Hunger and plenty (1949)

From the November 1949 issue of the Socialist Standard

"If the nations of the world were really to attack the problem of food, it would prevent them attacking each other. A plan now before the sixty Governments of the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation opens the way to a beginning by dealing with one aspect—the fear of slumps, which has always kept the world production far below world needs.

Half of the people of the world have never had enough to eat. That figure is given in a United Nations calculation of how the world fared in 1939.

A couple of years ago it was estimated that 462,000 children were seriously short of food and in Europe itself 60,000,000 were on the danger list.

Yet everyone old enough will remember how in various countries during the 1930s vast stocks of food were destroyed and farmers were brought to bankruptcy because they had produced more than people could buy.

Bonfires were made of many millions of pounds worth of grain and coffee, to keep the prices up. Milk was poured down drains. The U.S. Government once ordered the slaughter of 3,000,000 young pigs because there was ‘ too much bacon.’ Denmark and Holland did similar things.

In a world where millions were starving, all sorts of arrangements were made to keep down the production of food.”

(Daily Mirror (26/9/49) Editorial column).

The correspondent then goes on to say that what we need is a United Nations plan to set up a clearing house for surpluses, which would enable countries to buy in their own currencies if they were short of dollars for instance. First of all there is a contradiction in that statement. In the opening remarks he states that because people were unable to buy back what they had produced, there arose a surplus.

He goes on to say, however, that these clearing houses would get over the difficulty of countries needing the food because if they were short, say, of dollars they could pay in their own currencies.

If you notice, their first remarks were referring to 1939 and the years before that. Was there a dollar shortage then? No. It is therefore obvious that whether there is a dollar shortage or not the position remains the same. Like many others, they make the mistake of thinking that in some way or other Capitalism can be made to work in the interest of humanity. What they fail to see is that so long as goods are produced for a market with a view to profit, this insane situation where vast stocks of food are destroyed because workers have produced more than they can buy back, will once again loom on the not so far distant horizon.

Slumps, booms, war and unemployment are.part and parcel of the capitalist system, and so long as workers support various reforms. United Nations plans and the like, which only tinker around with Capitalism and do not solve these problems, so long will they have to put up with the evils which go with that system.

Workers—don’t bury your heads in the sand. Get to grips with the capitalist system and understand how it works, and then, only then, can you overthrow that system and establish Socialism in which goods will be produced solely in order to satisfy human needs.

J.P.