so much as those who had got the food couldn’t sell it, and those who needed the food hadn’t got the money to buy it.
With India’s ‘Green Revolution’, the programme went on, vast progress had been made in agricultural activity over the past twelve years. There was now a permanent stock of 21 million tons of grain (more than the whole annual production of the UK), yet malnutrition was still rampant. In addition, vast acreages still remained unexploited through lack of fertilisers, insecticides and modern techniques generally.
The correspondents in Africa and South America had the same kind of tale to tell. “In Nigeria”, one reported, “it’s said that if you plant a broom handle it will grow.” But here too, he went on, production was severely limited, this time by the system of land tenure in operation.
After pointing out that in a century’s tune the world’s population should stabilise at twice the present level, with the need for three times the present output, the presenter concluded with a question put to an academic expert on the subject; “Can the world feed us all?” The academic’s reply was: “Yes, if exploitation is rational, and even at the present level of technology.”
The key words in this reply are, of course, “if exploitation is rational”, for in a world where the means to produce food, and indeed everything else, are the property of a small minority of human beings competing to sell their produce at a profit, exploitation of resources car. never be rational. It can only be carried on in the overall interest of this small owning minority. ‘Rational exploitation” can only come about when the means to produce food and other goods are the common property of the whole of humanity and are used co-operatively in a system of free access and democratic control.
In the meantime, the small minority will continue to have it their way. Their political control, either through state dictatorship as in Russia, China and Cuba, or through representative government as in Britain and the USA, safeguards their economic position while assuring continued waste and artificial shortage in all parts of the world.
It is up to the vast non-owning majority to take this political control for themselves and to use it to create a non-class divided society which will release the rich abundance of food and other goods which the earth has to offer.
Howard Moss
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