Poverty and hunger (1966)

Book Review from the December 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

As I Recall by Lord Boyd Orr (Macgibbon & Kee)

This is a fascinating, but also an infuriating, book.

In the introduction, Ritchie Calder speaks of the author’s frustration and anger when, time and again, he was foiled by the profit motive in his efforts to improve the diet of the poorest. He speaks bitterly of his frustrated attempt to get free milk into schools to supplement the children’s impoverished diet, at a time when there was a glut of milk because people could not afford it and skimmed milk was being poured down the drain. He quotes from one of Lord Boyd Orr’s speeches: “half the population of the world suffers from lack of sufficient food; farmers suffer ruin if they produce ‘too much food’. Adjust our economic and political systems to let these two evils cancel each other out.’’

This is why this is an infuriating book. Lord Boyd Orr shows many times that he recognises the responsibility for malnutrition and hunger lies in the capitalist system and yet, even recognising this, throughout his long life and even now, he has sought the remedy within that system.

In the section dealing with his research work, Lord Boyd Orr speaks of the brushes he has had at various times with the Ministry of Agriculture. At one time the Ministry was creating Boards to fix prices of home produced bacon, etc., and to restrict imports. He was opposed to these “because . . . this meant dearer food for the poorer half of the population who were already unable to purchase sufficient for health . . . The Pig and Bacon Marketing Board would mean that there would be less bacon imported from Denmark, and in return we would send them less coal, with the resulting increased unemployment in both countries.” This is a point which still eludes our successive Governments, who preach the gospel that “we” must import less and export more!

In his criticisms of the Agricultural Marketing Board, Lord Boyd Orr advocated a comprehensive food and agricultural policy based on human needs. He pointed out that while the poorest people spent more than 75 per cent of their income on food, the wealthy spend less than 10 per cent. Therefore rises in prices obviously affect the poor much more than the wealthy. In reply he was informed that, as the Rowell Institute (his research institute) was maintained by government grant, the Director should not be allowed to engage in propaganda against his government.

In the chapter dealing with his dietary surveys and wartime food policy, the author speaks of an interview he had with Kingsley Wood, then Minister of Health, who asked him why he was making such a fuss about poverty when, with old age pensions and unemployment insurance, there was no poverty in the country. The extraordinary thing was that Kingsley Wood genuinely believed that if people are not actually dying of starvation, there could be no food deficiency. Naturally he had never put this theory to the test at first hand!

There are many other instances of ignorance or deliberate obstruction and manipulation of facts on the part of “our” politicians. Nevertheless, Lord Boyd Orr can speak with admiration of General Smuts and say superstitiously that “God frowned on our work in Kenya” because two of his friends died there, one through cancer and the other through a motor accident.

When speaking of the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation, the author mentions the interest shown by American businessmen in schemes for world distribution of food “from a financial point of view.” However, due to the frequent opposition of the British team who, obviously, could see none of these advantages in view of the preferential tariff and price arrangements of this country with its “ex Empire”, many of these schemes failed.

The Atlantic Charter of 1941 stated as its aim “freedom from want for all men in all lands.” The author speaks bitterly of the fact that, already by May, 1943, at the Hot Springs Conference in America on world food problems, this had , been forgotten. ‘The old men had crept back into power, determined to resist any economic change which threatened their financial interests.” When addressing the delegates at the Quebec Conference he felt that, although the delegates themselves were in favour of his suggestions they, “like the delegates at the Hot Springs conference had been told what to say by politicians who had little interest in alleviating poverty, even in their own countries, and even less in eliminating hunger and poverty in the world.”

In spite of his experiences with succeeding British Governments, Lord Boyd Orr can say “my attempt to persuade Mr. Attlee to become interested in this project was rather foolish. He was doing a magnificent job . . . with many inexperienced ministers to reorganise Britain after the war . . . that he could not be expected to be well informed on what must have considered a side issue of the foreign policy.” Side issue indeed!

The role taken by the British Government at least appears to have been consistent. On one occasion the FAO, having sent a group of agricultural experts to Greece, reported that a grant or loan of 200 million dollars would be sufficient to finance the development plans agreed, to bring about a rapid increase in food production. Instead of the grant. Britain sent troops to support the government and Royal Family. 

In summing up, Lord Boyd Orr chafes against the division of the world into opposing camps and sees in World Government. the promotion of which now takes up much of his time, the solution to these problems. His references to “Socialism” and “Capitalism” show why Lord Boyd Orr still places hopes in such an organisation.

Eva Goodman

Food Production: The World Can Feed Us All (1970)

From the August 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

The main function of food is to provide the human body with energy. This it does in chemical form. This chemical energy is converted into mechanical work and into heat (to maintain body temperature). What a human being needs can be worked out in energy terms and the unit generally used to measure this is the “calorie” (or, more correctly, the kilocalorie). Many people don’t realise that this is a unit of energy, equally applicable in physics as in biology.

Depending on his age, sex, work and climate a person’s calorie needs can be worked out. If he is not getting these calories then he is underfed and can properly be regarded as “starving”.

But calories are not all that a person’s food must give him. It must also provide the various substances the body needs to develop and function properly especially proteins, vitamins and various minerals (like iron, calcium, iodine).

The bulk of people’s food is taken in the form of carbohydrates (starches, sugars) and fats. The carbohydrates, which come from corn, rice, potatoes, are cheap. Which is one reason why they are the staple diet of most people. The fats provide more calories and come from eating meats and some vegetables.

They say that you could in theory live without carbohydrates and fats; the same does not go for proteins, however. Protein-foods also provide calories (which is why they could replace carbohydrates and fats) but their main role is in supplying certain essential ingredients to the body to grow and to renew itself. The trouble is that proteins are found in the more expensive foods. Thus malnutrition arising from protein deficiency is fairly widespread. Malnutrition can also be caused by a deficiency of vitamins and minerals.

You often hear it said that “two-thirds of the world are starving”. That all depends on what you mean by starving. The Food and Agriculture Organisation estimates “that up to half of the population of the world continues to suffer from under-nutrition and malnutrition in varying decrees” (1963). But is malnutrition, as opposed to under-nutrition, properly called “starvation”? To most people starvation means not getting enough food, being almost at death’s door. If two-thirds of the world were starving in this sense then the world’s population ought to be going down as they die off. It is safer to say that up to half the world’s population is either underfed and/or badly fed. Estimates of those actually underfed put the figure at about 10 to 15 per cent; the half being made up by cases of malnutrition mainly from protein deficiency.

Faced with these terrible figures people say its the result of ignorance or of too many people or of not enough land to grow food on. In fact this problem is caused by none of these. All this human suffering is unnecessary and could be rapidly ended given the necessary changes in the structure of society.

That the natural resources of the earth and the knowledge and machines of its people are sufficient to provide an abundance of foodstuffs is a well-established fact. Listen to Professor Clark, formerly of the Agricultural Economics Research Institute of Oxford University:

  The purpose of this article is to consider whether the earth’s resources, if properly developed, would yield material goods sufficient to provide, a satisfactory livelihood for the whole human race. Although it is not usual to state one’s conclusion at the beginning, in this case it can be stated without qualification. The material resources of the world would easily suffice to make such provision, not only for the whole human race as it now is, but also for any conceivable expansion of our numbers which is likely to occur for a very long time. Whatever was the case in the past, we can certainly say now that, with modern scientific and technical knowledge, the fact that so many people fall short of satisfactory livelihood must be blamed entirely upon human shortcomings, not upon the inadequacies of nature (“The Earth Can Feed its People”, Christian Responsibility and World Poverty. A Catholic Viewpoint).

Prof. Clark is a Catholic and an opponent of birth control, but even supporters of birth control as one way to solve capitalism’s current food problems agree on this. N. W. Pirie, of the Rothamsted Experimental Station, writes in his recent book Resources: Conventional and Novel (reviewed, Socialist Standard, September, 1969) of the possibilities of increasing food production by the further application of conventional agriculture:

  At many points there is great scope for further research, but the vigorous application of existing knowledge on a worldwide scale could increase immensely the amount of food produced. The extent of the possible increase is a matter of opinion. But only a very cautious prophet would predict less than a doubling.

In 1963 the F.A.O. published Possibilities of Increasing World Food Production, a region-by-region survey of food producing potential, and declared that “it is clear that world potentials for increasing food production are very substantial indeed”. This conclusion is all the more impressive since the FAO openly assumes that food will continue to be produced for sale and traded on the world market (a great restriction on production).

It is perhaps worth running through what are these conventional methods that could be vigorously applied: (1) Cultivating more land; (2) Irrigation; (3) Better varieties of crops; (4) Use of fertilizers; (5) Use of weed killers and pesticides.

All these techniques could be further applied as soon as Socialism were established in order to increase food production immediately by a substantial amount.

Developments in agriculture are not the only ones that can allow food production to be increased. It is often said that although the food can be produced in America, Europe, Australia, the facilities for transporting it to the people who need it either don’t exist or are quite inadequate. The ports of India are said to be so overcrowded that it would be physically impossible to transport more food there. There are said to be no roads to the places where people are starving so that the food would have to be carried by porters over long distances. This may well be true but there are transportation techniques which are also not vigorously applied. When there is a war on, the logistics sections of the armed forces overcome such problems and the Indo-China war has shown that the USAF can build temporary air fields in the middle of the jungle in a very short time.

Besides the more vigorous application of conventional methods of agriculture, further research could lead to the discovery of new methods by which food production could be increased.

Food, as we saw, is energy in chemical form and, if really necessary, essential foodstuffs could be produced synthetically toy industrial processes. In the last world war, Germany had a factory producing artificial fats. Vitamins and minerals are already produced industrially. Research into ways of manufacturing proteins is also going on, as newspaper stories about food from oil and coal show.

Then there is the sea, a vast source of untapped food potential, especially of protein-rich foods. As far as obtaining food from the sea is concerned mankind is still largely in the hunting and gathering stage from which on land we developed millions of years ago. Very little farming of the sea is done as yet. Two scientists, writing in the April 1969 issue of World Health (WHO), estimate:

  If the sea’s resources were used rationally, an acre of its surface could produce twice as much protein-rich food as an acre of high-class pasture. . . . According to estimates made by the oceanographer Professor L. Zenkevitch of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, the productive capacity of the sea is more than a thousand times that of the arable land area.

Half the world is inadequately fed despite the existence of the resources to provide the food they need in abundance, not because of overpopulation nor because of nature but because of the capitalist system of production for profit on the basis of the class ownership of the means of production.

Adam Buick

Hunger amidst plenty (1993)

From the May 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

To say that millions of human beings suffer from hunger because there are too many people is to subscribe to a myth. It is an explanation of a situation which is not based on an examination of the facts. The continued existence of millions of lives endured under the scourge of hunger, malnutrition and starvation is not “natural” or “unavoidable” but is entirely artificial.

The so-called population problem is in reality a poverty problem—a problem of capitalism. Who is not moved at the sight of famine victims depicted on TV screens, newspapers and magazines? The desire to do something about such an appalling situation is natural and worthy. Socialists argue that the first step to be taken in solving the problem of hunger is to recognise that famines are artificial and that the miseries that they bring are unnecessary and avoidable.

There are three dangers to be avoided, however.

First is the danger of believing that charity is any sort of solution. The danger here is that giving money to organisations such as War on Want or Band Aid diverts attention from the real causes of hunger and does nothing to remove them. It also encourages the “it’s all right. I’ve done my bit” attitude which is the basis of political apathy.

The second is getting involved in political action to pressurise governments to give more aid. Charities themselves admit that the scale of world hunger is beyond their means and call on governments to put money into schemes meant to alleviate the suffering of poor people. Those who urge the adoption of this “solution” would do well to remember the words of Tom Clausen (President of the World Bank) who said in 1982 that it was

  not in the business of redistributing wealth from one set of countries to another. It is not the Robin Hood of the international financial set. (Quoted in Anne Buchanan Food, Poverty and Power. 1982. p. 68).

The third danger is that of blaming the victims, blaming the poor for their poverty. This attitude dehumanizes the poor so that they become “hordes”, “floods”, “a cancerous growth" or “a plague of people”. It also, by making the problem seem so enormous, saps the political will to do anything let alone take any meaningful action. In addition it patronises the Third World poor in particular as they are seen as being helpless victims unable to do anything for themselves. The attitude of the neo-Malthusians is to condemn the poorest of the poor to death because, as Paul Erlich has written, “the battle to feed humanity is already lost” (The Population Bomb, 1971, p. 15).

Enough food

World population is about 5,700 million. That figure is set to reach 6,000 million by the year 2000. Estimates of the number of hungry vary. According to the US President’s Science Advisory Council 450 to 500 million people are hungry. The World Bank's estimate (using different criteria) is 730 million without enough to eat to enable them to have an active working life: of these 730 million 340 million have diets insufficient to prevent serious risk to health and they suffer arrested mental development and have stunted growth.

The question then arises could the hungry' be fed?

Current world food production is in the region of 3,800 million metric tons. Half of that by weight is grain. Equitably distributed it would give each man, woman and child on the planet 5lbs of food per day. United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation statistics show that this food represents 2709 calorics per head per day and 71 grammes of protein per head per day (United Nations Statistical Yearbook, 37th edition, 1993. Table 24, p. 17). Nutritionists calculate that on average human beings need between 1800 and 2500 calories a day (for energy) and 45 to 50 grammes of protein (for body growth and repair).

The amount of food currently being produced would adequately feed the expected world population for the year 2100.

In the mid 1980s the US Department of Agriculture made some calculations based on actual nutritional needs and estimated that the 67 poorest countries (those with the lowest income per head of population) required 25.8 million metric tons of food to meet their needs. The FAO estimated needs to be 20 million metric tons. The 1984-5 global cereal carry-over was 294 million metric tons, not counting the butter, beef, milk powder, etc kept in storage because the market could not absorb the supplies. (It cost £1,570 million per year for the UK alone to keep it off the market).

These figures do not take into account the fertile land withdrawn from production in an attempt to keep up prices and maintain profit. The agricultural economist Colin Clark calculated in the early 1970s that world resources of agricultural land could feed 47,000 million people at maximum standards (Population and Land Use, 2nd edition, p. 153).

In the face of this overwhelming abundance why do millions of our fellow humans continue to starve? The situation is clearly intolerable.

Cartoon by Peter Rigg from the May 1993 Standard.

Not produced for need

What needs to be done first is to recognise something so obvious that it might be thought not worthy of restatement and that is this: food is not produced primarily to satisfy human need, but to be sold on the market so as to realise a profit. No profit, no production. Because the market only recognises effective demand (i.e. demand backed by the ability to pay) people starve within sight of food. The economist Keith Griffin (President of Magdalen College, Oxford) pul the problem this way:

  The fundamental cause of hunger is the poverty of specific groups of people, not a general shortage of food. In simple terms, what distinguishes the poor from others is that they do not have sufficient purchasing power or effective demand to enable them to acquire enough to cat. The problem is the relationship of particular group of people to food, not food itself. (World Hunger and the World Economy, 1987, p. 18).

That academic assessment is backed by the findings of aid charities in the field. War on Want’s Don Thomson has stated:

  Experienced disaster and officials now admit . . . that they know of hardly any famine in living memory where there has been an outright shortage of food locally. They found instead that the victims did not have the means to buy. (New Scientist, 7 November 1974).

In a world of buying and selling a bumper crop of food cannot be guaranteed to feed the hungry. Take for example the situation in Mozambique where up to 4 million people were facing starvation largely because the country's agricultural production had been wrecked by years of civil war. In 1987 neighbouring Zimbabwe had a 2.8 million ton “maize mountain”. A stack of white maize three storeys high stood alongside the railway linking Zimbabwe and Mozambique 55 miles away. The food would have met Mozambique’s needs for several years but as Pat Henderson. chief executive of the Zimbabwe Commercial Grain Producers Association said at the time:

  It's not only a human problem, it's a financial problem. We cannot give our maize away (Observer, 15 February 1987).

Henderson was right. It is commercial madness to give free access to food in a money economy. The human problem of hunger cannot be solved within the framework of production for profit.

The challenge that faces humanity is that of organising things on a different basis. Class ownership of the world’s resources must be replaced by common ownership. This will be done when the majority of the world's population—we who own no productive resources other than our ability to work—organise to take democratic political action to dispossess the profit-seekers who currently own those resources.

Gwynn Thomas

The Starvation in Somalia (1992)

Editorial from the December 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nobody can fail to be moved by the pictures and accounts of people starving in Somalia. It really is an obscene crime against humanity that people should be dying of starvation in a world which is not only capable of producing enough to feed everybody but even has enough food stockpiled to stop it straightaway. As the Observer reported on 30 August:

Britain has enough wheat and barley lying unused in its grain stores to feed the entire Somalian nation for more than a year.
 At one single centre—on a disused RAF base near Kidderminster in Worcestershire—there are four huge warehouses stuffed with enough grain to supply the stricken war-torn nation for a month.
   One of these warehouses is said to be so full that it is virtually impossible to open its large steel doors. Yet in Somalia, hundreds of people—mostly children—are dying daily.
  The Kidderminster grain mountain is part of a total of 568,000 tonnes housed in Britain—in turn part of 19.6 million tonnes of wheat and barley kept in EC warehouses.
  This massive surplus could feed Somalia—which needs 40,000 tonnes of food aid per month for its starving people—for more than 40 years.

In a sane world, one geared to meeting human needs and serving human welfare, stopping people in Somalia dying of starvation would be a question purely of logistics. Organising to transport the food from where it is stockpiled to Somalia.

But of course we are not living in a sane world. We are living in a world dominated by market forces. And it is their inability to operate in the human interest that has caused the problem in the first place and is now preventing it being solved in the simplest, most direct way.

People are starving in Somalia not because there is not enough food in the world to feed them. They are starving because they lack the means to make their demand—or rather, their absolute need—for food effective. They lack either money to buy food or access to land to grow their own. Those in Somalia who do have these things are not starving.

Those with money in Somalia can, and do, have access to food—the television has shown pictures of well-stocked markets, sometimes with starving people lying on the other side of the street. We mention this not to belittle the extent of the obscene situation in Somalia but to underline the point that famines only affect those whose access to money or land has collapsed for some reason. Famines are a social not a natural phenomenon.

Protecting the market for food in Somalia is in fact a key factor shaping the so-called “food aid” policies of governments and the UN. They know that to make available for free distribution anything but minimal amounts of food per starving person would be to undermine local markets and local market-oriented production, leading to more people coming to lose their access rights to food. And of course they are right. Given the market system this is exactly what would happen. So, quite apart from financial cost considerations, they deliberately limit the amount of free food they supply.

This is what we mean when we say that it is market forces that are preventing the immediate starvation in Somalia being solved in the way that it would be, almost literally overnight, in a sane society, one that would have to be based on the common ownership of resources: transporting the food from the warehouses of Europe to the towns and villages of Somalia.

But what of the long term? Could starvation be averted after the warehouses of Europe and North America had been emptied to feed the starving in Somalia and other parts of the world? In other words, could the planet produce enough to adequately feed the whole world’s population on a permanent, continuing basis?

Professor Vulimiri Ramalingaswami, who is chairman of the World Health Organisation’s medical research committee, is in no doubt that it can. “We have the ability as a world to produce enough food for everyone”, he told a meeting in Geneva in August. “We need to devise mechanisms so these fruits can reach those in greatest need” (Guardian, 18 August).

Professor Ramalingaswami is to chair a conference in Rome this month that the WHO is organising jointly with the Food and Agriculture Organisation. The FAO and the WHO are apparently thinking in terms of a “world crusade to end famine deaths”. Something like this is indeed what is required: a crash programme to increase world food production and distribute it on a free, non-market basis to where it is needed. But it is not going to happen. For the same reason that the warehouses of Europe are not going to be emptied to immediately stop the starvation in Somalia. It would undermine the market.

Not this time the local markets in some famine-stricken part of the world, but the world markets for wheat, maize, rice and other world commodities. As long as all things are produced for sale on a market with a view to making a profit, food is never going to be produced to feed people who can’t pay for it. As long, in other words, as food remains a commodity people will starve and Somalias will continue to happen.

Abundance and Poverty (1961)

From the May 1961 issue of the Socialist Standard

Some time ago, under the above caption, the now defunct News Chronicle, in a leading article, asked “is it really beyond the wit of man to devise a means of sharing out more fairly the world's bounty?" This was by no means the first challenge to society to meet the paradox of want in the midst of plenty, and the report that to-day, in Toronto, thousands of children are starving, provides ample evidence that the challenge has not been met

The statement comes from Dr. Morris Zeidman, a Presbyterian minister who runs the Scott Mission, which has “opened its doors to feed the hungry children of the city’s unemployed.” Referring to a woman who could not drink the soup provided, a mission worker said, “Some of these people have been subsisting on so little that they now find it hard to stomach ordinary food ” (The Guardian 10/3/61).

Is this, we may ask, part of the heritage of freedom for which members of the working class fought and died in two of the bloodiest wars in history? Must people go without the basic essentials of life at a time when productivity has increased to heights never known before? When man was the slave of nature, shortage and want could be explained in something like intelligent terms, but to-day, when his productive capacities are virtually unlimited, he must find some other answer.

Thirteen years ago, Lord Boyd Orr, then Director-General of the World Food and Agriculture Organisation, could say “There was no difficulty about producing food for the present population of the world, or even twice that number, but the problem was, could politics and economics arrange that the food that was produced was dispersed in the countries that needed it?’’. Seven years later, the Oxford economist, Mr. Colin Clark, remarked that in two years no authority had disagreed with Professor Dudley Stamp, who pointed out that if Danish agricultural standards were to be practised on the available cultivable land, there would be enough food produced to give an excellent diet to probably seven times the world’s present population.

What Lord Boyd Orr and Mr. Colin Clark failed to recognise, or at least make no mention of, is the fact that however capable man may be of producing wealth, it is ultimately the question of ownership which decides whether or not he will partake of that wealth. Food, like every other commodity in our modern world, is produced primarily for profit, and the fact that it eventually may satisfy hungry children in Toronto or elsewhere is incidental and of secondary importance.

The answer to the News Chronicle’s question will not be found in the speeches of politicians and economists; if it could, the question would not be asked after a century of Parliamentary Statutes and fact-finding Commissions, designed to reform capitalist society in the interest of those who make it tick.

A. F.

The World of Plenty? (1957)

From the November 1957 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists have always said that under this capitalist system the most decisive factor in production is the profit motive, and that production itself is geared to a marketing system that does not take any account of the real social needs of the community. We have said that capitalism channels all men's efforts down the narrow inhibited path of commerce and reduces his vast potentialities in the field of production to within the bounds of profit making. These assertions and the whole tragedy of capitalism and its contradictions are exemplified nowhere with more grim irony than in the problem feeing the American Government, the problem of agricultural surpluses, the ever-increasing accumulation of unsold stocks of food in the U.S.A.

To release these huge surpluses on the world’s markets would inevitably cause a slump in prices of agricultural commodities, bringing in its wake disaster for the farming community, whose repercussions might extend even to an industrial crisis. From there might ensue a repetition of conditions that existed all over the world in the early 1930's.

Since 1940 production on U.S. farms has increased one-third. This is due largely to the modernisation of farming methods, more machinery, better fertilisers, etc. The world's markets could not consume the increased supplies at the existing prices, so to offset a fall in the prices of farm produce, and prevent large numbers of unemployed in agriculture, the U.S. Government employed a method of buying up all the surplus at subsidised prices This was not a great philanthropic gesture on the part of the Government directed towards the farmer. Besides the economic necessity of maintaining stable conditions in agriculture, this policy was also part of a political campaign to woo the vote of the farmer. This is a very important vote, as the agricultural community comprises a very powerful pressure group, and any party that antagonises them can expect at least vastly reduced support, if not electoral death. The policy of subsidising farm products resulted in even greater surpluses, for the subsidy was made flexible and higher prices were paid out in accordance with the success of overseas sales. In view of these price guarantees, even greater over-expansion was caused, with the consequent boosting of production.

These surplus food stocks are not only very costly (five billion dollars a year), but are becoming a great embarrassment to the U.S. Government.

An investigation was made by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation into the advisability of diverting food surpluses to the under-developed countries of the world, but the difficulties arising out of such a project were found to be so wide and varied that very little was done about any proposals put forward by this organisation.

The American Government, with an eye to increasing its political prestige in Poland during the disturbances there in 1956, made generous offers of help in the way of food supplies to the Polish Government. These offers met with stiff opposition from countries like Canada, who hold the markets in Poland, so this offer had to be withdrawn.

However, the most important effort made by the U.S. Government to reduce these agricultural surpluses was the creation of the Soil Bank in 1956. This is a system whereby farmers are paid to take acreage out of production; e.g., for 1957 the U.S. signed up 233,453 farmers to take 12,784,968 acres of wheat alone out of production in return for $230,974,475 in payments. This system was to operate over a period of three years.

Ezra Benson, the Secretary of Agriculture, did not want to put this scheme into operation until 1957, but politicians, with an eagle eye on the General Election of November 1956, brought such pressure to bear that he was forced to start making payments to farmers in 1956. The Soil Bank was hailed by the two major political parties as the solution to the farm problem, but they reckoned without the narrow individualism of men in business under capitalism.

In 1956 260 million dollars were paid out to farmers, and the organisation of the Soil Bank was so ineffective that money was even paid out to farmers who had already tried to grow crops on the acres they had donated and failed. Wheat farmers who received payments for taking wheat out of production grew barley or rye instead. In some cases the top soil was sold and the barren ground that was left was put into the Soil Bank. Pasture land was ploughed up and sown with crops. Fertiliser was piled on, and rows sown closer together. The combined result of all this was that in 1956 agricultural production broke all records.

Now let us turn to the desperate need for food that exists among millions of the world's population. The Agricultural Review (October 1956) had this to say:—

 "Nutritional experts affirm that more than one-half of the world’s inhabitants, including many engaged in agriculture itself, are still not getting enough to eat."

While the minimum subsistence level is assessed at 2,200 calories per day, it is stated that 1,166,000,000 people consume less than 2,200 calories. The poverty-ridden countries of India, Pakistan, China and Japan make up the majority of this number, but there are workers in every country suffering from malnutrition, including large numbers working in agriculture itself.

These conditions exist because of the very nature of capitalism itself. There is no question of organising production so as to meet the needs and requirements of humanity. What is needed is a system of society wherein the means of production shall be held in common ownership by all of humanity instead of a privileged few.

Wherein production can be consciously regulated to meet human needs and requirements. Wherein commodities are not produced for sale to the highest bidder, but are produced for the benefit of all mankind. Only in Socialism can there be found the answer to the problems of the working classes of this world. 

Joan Lawrence

Plenty for Everybody (1970)

Book Review from the September 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

Starvation or Plenty? by Colin Clark. Seeker & Warburg. 30s.

Colin Clark, the agricultural economist, is a controversial figure. He has been a fierce critic of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and what he regards as its exaggerations of the number of hungry and starving people in the world. He has always denied that overpopulation is, or is ever likely to be, a problem and has insisted that the world is quite capable of providing for many times its present population.

Clark has never disguised the fact that he is a Catholic and his critics have suggested that his aim is to justify his church’s opposition to birth control. It could be argued, on the other hand, that the Catholic dogma of “God will provide” brings a different approach to this question of food and population than the conventional capitalist dogma of solving the problem of plenty (in this case, plenty of people who could produce more food) by trying to abolish or prevent it (in this case, by birth control). We will merely record here Clark’s views and let people judge for themselves.

But first let us state our own view. We too say that population is not a problem and that Malthus was talking nonsense. The problem is rather the underproduction and waste that is built-in to capitalism through its profit motive (Clark, as a defender of free-enterprise capitalism, would disagree with us here). Only when the world’s resources are owned in common by all mankind can they be used rationally to provide abundance for all.

Clark estimates that the average consumption of people in North America and Western Europe is about 8 times the bare human subsistence level. How much land, he asks, would be needed to allow one person to live at the American level if the best agricultural techniques were applied? Only 2763 square metres or about two-thirds of an acre. Is there enough land in the world to allow the present world's population to live at this level?

  The potential agricultural area of the world . . . could provide for the consumption. at these very high standards, of 35.1 billion people, or over 10 times the world’s present population. This, it will be remembered, is on the assumption of the general use of agricultural methods already practised by the average farmer in the Netherlands or similar countries, without allowing for any further improvements in agricultural technology, for any provision of food from the sea, or for any extension of present systems of irrigation.

 

This. remember, is only a measure of what the world could provide if the most productive modern techniques were applied everywhere. To do this would take time and demand a massive technical and educational programme (of a kind only a rationally-organised socialist world could mount). But it does show that nobody need now starve and that overpopulation is just a myth.

And what about in the meantime? Even under capitalism (and Clark never steps outside the framework of this system), “for most of the world agricultural production is advancing substantially faster than population, and is likely to continue to do so”. He foresees that if this goes on and if agricultural productivity in the developing countries exceeds the demand there “there will be a most acute problem of disposal of agricultural surpluses in the export markets”. Clark blames the developed countries for hogging the world market in agricultural products and suggests they should give up part of this to the developing countries who could thus get the money to buy industrial products from them instead. Such a rational (from a capitalist point of view) re-arrangement of the anarchic world market is, we would suggest, most unlikely so that, if Clark is right here, capitalism will again expose on a more widespread scale than now its absurdity by producing food it cannot sell even though sonic people need it.

This short, easy-to-read book presents Clark’s views in handy form and should be read by all those interested in this question. It should challenge the prejudices of those who believe in the threat of overpopulation.

Adam Buick

Capitalism and hunger (1982)

From the July 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of the commonest platitudes to trip glibly off the tongues of politicians is “the interests of the community”. No politician would say that people do not matter; rather, they claim that work, administration, services and facilities should serve the well-being of all of society’s members. But, in reality, this is not the case. There is a wide difference between what we expect of society and the real way it works.

Production is crucial to everyday living. It should provide for our food, housing, clothing, our enjoyment of leisure, and our care of the aged, the sick and the young. We should manage this with dignity and security. These are the things that society should be organised to provide for.

So how does capitalism measure up to this expectation of life; the reasonable view for example that food should be produced directly for people to eat? We find that this is not what happens. When a farmer or some “agribusiness” makes a decision to organise food production, feeding people is just about the last thing they have in mind. What they firstly have in mind is making a profit and accumulating capital.

Although the operations of some capitalist farming enterprises are ruthlessly exploitative, farmers in general are not particular social villains. In a capitalist world they do not have much choice. If farmers were to invest in food production against the judgement that they will make a profit, they would be committing economic suicide. The object of the farmer is to accumulate capital, not to waste it. That is why the farmer goes in for food production, why he invests in land, fertilisers, seeds, farm machinery, and above all why he invests in farm labour power.

But still the naive might think that the production of food for profit enables need to be satisfied, and that without the profit motive we would all starve. But the reality is that the need for food, under capitalism, is only satisfied when it constitutes a market. The facts are that people starve because they cannot afford food, and it is a result of their poverty position in the social relationships of production that they cannot do so.

Reality is not what it is commonly assumed to be. Capitalist production uses human wants for making profit. Human wants are satisfied on the prior condition that this is profitable, within the system of producing food as commodities for sale on the markets. The organisation War On Want has reported: “In the Bangladesh famine in 1974 there was three months’ supply of grain stored away, yet people were dying right outside the stores. They could not afford to buy what was there".

The mention of commodities is important in understanding the object of present society. Every form of society produces useful wealth, but only capitalism produces overwhelmingly commodities. It does so against the background of productive relationships which only operate under capitalism: the exploitation of wage labour by capital. As with capitalism in general, the commodity is a very anti-social thing. Its production tells us more about human denial than human fulfilment.

Under capitalism, as with all forms of society, what is required for food production is the useful labour of food producers. Labour power also functions as a commodity. It is bought and sold at its price, which are wages, on the labour market. The farmer also has to buy machinery, seeds and fertilisers and these are produced by exploiting wage labour in other parts of the total productive process.

The object of the food producing enterprise is to realise profit and the accumulation of capital, so it is looking for values which are extra to the values of the initial investment. The source of these extra values lies in the wage labour part of the investment, because labour power is different to other commodities. Labour power ft the one thing that capital invests in which, when put to use, has the ability to create values over and above its own value. The influence of the markets sets limits to food production which are far below the potential which would be possible were food produced directly for human need.

There are few so-called “developed” countries which do not have government policies intended to restrict the production of food. The balance of restricted production with market capacity is not easy to control. Food which is surplus, not to human need but to market capacity, is stockpiled in wine lakes, butter mountains and so on. Fruit and vegetables are often destroyed so that the market price might be protected.

In America, thousands of tons of grain are stockpiled. The American government has made various attempts to restrict food production. One example was the “soil bank”, where farmers were compensated for taking land out of production. It failed, partly because farmers cultivated their remaining land more intensively and this resulted in higher food production. Thus the farmers were doubly compensated, firstly for taking acreage out of production and secondly by receiving subsidies for the extra food produced. In recent years in Australia, a region which has an enormous potential for food production, the Victorian State Government has paid farmers 10 dollars a head to kill cattle and bury them in lime pits, as part of a price support scheme.

Another aspect of restricted food production is that many of the world’s millions of unemployed are farm workers. This only makes sense in terms of the obscene logic of capitalist economics, and brings us back to the real priorities of world capitalism. A farm worker, as with any other worker, is taken out of production when there is no immediate prospect of exploiting his labour power for profit.

We cannot pretend that the object of present society is concern for human welfare. The production and distribution of food is organised as a world business. Its possibilities, but more importantly its limitations, are given within the framework of profit and loss accounts. The human misery which results is not relevant to those accounts.

The human cost of restricted food production and distribution is well known. Understanding of this misery is obscured by the dominant economic interests. Most estimates are that two-thirds of the world’s population do not get enough to eat in sufficient balance to sustain good health. This includes millions in the so-called “developed” countries who are living below the poverty line. The problem was dramatised in the report of UNICEF for 1981 as follows: “Every day this year (1981) 40,000 children died. Usually they were the youngest and weakest of the Third World’s 100,000,000 children who are always hungry”.

Clearly then we need a society which is concerned with the interests of all its members. The alternative to capitalism is a new set of productive relationships—socialism. The alternative to the present world where resources are monopolised by a privileged minority is a world which is held in common and at the free disposal of all humanity. The alternative to commodity production for the market is the production of useful wealth directly for human need.

The transfer of the world into the hands of all humanity and its conscious democratic control for the human interest is the political act of socialism. This transformation of productive relationships will remove the economic limitations of capitalist production and enable us to deal in a practical way with social problems.

The Food and Agricultural Organisation has put together over recent years an extensive description of the problem of hunger, though their analysis of its causes is weak. (They are, after all, funded by world capitalism.) Nevertheless they have collected data on the distribution of hunger, malnutrition and its related diseases, existing food sources and their use, potential food sources, efficiencies of systems of food production, the uses of mechanisation, fertilisers, transport and their relationship to productivity.

The FAO has also studied such aspects of the problem as crop location and scales of production, hybridisation of new plant varieties and their suitability in different conditions, and also food production in relation to conservation of resources and the environment. This knowledge entirely disproves the prejudiced view that hunger is caused by lack of resources or technique.

It must be stressed that while the scale of the problem of hunger requires productive efficiency, production for use need not confine its farming methods to those which have been profitable in the competitive, commodity-producing system of capitalism. It will have wide latitude in its choice of methods which will be decided by necessity and practicality. (Practicality being availability of technique, labour, resources, as well as considerations of suitability such as safety.)

In 1980, world capitalism afforded 20,000 million pounds worth of arms sales, and at the same time carried over 20 million unemployed in Europe and America alone. This represented only a fraction of total wasted labour under capitalism. The socialist policy is that world social production be adapted on the basis of common ownership and production for use so that these wasted resources are used for the benefit of the world’s people.

Pieter Lawrence

Food for thought in Rome (1997)

From the January 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

Twenty-three years ago, the then US Secretary of State. Henry Kissinger, vowed to a World Food conference that world hunger would be eradicated within the next decade. There were then 435 million chronically malnourished people on earth—a 75 million increase over the previous five years.

In spite of the "green revolution" in agriculture, the introduction of high yield crops, genetic engineering and advances in farming technology since the 1984 deadline set by an optimistic Kissinger, there are now as many chronically malnourished people on earth than ever— over 800 million. And although some expect conditions to improve, the United Nations Food Agriculture Organisation (FAO) reckons there will still be 680 million malnourished people in the year 2010.

Faced with this alarming scenario, delegates representing 194 nations attended the November 1996 UN World Food Summit in Rome, ostensibly to tackle the problem.

The gathering had been blasted by many as a farce before it had begun, in fact even before a 31 October meeting at which delegates had negotiated the bulk of the Summit agreement in advance which, incidentally, was to strive for food security "through a fair and market-oriented world trade system".

In spite of the October meeting, at which possible disputes were supposedly resolved in advance, the FAO remained confident it could focus attention, in Kissengerian fashion on what it sees as its central purpose, which it defines as a renewal of a "high level commitment around the world to the eradication of hunger and malnutrition and to the achievement of lasting food security for all" (Guardian, 1 November). If this did not smack of a complete misunderstanding of the rules of capitalism, the FAO went on to state that it did not seek pledges of food aid from rich to poor countries, even though this had halved in the past three years.

As could only be expected, the November Summit attracted only a few "leaders" from the industrialised world— no doubt only too aware of what to expect and similarly all too familiar with the fact that such global dilemmas cannot be solved within the context of capitalism. Furthermore, although the UN is supposedly committed to the idea that each person has a right to food and to be free from hunger, it can well be imagined how such "leaders" feared the legislation they might one day run into should they turn up at the Summit and consent to the right of their citizens to food.

Needless to say, a lot of crap came out of the Food Summit—and not the kind that fertilises barren land. There was a lot of finger-pointing at wars and the western arms industries and ethnic and civil strife as being the cause of much hunger. Overpopulation cropped up, with Vatican anti-abortionists objecting to the promotion of “reproductive health care" (as they had at the recent Cairo and Beijing summits) and the issue of free trade in agricultural goods for third world countries was also raised. Nowhere was the problem located in a wider context—the capitalist system itself.

Little wonder, then, that instead of agreeing to abolish world hunger, the 200 or so fat-arsed delegates could only consent to the idea of world hunger being reduced by 50 percent within 20 years—in other words, in the year 2015 world hunger would still be as high as when Henry Kissinger vowed to eradicate it 43 years earlier.

Neither did the Summit extract one single cash commitment, trading reform or agriculture policy shift from any major donor nation. After much prevarication, procrastination and pontification, the world's hungry were quite simply left to fend for themselves, the Summit declaration stating that primary responsibility for food security rests with individual governments operating with a "market- oriented world system".

Such news will not doubt be as welcome as a turd in a swimming pool for the likes of the 15 sub-Saharan countries who produce less food per person then they did 30 years ago—thanks largely to IMF structural adjustments programmes and the subverting of arable land to the production of cash crops to meet debt repayments. Meanwhile, the fat cats of the 6 multinationals who control the grain trade (Cargill, for example, has an income larger than that of the 9 largest sub-Saharan countries) can relax—their profits are safe.

The only sense to come out of the Summit came in form of criticism levelled by the major charities.

Save the Children lambasted the Summit as "a forum for legitimising a new international code of practice which . . .  subordinates basic rights to the market philosophy". Actionaid blamed the free trade system itself for global hunger and Oxfam pointed out that the "enhanced competition between the surplus agricultural systems of the industrialised world and the deficit system of the developing world" could only "exacerbate problems" (quotations from the Guardian, 13 November).

Although the FAO admitted that the world produces enough to ensure "adequate" food for all (2,700 calories per person per day), they nevertheless maintained that a 75 percent increase in food production was needed.

It may well be the case that the world is already producing more than enough food to feed the present world population, bearing in mind, for instance, that in one season in 1995 French peasant cooperatives were paid to destroy 972.000 tons of food, and that in 1993 the European community destroyed 3 millions tons of food at a cost of £439 million.

Add to this facts such as the US taking 8 million acres of arable land out of production to reduce their surplus in recent years, the 651 British farmers paid £ 100,000 each in 1994 for not growing food, the Indian army guarding food mountains, and you begin to realise what a waste of time such summits are.

The problem is not a shortage of food, or even a deficiency of “common- sense" among world leaders—it is the system they believe can be run in our interests, a system that says "can't buy, can't have". A system which allows the ruling élite in almost every country to destroy food and pay farmers for not growing food in order to guarantee profits.

Neither is the problem one of overpopulation. Twice the present world population could stand up in Cornwall. Africa is supposedly overpopulated, yet it is now acknowledged that Africa could feed a population six times its present size were western farming techniques to be introduced there.

Capitalism is solely responsible for world hunger, just as it is the root cause of war, diseases that are returning to haunt humanity, homelessness, unemployment and a thousand other social ills. And we call them "social ills" because all of these problems are rooted in the way society is at present organised for production—production for profit, not social need.

John Bissett

How socialism could increase food production (2001)

From the December 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

In two previous articles we set out facts showing that more people suffer and die from hunger than ever before.

Since the FAO was set up in 1945 to help solve the problem, the numbers add up to hundreds of millions. But the miseries of this problem could be so easily prevented. Millions die from hunger not because of natural catastrophe or "too many people". The catastrophe is the world capitalist system that puts profits before people. The deaths are preventable because potentially there are abundant resources of land, labour, machinery and farming technique. The problem is that these resources are not free to be used directly for needs. They are shackled to the anti-social ends of the market system that puts profits before people.

The proposal that the world community in socialism could immediately stop deaths from hunger and rapidly increase the supply of food is based on the freedom that all people would enjoy to co-operate with each other to produce food directly for needs without the constraints of the market system. However, we also have an example of a rapid increase in food production during World War II when the normal operation of the market system was suspended. For instance, throughout the UK, under the direction of the Ministry of Agriculture, farming was planned, organised and largely paid for from a war budget. It was still limited by the economics of the capitalist system. It could not have been sustained because it was part of an accumulation of debt that eventually had to be re-paid from the profits of post-war trade.

It became a huge debt. "We end the war a net debtor for nearly £3,000,000,000 to the world overseas, where we began it as a net creditor for a like or even larger amount" (British War Production 1939 - 1945, compiled by The Times.) The money was mostly spent on war production and the armed forces but it also included the costs of farming. Writing about the coal industry future Prime Minister Harold Wilson, who was then Director of Economics and Statistics at the Ministry of Fuel said that "by the end of 1944 economic laws had ceased to apply to the industry". What was true of coal mining was also true of farming. It meant that instead of production being determined by market capacity for sales at a profit, subsidised production was paid for from government funds. No limit was set on production, and prices were guaranteed by the government for 18 months ahead. Though this example may seem perverse so far as socialism is concerned, it does indicate what can be achieved when production and distribution is organised, even for a short period, outside the normal constraints of market laws. What was achieved was that over a period of about four years food production in Britain was increased by 70 percent.

Such an increase of 70 percent today, on a world scale and within four years, would be more than enough to provide every person with choice and free access to good quality food. The ways in which this rapid increase was organised and achieved in World War II could provide some lessons for socialism.

A policy was adopted for converting pasture for dairy and meat products to arable land for cereals and vegetables. In 1939 farmers were given a grant of £2 per acre for ploughing up grassland and between April and September of that year 350,000 acres of grass were ploughed and added to the acreage for growing bread grains. This policy was continued and soon, over 7 million acres of grassland were converted for arable use. It resulted in a more efficient extraction of calorie values. "An acre of permanent grass (for dairy and meat) feeds only one or two persons; that acre ploughed up and sown with wheat feeds 20, and planted with potatoes feeds 40." (British War Production 1939-1945).

Whilst more tractors were made available, the fact that more people could begin work immediately using hand tools was an advantage. Workers were brought in from Ireland. Volunteer land clubs were formed together with holiday harvest camps for schoolchildren and adults. I myself was one of many young people who were "encouraged" to spend school holidays working on the land. This was picking potatoes and pulling turnips for 3d per hour (or 1.25p) under a bewildered farm foreman known by the youngsters as "Nobby the Slavedriver". He impressed us most with his ability to shout instructions without dislodging the roll-up fag that always drooped from the corner of his mouth. He may have been good at farming but he had never been trained to manage dozens of youths whose attention span when weeding endless rows of carrots was about ten minutes. He did his best but, for easily distracted school kids, patriotism was an abstraction too far.

The 90,000 women of the Land Army came from very different backgrounds. The daughters of doctors, solicitors, labourers and factory workers from the industrial areas joined together, driving tractors, milking cows and cleaning out pigs. By all accounts the work was hard but enjoyable. The living conditions on farms were often crude but mostly morale was high.

There were German prisoners of war who were trusted to march themselves in squads between fields and their huts. Also many Italians who at one point, and without in any way changing as people, stopped being the enemy and became allies overnight. PoWs sometimes worked with conscientious objectors whose ideas ranged across a spectrum from Jehovah Witnesses and Quakers to Socialists. With this great mix some farms became debating societies. Despite many farm workers joining the forces the total labour strength in agriculture in England and Wales increased from 607,100 in 1939 to 740,500 in 1944.

But the expansion of agriculture needed to be kept in balance and to achieve this the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries became the main organising body that co-ordinated the work of local areas. Agricultural Executive Committees were set up in each of the 61 counties of England and Wales. In turn, these county committees divided the work between district committees as part of rural district councils. Attached to these local committees were technical staffs who could advise, assist and work directly with local farms. This was the organisation that carried out a balanced and comprehensive policy for increasing food production.

The British capitalist state was driven to this only as part of the means of winning the war. The object was to provide the population with "an adequate diet which would keep them fit for the strenuous tasks which total war imposes on all". But if this organisation could work so well as a war effort, a similar effort in socialism as part of war on hunger could quickly end the miseries of poverty and starvation that are a permanent and worsening feature of world capitalism. Over the last 25 years the numbers of starving people have doubled from 435 million to over 800 million. Against this, as the example of increased food production during World War II shows, the case that starvation is easily preventable is not just argued as theory, it can be demonstrated from experience.

The organisation that led to increased food production in Britain during World War II indicates practical ways of achieving similar results in socialism. Potentially, the organisation already exists. In place of national governments, the UN could be democratised as a World Council which could become a centre for co-ordinating a world-wide war on hunger. The FAO could also achieve its potential as a key organisation at last able to achieve real results. To devolve the work, agricultural committees could be set up in every country and these could be further de-centralised through county and district committees, (or equivalent bodies in all countries). At every level throughout this structure, the FAO could provide skilled staffs able to draw on its store of world data and technical information to advise and assist the work. This network could be extended to local farms with an ability to adapt to every local condition.

Common ownership would give all communities immediate access to land. In the short term, people in the areas of greatest need could concentrate their local efforts using the best means available. At the same time the regions most able to do so could assist with increased supplies. There can be no doubt that throughout the world, within a season, the plight of the seriously undernourished would be greatly improved.

In the longer term, communities in socialism would be able to look beyond the immediate priorities of desperate need and begin to sort out the appalling state of world agriculture that is a consequence of the exploitation and destructive methods of capitalist agribusiness. It not only exploits farm workers of all lands, it exploits anything in nature it can get its hands on.

There is of course widespread concern, not just about starving people but also about the damage and loss of natural food assets across the world. This is the continuing despoliation of land and ocean resources, the excessive and inappropriate use of weed killers and chemical fertilisers together with the cruel treatment of animals. But concern is too often weakened by a sense of powerlessness. It is also neutralised by actions that protest against capitalism whilst having no prospect of getting rid of it. It is therefore vital that the socialist movement is strengthened. The work of providing for the needs of all people begins with the work of organising for world socialism.

Pieter Lawrence

World Hunger: Why the FAO fails (2001)

From the November 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

The second of three special reports on another entirely preventable war on humanity - world hunger

The job given to the Food and Agricultural Organisation in 1945 to advise, assist and co-ordinate the world-wide fight against hunger had no chance of success. The "profits before people" laws of the capitalist system were always going to come before the needs of the hungry. Last month we gave figures showing that world hunger has not improved but is getting worse. Over the past 50 years this has been accepted by the FAO, indeed they were one source of the figures. The foreword to its l979 book Fighting World Hunger said "the fact that everyone has a right to enough to eat is now everywhere accepted and more widely proclaimed than ever before. But alongside this goes the fact that more human beings are hungry than ever before and that the number is growing all the time".

The worsening trend has continued. In 1974/5 the number of seriously undernourished was 435 million. The present FAO Factfile shows an increase to 828 million. The reality behind this brief statistic is that many thousands of men, women and children are dying every day. Fighting World Hunger asked the question "Why is there this gap between the growing realisation of our common humanity and the reality of growing deprivation which seems to deny it?"

It is a good question but for all its great store of technical knowledge the FAO has been unable to apply any solutions. This knowledge covers every aspect of food production. By satellite it has completed a soil map of the Earth's surface which, together with data on climates, matches the suitability of soil types with various crops. It monitors the use of land and the loss of soil fertility through erosion and misuse. From forests to fisheries, the important cereals such as wheat, maize and rice; fruits, vegetables, salad crops and spices, seed development, fertilisers, plant disease and irrigation methods, through its research and publications, the FAO is able to provide advice on any problem to do with the production of food.

But what it cannot do is actively co-operate with communities throughout the world in the vital work of making good quality food available for every person. So far as the production of food is concerned the role of the FAO is more symbolic than real and the reason for this is suggested by itself. It does acknowledge its limitations as a result of having to work within a world capitalist system that imposes severe and unpredictable constraints on what can be produced for sale for profit in the food markets.

For example, its State of Food and Agriculture 1999 (SOFA 1999) states that this

"also reviews global agriculture from the perspective of supply and demand, both of which have been hit hard by the recent financial crisis. In crisis-hit countries of Asia, lower agricultural output and demand, along with falling gross domestic product and increased unemployment, created greater food insecurity for large segments of the population. The effects of the crisis were felt globally, as the reduced purchasing power of crisis hit countries caused import demand and agricultural commodity prices to decline worldwide".

Then further: 

"The report (SOFA 99) highlights an alarming trend in this regard – human factors, such as armed conflicts and economic collapse, are playing an increasing role in provoking food shortages."

Since it is impossible to envisage a world capitalist system without recessions, unemployment, financial crises, economic collapse and armed conflicts, such FAO reports as SOFA 99 point directly to capitalism being the cause of the problem of world hunger. It is significant that it goes on to insist that "preventing conflict and assuring sustainable economic growth are essential if World Food Summit goals are to be met and emergency food shortages avoided". The idea that this can be achieved within capitalism denies all experience. It substitutes blind optimism for sound analysis and real solutions.

This is not to say that the people of the world cannot unite in the work of ending hunger but for this we must get rid of capitalism. It is only by working with the relationships of common ownership, democratic control and production solely for needs that it would be possible. On this socialist basis the work of ending hunger would be straightforward and immensely rewarding. And this is when the FAO would at last be able to fulfil its aims.

Limiting production

Over the past 50 years, governments in the developed countries have intervened massively in farming. They have used subsidies, compensation and strictly enforced quotas to limit production. This has resulted in food being destroyed and land taken out of production to keep output more or less in line with market capacity. The amount of food that can be sold on the markets is always much less than could be produced directly for needs. Our inability to make full use of productive powers is a permanent feature of capitalist farming but in socialism this restriction will be removed. Through voluntary co-operation and with the ability to freely organise and use all the factors of production and distribution, communities across the world will have no barriers against producing food in the amounts required for needs.

With food, it is possible to increase production rapidly because a lot can be done with hand labour. It is not necessary to first expand means of production. Whilst industry and manufacture may take time to bring in more machinery and equipment, local initiatives could mean more people using their local land resources for more intensive production. But, to begin with, a socialist world could immediately stop people dying of hunger with a more equal distribution of scarce supplies. At the same time local initiatives would greatly improve the supply of food within a very short time

But local food production is limited by variations of soil and climate, which means that local projects would contribute to balanced production throughout the regions of the world. On this larger scale the grain-producing regions of America, Canada, Australia and Asia would continue to be important. Wheat, maize and rice are basic to world agriculture and new areas could be developed for the production of these cereals together with the whole range of nutritious fruits and vegetables.

With the ending of rival capitalist states and the market system the world community in socialism would have the great advantage of being able to make the best use of the land resources of the planet in whatever location may be considered best. A priority in such decisions would be care of the environment. The possibility that conservation methods might require more people would not matter. There would be no economic pressure to carry on using destructive production methods that use the least amounts of labour. Furthermore, with the ending of occupations such as those in insurance, finance and banking, millions of people would become available for useful production in socialism. Moving on from the insanities of capitalism what more meaningful way could there be to take up a new life in a better world than to join in with the work of stopping people dying from hunger?

To help take up this challenge, the FAO, together with other potentially useful organisations, would be ready made to advise, assist and help co-ordinate this great project. From any technical viewpoint, from the fact that abundant resources of land are available, and given the ability of every person to co-operate with others, the relentless horror story of millions of men, women and children dying every day from hunger is so easily preventable.

In a final article we will suggest practical ways that specialist bodies like FAO could work in socialism within a world system of democratic administration.

Pieter Lawrence

World hunger: A global problem (2001)

From the October 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

The concern of many people about the effects of globalisation is justified. Globalisation enables international companies to manipulate their worldwide use of the cheapest and most defenceless labour to plunder natural resources, to buy off local power groups and by-pass or corrupt governments. The clear object is to maximise exploitation and profits. But this is globalisation in its corporate form, operating within a world capitalist system. It does not mean that, in itself, globalisation is a bad thing. It does bring its good things. For example, instant world communications means we can be aware of events in every country and this heightens the way we think globally.

In any case, global society is here to stay. There is no going back on a production system that is linked across the world. But the exploitative nature of this system in the hands of multinational corporations means that workers share a common interest which also goes beyond national boundaries. The problems of the great majority can only be solved by united world action.

One such problem, world poverty and hunger, was highlighted by protestors at the recent demonstrations in Genoa and Seattle They blamed the “profits before people” motives of world agribusiness. In this they were right, but to solve the problem we need more than blame. We need a sound political approach and practical proposals for how we as a world community can ensure that all people get enough good quality food.

Fine aspirations

It is not so long since world organisation was seen as a good thing. It was after the Second World War, as part of the United Nations, that the Food and Agricultural Organisation was set up to help solve the problem of world hunger. In the aftermath of the killing and destruction, and perhaps in response to a demand for radical change, statesmen from every country vowed their commitment to build a better world. Then it was thought that “internationalism now held the key to a better world order”. This was when the promise of global action through the FAO carried the hopes of the many millions who were desperate to improve their lives.

In the 1979 FAO publication, Fighting World Hunger its Director said, “Hunger and malnutrition are world problems. They need a world solution. They are too vast and formidable to admit of anything less than a global attack.” We wholeheartedly agree and we can agree with more. The same booklet went on, “The persistence of hunger and malnutrition is unacceptable morally and socially, is incompatible with the dignity of human beings.” And then again, “Every man, woman and child has the inalienable right to be free from hunger and malnutrition.”

The aspirations were fine but could they be delivered? From the time the FAO was set up socialists took no joy in pointing out that the UN was bound to fail in its declared aims to bring about peace and plenty. It could never be within its terms of reference to abolish the capitalism system which was, and remains, the cause of the problem. 1945 was a time of great optimism but since then it has faded. The first hopes of success have been replaced by more realistic forecasts. The FAO now accepts that the food markets place constraints on production; that trade in food commodities is volatile, influenced by rapid shifts in market conditions, and price fluctuations as well as wars and civil strife. None of these capitalist features can be controlled or planned. Nor can they be made to work in the interests of the majority of people.

So, the reality was that during the 1960s the world position of the hungry improved but after l970 it worsened. The FAO figure for the seriously undernourished for 1974/6 was 435 millions people. This was 75 million higher than five years earlier. Fighting World Hunger stated “Today the absolute numbers of people suffering from undernourishment are greater than ever before.” The l981 Annual Report of UNICEF said that 40,000 children were dying every day (over 14 million per year) from malnutrition or malnutrition-related disease.

But, looking forward from then and on the basis of an assumed increase in world population between 1980 and 2000 from 4,415 million to 6,200 million, the FAO made various projections. The best projection was that with a steady increase in food production of 3.8 percent per year in the developing countries the numbers of seriously undernourished could reduce from 435 million to 260 million by the year 2,000. A 3.2 percent increase could foresee a reduction to 390 million. Increased production of 2.8 percent per year would see a reduction to 590 million seriously undernourished people by the year 2000.

Poor delivery

In fact there are now over 800 million people seriously undernourished. We have passed the year 2000 and, if we look at the FAO Fact File on its website (Link), we find that the number of the world's hungry at 800 million is much greater than was predicted by its earlier worst case scenario. It states, “The absolute number of chronically undernourished people rose between 1990-1992 and 1994-96 in three out of five developing regions of the world. The largest number of undernourished people are in Asia.” It also makes the lame and obvious statement, “This was mainly because there has been little progress in reducing poverty.”

Inevitably, the figures include children. The number of undernourished children suffering from underweight, stunting or wasting is 414 million. “An alarmingly high proportion of children in the developing world suffer from undernutrition, resulting from a combination of inadequate food intake and diseases such as diarrhoea that prevents proper digestion of food.”

Together with the growing numbers of hungry people, recent decades have seen the destruction of natural assets and land resources. As well as the loss of rain forests there has been desertification, misuse of agronomically fragile soils, degradation of soil by salinity and overgrazing of marginal lands. “On the southern edge of the Sahara, an area the size of Somalia has become desert over the past 50 years. The same fate now threatens more than one third of the African continent” (FAO FactFile).

It is possible to read the figures on the world's hungry and to regard them in a very dispassionate way. There are many such lists of dead. Most of us cannot fail to be shocked at the number of 50 million who died in the Second World War. That number is horrendous but the numbers who die from lack of food are relentless, a holocaust that kills its victims every day of every year with no end in sight. Unlike the casualties of the violence in New York the deaths from hunger are not the material of media drama. This is a silent outrage which is mostly ignored. It is of course impossible to take in the suffering of the millions of families who go into mourning every year over the death of a child because of starvation – over 800 million children since the FAO was set up in 1945. The total number is incalculable, but must approach 2 billion. Those who are better off are not uncaring but pre-occupied, pursuing their own daily struggles. We are driven by an economic individualism that provides us with little freedom to act effectively as a community.

But though the facts may not be newsworthy they are still put out by the FAO and others. The FactFile still speaks of “World hunger – widespread, persistent, unacceptable.” After so many years its appeals now sound forlorn: “If decisive action is not taken, the number of chronically undernourished persons will be substantially the same in 15 years time”. For many millions this is not so much an appeal, it is a death sentence.

And the tragedy is made worse because it is all so needless. A further article will set out the ways that people in a world socialist community could stop the dying immediately. Within a short time, with co-operation and united action they would be able to provide every person with sufficient good quality food.

This is the first a series of three articles.

Pieter Lawrence