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Saturday, October 1, 2022

Artificial Scarcity (1981)

From the October 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Food, like everything else under capitalism, is not produced for use. It is not produced to be eaten but to be sold, with a view to profit, on a market, a local market, a regional market and, increasingly, the world market.

When there is production for the market it is only market demand, not real need, that is satisfied and it is this that, in the context of food production, condemns millions of people in the world to go hungry or be badly fed and others to actually die of starvation. These people are malnourished, or die, not because it is technically impossible to produce enough food to feed the whole world’s population, but because the present world economic and social system capitalism-produces only to satisfy profitable market demand and not human needs. It is as simple as that. These people don’t starve to death; they are starved to death, by capitalism.

All scientists who have studied world food production potential are agreed that the world could, from a technical point of view, produce enough food to feed the present world population of 4,000 million, and more. We could quote pages and pages from scientists to this effect, but will confine ourselves to two who contributed to the September 1976 issue of the Scientific American on ‘Food and Agriculture’:
Considering only such natural factors (biology, soil and climate] one can say that with the present base of arable land, with a largely vegetarian diet based on yields that could be achieved with present knowledge and with a substantial amount of energy and human effort the world could support a human population of 50 billion or more (Robert S. Loomis, “billion” in the US sense, so 12 times the present world population).

The southern half of the Sudan is potentially one of the richest farming regions in the world, with the soil, sunlight and water resources to produce enormous quantities of food-as much, perhaps, as the entire world now produces! . . . If its glacial waters and rainfall were harnessed and its farmers better supported by modern off-farm services, the 40 million hectares of the Indus-Ganges-Brahmaputra plain of Pakistan, Bangladesh and India could be made to yield upward of 20 metric tons of cereal per hectare per year, or about 80 per cent of the world’s present cereal output (W. David Hooper).
So this point is not open to argument. The world can produce enough to feed all its present inhabitants and many more. The fact that at the moment it does not do so is to be placed at the door of the present world economic and social system.

But world capitalism, as a system of production for sale on a market with a view to profit, not only ignores needs that can’t be paid for, but it also distorts the pattern of world food production, as has been well-explained in Susan George’s How the Other Half Dies (Penguin).

The farmers in the so-called Third World have been increasingly drawn into producing for the world market (“cash crops”) at the expense of producing for themselves or for local markets (“food crops”). Everybody has heard of the banana republics of Central America, but scattered throughout Africa, Asia and Latin America are coffee republics, sugar republics, soya republics, cocoa republics states producing essentially a single crop for sale on the world market and who are thereby at the mercy of the purchaser of this crop, generally a multinational company.

Reactionaries denounce “multinational” companies for being multinational rather than national, but in fact they are inevitable under capitalism and a sign that it is already an international system and so ripe for the change-over to world socialism. A multi-national company has the same objective as any “national” company: to make profits and accumulate capital. If they support and encourage the distortion of world food production towards satisfying the market for processed foods in the industrialised parts of the world at the expense of producing food to satisfy the needs of the people of its agricultural parts, this is because the former is more profitable than the latter. In this they are behaving perfectly logically, given that we are living in a capitalist world. As George puts it:
The rub is that agribusiness and private banks cannot be expected to invest in anything that is not profitable—this is simply not the nature of the beast. This is where the question of the individual sincerity of industry leaders is answered: they themselves—even if they are corporations with the best will in the world—are not free agents. They must, under the logic of their system, market produce in countries that can best pay for it; they must get the best possible return on investment, which means either cheap labour and more amortisable machinery; they must control all the facts of food production and distribution for maximum profitability from field to supermarket shelf.
The countries of the Third World are caught in a vicious circle. In order to modernise themselves they must have funds to invest. How do they get these funds? By selling on the world market the crops that they are apparently best qualified to produce. This means forcing their peasants and farmers to stop producing to satisfy their own needs or local markets and turn to producing the cash crop in question. This in turn means that money has to be spent on importing fertilisers and food crops, paid for by the profits from the exports of the cash crops!

And, if the price of the cash crop on the world market falls? Then they do not have enough money to import enough food and the world hears about a “famine” somewhere caused by some “natural” disaster. The disaster, however, is really a social and economic disaster caused by capitalism. We have already seen how two areas which suffer most from famine—Bangladesh and the Sudan (a Sahel country)—could, under appropriate social and technical conditions, easily produce enough food to feed their populations. These famines, we repeat, are not natural but artificial in the sense that they could be avoided if we had a social system geared to satisfying needs rather than profitable sales.

Susan George is right: this is a crazy way to run the world. Her proposed solution, however, is very disappointing. She recommends Third World States to try to cut themselves off from the world market and concentrate on food production for internal consumption (as she imagines China and Vietnam tried to do for a while). But this can’t work precisely because, both from an economic and from a technological point of view, there already exists a world system. No one area of the world can isolate itself.

The only solution is a change of social system at world level, to one where the resources of the Earth, man-made and natural, would become the common heritage and be used purely and simply to satisfy human needs. In other words, the abolition of frontiers and Nation-States, the abolition of markets and production for profits, the abolition of banks and of companies, multi-national and national. Only on this basis can the technical potential to produce enough to adequately feed, clothe and shelter every single man, woman and child in the world realised.
Adam Buick

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