It is now common knowledge that up to two-thirds of the world’s population suffer from malnutrition while millions actually die from starvation each year. Why is this? Why in a world of potential plenty is so elementary a human need as food neglected for so many people?
Some would deny that we live in a world of potential plenty and claim that the cause of world poverty and hunger is natural scarcity. That, in other words, some people starve simply because not enough food can be produced. Certainly today sufficient food is not produced, but this is beside the point. What we need to know is whether or not, in the present state of scientific knowledge and productive techniques, enough food could be produced adequately to feed the whole population of the world.
There can be no doubt about the answer to this question: agronomists and other scientists who have studied the problem are all agreed that the world has the potential to produce enough food to adequately feed its present population, and more.
Here, for instance, is the view of one of the contributors to a special issue of the Scientific American on Food and Agriculture in September 1976. In his article on “The Development of Agriculture in Developing Countries" W. David Hopper writes:
As one considers the tropical farming world and the technology now available or soon to be available, there can be no grounds for pessimism about the latent potential of the world to feed increasing numbers of people for a long period ahead. Whether that latent potential will be harnessed to the benefit of man is the question.It is important to recognise that the world’s food problem does not arise from any physical limitation on potential output or any danger of unduly stressing the “environment". The limitations on abundance are to be found in the social and political structures of nations and in the economic relations among them. The unexploited global food resource is there, between Cancer and Capricorn. The successful husbandry of that resource depends on the will and the actions of men.
World malnutrition and starvation, then, is not a natural but a social problem. Its cause must be sought not in any lack of natural resources but in the way society is organised.
World society everywhere rests on the basis of the monopoly of the resources of the world, natural and manufactured, by minorities, either privately as individuals (as generally in the West) or collectively through the state (as generally in countries like Russia and China). As a result the world’s resources are used to produce wealth, not to satisfy human needs but to be sold on a market with a view to profit.
Each economic or political unit (enterprise or state) into which the world is divided is in competition with every other such unit, both to acquire raw materials as cheaply as possible and to sell its products as profitably as possible. This economic competition brings into being economic forces — the world market — which are beyond the control of any of the competitors and to which in the end they must submit.
It is in fact the world market that rules the world. Acting like a natural force beyond human control it has much more power than any national government and forces governments to comply with its economic laws whether they want to or not. At the moment the world market is in the depression phase of its economic cycle, an economic fact about which governments can do nothing and to which they must adapt their economic policies. In other words, as the French Minister for Economic Affairs, Jacques Delors (who speaks from first-hand experience) has put it. the world "is in the grip of forces which nobody masters" (Club de la presse, 19 December 1982).
It is this anarchical world market system of artificial scarcity and organised waste that is responsible for poverty and hunger in the world today. The law which governs production everywhere is “no profit, no production”. Which means that if there is no profit to be made from producing and selling a good then that good will not be produced, even if people desperately need it. As the mass of the unemployed or underemployed in the so-called Third World do not have any money incomes and therefore do not constitute a market, they do not count for the present system of production geared only to meeting profitable market demand. Their very real human need for food is not “effective”, to use the jargon of modern economics, so they are badly fed and, in many cases, starve to death.
What makes matters worse is that under the present system every year, despite mass hunger, food is destroyed: fruits are left to rot, milk is poured down mines, coffee is used to fuel trains, and so on. From a human point of view this is quite scandalous but we are dealing with a system that has a logic other than the satisfaction of human needs, as is also shown by the well-established American policy of paying farmers not to grow food. The Common Agricultural Policy in Europe too has paid farmers to pull up trees and to slaughter cattle as a way of maintaining price and profit levels. But giving away these alleged "surpluses" is no solution. Quite the reverse, for within the context of a market system giving food away free makes matters worse by narrowing even further the market and so discouraging production.
The present world system is also one of organised waste — the most obvious being armaments — which is directly linked to the competitive, ever-raging struggle for profits. For, although in the end it is a state’s economic strength — its competitiveness — which enables it to succeed, its political strength — its armed clout — is also an important factor.
When a conflict arises (over markets, sources of raw materials, trade routes, investments, outlets) it becomes a trial of strength and, even if the matter is settled peacefully by negotiation, the outcome still depends on the relative strengths of the two sides. The Labour Foreign-Minister-who-never-was, Aneurin Bevan, once expressed this fact of present-day life quite well when, opposing CND at a Labour Party Conference, he said that he didn’t want to go into the conference chamber naked. No statesman wants to do this, which explains why each state (including those in the so-called Third World with underfed and starving populations) seeks to have the most powerful armed forces that it can afford. The waste of armaments is immense, not just the arms themselves and military expenditure generally but also the destruction caused by the wars which are always going on somewhere in the world.
If all this waste and destruction were eliminated and the resources involved redirected to constructive ends then the world could more than adequately feed, clothe and shelter its present population. World poverty, hunger and ignorance could be completely eliminated. But this would require the abolition of the present system of minority ownership and production for profit, and its replacement by a new system organised on a completely different basis.
During the early stages of the discussion of the law of the sea-bed. President Nixon (of all people) referred to the oceans as "the common heritage of all mankind”. The same phrase occurs in the treaties about Antarctica and the moon. These treaties declare that no state can establish territorial rights nor any individual private property rights over these areas — that, in other words, they belong to nobody. What is required is that this same principle should be extended and applied to the whole globe: all that is in and on the Earth should become the common heritage of all humanity.
On this basis there would be nothing to prevent the world’s people organising the production and distribution of wealth simply and solely to satisfy their needs as individuals and as a community. Production would no longer be restricted by the law of “no profit, no production” nor any longer governed by the blind economic force which the world market represents. Instead it would come under conscious, democratic social control and be oriented to what after all is its only rational end — satisfying human needs and wants. In these circumstances production could be rapidly increased to levels which would ensure that every man, woman and child on this planet was adequately fed, clothed and sheltered. The mass hunger and deaths from starvation which characterise the world today would remain only as bad memories of what no doubt will be commonly agreed to have been a barbarous past.
The Earth the common storehouse of all humanity; the production of wealth solely for use not sale or profit; a world without arms — is this an unrealistic Utopia? Not at all. It is the only logical and rational way to run the world given the present high stage of development of the forces of production. Because a solution is so simple and obvious does not mean that it won’t work.
Adam Buick
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