Running Commentary: Bad news (1988)

The Running Commentary column from the September 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

Bad news

After all the efforts of Oxfam, Bob Geldof and the rest, nobody now needs to be told about the terrible effects of drought on human communities. Without rain crops do not grow; cultivated land becomes a barren desert and people starve to death by the thousand. To enterprises like Band Aid and Comic Relief, these are natural tragedies — acts of God, as evasive insurance companies like to say. The inference of this is clear: drought happens outside of human control and we are powerless to do much more about it than put money into collecting boxes.

But questions need to be asked: about why a world which is capable of feeding its population should periodically watch millions of them die because they don't have enough to eat; about why, as famine rages in one part of the world, in other parts food is left to rot and farmers are paid not to produce the life-giving stuff

The answers to these questions — and to some others have been revealed by recent events in America, where there has been a severe drought. Many agricultural areas have been desperate for rain as soaring temperatures turned the soil into blackened powder, crops withered and animals could not breed. But while the American farmers were getting desperate, the people who make money out of selling their produce were in rather better shape. Shortage means rising prices, which in June reached record levels. So a nice profit could he made from buying farm produce and, as the drought continued to affect production, watching the selling price rise with the temperature.

This comfortable situation was exposed in all its fragility in July, when the weather forecasters suddenly began to talk about the approaching end of the drought. The reaction of the commodity dealers was decidedly not relief; they panicked at the thought of better crops and what this would do to their profits In their frantic efforts to unload what they had bought they pushed prices down further, by record amounts.

Anyone whose heart aches at the plight of these brokers in human needs may take comfort from the fact that the government has a price policy, which came quickly to the rescue like the US cavalry. Prices were stopped from falling too far and. in any case, it did not rain as much as the farmers had hoped and the dealers had feared.

This sordid episode illustrates that food is produced, not to feed people but to be sold with the object of profit. That is why farmers suffer in a natural disaster while the people who market their produce benefit. It is also why masses of people starve when there is absolutely no reason for them to do so. The activities of Oxfam, Geldof and the rest obscure this fact, but until we have a society based on satisfying human needs it will continue to bedevil their well-meant efforts It will not, like the drought-stricken soil, blow away.

Blue Blood

If, as the Democrats say, George Bush is a wimp he can at least claim to be a royal wimp — of which, as we know, there is already no shortage. No less an expert in irrelevance than the senior genealogist for Burke's Peerage has traced a Bush connection to every European monarch (not that there are many of them left now) As far as the British royals go. Bush is a 13th cousin twice removed to the Queen, a 13th cousin once removed to the Queen Mother and he is linked to, among others, the Princess of Wales and the Duchess of York

It might be thought that the most surprising thing about this is that there are so many people prepared to spend so much time in research into such meaningless trivia. Does it matter if the ruling class can be shown to be one vast, international hot-bed of incestuousness? But the story did provide a little publicity for Burke's, which does not enjoy a readership to compare with Mills and Boon. It also contributed to the mystique of ruling class origins, which asserts that they hold their superior position through some process other than the exploitation of the majority of people.

The assumption is that "royal blood" is also noble blood — that being in the aristocracy proper presupposes an especially gallant personality. This romantic nonsense is not supported by history, which reveals the roots of the British nobility in mediaeval episodes of banditry and bloodshed. True to this type, another of the Bush relations is Lord Lucan, long absent from this country since the police announced that they would like him to help in their enquiries into the murder of his children's nanny.

It will not be known for a while whether all this will win or lose votes for Bush; his opponent. Michael Dukakis, makes much of his humble, plebeian origins. American workers. much like those in other countries, tend to vote on issues other than the candidates ancestors, which does not mean that they concern themselves with anything more relevant or pressing. They will give their support to the man who in their opinion will be less inept in grappling with the problems of American capitalism

Wimpish Bush or Workaholic Dukakis is no real choice. Come November, it will be equally futile to vote for or against royal connections.

Blow out

As the smoke cleared from the wreck of Piper Alpha a number of sordid but instructive facts began to emerge. There has been no lack of experts to tell us that the design of the rig was defective. It is fair to ask what the experts were doing when the rig was being designed and built. At that time the North Sea oil boom was just getting under way; it was no time to delay things with footling doubts and questions about safety. It was all excitement then; there was going to be a British oil field, to rival the Middle East. In the rush to get the rigs built and into position, a little detail like placing the workers' living quarters over a potential bomb was either hardly noticed or noticed and ignored.

In those heady days we were sold that North Sea oil and gas was a massive break through the long awaited entry into a trade which would bring boundless prosperity to us all (there was little mention of what it would do for people like Armand Hammer). Workers on the rigs were glamorised into an elite, agents of a modem technology which could triumph over the elements, earning big money in the storms far out in the cruel sea so that we could benefit.

It was a similar story at BP's terminal at Sullom Voe, which was designed to handle half the British output from the North Sen but which, after only six years of full operation, has serious problems of corrosion. At least one technician at the plant says that these are due to the pressures of time and profit which were being applied as the terminal was built.

Piper Alpha has been described as an accident but it is hardly correct to use this word in a case where the risks should have been so clearly foreseeable but were so deliberately built into the design to increase the rig's chances of profitability. That this is accepted now — if tacitly — is shown by the sordid process of arguing for compensation, which has attracted a whole clutch of lawyers including some from America, where they are accustomed to what is called ambulance-chasing after a disaster. When a worker is killed their family often suffers the added burden of financial stress, and it is right that they should try to ease it by claiming compensation from the employers. What should sicken every worker is to see how this exposes their standing in capitalist society. The compensation which each family receives will be adjusted — perhaps by a court — according to what is judged to have been the dead worker's earning capacity. The higher paid their job, the longer their expected working life, the higher the compensation.

Whatever our job — however tedious or glamorous tt may be — our status as wage slaves, living through the sale of our working ability, reduces us to factors in the investment process. We represent a type of capital, to be expended to produce profit and to contribute to the accumulation of yet more capital by our employers We are living beings but before that we are items on a balance sheet.

Blogger's Note:

The August 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard carried a standalone article on the Piper Alpha disaster.

Heart-stopping (1988)

From the September 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

"The biggest cause of rheumatic heart disease was lack of sufficient food and, by his estimate 400 million people throughout the world were malnourished. He said enough food was produced to give every person a satisfactory diet of 2,500 calories, but food was grown to earn money and distribution was thus unequal". 

Professor Christiaan Barnard, reported in The Johannesburg Star, 22 March 1988.

World hunger can be ended (1982)

From the September 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Late last year, Ronald Reagan was reportedly telling delegates from the World Bank that they should believe in the “magic of the market”. The latest World Bank statistics, however, reveal that 1.3 billion people suffer from a serious lack of calories and 700 million are on the verge of starvation. Those millions are direct casualties of the “magic” of the market, which responds to human needs only if they are backed up by the flow of money. Capitalism is based on class monopoly of the means of life and the destruction of food alongside mass starvation is just one of its insane contradictions.

The problem is by no means limited to Asia, Africa and Latin America. In 1975, the US Bureau of Census reported that over twelve million Americans were malnourished or sick because they had too little to spend on food. In 1981, a Common Market Commission report stated that more than thirty million people in Europe fell below even the official government poverty lines. Living standards in the industrially advanced countries are falling steadily, with the vast majority living in relative degrees of poverty compared with the ten per cent who possess substantial wealth. And yet, we are now able to produce an abundance of wealth; scarcity is artificial rather than natural, contrary to the assumptions of economics textbooks.

The 1980 World Bank Report declared that the quantity presently produced could provide 3000 calories and 65 grams of protein per person per day if it was more widely distributed. But the amount of food produced is often only a fraction of what is technologically possible, because of the artificial restrictions imposed by the world market. Even the 1.4 billion tons of grain grown in 1981 could not all be sold and so was not all eaten. In September 1976, Scientific American estimated that current resources could feed twelve times the present population of the world. In 1966 the US President’s Science Advisory Committee reported that less than half of the world’s arable land was under cultivation, and Canadian officials have said they could increase food production by fifty per cent in five years if necessary.

Sometimes famines result from a lack of food in a particular area, such as Kampuchea in 1979-80, but more often the problem is that farmers whose crops fail have no money to buy food elsewhere. This was the case in Ethiopia in 1973-4 and in Bangladesh in 1974. Why then is it that apparently unnecessary hunger is so prevalent in “civilised” societies? How can we read of farmers being paid by governments not to produce food and still imagine that we live in a sane society? The answer is that these contradictions are part and parcel of the way production is organised across the world today. The creation of surplus-value by wage-workers, and the competitive accumulation of this value as capital by companies and states, lies at the root of present social problems. Food is not produced to satisfy people’s hunger but for the primary purpose of making a profit. Proof of this lies in the fact that as soon as profit declines, production is cut back or even terminated, regardless of how many people might be starving. In India, over twenty million tons of “surplus grain" is being guarded by soldiers, while thousands of people starve. In 1978, the EEC dumped about 200,000 tons of fruit and vegetables in the ocean in order to maintain price levels. The insane logic of the profit system was made clear in the Financial Times:

There are now perhaps 750 million people who live at the margin of survival . . . gifts of free food, which can undermine local markets, can disrupt the process (7 August 1979).

So there is a strict incompatibility between capitalism and the satisfaction of human needs. The fact that the governments of the world are spending one million dollars a minute on armaments against such a background of hunger and waste is enough to demonstrate this.

But although the needs of humanity as a whole are not being met, those of the propertied minority generally are. Their privilege and property are in inverse proportion to our poverty and deprivation. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisations’s most recent world land census confirmed that one in forty of those with 250 acres or more control nearly three quarters of the land. Seventeen per cent of South American landowners control ninety per cent of the land; in Brazil, after the “economic miracle" of the seventies, the richest fifth of the population have more than twenty-five times as much as the poorest fifth. In Africa, three-quarters of the people have access to less than four per cent of the land. In Russia, the state allows access to the land and other resources only on its own terms which, as in the West, are guided by profitability. In Britain, one per cent of the people own more wealth than the poorest eighty per cent together. The world’s food resources are monopolised by people like the shareholders of Nestles, with a higher turnover than the Swiss government’s budget. The idea of “rich" and “poor” countries is therefore a distortion — there are people with great wealth even within the nations commonly regarded as “poor".

Those who own and control the means of producing and distributing wealth agree that the most “reasonable" pay for any worker is the bare minimum. Their concern is to accumulate capital in competition with their rivals, to undercut them out of the market or swallow them whole. In 1981, for example, Whitbread brewery announced pre-tax profit of £66 million and earnings per share of 23p. Each worker was said to have created on average over £12,000 value in the production process, far in excess of the average wage. It is in this way that the shareholders expand their wealth while employees have to keep working merely to survive.

Brandt — more of the same

In recent years, the capitalist class and their political representatives have shown an increasing concern with some of the more embarrassing obscenities of their system. Their minds, fully in tune with their bank accounts, have come up with a spectacular and profitable solution: more of the same. By investing capital in the less developed parts of the world, they hope to open up lucrative new markets, and reduce starvation into the bargain. The transition from peasant to wage-worker, which took place over hundreds of years in Britain, is now proceeding more rapidly in countries like India. Nearly fifty million landless labourers have been produced there over the last twenty-five years, by the sweeping growth of world capitalism. Poor farmers cannot cope with the competition from multi-national corporations and with fluctuating prices, so they sell up and seek employment as wage-labourers. The “enlightened” capitalist philosophy is summed up in Brandt’s North-South, a programme for survival: “It is true that the rich cannot prosper without progress by the poor (p33), and by Sir Reay Geddes in The Role of Business in the world economy:

The business community abhors poverty, disease, malnutrition and illiteracy, considering their elimination to be both a moral imperative and the main route to social progress. It would also be good for business, (IDS Bulletin. Vol. 12, No. 2. April 1981.)

Brandt proposed an emergency four-point programme comprising the transfer of resources, energy conservation, a food aid programme and measures of agrarian reform. He also outlined a long-term strategy of industrialisation, free trade, and reform of the world monetary system. This is seen by some Western bankers as a way for the West to compete with Russia in the domination of markets. Brandt's proposals were in part a response to the recession of the late seventies and the consequent weakening of the financial system set up by the Western powers at Bretton Woods in 1944. By the end of 1980, “developing" countries such as Brazil, Mexico, Turkey and India owed about 500 billion dollars to various banks and governments. The credits used to finance the boom of the early seventies were difficult to repay with the onset of recession. Brandt sought to reorganise the profitable recycling of “petrodollar” oil revenues to pass through the banking institutions and be reinvested in “backward” countries.

All of these policies are concerned with ways of running world capitalism, and are likely to perpetuate the most unfathomable misery. The horrors of industrialisation in nineteenth-century Britain did not happen because the investors were malicious rather than kindly. Far from relishing these horrors, they preferred to forget them by wandering through parks and art galleries. Their aim, like Brandt, was the rapid accumulation of capital by squeezing maximum profit out of wage workers. This is in line with the logic of the market system, where success is measured in financial terms rather than human satisfaction. Reckitt and Coleman, whose interests include Robinsons Barleywater, Gales Honey. OK Sauce. Dettol, Disprin and Reeves' artists' materials, explain in their house journal, Roundabout, the success of certain policies in Chile:

Unlike the UK. the ideas are working in Chile. It is, of course, only fair to say that in putting the philosophies into practice Chile did not have democratic processes getting in the way. . . . One of the reasons we are so enthusiastic about our business in Chile is that it is getting the chance, through the country’s government, to operate in a good and peaceful atmosphere.

For the aptly named Reckitt shareholders, then, the notorious oppression suffered in Chile is just one more price to pay for the development of lucrative markets in Latin America.

The Brandt Report and other proposals for expansion, investment and reform might have been innovative two hundred years ago. Today they are irrelevant to the struggle for a world-wide, democratic society. We have the ability to provide food in abundance. The only barrier is the system of capital accumulation and class rule which Willy Brandt is intent on preserving. Even amongst those whose proclaimed radicalism prevents them from accepting Brandt, there is a blind acceptance of the capitalist principles which generate poverty as the cornerstone of class division. In their pamphlet. Beyond Brandt, the Third World First group propose the old and failed policies of Keynesian expansion, “self-sufficiency". and import controls, and mention the Chinese dictatorship as a model for liberation. Most ridiculously of all, they conclude:

Most importantly, Third World countries are debating the possibility of a Southern financial system, including a Third World bank, which would provide an alternative to the private banks and multilateral institutions of the North.

Unless world production is reorganised for use instead of profit, people in the less developed countries will be thrown directly from the frying-pan into the fire.

The possibilities of production are well established. The US grain boom of the sixties led to 20 million hectares being taken out of production; in 1972-3, they were put back in and the wheat crop was increased by twelve per cent. In 1977, the US wheat acreage was again cut back, this time by twenty per cent. The grain trade between America and Russia has been used by both Carter and Reagan as a political lever, while Gromyko summed up the position of the Russian ruling class last year when he said: "The Soviet Union would like to have normal, businesslike relations with the United States" (Guardian. 23 September 1981). As Bertholt Brecht put it. "famines do not occur, they are organised by the grain trade", and this includes Russia and China as much as America.

How, then, can the problem be solved? A useful lesson can be learnt from Honduras, one of the most fertile lands in Central America, where half of the children suffer malnutrition and stunted physical and mental growth. Two companies own about a quarter of a million acres used to grow bananas for export. The native peasants who work the barren hillsides last year organised several “invasions” in an attempt to take over the fertile valleys, but were put down by the military. The dispossessed majority across the world must instead take democratic, political action to bring resources into common ownership. If the state machine is not taken over democratically and dismantled, it will be used against any attempt to gain forcible access to the wealth we produce. The problem of world hunger can be solved only when a majority are prepared to act on the understanding that the abolition of poverty will involve the abolition of all property.

Clifford Slapper

The world can feed us all (1976)

From the October 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capitalist economists like to pretend that the world’s population cannot be fed with the resources available to it. The over-population myth is glibly trotted out to explain world-wide malnutrition whenever a Socialist points out that starvation is in fact due solely to the insane system of society which at present operates everywhere in the world—capitalism.

More of so-called over-population later, but let it be stated clearly and unequivocally now: The earth’s potential where food production is concerned is now more than adequate to satisfy the needs of all its inhabitants.

Moises Behar, chief of nutrition to the World Health Organisation in Geneva has recently made the following pertinent observation:

During the 1960s great efforts were made to improve economic development in the poor nations of the world. By speeding up economic growth, so it was argued, the poor social conditions that inevitably meant poor or inadequate nutrition for many people would be remedied. The gross national product was therefore considered the main criterion of progress.

The desired economic growth was achieved in many countries; in some instances, the targets set were exceeded. Unfortunately, most of the additional income went to those who were already affluent, without doing anything to help the poor. The same process was seen at the international level: rich nations became richer and poor nations relatively poorer.

In his article in the WHO Chronicle (1976, 30, 140), Behar takes the “Green Revolution” for his second example:

Extraordinary technological achievements enabled scientists to produce bigger and better crops of the most important cereals. Yet, once again, little thought was given to the fact that these new techniques could be applied efficiently only by farmers with adequate skills, knowledge and resources.

Thus the ‘Green Revolution’ failed to prove any significant improvement in economic capacity, availability of food or living conditions for most poor and malnourished people, even though grain production increased.

National economic growth and developments in technology are thus inadequate by themselves; they must operate within a suitable social structure, (our emphasis).

Nor is Behar impressed by international welfare organisations “which seek to alleviate malnutrition through supplementary feeding programmes. These only act as palliatives and, still worse, create a false impression that something has in fact been accomplished.” Not being a Socialist, Behar does not go on to advocate the “suitable social structure” which we do —world Socialism, production for use and not for profit only.

But to return to the mythical over-population bogey. It has become a cliche in Britain to speak of “this overcrowded island”. In fact, although the British Isles are far from being among the world’s more lightly-populated regions: “The whole population of the United Kingdom could be re-housed in the single county of Devon with a density of ten houses per acre (quite a generous piece of land for each family) and there would still be land to spare.” (J. P. Cole, Geography of World Affairs.)

It is also worth noting that if the world’s entire population were now placed in the United States the population density in that country would still be no more than that of Holland today. Remember this when the sensationalists talk of “standing room only” in fifty years time!

R. B. Gill

What the market does to our food

From the Winter 1987-88 issue of the World Socialist 

British agriculture is notable for being the most mechanised in the world. There are more tractors than farm-workers. A smaller proportion of the working population — about 1 per cent as opposed to 4.5 per cent in the United States — works on the land and is responsible for two thirds of all our food and drink. Yields are among the highest in the world; wheat at more than five tons to the acre, for example. This compares with North America where one ton is the norm, curiously enough not much more than the average yield in Medieval England. But this arises from the extensive agriculture of Canada and the US with their limitless plains. Europeans have to squeeze more out of their plots.

Historically this was effected by good husbandry; manuring, marling, liming. Now it is achieved by spreading ever increasing amounts of chemical fertiliser on the fields. Equally, increasing amounts are washed off into the watercourses creating new problems, causing the Health Ministry to warn mothers in East Anglia, for example, not to make up their babies' feed with tap water on account of the sodium nitrate in it.

In the middle 1980's Britain again became, after a gap of two centuries, a net exporter of grain. British agriculture had, during those two hundred years, been the plaything of governments. The split in the ruling oligarchy between the landed interests and the new industrial magnates, between the old Tory interest (which incorporated the State Church) and the new Whigs, had made agriculture a political football. The most outstanding expressions of this struggle were those Corn Laws which were passed from 1815 onwards and repealed after a bitter struggle in 1846.

Driven off the land

The Tories favoured protection: high tariffs on imported corn, so guaranteeing them as landowners a high price. The Whigs wanted free trade in corn so that bread and beer for their workers were cheap and would result in cheaper labour.

After the repeal of the Corn Laws, imported grain from North America, but also from Russia, Argentina and Australia kept British agriculture in an almost permanent state of depression.

It is interesting to examine the nature of this competition that British farmers faced from overseas:

The very cheapness of our public lands, and the facility of purchase and transfer, tended to a system of bad farming, or strip and waste of the soil, by encouraging short occupancy and a speedy search for new homes, entailing upon the first and older settlements a rapid deterioration of the soil, which would not be likely to be arrested except by more thorough and scientific knowledge of agriculture and by a higher education of those who were dedicated to its pursuit. (Justin Smith Morell, quoted by Wendell Berry in The Unsettling of America, p. 145)

So much for the doctrine of Comparative Advantage of David Ricardo in which each nation is supposed to concentrate on what it does best. The Americans, once the Red Indians were got out of the way, took over a continent stuffed with good things: thousands of square miles of timber, some of it many centuries in the growing; oil in the South West so abundant that a pipe had only to be banged into the ground and oil would gush out; mountain ranges of high grade iron ore in Minnesota; and the loess soil of the great plains, wind blown alluvium which had built up over geological time to the equivalent of a topsoil thirty and forty feet deep in places.

Most of these comparative advantages have lost some of their edge. The soil was the first to go. From the first settlers on, the technique of farming was little different from the crudest slash-and-burn agriculture of primitive peoples. The land was "pumped" as the French say. It was cultivated until exhaustion set in, often no more than four harvests, and cultivators moved on to a fresh patch. It was cheaper to do this than replace the nutrition in the soil as European farmers had been obliged to do for thousands of years. It followed the doctrine of Comparative Advantage as enjoined by the new Market-based economics with highly satisfactory results — in the short term. European — particularly British — agriculture could not compete and the result was the economic destruction of small and medium farmers. The continuing Enclosure Acts scooped up the small farms into the properties of the big landowners and social disaster was added to agricultural chaos.

In our own time the process is being extended to Third World, in this case Brazil:

The big trouble is a steady flow of migrants from the countryside. Squeezed off the land by the rapid advance of mechanised crop farming and by the spread of huge ranches raising beef cattle, millions of families swarm into the cities. Under pressure to survive, they turn to crime and so provide more than their share of the jail population.

The civilian Government that took over in Brazil last year, after 21 years of military rule, is trying to clinch a programme whereby millions of acres of land still sloppily farmed by big landlords are to be split up into family smallholdings. That way, the human tide flowing into the cities would be reduced to a trickle, even reversed, Ministers hope.

But many landlords are digging in their heels against the scheme, some using hired gunmen to keep wandering landless families from settling on estates where they try to build huts, plough and plant.

Landless squatters are being murdered by paid triggermen at the rate of about four a week across Brazil. But you don't see many of the gunmen, or their bosses, in jail.

(Observer, 11 May 1986)

Needless to say the majority of these huge ranches are owned by foreign-based multinationals and the bulk of the meat is intended for junk-food in the West — hamburgers, hot dogs, sausages. Agronomists have predicted ecological catastrophe in the cutting down of tropical rain-forest and replacing it with grazing in the fragile soil of the area.

In the United States this catastrophe has already been visited upon huge areas. The soil was deprived of the organic material which bound it together and the wind and weather just blew it or washed it away again. The dust bowls and dust storms of the United States are part of world history and the process is continuing. Chemical fertilisers, herbicides and pesticides are being rushed up into the battle to get food out of the land, yet every time the solution seems short-lived, the cure worse than the disease.

The chorus of warning from biologists and agronomists fills the reading lists and the newspapers. Massed against them is the power of the multinational agrochemical industry and the stubbornness of farmers who are struggling to avoid foreclosure by the banks. Thousands of farmers in the Mid-West have been turned out by the bailiffs in the present depression, and the big interests have taken over.

The Average British Diet

There was a major crisis in British fanning in the late 1870's and 1880's which was only interrupted by World War I when foreign food imports were almost cut off by German U-boat attacks. The stimulus to cultivation and stock rearing did not last much longer than the end of the war, however. By the middle 1930's there was less land under the plough in England than there had been in the Domesday Book, nearly nine hundred years before, when the population was one-thirtieth of the size!

Those who do not learn from the lesson of the past are doomed to repeat its errors, says George Santayana, and the British government again found itself in World War II with the prospect of starvation for the people. All talk of market forces was forgotten. Backyards, tennis courts, lawns, public parks and golf courses were dug-up and planted. A medieval cottage economy took over great areas of the country with people keeping chickens, ducks, rabbits and pigs in back gardens and in London, even on their roofs.

The tendency to import Britain's food and drink requirements rather than rely on home-produced goods had begun early. Large quantities of wine were imported in the Middle Ages but it was not a staple of diet, despite the quantities involved, three million gallons annually in the fifteenth century, one for every man, women and child in the country.

From the eighteenth century on, however, exotics like cane sugar, tea, and coffee were imported to join potatoes as new and important items of diet, to the chagrin of commentators like Cobbett. He felt that tea and potatoes were no substitute for the bread and ale of old England.

The deleterious effects of sugar in the diet were far greater, especially when cane sugar from the West Indies met competition from the new home grown beet sugar. The greatly reduced cost, together with advertising and the confectionary industry have produced the highest sugar consumption and the worst teeth in the world. The dental profession's efforts to do something about it are stultified by the fact that the government is beholden to the power of pressure groups like the sugar and confectionery interests who dominate all food committees and ultimately Parliament itself. He who pays the piper calls the tune, and the sugar interest pays a lot to politicians, particularly Conservative politicians.

The move to the steel-roller milling of flour in the latter half of the nineteenth century reduced still further the quality of the average British diet. The new mills could not deal with the germ and the bran of the wheat as the old stone mills had done and these elements were disposed of as animal feed or sold to the public as cures for the diseases created by the deficient flour.

The resistance which might have been offered to the continuing debasement of British diet by a peasant population was missing; the peasantry had finally been got rid of by the General Enclosure of 1845. The "allotments" offered as a sop might have enabled a worker to survive on a lower wage; they would not enable him to thumb his nose at an insufficiently generous wage offered by a prospective employer. As Professor Thorold Rogers wrote of earlier Enclosures: "Two acts of government had effectually delivered the English labourers into the hands of their employers and left them helpless. These were Henry's crime of base money and the confiscation of glebe lands. "(History of Agriculture and Prices in England, Volume V)

The period between World Wars I and II must be reckoned among the worst years for British diet. True, there was not the picturesque squalor of Victorian England nor the comedy of the Union-Jack-waving freaks who offered themselves for service in the Boer War, two thirds of whom were rejected as unfit even for the army. The scraps and leavings with which Dickens' characters fed themselves had been replaced by a diet of weak tea, turnip jam, and a bread which might have been made from plaster of Paris for all the nutritive value it contained. The consequence was a race of dwarfs with blackened teeth and rickets. When the Second World War broke out a vast industry was called into being to fit up these degenerates with sets of false teeth and spectacles and to sew up their piles and hernias. As Mayhew, Engels and the Hammonds had exposed the terrible diets of the nineteenth century, so another group of reformers, Sir Albert Howard, Lady Eve Balfour, Sir Jack Drummond, were calling attention to the condition of British agriculture and the terrible diets of British citizens in the twentieth century.

The Second World War brought death to 40 million Europeans and privation to the survivors, but to the British working class the war-time rationing of foodstuffs meant, paradoxically, an improvement in diet, so bad had standards been before. Official statistics reported increased height and body weight of children and dental decay was reducing. This was despite a generous ration of confectionery which at the end of the war stood at seven ounces per person per week. The conclusion this suggests is that the body can deal with a certain amount of sugar and other rubbish provided general levels of nutrition are kept up — which had not been the case pre-war.

The end of sweet-rationing was strongly opposed by the trade — another paradox. But they knew what we have always argued: that free access to a good or service, or to all goods and services, does not mean increased consumption, but usually the opposite. The illusion or reality of limited supply creates a false demand. At all events, sweet rationing was ended, average consumption fell from seven ounces per person per week to five ounces and the confectionery trade went into recession. Limitation of demand by price was never an issue; sweets were and still are comparatively cheap in Britain.

Nasty things on the food front

During the 1950s a new group of factors entered the diet of people over the whole world served by the market. Artificial fertilisers were brought in to replace the animal manures which were disappearing with the move to a mechanised agriculture. Chemical herbicides were introduced to eliminate the need for hoeing and good tilth which had always been regarded as the sine-qua-non of good agriculture. Insecticides were being increasingly used to deal with problems created by, among other things, monoculture: the giving over of large areas to a single crop with the consequent build-up of huge concentrations of parasites like potato eel-worm, carrot-fly, codling-moth, aphids. This problem was not entirely new. In the nineteenth century the phylloxera vine-louse from North America had devastated the European vineyards. After desperate attempts to deal with the invader by chemical means had failed, the growers decided to go nature's way. The European vines were grafted onto North American roots. These had evolved along with the phylloxera and were unattractive to the insect, interrupting its life-cycle.

No such wisdom has taken hold of the world's cultivators in the twentieth century. According to the Economist, in November 1984, a study of 3,000 Americans revealed only 30 of them without at least one kind of insecticide in their blood. And that is the good news. In Britain, while Labour governments have been complacent about such matters, the Thatcher administration was active in conspiring to prevent public health action on the subject and even to deny information to those outside government and the agrochemical industry. The final horrors are reserved for the Third World where chemicals are freely used which are banned even in slovenly Britain. The consequences are that up to 10,000 people a year there die from pesticide poisoning (Economist, 12 April 1986).

But where warning voices from the 1930's onwards have not been needed, the disciplines of the balance-sheet are beginning to be felt. To quote the Economist again:

Chemical solutions are expensive. Those that come from fossil fuels cost a small fortune to develop. Third world countries spend huge sums subsidising their use. In Egypt, for instance, agrochemical subsidies work out at an annual $5 a head.

Recently, the pace of agrochemical invention has slowed, while the evolution of resistance has accelerated. In the 1940's the United States lost 7 per cent of its agricultural crops to insects. Today it loses about 13 per cent.

Exeter University has a number of fast selling lines in insects which eat other insects. Name your enemy and they will try to supply you with an enemy of your enemy and therefore your friend. In Essex, an octogenarian, Lawrence D. Hills, who had been sending out warnings for decades about the way farming was going and being ignored or denounced as a fool for his pains, acquired a new intellectual respectability and was being listened to. Apart from his research into nature-based means of combating pests, Hills drew attention to the dangers inherent in concentrating agriculture on too narrow a genetic base, allowing thousands of plant varieties to disappear. On the Cotswolds farmer Joe Henson has set aside a reserve for rare and disappearing animal breeds. They will be needed.

A glance through any of those magnificent Victorian gardening manuals will remind the interested person of the specimens which have been lost, leaving only those varieties which fit the needs of the market fruit and vegetables which travel and store well and look good on the supermarket shelves, never mind that when you get them home they taste awful.

Nasty things happening on the agricultural front have been paralleled by equally nasty things in animal husbandry and poultry keeping.

During the latter part of the last century unwelcome amounts of fat were being urged on the public by the meat trade. The drive to intensive rearing of birds and animals had increased fat by decreasing mobility. At the same time the move from candles and rushlights made of animal fats to lamps fuelled by mineral oil increased the surplus. During the 1930's a sausage-maker Thomas Walls and Company solved the problem of mounting surplus fat by converting it into ice cream. Fifty years later nutrition experts were complaining that British sausages contained as little as 5 per cent meat, the rest being made up of fat and "rusk", a flour based absorber for the fat.

The problem of animal fat surpluses was brought to a crisis point by the development of petroleum-derived synthetic soaps — detergents — after World War II. This virtually ended the career of animal fats which for thousands of years had provided mankind with uses ranging from lighting, soap, and grease for his axles to waterproofing for his clothes and boots.

Another development of the decades following the War was the dosing of poultry and animals with chemicals, first to control disease, later to increase body weight. In the nineteen fifties a number of Swiss men had gone to their doctors complaining of strange symptoms: loss of facial hair, incipient breasts. These were found to derive from canned chicken imported from the US which contained significant residues of female hormone used to promote growth.

The Swiss promptly banned a wide range of American goods and a bitter commercial squabble developed. Since then the use of hormones has been extended to beef cattle and similar symptoms have shown up in places as far apart as Italy and Puerto Rico including mature breasts on baby girls of four years.

A corn and beef farmer of Truro, in Cornwall explained the circumstances to me like this:

If you inject a hormone pellet into the ear of a bullock, you can bring him to market in twenty months. If you don't, it will take twenty-four months to bring the animal to market, you will go bust and the bank will send the bailiffs in. The cost of feed will wipe out what you get for the beast. But I know a man who puts a pellet in each ear and one up the arse. He markets his animals in eighteen months and he is making a fortune!

A significant development for British agriculture at the beginning of the 1970's was the UK entry into the Common Market. This economic union began after the war with the linking up of some of the smaller countries into the Benelux (Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg) Agreement and was then joined by Germany, France and Italy. At the beginning it was mainly an agricultural arrangement — the CAP, the Common Agricultural Policy. British governments first ignored it, then tried repeatedly to sabotage it, then finally applied to join it.

The European Economic Community, to give its correct title, set about stimulating its agriculture to ensure European self-sufficiency, but also to protect its smaller farmers and thereby reduce social chaos. This ran counter to the trend of British thinking, which was that the market must decide and if the remaining peasants were driven to the wall, too bad. But the British were outvoted and an endless series of financial squabbles ensued.

Build-up of surpluses

Another consequence was the build-up of huge surpluses of every imaginable foodstuff. In 1986 nearly a million tons of beef, Fifteen million tons of grain, butter mountains, wine lakes, olive oil lakes, the dumping of millions of tons of fruit and vegetables. This was not new. In the thirties wheat was being dumped in the sea and fish was being dumped on the land and the Brazilians were firing their trains on coffee beans, but the surpluses were not on anything like the same scale. What was not new was that these surpluses were building up alongside massive deprivation among the people.

Good food was being destroyed while people were being driven to consume junk food, because it was cheaper (and because more housewives were being driven out to work because of economic pressures: unemployed husbands, debt, etc.) Canned, frozen or dried soups, dinners, instant mash, ready hash, custard without eggs, ice cream without cream, lemonade without lemons, fruit jelly without fruit, meat loaf without meat. And to make this rubbish palatable, a veritable witch's cauldron of chemical dyes, flavourings, and smells, entered the food industry. The consequences for health are still being discovered.

The consequences for the undeveloped world of the trade in food have been no less disastrous. In the Great Famine in Ireland of the 1840's people starved while wheat was being exported to England. In the great Ethiopian Famine of the 1980's fruit was being exported to Europe, fruit which could have saved lives.

Throughout the Third World fruit and vegetables are being produced by multinationals like United Brands of Boston, Massachusetts, and Unilever of Holland and Britain, on the best land in Central America and Africa for export to North America and Europe, while the local population is forced to survive on poor land, or worse, to become labourers on the latifundia of the big foreign companies. The power of these companies to influence, form, or destroy governments led in the inter-war years to the phenomenon of the Banana Republics, governments which were mere puppets of western multinational fruit companies.

It is difficult to find any aspect of food production in the modern world where the market can be said to exert a good influence. The mere fact of production for sale and not to satisfy needs, promotes an urge to grab the money and run, in all industries and services, but in food the results seem to be more catastrophic than anywhere else. Unfresh vegetables containing toxic chemical residues, meat with dangerous levels of antibiotics and hormones, fruit and vegetables which do not taste like fruit and vegetables used to taste, chocolate where the cocoa content has been reduced to the point where the Common Market Commissioners will not allow it to be called chocolate. The list is endless and depressing.

Another revealing development is a growing tendency for stock farmers to keep a particular animal for their own family which is raised the old way, without chemicals, and for fruit and vegetable growers to raise plants for their own consumption separate from those they send to market.

The good news, what little there is, lies in the discovery of the smarter entrepreneurs that "health" food, "organically" grown fruit and vegetables, chemically-free meat and poultry, is a growth market. White bread is a disaster area, commercially speaking, whereas the market demands more "stone-ground 100 per cent wholewheat" flour and bread than is available.

Ken Smith (Britain)

The World's Starving Millions (1975)

From the October 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is estimated that the awesome number of 460 million of our fellow human beings are suffering from severe malnutrition. What is worse, this estimate is based on the peak level of per capita food supplies before the situation began to deteriorate so seriously in 1972; since then the number of severely malnourished people must have greatly increased. (Report of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, 1974.)

So the horrifying story continues. In space men link up, with machinery costing more than those 460 millions could ever dream of, whilst on earth hunger and famine spread inexorably. In a world of space link-ups is there any scientific reason why there should be starvation? The answer is a resounding “No!” 

Dr. Magnus Pyke (Secretary of the British Association for the Advancement of Science) in an address published in New Scientist (10th July 1975) points out that scientific ability has more than kept pace with population expansion. “For the world as a whole,” he says “the production of food has — the figures show — outstripped the increase in population numbers.” It is estimated that whilst the world’s population over the next ten years can be anticipated to grow at the rate of 2.1 per cent, per year, the world’s food production will increase by 2.7 per cent, per year. And according to Dr. Pyke there is enough food around to feed the human race: “. . . food is available to prevent hunger world wide.”

So what’s the problem? Dr. Pyke argues that it is not know-how that is the difficulty:

The thesis I am propounding is that while the knowledge and power over events which science can provide can make great things possible, there are certain human problems in the solution of which science is incompetent.

Unfortunately Dr. Pyke does not tell us what are those “human problems”. Instead he gives us an idea as concrete as hot ice-cream. He says the starvation problem is basically the result of

. . . fundamental incapacity to deal with the relations between man and man, with human miscalculation and misfortune, and with Acts of God such as the failure of the monsoon two years running . . .

He has hopelessly contradicted himself. Having talked about “human problems” the solving of which are necessary, he is now talking about miscalculation, misfortune, and (spare us!) “Acts of God.” About

as scientific as dry rain. He ends up calling for the extension of the equivalent of the British Welfare State throughout the world.

As a scientific analysis of the ability of man to produce food, Dr. Pyke’s address clearly shows man’s capacity to produce an abundance of food. As an explanation of hunger alongside surpluses of food he takes the listener nowhere.

Two things are clear. One, there is the ability to produce a surplus of food; two, millions of people are starving (not just in “underdeveloped" countries either).

The reason for this conundrum is the economic system that man now uses. Instead of food production aiming to feed the people of the world, it is directed at one thing only, profit and accumulation of wealth for the owners. Although the scientists like Dr. Pyke often appear not to see this, the politicians who are elected to run capitalism can, when they choose to. For instance, Mrs. Judith Hart MP, former Minister of Overseas (Under) Development said that British farmers wanted to help towards solving the problems of shortage of food. But on what terms:

Our agricultural industry does not mind very much what it produces, as long as it gets a fair return.

(The Times, 21st July 1975)

And there is the difficulty in a nutshell. Producers don’t care what they make or how they make it. So long as it sells at a profit, capitalism will make it. The starving millions can’t “buy” food because they can’t fulfil that essential condition. So the capitalists invest in other things which bring a “fair” (i.e. profitable) return. Such as armaments for the governments of the starving.

The solution to the appalling problem lies in our hands now. But it demands, not as Dr. Pyke in childish simplicity suggests “a world welfare state” (isn’t the British one bad enough?), but a world working class, consciously determined to establish Socialism.

Ronnie Warrington

“Too much” food again (1971)

From the September 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

Under capitalism we are faced with a seemingly insoluble contradiction. Poverty and hunger exist in the midst of potential plenty. Within the private property relationships of capitalism the existence of means for ending this problem can itself appear to be a problem.

Take for example three reports in just one edition of The Guardian, that of July 12. In it we are informed on page 3 that:

“The world’s population will double by the year 2004 at the present growth rate, yet food production has already declined on a per capita basis, the UN reported today . . . agricultural production in 1969, the latest year for which comprehensive figures were compiled by UN statisticians, was 2 per cent lower than the previous year.”

A serious problem by any standard when one considers that the majority of the world’s people are inadequately fed at present. But here comes the contradiction . . . Turning over to page 4 we see an article by John Cunningham entitled quaintly “Scientists look into eggs”. He tells us that:

“Scientists are going to work on an egg — actually thousands of eggs — to try to find new uses for a surplus which is worrying the Eggs Authority so much that it is prepared to spend £40,000 on research and development this year.

‘We are not simply looking for food uses’, Mr. Bernard Mallett, the authority’s chief executive, said yesterday. ‘Frankly, anything could hold the key. It could be an industrial use, the manufacture of plastics, decorating materials, cosmetics . . . who knows? We hope research will find some profitable outlet for eggs surplus to even the food products market.'”

However the troubles of the Egg Marketing Board are nothing compared with the problems reported on page 12, in the Business Section, to be afflicting the Common Market Commission in Brussels.

“The record grain now ripening in the fields of Europe is causing grave concern . . . The crop is currently estimated at 174 million tons — four million tons more than the highest previous total. 

If such a crop is harvested, it could revive the nightmare of big surpluses in Europe.”

And their solution? “The Commission”, said The Guardian, “can only pray for rain”.

These contradictions are an inevitable outcome of the commodity system. Under capitalism food, together with other things we need in order to live, is private property. Wealth takes the form of commodities, that is, it is produced not primarily that people might eat, but to be sold on a market with a view to making a profit. If too much food is produced for the market system to deal with profitably then the owners and those who run capitalism are faced with a “problem”. But this is only a problem where the relationships of ownership exist.

In a Socialist society, where the means of life will be owned in common by the world community, food will be produced not for profit but to satisfy human need. With the removal of the artificial barrier of the profit-motive, producing sufficient food to feed all the people of the world would present very few problems. Yet today while men and women go hungry eggs are “fed to minks to improve the quality and sheen of the fur” and men in Brussels are hoping rain will destroy food : what a sad reflection on the values of a society where profit is the paramount motive for production.

Gwynn Thomas

The Common Market Special Survey: 4. Agriculture (1962)

From the January 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

Agriculture may not be the most important problem for Britain in its negotiations over the Common Market but it is certainly going to be one of the trickiest.

Nor should it be forgotten that agriculture has been causing a great deal of trouble within the Common Market itself. Only recently, France declared that she would veto any fresh moves on the industrial front until West Germany showed more enthusiasm for removing the barriers on the agricultural side. The motive, of course, was the usual one—France is keen to get a larger slice of the German market for her agricultural exports.

The fact that Denmark, another large exporter of foodstuffs, has also applied for membership of the Community will cause further complications. It will be interesting to see how all these conflicting interests are finally sorted out, if in fact they ever are.

Britain

But there can be no doubt that British agriculture has plenty to worry over. Home farmers are overwhelmingly opposed to Britain going into the Common Market and have done their utmost to prevent it. There is equally no doubt that it is fear for their agriculture that has caused many Commonwealth countries to make such an outcry about Britain’s application to join. But in this modern world of capitalism it is the interests of industry that call the tune and the Macmillan Government has gone on regardless of both farmers and Commonwealth.

British agriculture has good reasons to be wary of the Six. In the first place, in spite of all the efforts during and since the war to step up home production, the U.K. has still to import more than half its food. Most of these imports come from the Commonwealth—meat and dairy produce from New Zealand and Australia, wheat and coarse grains from Australia and Canada, and such things as fruit from all three. Much of this comes in at preferential tariff rates, though this benefit is not so important as it once was.

On the other hand, the Common Market is virtually self-sufficient in foodstuffs. Indeed, certain countries like France and the Netherlands are now actually piling up surpluses. France in particular, as a result of improved methods since the war, is rapidly coming to the point of crisis in the production of some items, for which she is becoming desperate to find markets. Nor is the position going to improve since she has vast capacity to expand. By far the largest country in area (second only to Russia in Europe), and larger still in actually usable agricultural land, it has been estimated that with fully improved methods she could supply the whole of the Six with some products, notably wheat and beef. It is the fear that France may insist on supplying Britain with wheat that is causing Canada particular concern.

Both France and the Netherlands, and Denmark if she also joins, see Britain’s entry into the Common Market as providing a welcome outlet for their agricultural exports. The British farmer takes a much less rosy view of the prospect.

His pessimism is made worse when he considers a further important difference between the way his products are sold compared with the Six. This is strange on the face of it because food prices are generally higher within the Six than they are in this country and this should apparently be to his advantage.

But the reality is not so re-assuring. The reason why food prices are generally lower in Britain is because it has long been the policy of British governments to keep them down artificially. Their method of doing this has been to allow food to come into the country almost free of restriction and let prices find their own level irrespective of the fact that these prices are below those at which the home farmer can produce economically.

This policy if left unchecked would, of course, soon bring most British farmers to bankruptcy. To avoid this, the Government has regularly made up the difference between the farmers general price and the imported price by means of subsidies. This difference is certainly not chicken-feed—it amounts to about £250 million a year, plus many more millions in the way of other payments to assist and improve their farming.

The Six

This procedure is in marked contrast to the system in most countries of the Six, whose governments have been more inclined towards policies of keeping out foreign imports by means of tariffs and quotas. They have been able to do this mainly because they are largely self-sufficient in food and the result has been that though prices are higher they are at the same lime more closely related to the farmers’ actual costs.

In practical terms, of course, the two systems boil down to essentially the same thing. All that happens is that the subsidies needed to help out the British farmer are found from extra taxation so that overall the amount actually received is near enough the same. But it has been an exceedingly useful method for the British capitalist class in keeping food prices stable and thus of helping to keep wages under better control. It was, of course, used to its greatest effect during wartime and in the critical period immediately afterwards.

The Six have already made it clear, however, that they will expect Britain to fall in with their system. It is also pretty obvious that the British Government will not in fact be unduly upset about this since whatever merits the subsidy system has had in the past it has been causing them a lot of headaches recently. They are particularly restive about the financial burden: assistance to be paid out to farmers is even higher than usual this year, enough to make them wonder whether the time hasn’t come to have done with it altogether.

Prices

If therefore Britain does join the Six a rise in food prices seems highly likely. Estimates about this vary from a shilling or two per head per week to something very much more, but the truth is that nobody really knows. One thing is certain, however, and that is that it would provide the Government with a wonderful opportunity to whittle down the effective buying power of wages at a time when the wind of competition within the Common Market was already making the British worker feel chilly.

Agriculture is notoriously a difficult subject to make forecasts about. Governments play about with it and it has always provided a voting lobby sufficiently powerful to make political parties commit themselves to all sorts of peculiar things to win farmers’ support at election times. In addition, until the atomic bomb came along to make the question academic, capitalist governments everywhere have always had some regard for its importance in times of war. The fear of blockade has always been a bogey for them. One can never be certain, then, of what will happen when governments start talking about agriculture and even less certain when a group of their spokesmen get round a conference table to bargain and horsetrade.

A few things can be said, however. It seems fairly certain, for example, that if Britain does go into the Common Market ii will do so at the considerable expense of Commonwealth countries. Present indications are that whilst the Six may how some special consideration for New Zealand, whose economy is almost completely independent upon Britain taking all her meat products and butter, they will have little time for the claims of Australia and Canada who will have to start looking elsewhere for markets for their products. Australia has in fact already begun to do this and is now selling to China and Japan.

Bigger Units

Agricultural interests in France and the Netherlands would gain from this, though Denmark will provide extra competition if she also joins. Italian horticulture will also be given a fillip since the hitherto heavily protected U.K. market seems almost certain to be made more accessible. It is hard to see anything other than a catastrophic effect upon British horticulture, in fact, unless the negotiators bring something remarkable out of the bag. Expensively-heated glasshouses are no match economically for free sunshine and fast transport and can only have their existence in (he mad world of capitalism.

But even more clearly than with industry, the future of European agriculture is going to reflect the inexorable drive of capitalism towards bigger units, mechanisation, and more economic production.

In Italy, 44 per cent. of the population are still dependant upon the land for their living. In France the proportion is 25 per cent. and even in Germany it is 15 per cent. The figure in Britain is 5 per cent.

All these countries are taking deliberate measures to get their peasants off the land and into the towns and factories, though economic forces themselves are probably doing the work more effectively on their behalf. Hundreds of thousands of small farmers are fated to leave their farms in the not far-off future and their land will be merged into larger holdings, revert to its natural state, or be transformed into state forests.

Even in this country the process is still going on. Many small farmers are only able to keep going because of their subsidies from the State. Each year still shows a drop in the number of people getting their living from the land.

The Common Market, therefore, only throws into prominence a process which has been part and parcel of capitalism since its existence. In fact, the Common Market is itself a reflection of this process on the international field. The same impetus which forces firms to amalgamate within a country’s boundaries now forces the countries themselves to look outside their boundaries.

Surplus

But whilst the implications for industry of this process are great, for agriculture they are enormous. That is why all the negotiators at Brussels, whether they belong to Britain, the Six, Denmark, Ireland, or any other country with agricultural interests to protect, are going to talk tough and bargain hard.

And, very much in their minds and hanging darkly over all, is the shadow of surplus. Surplus in a world where half the population live near to starvation and another quarter not very much better.

And that for us is the real dark shadow over all this business of agriculture and the Common Market.

Stan Hampson

You can have your veggies and eat them too ! (2006)

From Issue 20 of the World Socialist Review

The practice of vegetarianism — or non-practice of animarianism* — is not new to humanity. However, one could argue that it has never been more important. World hunger, inhumane and filthy methods of meat production, and the spread of livestock diseases both new and old are forcing many who would never consider abandoning sinking their teeth into a steaming hunk of flesh to give the idea a second thought. There are many kinds of vegetarians, ranging from impostors to the almost monastic avoiders of any food product of animal origin. This lifestyle is admittedly difficult; from meat-lover’s restaurant menus to relatives who have to cook me something extra (and have my eternal gratitude), to the usually absurdly high-priced products offered in the supermarkets.

I will try to show how vegetarianism in socialism makes sense and pass along some of the general benefits of the lifestyle, without attempting to convert you. There are people and organizations out there that can help you if you have questions or want more details on the nutritional aspects of meat-free lifestyles.

One of the concerns about meatless diets is protein. Actually, a balanced Western diet includes four times the recommended amount of protein for an average healthy adult, so leaving out the meat isn’t going to kill you. In fact, I don’t track where my protein comes from, and I sort of don’t care, because I know that there are sufficient quantities in many plant-based foods, the chief being the soybean. This is exactly where the herbivores get it and they do just fine.

Incidentally, this introduces an area where I think vegetarianism and socialism cross — at the cessation of the waste of matter and energy involved in transforming plants into meat. A good rule of thumb to estimate this waste is the “ten percent pyramid,” with humans on the top and the little greenies on the bottom. Only ten percent of each pound of “eaten” is successfully converted into “eater.” The rest is waste in the form of uneatable or indigestible matter and heat energy lost during chemical conversion. Therefore, it takes about ten pounds of plants to produce one pound of animal, and ten pounds of animal to produce one pound of human or other carnivore.

A Happy and Livable Planet

A little math tells me that if I was a carnivore, it would take 250 x 10 x 10 = 25,000 pounds of vegetable matter to produce a meat-eating version of me, but only 2,500 pounds to produce me as an herbivore. Abandoning meat as a food source can optimally increase the nutritive capacity of agriculture ten times, thus reducing our dependence on it! When socialism rolls around, the elimination of waste and hunger will surely be both primary goals for the creation of a happy and livable planet.

A socialist future like the one I dream about will also have a lot less pain and suffering than the current offering. I’ve done my homework, and without getting into details, I can say that there is a lot of that going on in the meat industries. Plants, in contrast, don’t feel pain. They cannot for the obvious reason that they do not have brains, or any nervous systems at all. And no, the cows and pigs are not going to reproduce out of control if we stop using them for food.

There are environmental impacts as well, the most serious of which is the pollution caused by the wastes of animals grown for food. This has to go somewhere — and usually, untreated livestock waste is dumped into the nearest body of water, unlike human waste, which is in most cases required by law to be treated before release into the environment. The impacts of farm animal waste are significant — I’m not going to quote statistics, so you can research this if you want.

The impact of fertilizer is even greater; however, this problem does not completely go away if meaty diets eventually disappear. Fertilizer will still be necessary to grow crops, but mindful socialists will not be forced by the pressure of the market to produce the most, the biggest, and the best — only that which is needed. They can take care that the effects of the fertilizer they do use are reduced and monitored by careful farming practices, efforts made easier by a cooperative agricultural model and not a competitive one. Meat processing facilities have environmental impacts as well. Since it seems impossible for capitalism to maintain clean and efficient slaughterhouses, those places remain vectors for disease and contamination. Shockumentaries still pop on the tube every once in awhile, reminding us, however ineffectively, how filthy meat processing actually is.

In sum, the benefits of a vegetarian society can go hand in hand with the desires of a socialist society. A widespread vegetarian lifestyle can play a significant role in reducing energy demands, pain and suffering, and the negative effects of agriculture on the environment. The environmental and medical impacts of a meat-centered culture are well documented even if they are generally ignored; and even though the psychological impacts may be harder to measure, they still contribute, in my opinion, to making the world a little more violent than it needs to be.

Tony Pink

* This is not an actual scientific term, but then neither am I.

Without comment (1986)

From the November 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

For more than a decade now. the gap between population growth and food production in Africa has been widening. On present trends, says the FAO. the continent will have 650m more people and an annual deficit in cereal supplies of 100m tonnes by the year 2010 — more than the current yearly volume of world trade in wheat. 

Such shortfalls in the developing world have come to seem particularly offensive at a time when industrialised countries are struggling with budget-busting food surpluses that they cannot sell. The contrast between the two is probably the most striking and frustrating paradox of our age. 

It leads many sympathetic people to suggest that the problem is not one of food production, but one of food distribution. Find a way of recycling the food surpluses of the North to the food deficit areas of the South, they argue, and the problem will be on its way to a solution. But that hardly seems an adequate long-term answer to the problems of hunger in countries which are without exception still agriculturally-based, and likely to remain so for many years. 

The conundrum can be put another way. There is a problem of distribution, to be sure, but it is more to do with money than with food. People are not hungry these days because food supplies are not available; they are hungry because they are poor. 

(Financial Times 4 September 1986)

Profits before food . . . (1984)

From the November 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

In June a Danish MEP, Jens-Peter Bonde, put down a written question in the European Parliament to the Common Market Commissioner for Agriculture, asking him to state what proportion of fruit bought by the Common Market to maintain price levels “was distributed free of charge, processed to make alcohol, used as animal fodder or destroyed in 1983” and adding, “when does the Commission intend to stop destroying people’s food?”

In his reply the Commissioner, Poul Dalsager, tried to argue that no food had actually been destroyed; it was just that some of the food bought to maintain prices “became unfit for use” before it could be turned into alcohol or used in other ways. This is pure hypocrisy: the food was deliberately allowed to rot — destroyed — because as Dalsager went on to explain, “an increase in the number of possible uses cannot be achieved without the risk of interfering in the normal distribution channels or of distorting competition between the various commercial operators”. In other words, if too much is given away to hospitals and other institutions or used as animal fodder or turned into alcohol, the profits of food merchants, animal feed producers and other alcohol distillers would be threatened.

The figures quoted by Dalsager allow us to work out how much food was destroyed in the ten Common Market countries in the year 1982/83 (April to April). For comparison we also give the figures for the amount given away free as this very neatly illustrates capitalism's priorities.

Adam Buick

World Socialist Radio - Withdrawal Symptoms (2025)

Adapted from the October 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Withdrawal Symptoms by The Socialist Party of Great Britain

Even in a socialist society the legacy of capitalism would pose deep challenges—particularly in areas tied to personal behaviour, health and consumption. The episode points to obesity, processed foods, addictions, pollution, synthetic drugs and industrial toxins as examples of harms created under capitalism, and raises the question of how a socialist world would responsibly manage them without exacerbating individual dependency or imposing authoritarian controls. While acknowledging that some “withdrawal symptoms” might result from removing harmful, profit-driven products, a democratic socialist society would not perpetuate illnesses for profit, and would need to find ethical, collective ways to address lifestyle and health issues.

Adapted from the October 2025 issue of The Socialist Standard.

World Socialist Radio is the official podcast of The Socialist Party of Great Britain. We have one single aim: the establishment of a society in which all productive resources – land, water, factories, transport, etc. – are taken into common ownership, and in which the sole motive for production is the fulfilment of human needs and wants.

World Socialist Radio is the official podcast of The Socialist Party of Great Britain. We have one single aim: the establishment of a society in which all productive resources – land, water, factories, transport, etc. – are taken into common ownership, and in which the sole motive for production is the fulfilment of human needs and wants.

RSS Feed for Withdrawal Symptons.

To read more news, views, and analysis please visit: worldsocialism.org/spgb

Nature (2025)

Book Review from the May 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Nature of Nature. The Metabolic Disorder of Climate Change. By Vandana Shiva. Chelsea Green Publishing. 2024. 162pp.

This is a wonderfully eloquent treatise on the human relationship with food and how that relationship is being disrupted by the despoiling of the earth and biosphere that is taking place and by the earth being treated as ‘raw material for industrial production’. In essence, it echoes the famous line from Rousseau: ‘You are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody’ It imparts with the utmost urgency messages such as ‘biodiversity erosion has now become an extinction emergency’ and ‘the climate crisis has become a climate emergency’, not simply stating them as unevidenced opinion but backing them up with research and evidence gathered over decades from the most well-informed scientific sources.

The author is particularly scathing about ‘agribusiness’ (also referred to as ‘the chemical and industrial food corporation’ and ‘the Poison Cartel’) and the alarming rate at which it is not only destroying biodiversity and the environment with its methods of cultivation and extraction but is now also, in response to criticism of its activities and consumer concern, pretending to ‘decarbonise’ its industrial food chain by what it falsely calls ‘regenerative agriculture’. Even its investment in meat (and dairy and egg) substitute products as a supposed replacement for intensively produced food is, she argues, a way of bamboozling consumers into thinking switching to such products (referred to here as ‘fake food’) somehow helps to lessen degradation of the biosphere and pressure on natural resources. Most of it, she claims, even when plant-based, is in fact just as ultra-processed, chemically and resource intensive and harmful to health as food produced and marketed through the conventional industrial food systems and just as, if not more, wasteful of the earth’s natural resources. The result, she states, is that it ‘ignores our relationship with nature’ and ‘reduces the bio-diverse, self-organised, living earth to raw material for the money machine’.

All of this of course means that the author is profoundly opposed to the so-called ‘deep green’ agenda of renewability, regarding it as no more than a sop to the growth mantra of industrialised production. She sees the complex infrastructure needed to set up, deal with and maintain ‘renewable’ activities and technologies as both continuing to rely on fossil fuels and involving at least as much savage exploitation of the earth‘s fragile resources, both biological and geological, as in ‘non-green’ methods of production. So she is intensely critical of apparent environmental champions such as George Monbiot, referring to him as one of ‘the messiahs of fake food’ for his claim that ‘lab-grown food will soon destroy farming – and save the planet’. Such a view she dismisses as ‘false at every level’, since ‘being energy, resource and capital intensive, the lab food and fake food economy is highly non-sustainable’. A ‘greenwashing operation’ pure and simple and a massive fraud is the way this book’s author sees all this – at best an exercise in rearranging the deckchairs. But, even worse, it is, she tells us ‘a fully fledged counterfeiting operation that aims to gain control over our diets by making food ever more dependent on the multinational companies that produce and patent it’.

All this constitutes a searing indictment of capitalist industrial production, even though the author does not once in this book use the word ‘capitalist’ or ‘capitalism’, preferring instead to use terms such as ‘maldevelopment’ or ‘the economy of greed’. This may be a deliberate choice on her part so as not to lay herself open to any accusation of political partisanship as opposed to following the evidence of facts and science. Nevertheless, it is still clear that she is describing what socialists call commodity production, i.e. the production of goods for sale on the market with a view to profit for the tiny minority class who own the means to produce them. And she does show that she knows of the existence of this class (she mentions ‘the 1%’ on several occasions), that they are ‘predatory’ and that their activity ‘places profits above nature and people’. Yet there is no evidence in her book to indicate that she is looking outside the framework of commodity production for a different way of doing things.

At the same time, she has ‘an alternative path’ to propose to the current system’s ‘chemically grown and highly processed’ methods of food production. This consists of methods of production that would be ‘ecological not industrial … conserving and regenerating the earth’s biodiversity’, and these would involve ‘following the ecological laws of the earth – the law of diversity and the law of return, shortening the distance between producers and consumers, deindustrialising and deglobalising food systems to reduce emissions and enhance health’, thus offering ‘solutions to the climate crisis, the extinction crisis and the hunger and health crises, because the health of the planet and our health are interconnected’. It must be said that this is nothing if not an admirable vision. The snag, however, is that the author seems to see it as achievable within the framework of the present system of buying and selling and production for profit – and this by means of social pressure and the goodwill and actions of governments. Unfortunately this ignores the reality that all governments of all kinds and stripes are servants of that system (i.e. the capitalist system) and their role is one of oversight and of attempting to make it run in the least worst way. They are not in the business of overthrowing it or regulating it for the common benefit – or indeed for anyone’s benefit other than that of the small minority who already monopolise the planet’s wealth.

The existing method of production and distribution, with its growth imperative and its commodification of everything, has, as this book so trenchantly informs us, seriously damaged and may well be on the way to completely destroying the natural environment. How can we prevent this going any further and reversing it? Not via tweaks to the way the current system works but by a democratic political movement expressing a majority will of the world’s people to cooperatively organise a leaderless, stateless society without governments, without markets, without buying and selling and with free access to all goods and services – a society which will recognise the necessity to produce and distribute sustainably while being sensitive not just to the needs of the human species but to the whole biosphere, the whole environment of which we are a part – the real ‘economy of care’ that Vandana Shiva so passionately advocates for but offers no realistic path to.

Howard Moss