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
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