Socialists argue that the world-wide problem of hunger is not caused by the earth’s resources being insufficient to provide enough food for its population, but by the fact that the present social system, capitalism, is geared to profit-making and not to the satisfaction of people’s needs. Capitalism restricts the amount of food produced and sometimes leads to the destruction of what is already produced. Socialism on the other hand will be a society freed of all socially-imposed limitations on the production and distribution of food.
Myth of scarcity
From time to time, evidence in support of our view that starvation is the result of the economic system and not of overpopulation is provided by capitalist institutions. A recent example is the report Food First: Beyond the Myth of Scarcity, compiled by the Institute for Food and Development Policy in San Francisco, and summarized in an article in the Guardian of 1st September.
The report points out that Africa, with the worst malnutrition of any continent, is a net exporter of foodstuffs such as cattle and vegetables. Thus food desperately needed by the millions of malnourished Africans is sold abroad as a way of acquiring the foreign exchange sought by the emerging African capitalist states. In Ecuador—a country not noted for the high living standards of the majority of its inhabitants—only 14 per cent. of cultivable land is actually farmed, a tragic waste of resources which becomes positively obscene in the context of the hungry millions of mankind.
Not only does capitalism mean underproduction and scarcity, it also artificially brings about a situation where “too much” is produced (this means too much for the good of profit-making and the accumulation of capital, of course, not too much for people to eat). 1976 saw a bumper world harvest, which has led to enormous stockpiles of wheat and falling prices in the United States. President Carter’s reaction to this is to move to stabilize prices and reduce storage costs by ordering American farmers to cut down the acreage of wheat by one-fifth next year! Wheat-fields will be ploughed up, and less wheat produced, all in the name of profit. Meanwhile, millions of men, women and children will starve because they cannot afford to buy the food they need. No profits are made by selling wheat to those who cannot pay the going rate. As the Guardian writer says, “Food is produced to meet the demands of those with sufficient money to buy it.”
The way out of this absurd situation is not to try and tinker with the profit-motivated capitalist system so as to make destruction of food unprofitable, or to pay the developing countries “fair prices” for their agricultural products. The elimination of world hunger can only be achieved within a socialist society, where production will be solely for use and not for profit, with free access for all to what is produced. Then the resources of the earth and the agricultural knowledge of mankind will be combined to produce enough food for all.
Paul Bennett
No comments:
Post a Comment