Capitalist agriculture . . . the profits of doom (1994)

From the November 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ever since Malthus, population growth has been the subject of heated controversy. By and large, disputants in the debate have tended to polarise into two camps.

For the Neo-Malthusian pessimists there is no prospect of an end to world hunger while population growth continues, indeed it could well increase as the latter begins to exceed — and thereby undermine — the carrying capacity of the land.

Then there are the Technological Optimists. For them, the concept of a “carrying capacity” is problematic; it is not something that is fixed but can be enlarged by human effort and ingenuity. Indeed, Ester Boserup has argued in her book The Conditions of Agricultural Growth that population pressure, far from being a harbinger of doom, is a prime stimulus to technological change. Thus, extensive farming practices, which become subject to diminishing returns, are abandoned and more intensive forms of land use are introduced, resulting in an increased “carrying capacity”. In fact, some of the wealthiest parts of the world — like Western Europe — are also amongst the most densely populated.

Where do Socialists stand in this debate? At first glance, we appear to side with the technological optimists in asserting that the world is not overpopulated. We base this claim on an empirical analysis of the relationship between global food demand and the global capacity to satisfy that demand. This suggests that the world could adequately feed its population. According to the World Bank in its 1986 Report Poverty and Hunger: Issues and Options for Food Security in Developing Countries, enough grain is already produced to provide everyone with 3,600 calorics per day, well above the recommended 2,400 calories for an adequate diet — though, much of this, it should be said, is (inefficiently) used to feed livestock.

The prevalence in hunger does not arise from any shortfall in agricultural potential but from the operation of economic factors which impede full realisation of this potential for the benefit of all. The objective of capitalist production is not primarily to meet human needs. Instead, human needs are only met to the extent that these are backed up by purchasing power. That is why vast quantities of food are destroyed and why farmers are paid not to produce, while millions starve because they lack the means to buy or grow food. In short, the much-vaunted productivity of capitalism has now reached the point of open and irreconcilable conflict with its social relations of production, its mode of distribution.

There is a further point on which we part company with many technological optimists. This concerns the nature of technology itself. This is not independent of, but is profoundly conditioned by, the social relations of production. In this regard we share the concern of many environmentalists about the impact of modem capitalist agriculture on the environment. It is conceivable that this, rather then pressure of population, may ultimately precipitate the doomsday scenario. Unless, that is, a socialist transformation of society — and thus of its productive methods — can intervene first.

Not neutral

Technological innovation does not occur in a vacuum; it has socioeconomic consequences in a capitalist economy which benefit some but often at the expense of others. An example is the Green Revolution initiated in the 1950s 

This represented a major incursion of an industrialised mode of fanning into Third World countries. Based on the introduction of new high yielding varieties (HYVs) of cereal crops, it sought to increase the productivity of local agriculture. However, this required the application of a whole package of inputs, around which HYVs were specifically designed having in mind, the interests of multinational conglomerates supplying such inputs. This absence of any one of these inputs meant that the expected gains in productivity would not be realised, and HYVs would tend to perform poorly compared with traditional crops. Thus, without irrigation, nutrient uptake would be much reduced, without pesticides, the very inputs, such as chemical fertilisers, that promote crop growth, will encourage a proliferation of weeds, and so on.

It is this in-built complementarity of inputs, not just the costs of individual inputs, which explains why it is mainly richer farmers, particularly in Asia and Latin America, who have benefited from “Green Revolution” technology, accentuating the process of land concentration in these countries at the expense of poorer farmers. It raises the critical threshold at which farmers are able to afford, and make effective use, of such technology.

But what of the long-term productivity of an industrial mode of fanning promoted by capitalism, i.e. its sustainability? To increase output, more land could be cultivated. However, much of this uncultivated land is ecologically marginal and would be highly vulnerable under capitalist industrial farming. Alternatively, cultivated land could be made more productive. Since the 1950s, rapid increases in output — faster than population growth except in Africa — have been based upon increasing applications of four major non-land inputs: artificial fertilisers, pesticides, irrigation and mechanisation. However, there are now growing doubts about the wisdom of such an approach. Since the 1970s, there has been a levelling-off of per capita output.

According to J. Harris in World Agriculture and the Environment, these earlier increases were made possible because they occurred in a world not yet heavily damaged by soil erosion. But today, the current annual rate of topsoil loss — 25 billion tonnes — is such that the world can expect to lose 50 percent of its topsoil by 2050. Since there is a strong correlation between topsoil depth and crop yields, this is an alarming development for the future of fanning.

Soil erosion

Applying yet more fertilisers to compensate for the loss of soil fertility will not solve the problem in long run. Indeed, US agriculture today uses five times more fertiliser than in 1947 to produce the same amount of crop, but it is not clear whether this growing demand for fertilisers — particular phosphates — can be indefinitely met. There are also many minor nutrients and trace elements, lost through harvesting, which are not being replaced by industrial fanning, but which may be essential to long-term maintenance of yields. Furthermore, excessive applications of fertilisers actually exacerbate the problem of erosion by facilitating a breakdown in soil structure — both directly, through its effect on soil chemistry and, indirectly, by allowing farmers to dispense with organic recycling, leading to a decline in humus content which binds the soil together and helps it to hold water and oxygen essential for plant growth.

A similarly worry emerges in the case of other major agricultural inputs. The narrowing down of the genetic basis of farming, typified by HYVs, and the simplification of the agro-ecological landscape associated with market-oriented monocultures, has created ideal conditions for the spread of pests. To counter this threat, chemical pesticides have been applied on an increasing scale. However, it is often the natural predators of pests which are more severely affected by this than the pests themselves which, because of their larger populations, are more easily able to develop mutations giving them resistance to pesticides. This in turn, tempts farmers to apply more frequent, and stronger, doses, but the evidence suggests that, as with artificial fertilisers, this too may be subject to diminishing returns. As a result, farmers find themselves trapped in what is aptly called a “pesticide treadmill” while a significant proportion of output — some 45 percent overall — continues to be lost through pests.

Increased mechanisation and tractorisation too contributed to soil erosion through deep ploughing, a practice that is particularly damaging when applied to the fragile soils of many tropical countries.

Sustainable

Technology, as pointed out, is not neutral; it is conditioned by the economic system in which it is applied. Capitalist agriculture is constrained by the profit system and the need to maximise output in the short-term without regard to wider consequences for the environment and society. The type of technology this entails cans only be modified with extreme difficulty. Farmers must, afterall, seek a financial return on any investment they make.

The trend towards environmental deterioration and social dislocation associated with capitalist agriculture, is likely to gather pace as recent developments in the world economy unfold. An example is the new GATT agreement which covers 90 percent of the world’s agricultural trade which will further strengthen the hand of agribusiness at the expense of many small farmers and undermine much existing environmental legislation. Similarly, structural adjustment programmes imposed by the IMF on many debtor countries to reduce their debts will increase pressure on them to expand cash crop production and to that end employ industrial methods of farming, despite the fact that the cost of these have risen far more steeply in recent years in comparison with the price of agricultural commodities.

In short, agriculture today stands at a critical crossroad; where we go from here will have profound repercussions for both urban consumers of the products of farming as well as farmers themselves who, lest we forget, still constitute a majority of humankind. We can choose to retain the status quo and risk going down the road of possible, if not probable, ruin. Or we can decide to take Earth, and all that is in and on it, into common ownership and democratic control. By fundamentally changing our relationship to one another, we shall fundamentally change our relationship to nature. You cannot do one without the other.

Freed from the constraints of market competition, we could begin to adapt our technology to suit our needs within limits imposed by nature We cannot predict precisely what this entails but we can tentatively sketch the broad outlines of a new agriculture:

• A scaling-down in the overall use of industrial inputs with some redistribution towards those parts of the world where marginal productivity of such inputs is still relatively high.
• The adoption of a more labour-intensive approach to farming, particularly in the more developed areas, where today the proportion of socially unproductive labour is highest, i.e. occupations essential to the functioning of capitalism which will disappear in socialism.
• Greater emphasis to be placed on small-scale mass-produced “appropriate technology” which would rapidly transform the situation that currently exists in the less-developed areas of the world.
• Selective reversion to traditional farming practices, such as intercropping and agro-forestry, combined with a careful "holistically-oriented” application of useful innovations in the field of biotechnology, e.g. self-fertilising crops.
• Blurring of the distinction between town and country; a huge expansion of small-scale horticulture in and around existing conurbations with the aim of ensuring a substantial and diverse supply of locally-grown food, thus incidentally reducing the costs of transportation.
• Related to the above, a massive phased programme to systematically overhaul existing urban infrastructure to facilitate the return of off-farm wastes to the land.
• Finally, to conserve ecologically marginal land by restricting the use of it to rotational/extensive farming.

To those who dismiss this, our response is quite simple: never has the need for a clear and practical alternative to the chaos of capitalism been more pressing, more vital. Only on this basis can we ensure a fruitful and sustainable future for ourselves and our children’s children. The seeds of that future lie within us; it is up to us to nurture and cultivate them.

Robin Cox

Famine in Africa (1984)

From the December 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Toyin Falola, writing about the impact of colonialism in Africa, has this to say:

The situation then turned from one of mere trading partners to one of unmitigated exploitation. Colonial rule was so successful that although nearly all African countries have now achieved political independence they remain economically dependent on Europe. This unequal partnership is a major obstacle to the socio-economic development of Africa. [1]

The problem with the theory of “neo-colonialism" is that, like all theories developed within the narrow perspective of nationalism, it tends to overlook the boundaries of class. Where it acknowledges the dynamics of class struggle, more often than not it absorbs it into the conflict between countries — between the rich industrialised North and the impoverished providers of raw materials in the South. Thus Susan George:

The present world political and economic order might be compared to that which reigned over social-class relations in individual countries in nineteenth century Europe with the Third World now playing the role of the working class. [2]

To be fair to George, she does draw attention to the existence of “local elites" in the Third World. Yet all too often with those who subscribe to this neo-colonial model of the world, it is not that such an elite exists that matters but that it should so unashamedly ally itself with its erstwhile colonial masters.

Who is this elite in Africa? According to Greg Lanning:

At independence the new rulers in Africa lacked an economic base in society and used the patronage and power of government to consolidate their own position. Partly because of this and partly because of the nature of an underdeveloped economy, “the state plays a major role in economic activity and development". The importance of the state in post-colonial Africa means that those who staff and run the state apparatus form the basis of the emergent ruling class in Africa. [3]

The dominant ideas in society being those that best serve the interests of its ruling class, it is perhaps not surprising that contemporary politics in Africa should be so receptive to Leninist ideology with its statist prescription for the management of an emergent capitalism. On the other hand, as Lanning suggests, in trying to consolidate their economic position Africa's rulers depend heavily on the revenue accruing to their national treasuries from foreign companies operating within their territories. Such a situation demands a degree of pragmatism. For a ruthless pragmatist like President Mobutu of Zaire this has proved most rewarding. With a personal fortune of about £100 million, Mobutu is one of the richest men in the world, while the average wage of a Zairean worker amounts to just over ten dollars a month. Clearly, if Africa’s ruling class chafes against the constraints of “neo-colonialism", it is also very much a beneficiary of it. While it has neither the inclination nor the option to withdraw from the interlocking relationships characteristic of an integrated world economy. Dinham and Hines point out to what extent it has been able to modify these relationships to its own advantage:

Could a politically independent state wrest economic power from the foreign companies which continued to control their export crops? The strategies open to governments were limited and experience soon showed that measures to acquire immediate control by nationalisation led to retaliation from the companies involved. Most countries opted for more modest legal and financial controls. These measures did not drive the companies out — nor were they particularly intended to do so, for the companies were by now crucial to many African economies. [4]

More recently, however, the trend has been for these multinational firms to opt out of plantation agriculture in which many of them have their roots and to move towards an arrangement known as “contract farming”. What this means is that local producers are contracted by a firm to produce a certain output which the firm then purchases at a fixed price. This has the advantage for the firm concerned in that it eliminates the risks attached to growing crops.

But while multinational firms invest less in direct landownership than they did in the past, in other respects their dominance has become more entrenched and pervasive. These latter activities include the marketing, processing and transport of agricultural products as well as the provision of agricultural inputs such as fertilisers, machinery and management or technical services. Such "vertical integration" is the hallmark of modern agribusiness corporations. In other words they are able to exercise wide ranging control over the many links that make up the food chain, from the supply of seeds to the packaging of the final product.

For the proponents of economic nationalism, this is a highly regrettable state of affairs. Not only are African countries denied greater "vertical" control over their products but are economically restricted in a “horizontal” sense as well. This is to say their structure of production is relatively undiversified. being closely aligned in most cases to a fairly narrow spectrum of external markets which absorb the bulk of Africa’s trade. According to Dinham and Hines

Twelve countries are dependent on just one main crop for over 70 per cent of their income. and a further eleven countries depend on only two crops for well over half their income. [4]

Such a highly concentrated pattern of production has a number of disadvantages built into it. In the first place, it greatly increases the risk of loss due to environmental factors. It also makes these countries extremely vulnerable to fluctuations in the price of their export crops. Just as a mining community in Britain, for example, could be devastated by the closure of a mine on which it heavily depends, so a drastic fall in the price of a single agricultural product can wreak havoc with whole regions given over to the production of this crop. In Africa’s case, probably the most extreme example of “over-concentration” is that of Gambia, where groundnuts are grown on 73 per cent of the arable land and account for 90 per cent of its export revenue.

The market economy is, of course, an inherently unstable system and within it the price of agricultural products tends to be more volatile than most. It is this very instability which adds yet another dimension to Africa’s plight in that a high proportion of its export crops happen to be slow maturing and so not readily adaptable to the vagaries of the market.

Take, for example, coffee. In at least eight African countries coffee is an important export crop grown largely by smallholders. High current prices will induce farmers to plant or expand their acreage of coffee trees. Once planted they have to wait for roughly five years for the coffee trees to mature but as Moore-Lappe and Collins point out:

By the time your first harvest of such crops is ready you might find the bottom has dropped out of the market. And it probably will have since producers in your country and others will have planted to meet the demand at the same time you did The likely result is overproduction once the new trees begin to bear more than the consumers are willing to buy even with a drop in price. [5]

In the economically advanced areas of world capitalism, governments have usually sought to cushion agriculture from the erratic workings of market forces. But this in turn has created yet another problem: periodic crises of “over-production” and chronic food surpluses. In fact so huge are these surpluses that in America alone it costs £700 million a year just to stockpile them. [6] But such stocks are by no means surplus to human requirements; they are surplus to the capacity of the market system which restricts workers’ consumption to the size of their wallet. Once again, Susan George:

As long as food is regarded as a commodity . . . you will have this scandalous situation of surpluses on the one hand and famine on the other. Because people who can’t pay. who cannot become consumers with a Capital C are not interesting to this world system. [7]

In the Third World, however, there is far less scope for governments to intervene and protect their agricultural sector in the way that the EEC or the American government can. The reason is that the subsidies paid to farmers in the richer countries represent a tax burden on other sectors of industry. But in the developing countries this is hardly a practicable course of action:

Developing countries are so called because their other industries are not developed: generally speaking, agriculture is their one main industry. Agriculture has, in their case, to support the government. Only in developed countries with prosperous industries able to give revenue to the government can the government, in its turn, support agriculture. [8]

In addition to the problems affecting African countries arising from fluctuations in the prices of their agricultural exports, there has been in the post war era a longterm tendency for these prices to drift downwards against those of imported manufactures and oil. For example, "in 1969 a coffee producing country had to sell 66 bags of coffee to buy one 16 tonne truck but by 1979 it had to sell 123 bags of coffee to buy the same truck" [4] Don Casey, in a paper prepared for the UN Development Programme, estimated that the total loss of foreign exchange earnings to Africa due to this relative fall in the price of agricultural exports in the two decades after World War Two, "exceeded all foreign funds invested, loaned or granted during that period". [5]

This "deterioration in the terms of trade" has prompted African and other Third World governments to try to secure commodity agreements through bodies like the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in order to stabilise prices or else to form producer cartels along the lines of OPEC. To date such attempts have been largely unsuccessful. Partly this is because "producer countries" are themselves no more a monolithic bloc than their customers but are deeply divided by competition over markets. When, for example, a conference was held some years ago to try to reach an International Tea Agreement, several African countries objected to the idea of fixing prices or quotas. The reason was that Africa’s share of world output was projected to grow substantially in the near future.

Faced with these increasingly stringent economic pressures, African governments have little choice but to move even further down the road that has led to the predicament in which they find themselves. To boost their revenue they must encourage commercial agriculture. In so doing they have had to turn more and more to multinational agribusiness for the necessary imports and to private banks or aid agencies for loans to finance this expansion. This of course only further reinforces the need to promote commercial agriculture. It is after all mainly from this source (apart from the mining sector in some cases) that governments can hope to raise the necessary amounts of foreign exchange that can go towards repaying the debts incurred.

For peasant farmers throughout Africa such developments translate into a mounting burden of misery. As peasant farmers they are of course mainly “self provisioning" — they produce food primarily for their own consumption — production for the market being a secondary consideration. But today this social arrangement is coming under increasing attack.

After “independence”

Julius Nyerere in his famous 1967 Arusha Declaration, remarked that

The basic difference between Tanzanian rural life now and in the past stems from the widespread introduction of cash crop farming. Over large areas of the country peasants spend at least part of their time — and sometimes the larger part of it — on the cultivation of crops for sale — crops like cotton, coffee, sisal, pyrethum and so on. But in the process the old traditions of living together, working together and sharing the proceeds have often been abandoned.

The Arusha Declaration itself was an attempt to transform peasant agriculture by reducing the influence of market forces. It sought to build a self reliant economy by raising agricultural productivity through the mass mobilisation of peasants within a framework known as the Ujamaa (meaning “familyhood”) programme. Among other things this entailed the enforced resettlement of scattered peasants into some 8000 planned villages, ostensibly to extend essential services to the rural population as a means to greater productivity.

The Ujamaa experiment is interesting because of its ideological commitment to the idea of peasant self-reliance. Its failure to live up to this commitment — for it came increasingly under the control of a burgeoning state bureaucracy — highlights all the more starkly the inherent conflict of interests between African governments generally and the peasant populations in the countries which they govern. The fact of the matter is that these governments need to further extend the influence of market forces, not to reduce it; to transform, as Marx put it. “a society in which one definite mode of production dominates even though not all productive relations have been subordinated to it" into one based more and more on purely capitalistic relations of production. In short, what the Ujamaa programme foundered on was not an ideological betrayal but the economic exigencies of Tanzanian capitalism and its heavy dependence on foreign imports and aid resulting in the need to generate foreign exchange.

How is the capitalist imperative to extract marketable surpluses from cash crop production transmitted to, and impressed on, the African peasant? In colonial times a favoured method to induce peasants to grow cash crops was by levying taxes. This remained the case after political independence. Indeed, in some cases the burden of taxation has substantially risen:

In Mali in 1929 the French levied a tax that required each adult over fifteen to grow between five and ten kilos of cotton to pay for it. By 1960, the last year of French rule, the tax had risen to the equivalent of forty kilos. By 1970. during the drought, the successor government forced each adult peasant to grow at least forty eight kilos of cotton just to pay for taxes. [5]

Generally speaking, crops that peasants produce for export are purchased by marketing boards — usually government-run and almost all monopolies — and then sold to foreign buyers for processing. The price that peasants are paid is often far less than that charged by the marketing board which in turn reflects the state of the world market. It may be deduced that the lot of the peasant might improve with an improvement in the world market. But this is not necessarily so:

A slight increase in income that peasant farmers in underdeveloped countries might acquire from a rising world price for their commodity has to be weighted against the increased threat of displacement by land-grabbing commercial farmers or corporations that see higher prices as new grounds for profit. [5]

In the post war era most countries in Africa experienced a surge in cash crop production though more recently in the 1970s output has tended to level off (partly due to the world recession). Significantly, this growth was achieved primarily not by raising yields but by expanding the area under cash crop production. Inevitably, this was at the expense of subsistence agriculture which was progressively pushed onto less productive marginal land. Since subsistence agriculture is a major local source of food, this development goes a long way towards explaining the steady fall in per capita food production in Africa over the last twenty years or so.

In the past the availability of relatively abundant land, coupled with communal forms of land tenure, tended to cushion subsistence agriculture and ensure a modicum of food security. Indeed, it was this that mainly inhibited the development of a strong indigenous landowning class. But today this picture is rapidly changing as a recent survey from the Cornell University Centre for International Studies suggests:

The study found a trend across Africa towards increasing privatisation of communal lands, growing concentration of landownership and the fragmentation of holdings, all factors further aggravating rural poverty. In some countries lands traditionally available to all tribal members are being appropriated by government officials or foreign firms, usually with the acquiescence of chiefs.[4]

It has been estimated that three quarters of Africa's population now have access to less than 4 per cent of the land [2] while in many parts of Africa “small farmers do not own enough land to occupy themselves for at least 6 months of the year”. [9] And most importantly, with the question of famine in mind, “8-10 per cent of the rural labour force in Africa is now landless and these numbers and proportions are growing rapidly". [4]

The consequences have been catastrophic for millions of peasants caught between the hammer blows of the market economy and the anvil of diminishing returns from subsistence agriculture. And as rural deprivation worsens, so the tide of migration to the cities has gathered pace. Africa may be the least urbanised continent. with less than a quarter of its people living in cities, but its rate of urbanisation is roughly twice that of its population growth. This means on current trends that the population of African cities can be expected to double every 14 years. But how can this growing population be fed when domestic food production mainly in the form of peasant farming is in the throes of decline?

The answer as far as governments are concerned is to import food, particularly cereals, from abroad. This first began on a significant scale in the 1960s when the price of cereals was low as a result of the accumulation of huge surpluses in North America and Europe. But. as Sir Fred Catherwood explained, this was by no means an unmixed blessing:

These surpluses from Europe and from America depress Third World prices; they put Third World farmers out of business, they drive them off the land and into the shanty towns and they reduce rather than increase production in the Third World. [7]

Without doubt. African governments are fully aware of this, but whether they are in a position to do anything about it is quite another matter. They have to take into account for example the likely response of town dwellers to any increase in the price of basic foodstuffs that might benefit local producers. Furthermore, as new tastes become entrenched in the urban areas it is even more difficult to break away from dependence on a particular cereal (like wheat) which for climatic or other reasons cannot be grown in much of Africa. The population of Africa may be mainly rural but political power is overwhelmingly urban-based, with consequences graphically spelt out by Basil Davidson:

So it was increasingly the towns, after independence, that dictated the priorities of economic policy; and the new demands of the towns, pushing aside the needs of the countryside, increasingly called the tune. More and more exports had to go in paying for the imports demanded by the towns . . . the towns and cities, in short, became the tail that wagged the economic dog. and the rural populations, still in most cases the great majority of all the people, had to suffer for it. [10]

When in fact big increases in food prices have been pushed through against the wishes of the urban population, this has in many countries been the prelude to serious riots and, in some cases, a successful coup d'etat. Little wonder, as Rene Dumont put it. "governments fear urban unrest far more than the dispersed and unorganised peasant farmers”. [11] Prompted by this threat—not to mention the military aspirations of rival African states — they have sought to massively arm themselves with the paraphernalia of repression: “At present governments spend an average of between 4 and 7 per cent of their budgets on agriculture — while spending 20 per cent on defence". [12]

More recently in the 1970s the cost of food imports rose substantially. For African countries this was an ominous development. particularly when seen against the background of a relative fall in the value of agriculture exports. Many governments in response to this crisis have initiated large scale (often state run) agricultural schemes in a bid to boost domestic food production by attracting foreign investment and expertise.

At first sight this might seem an unlikely area for foreign firms to invest in, for the reason so candidly explained by the Chairman of General Foods: "It is virtually impossible for a private business establishment to develop, distribute and sell enough of the kinds of food poor people need and still break even, much less look for any profit". But the role of aid has been a crucial factor in enticing agribusiness. Firms find it sufficiently lucrative to participate in large scale agricultural projects as these "attract funding on concessional terms by aid agencies" and with payments effectively guaranteed by the aid agencies concerned this eliminates financial risks to the firms themselves. In short, with the prospect of large scale schemes coming to dominate domestic food production in the 1980s this will "ensure agribusiness an increased role in Africa’s food production, thus complementing its historic control of Africa's cash crop production". [4]

Should this happen it will further erode subsistence farming, displacing peasants or driving them more and more into the market place of hunger where the economic risks are as great as the physical margins of survival are small. For increasing numbers of them throughout Africa a way of life is dying by degrees; slowly strangled, as though by a python whose length spans the circumference of the globe.

Robin Cox

References

(1) African History and Culture, edited by R Olaniyan, 1982

(2) How the Other Half Dies. S.George, 1979

(3) Africa Undermined. G.Fanning with M. Mueller. 1979

(4) Agribusiness in Africa. B.Dinham & C. Mines. 1983

(5) Food First, F.Moore Lappe & J.Collins. 1982

(6) The Observer, 1 April 1984

(7) Utopia Limited, programme notes, 1984

(8) Agriculture The Triumph and the Shame. R Body. 1982

(9) The growth of Hunger. R.Dumont & N Cohen. 1980

(10)  The Story of Africa, B.Davidson. 1984

(11)  The Guardian. 25 June 1982

(12) Newsweek. 6 August 1984

Food for profit: food for thought (2003)

From the July 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

The work of growing and preparing food should involve pleasure, not exploitation of those engaged in it. The environment should not be damaged by profit-seeking, short-term policies for “marketing” food. The consumption of food should be a healthy activity based on need, not ability to pay.

Capitalism cares little about the working conditions of the people who produce food, the effects on the environment of how it is produced, or the well-being of its consumers. Socialism will mean a fundamentally different set of priorities regarding food – no exploitation of producers, proper regard for environmental consequences, need not profit as the motive for distributing and consuming it.

Exploiting producers

There is ample and growing evidence that workers engaged in the food industry are among the most exploited and poverty-stricken producers of a vital “commodity”. This is especially so in the Third World. The Guardian (17 May) gave details of the working conditions and daily lives of wage-slaves in just one African country, Kenya. The general picture, if not the details, could be repeated in many other parts of the economically underdeveloped and developing world.

A group of Kenyan women are picked up by the company truck from their homes at 4 am to arrive at the workplace in time for the 4.30 am shift, which lasts until 3.40 or 4 pm, as laid down by Kenyan law. Their job is to top and tail beans for the English market. They work in refrigerated packing sheds next to Nairobi airport, standing at stainless steel benches. They work “flexitime”, depending on the amount of orders they have to complete each day. Sometimes they can go home early, but if the orders are big they have to work until they are finished.

Gladys (not her real name) is dead on her feet after a 12-hour shift with only one break. She lives with her husband and three children and works to earn enough money to send them to school. In the block where she lives 100 people share a lavatory and outside tap. She has no choice about the hours she works or the way she is paid. There is no overtime, but performance-related pay instead. The employer’s representative is candid about this: “We’ve found that by introducing PRP we can reduce the number of the workforce.”

Environmental consequences

The capitalist food industry is bad for the environment as well as for the workers. In many parts of Africa and elsewhere, land where people were growing food for local consumption has been turned over to land growing food for export – cash crops. The greenhouses and tunnels of the intensive farms shrink the lakes and blight the shores with algal bloom. There is excessive extraction to water the crops, pollution from pesticide run off, deforestation caused by the logging industry and workers having to cut wood for cooking fuel.

In the last 20 years or so there has been much controversy over the introduction of genetically modified crops. There is nothing inherently damaging to people or the environment about genetic modification. For thousands of years the seeds of plants with more desirable characteristics have been selected for planting the following year – in effect, a form of genetic modification. What is harmful is not the technique but its use in the pursuit of profit. Agribusinesses have sought to patent the “terminator” gene introduced into plants. Crops are harvested normally, but the germ of the grain is sterile and seeds have to be purchased each year. Only in capitalism, where the prime aim is not human welfare but profit, could such a mad idea be put into practice.

Bad for consumers

Food today is bad for consumers in a number of ways, all connected with the market system. On a world scale there are crises of starvation and obesity happening at the same time in different places. Peasants who were once self-sufficient can no longer earn a living from their produce. Increasing numbers of people in the economically developed world grow grossly fat and unhealthy on the heavily promoted commodities of the junk-food industry.

Capitalist methods of food production have led to a number of outbreaks of food poisoning resulting in deaths and serious health damage. In the 1980s it was the injection of hormones into calves to fatten them quicker that led to birth defects. There followed salmonella, E coli, BSE and a spate of more recent food scandals. The causes are a mix of misuse of GM technology, pesticides that induce cancers, animal maltreatment, no or inadequate labelling, and abysmal hygiene standards. Market forces always value profits above human welfare. Whatever remedial measures are taken are usually too little and too late.

Food in socialism

Marx famously dissuaded us from writing recipes for future cookshops. We can speculate about the future, but would be wise not to go into too much detail. However, since socialists advocate the replacement of capitalism with socialism we are obliged to outline, at least in principle, how the new system will work. Without majority agreement and action on these principles some form of capitalism, reformed or unreformed, will continue.

Socialism means a classless society – no working class employed and exploited to produce food among other commodities, no capitalist class to own the means of food and other production and distribution. With no workers required to be employed in activities useful only in capitalism – banking, insurance, the war industry, among many others – more of us will be able to devoted more time and energies to producing and distributing food. With profit no longer the spur to activity, short-term policies leading to environmental damage will give way to long-term and sustainable policies.

Probably there will still be big eaters and small eaters, vegetarians and carnivores, even those who like fast food once it is rid of its capitalist connotations. In our pamphlet Socialist Principles Explained we discuss how food production and distribution may be organised in a socialist world. To some extent existing bodies like the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the UN may be converted and used for socialist purposes. But it may be that other and novel arrangements will be called for.

Socialists today lean towards being technophiles or simple-lifers, or somewhere in between. Some of us look to a future of socialist restaurants and hotels and less home cooking – others like the idea of having more time for artisanal rather than industrial food production and preparation. All tastes will be catered for.

Stan Parker

These FoolishThings . . . (1996)

The Scavenger column from the July 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Pornography

W.H. Smith admitted it had inadvertently sent Mr Shaheen copies of a magazine called Lipstick, unaware of its adult content. The spokeswoman added: “We stock far fewer of these titles than others, and they are a small part of the market. There is a limit beyond which we will not go, but we have to balance commercial and moral obligations.” Sales of adult magazines have risen by 10 percent in the past year. Guardian, 11 April.

Why BSE?

The deep reason for BSE and CJD is that the modern world has lost sight of what agriculture is for . .  In the Western world agriculture is designed to make money . . . About half the grain and more than half the pulses grown in the Western world feed livestock . . .  We could just eat less meat. It is produced in such vast quantities only for profit . . . Meat is sold and sold again because it is more profitable to feed 10 kilos of wheat to cattle and pigs than sell one kilo for papadoms. Colin Tudge, Independent on Sunday, 24 March.

“He loved Big Brother”

Job hunters face a new hurdle in their search for work—the value test. Increasingly, employers are checking candidates values to see if they fit the organisation’s goals and way of working. A candidate’s technical expertise and key competencies are almost taken for granted. Values represent the spirit of the company and are increasingly seen as the key to rising profits and maintaining a motivated and cheerful workforce. Financial Mail on Sunday, 26 May.

We said we’re sorry!

Shell mounted a robust defence of its activities in Nigeria yesterday, ruling out withdrawal from the country, and calling for an atmosphere of “reconciliation”. Chairman John Jennings attempted to draw the sting from attacks on Shell’s policy in Nigeria at the group’s annual meeting, agreeing to shareholder calls for a moment’s “quiet reflection” in memory of writer Ken Saro-Wiwa, a long-time critic of Shell who was hanged by Nigeria’s military government last November. Mr Jennings admitted publicly for the first time that Shell had bought around 100 handguns for police guarding the operations in Ogoniland, the Nigerian region where it had been accused of damaging the environment, and where Mr Saro-Wiwa’s campaign was based. He also admitted that Shell’s drilling standards in Nigeria were not as high as those applied elsewhere and that Shell had suffered more oil spills in Nigeria than elsewhere. Guardian, 16 May.

Fair shares

Share options and compensation pay-offs are set to earn West Midlands Travel bosses millions of pounds, it was revealed yesterday. The share options— agreed before the takeover of the Birmingham bus giant by National Express last year—entitled ex-chairman Don Colston to pay only £385 for shares in WMT’s new owner which are now worth almost £1.2 million. Former managing director Joe Duffy, who will receive almost £400,000 in compensation when he retires at the end of this month [April), paid about £562 for shares valued yesterday at £1.75 million. Evening Mail, 10 April.

Bleeding workers

Until now, employees at the Mechctronics plant in St. Helens Auckland, County Durham, have been allowed to donate blood at a nearby working men’s club every six months on the firm’s time .. . (Now) they have been told they can still go to give blood but must work an extra 45 minutes to make up for lost productivity. Evening Mail, 30 April.

The Scavenger

Tiny Tips (2025)

The Tiny Tips column from the July 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

The watch is a limited edition of only 150 pieces that’s already being delivered to customers. The retail price is $330,000…prices on the secondary market will get a bit bonkers. 

[HODINKEE]

Pakistan’s claims to all of Kashmir are driven by the region’s hydrological importance, its majority-Muslim population, and the military’s interest in rallying the nation behind it on these grounds. 

[Andrew Korybko’s Newsletter]

‘That’s where I sleep, under that bridge’ he says, pointing to a nearby cluster of tents beneath a highway overpass. ‘And the dogs are up there with their own private pool. They probably eat more in a day than we do in a month’. 

[NPR]

Underage workers, in some cases, have been hired to kill poultry flocks, handle dead carcasses and clean industrial poultry farms. Workers sometimes lack personal protective equipment or receive damaged gear, despite the risk of the virus jumping from animals to people. Dealing with a federal backlog, some farms have used killing methods considered inhumane, because it can be quicker and cheaper. ‘The biggest factor in agricultural safety is the urgency’ said Bethany Alcauter, director of research and public health for the National Center for Farmworker Health, a Texas-based nonprofit that advocates for worker safety and health. ‘Everything has to get done in a short amount of time, and that really can be problematic because there’s not the same amount of time to adequately train workers’.

[truthdig]

‘Trump’s view of a man at a desk moving pieces of the economy around like rooks and pawns on a chessboard is what socialism is all about—though the old tyrants in Moscow at least had the humility to assume that a committee of experts would be necessary to manage the economy according to ‘scientific‘ principles or at least the guile to pretend that they believed it, whereas Trump apparently has swallowed his own silly god-man horsepucky, being, as he is, an ass of exceptional asininity’. 

[MEDIAITE]

On July 28, 2024, Venezuelans turned out to vote in large numbers despite more than a decade of systematic repression and human rights violations under President Nicolás Maduro. Hours after polls closed, the Electoral Council declared that Maduro had been re-elected, with over 51 percent of the vote. The United Nations Electoral Technical Team and the Carter Center, which observed the elections, said the process lacked transparency and integrity, and questioned the declared result. The Carter Center said that the precinct-level tally sheets published by the opposition, which seemed to indicate that opposition candidate Edmundo González had won, were reliable and ‘authentic’. The Electoral Council failed to release the official tally sheets and did not conduct the required audits or citizen verification processes mandated by law. Thousands of protesters took to the streets in demonstrations, most of them peaceful, demanding a transparent and fair counting of the votes. They were met with brutal repression.

[HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH]

(These links are provided for information and don’t necessarily represent our point of view.)

News: Down on the farm (2001)

From the June 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Down on the farm

Capitalism, when viewed from the perspective of human needs, is a crazy social system. We can have building workers unemployed whilst people go without decent housing and wonderful technological advances that could produce all the food, clothing and shelter needed for all of humanity in a clean, healthy environment – yet this technology is used to poison the rivers, lakes and oceans of tire world, because of the profit motive of capitalism. The latest piece of madness to emerge from the insane asylum that is capitalism is reported in the New Scientist online News:

“A Canadian farmer must pay Monsanto for the genetically modified crops found growing in his fields, even if the seeds blew there from neighbouring fields and he never intended to grow them in the first place, a federal court ruled last week. Basically, the judge is saying that it doesn’t matter how it got into your field, it’s Monsantos property. “But how does a farmer know if he’s got a genetically altered seed that belongs to Monsanto?” asks the farmer Percy Schmeiser of Bruno, Saskatchewan. The decision is an important one for Monsanto, which says it has to stop farmers stealing its property. Farmers in Canada and the US must sign agreements with Monsanto saying they will buy new GM seed each year instead of saving seeds new from the previous year’s harvest.”

What will the profit motive do with GM food?

Monsanto has made great play of how their disease resistant seeds would help to produce more food for the starving “Third World”. How wonderful it would all he for the farmers of Africa and Asia. However, they failed to highlight the contracts that US and Canadian farmers must sign about buying new seed each season. The same contracts would have to be signed in Africa and Asia. Every technological advance that human ingenuity devises is distorted by the profit motive.

Nature (2025)

Book Review from the May 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Nature of Nature. The Metabolic Disorder of Climate Change. By Vandana Shiva. Chelsea Green Publishing. 2024. 162pp.

This is a wonderfully eloquent treatise on the human relationship with food and how that relationship is being disrupted by the despoiling of the earth and biosphere that is taking place and by the earth being treated as ‘raw material for industrial production’. In essence, it echoes the famous line from Rousseau: ‘You are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody’ It imparts with the utmost urgency messages such as ‘biodiversity erosion has now become an extinction emergency’ and ‘the climate crisis has become a climate emergency’, not simply stating them as unevidenced opinion but backing them up with research and evidence gathered over decades from the most well-informed scientific sources.

The author is particularly scathing about ‘agribusiness’ (also referred to as ‘the chemical and industrial food corporation’ and ‘the Poison Cartel’) and the alarming rate at which it is not only destroying biodiversity and the environment with its methods of cultivation and extraction but is now also, in response to criticism of its activities and consumer concern, pretending to ‘decarbonise’ its industrial food chain by what it falsely calls ‘regenerative agriculture’. Even its investment in meat (and dairy and egg) substitute products as a supposed replacement for intensively produced food is, she argues, a way of bamboozling consumers into thinking switching to such products (referred to here as ‘fake food’) somehow helps to lessen degradation of the biosphere and pressure on natural resources. Most of it, she claims, even when plant-based, is in fact just as ultra-processed, chemically and resource intensive and harmful to health as food produced and marketed through the conventional industrial food systems and just as, if not more, wasteful of the earth’s natural resources. The result, she states, is that it ‘ignores our relationship with nature’ and ‘reduces the bio-diverse, self-organised, living earth to raw material for the money machine’.

All of this of course means that the author is profoundly opposed to the so-called ‘deep green’ agenda of renewability, regarding it as no more than a sop to the growth mantra of industrialised production. She sees the complex infrastructure needed to set up, deal with and maintain ‘renewable’ activities and technologies as both continuing to rely on fossil fuels and involving at least as much savage exploitation of the earth‘s fragile resources, both biological and geological, as in ‘non-green’ methods of production. So she is intensely critical of apparent environmental champions such as George Monbiot, referring to him as one of ‘the messiahs of fake food’ for his claim that ‘lab-grown food will soon destroy farming – and save the planet’. Such a view she dismisses as ‘false at every level’, since ‘being energy, resource and capital intensive, the lab food and fake food economy is highly non-sustainable’. A ‘greenwashing operation’ pure and simple and a massive fraud is the way this book’s author sees all this – at best an exercise in rearranging the deckchairs. But, even worse, it is, she tells us ‘a fully fledged counterfeiting operation that aims to gain control over our diets by making food ever more dependent on the multinational companies that produce and patent it’.

All this constitutes a searing indictment of capitalist industrial production, even though the author does not once in this book use the word ‘capitalist’ or ‘capitalism’, preferring instead to use terms such as ‘maldevelopment’ or ‘the economy of greed’. This may be a deliberate choice on her part so as not to lay herself open to any accusation of political partisanship as opposed to following the evidence of facts and science. Nevertheless, it is still clear that she is describing what socialists call commodity production, i.e. the production of goods for sale on the market with a view to profit for the tiny minority class who own the means to produce them. And she does show that she knows of the existence of this class (she mentions ‘the 1%’ on several occasions), that they are ‘predatory’ and that their activity ‘places profits above nature and people’. Yet there is no evidence in her book to indicate that she is looking outside the framework of commodity production for a different way of doing things.

At the same time, she has ‘an alternative path’ to propose to the current system’s ‘chemically grown and highly processed’ methods of food production. This consists of methods of production that would be ‘ecological not industrial … conserving and regenerating the earth’s biodiversity’, and these would involve ‘following the ecological laws of the earth – the law of diversity and the law of return, shortening the distance between producers and consumers, deindustrialising and deglobalising food systems to reduce emissions and enhance health’, thus offering ‘solutions to the climate crisis, the extinction crisis and the hunger and health crises, because the health of the planet and our health are interconnected’. It must be said that this is nothing if not an admirable vision. The snag, however, is that the author seems to see it as achievable within the framework of the present system of buying and selling and production for profit – and this by means of social pressure and the goodwill and actions of governments. Unfortunately this ignores the reality that all governments of all kinds and stripes are servants of that system (i.e. the capitalist system) and their role is one of oversight and of attempting to make it run in the least worst way. They are not in the business of overthrowing it or regulating it for the common benefit – or indeed for anyone’s benefit other than that of the small minority who already monopolise the planet’s wealth.

The existing method of production and distribution, with its growth imperative and its commodification of everything, has, as this book so trenchantly informs us, seriously damaged and may well be on the way to completely destroying the natural environment. How can we prevent this going any further and reversing it? Not via tweaks to the way the current system works but by a democratic political movement expressing a majority will of the world’s people to cooperatively organise a leaderless, stateless society without governments, without markets, without buying and selling and with free access to all goods and services – a society which will recognise the necessity to produce and distribute sustainably while being sensitive not just to the needs of the human species but to the whole biosphere, the whole environment of which we are a part – the real ‘economy of care’ that Vandana Shiva so passionately advocates for but offers no realistic path to.

Howard Moss

From poverty to power (2008)

Book Review from the December 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

How Active Citizens and Effective States can Change the World by Duncan Green (Oxfam Publishing 2008)

Duncan Green defines an effective state as one that “can guarantee security and the rule of law,” and has an effective strategy “to ensure inclusive economic growth”. Such a state should be accountable to citizens and able to guarantee their rights. Active citizens are linked to the state by a “combination of rights and obligations”: making use of these rights to improve their conditions.

He argues that it is the combination of poor men and women and their national governments that provide the main actors in the fight against poverty and inequality. Case studies are given to illustrate how even the poorest people have by their organised and persistent actions brought about beneficent change in their circumstances. Like the Chiquitanos people of Bolivia who after 12 years of “unremitting and often frustrating struggle” won legal title to the 1m-hectare indigenous territory of Monteverde.

He is aware that the scales are weighted against the poor in all areas. For example, research is dominated by the private sector: in agriculture 5 large multinational corporations spend $7.3bn per year on agricultural research on high value, high profit products while the staple foods of poor communities are “likely to be overlooked.” In biotechnology the picture is the same with GM crops being genetically engineered to meet the needs of large scale farms. There is no serious investment in the five most important semi-arid and tropical crops.

Half of the world’s population lives in the countryside and the majority of people in absolute poverty live in the rural areas. OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) sources are given for the claim that over the past 20 years aid donors and governments have effectively withdrawn from the countryside. Mention is made of the well known ‘structural development programmes’ which imposed a ‘radical free market’ on debtor countries.

Agricultural growth, Green argues, reduces poverty but is most effective when small farmers are able to capture a fair share of the benefits. Local farmers, he says, should be helped to improve the quality of their produce so that for example retail giants like McDonalds and Pizza Hut use local produce instead of importing produce from the USA. Here his ‘active’ citizens would be small farmers “organising their ability to negotiate a fair deal”. However when it comes to buying fertilizer or seeds, or selling produce or their labour, small producers are dominated by the large corporations. Small farmers are “de facto employees”.

In Green’s view efficient states should take the environment and the enhancement of the daily lives of the poor as prime considerations. Global governance (the “web of international institutions, laws regulations, and agreements”) could help, and the 8 main ways he lists include managing the global economy, redistributing wealth through aid or international taxation, averting health threats and avoiding war. However global governance fails to live up to its ideals. “The WTO is frozen, regional trade agreements are proliferating and introducing profoundly unfair trade and investment rules, the G8 is failing to keep its promises on aid…”, then there is the threat of climate change and “a looming financial crisis”.

The book is well sourced with a 24-page bibliography and three further pages listing background papers. There is much useful information covering more areas than can be dealt with in a review. However Duncan Green takes a moral stance whereas under capitalism the prime consideration cannot be the welfare of citizens active or otherwise, but sale and profit; this drives development (forget sustainable) – and can also inhibit it. And the state that in his view is supposed to facilitate change will only do so to the extent that the interests of the owning class are served.

Pat Deutz

Food as a weapon (1992)

From the August 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

With the ending of the Cold War. American military power is no longer sufficient to hold its real economic rivals— Europe and Japan—in check, and the three power blocs are squaring up for the battle for world economic domination in the 21st century.

The current battlefield is a scries of talks on world trade, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which have now been stalled for nearly two years, with the European and US governments hurling abuse at each other over the emotive issue of farm subsidies.

So what is GATT, and why does an apparently minor dispute over handouts to farmers threaten to bring the world trading system to the point of all-out economic war?

The GATT process is aimed at promoting “free trade" amongst the competing states of the world, tearing down barriers to imports and allowing consumers to choose the most efficient supplier of anything from banking services to hairdryers.

In reality, of course, there is never any such thing as free trade among equal players— no ‘‘level playing field". US-based multinational corporations. with the economic battering ram of vast scales of production behind them, and the military and political power of the US state in the not too distant background, are clearly going to make easy meat of the struggling young industries throughout the “Third World”, currently protected by their own governments’ trade barriers.

Trade wars

Now all this is fine with European governments as well. They too have multinationals based on their soil, only too eager to participate in the turkey shoot. In the coming months you will doubtless hear ministers extolling the virtues of Free Trade for the health of the world economy.

But when we come to agriculture. there is a slight fly in the milk churn. European farms tend to be small and “inefficient" (unprofitable), whereas their US competitors tend to be large and “efficient"—fully industrialised and reaping the advantages of economics of scale.

This, of course, would give them a significant advantage in a genuinely free market, almost certainly devastating the European farm industry, and scoring round one of the battle for 21st century economic domination to America.

And American farmers have never been more desperate for markets for grain, which regularly gluts the American market. (Of course, this does not mean that there are no hungry people in America, simply that they can’t afford to buy what lies rotting in warehouses).

In fact this is another bizarre consequence of the ending of the Cold War. since in those good old days the Soviet empire bought all Americas surplus grain and paid on the nose with hard currency.

Europe’s governments, then, urged on by the powerful farming lobby, are determined not to give up their agricultural subsidies, while the US is desperate to prise the European market open.

A few months ago. a high- level EC delegation led by Portuguese Prime Minister Cavaco Silva and Commission head Jacques Delors, visited President Hush in Washington for crisis talks, with Cavaco Silva making it quite clear how deep the rift had become. “Sometimes there is a discrepancy between the apparent political goodwill and the technical proposals put on the table by the US”, he told the European (9 April).

And that’s just about as close as a diplomat comes to calling the other side a dirty cheating liar.

Both sides only entrenched their positions at the G7 economic summit in Munich last month, with John Major suffering a major rebuff to his attempts to break the deadlock, and vowing to continue to “bully, badger and cajole" fellow leaders into living up to the undertakings to conclude a deal by the end of the year.

In fact, although the European side has offered a 30 percent reduction in protection and support for agriculture, this would be on the basis of levels operating in 1986—a real cut of little more than 15 percent (The Grocer, 23 November 1991).

In the EC’s last review of support prices in June 1991. ministers cut a modest 1.5 percent from levels of support for oilseed, and at the EC Lisbon summit price support for cereals was cut 29 per cent. "Still not enough" said Hush.

Agri-business

The Daily Telegraph issued a dire warning following the failure of the Munich summit that the world is edging closer to a menacing era of protectionism. “There is a real danger that the Uruguay round of GATT could breakdown altogether, taking us back to the unstable trade bloc structures of the 1930s” (9 July).

The point is that food production is governed by the laws of competitive production for profit. Manufactures of food only survive by selling at a reduced price against their competitors, and with a glut of unsaleable food on the world market, pressure to subsidise unprofitable, mainly small-scale European producers against their industrialised US rivals is immense.

So the EC’s subsidies pile up yet more unsellable food, and US farming corporations are forced to watch their own surplus production rot in warehouses because it can’t be sold anywhere. The GATT negotiations are therefore a trial of political and economic strength between US and European agri-business, with their respective governments fighting their corners round the negotiating table.

What insanity! Capitalism— the competitive production of goods for sale at a profit—yet again proves itself to be completely unable to cope with a world in which we could provide an abundance of food for each citizen of this planet. It is the only system that actually manages to find adequate food production a major crisis. Surely its time to establish a system where this is an opportunity. through free access to all food production, to abolish hunger once and for all.

Andy Thomas

Adulterating our food (1966)

From the March 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

“If you must adulterate your milk, please use this clean water.” (Notice on a water tank in an Indian dairy, in the 1930's.)

Did you know that the first ever attempt, in the English speaking world anyway, to legislate against food adulteration originated in Britain in 1860? That year “An Act for Preventing the Adulteration of Articles of Food or Drink” was passed by Parliament, although by the time it reached the Statute Book it had itself suffered such adulteration that it was virtually inoperative. However, it paved the way for the other laws that followed fairly rapidly, and an interesting point about its original draft was that there was provision for regulation-making powers almost as wide in some respects as those which exist today. That should be a sobering thought for the enthusiastic reformist.

Like so many comparatively modern problems, food adulteration became a real headache only with the advent of capitalism. It was the Industrial Revolution which pushed the peasants into the towns, no longer producing their own foodstuffs but having to rely on those produced and sold by others. There was a growing demand for cheap food in line with the wage worker's puny purchasing power, and it was little wonder that adulteration began to flourish. Indeed, it became a very profitable business and by the beginning of the 19th century some of the more far-seeing capitalists were getting rather alarmed at its possible effects on the labour force.

It was not just that ale and milk were being watered down, but also that highly poisonous substances such as lead, mercury, tincture of capsicum and essence of cayenne, were being added to food. These and other abuses were publicised by The Lancet Analytical Sanitary Commission, and were investigated by a Parliamentary committee in 1855. Their confirming report is interesting for its assessment of the problem in commercial terms, something with which we are so familiar in 1966: —

Not only is the public health thus being exposed to danger and pecuniary fraud being committed on the whole community, but public morality is tainted and the high commercial character of the country . . . lowered both at home and in the eyes of foreign countries. (Quoted by Dr. J. H. Hamence, in a paper to the Pure Food Centenary Conference, 1960.)

Since those days we have come a long way. or have we? It is true, as Dr. Hamence also tells us, that by the turn of the century “the grosser forms of adulteration had largely disappeared and the lesser forms were being kept well under control” due mainly to the efforts of the public analysts. Equally true is it that today most food manufacture's have their own scientific staff and analytical chemists to help them keep within the mass of Government regulations. Yet the duties of the public analyst, although much changed when compared with his early predecessors, have expanded a great deal over the years. They now involve use of such methods of detection as chromatography and spectro-photometry. Why is this?

Well, capitalism doesn’t stand still, of course. As we have said, it was responsible for the emergence of the adulteration problem, and it also causes it to continue, but in different guises and forms. (This, by the way, is not to mention the very real new danger of contamination from radio active fallout.)

The analyst of the 1960’s has to be on his guard against a multitude of additives, colourings, anti-oxidants and pesticide residues (there were about 750 different pesticides on the market last year), to say nothing of the need to check manufacturers' claims on the nutritional value of their products. In this connection, the 1960 words of Dr. Hamence could easily have been written today:—

. . . advertising is straining at the leash and heaven knows what we should be told about a foodstuff if there were no public analyst.

All this is not surprising in the context of mid-20th century capitalism. For while the question of purity is one which may constantly concern a food manufacturer this is only part of the story. In the chaos that is capitalism, all sorts of interests compete, sometimes with the result that for each step taken forward, just a bit more than that one step is taken backward, Agriculture, for instance, has become “agribusiness” with the accent on intensive methods—hence the arrival of the broiler chicken, that “rather dull food for masses of humans, most of whom live mechanised and rather dull lives” (Elspeth Huxley—Brave New Victuals), And with it goes the problem of diseases—serious ones like leukaemia —to which the broiler seems particularly prone, and which some doctors fear may be passed on to consumers.

Again, with an eye on the market and a quick turnover, cockerels are caponised and bullocks fattened by giving them synthetic oestrogens (female hormones), which are apt to hang around in the carcasses and are resistant even to cooking. Miss Huxley points out:—

Oestrogens are potent substances, liable if carelessly handled to induce in human males squeaky voices, beardless chins and swelling breasts. In female domestic animals they can cause cystic ovaries, prolapse of the rectum and nymphomania, so they might not be good for the girls.

The amounts in meat are residual only, but the experts cannot say for sure whether they might accumulate over a period and damage health (prolonged administration of oestrogens to rabbits and mice has caused them to have cancer). So in the meantime, the practice will continue, together with the profits.

The Sunday Times colour magazine for October 17th, 1965, contained an interesting survey on current food production and tastes. It drew attention to the uniform "blandness” of taste at which the manufacturers aim .and blamed this trend at least in part on to that evil euphemism of the sixties, ‘market research”. This, thought Priscilla Chapman, was what had persuaded food firms to produce, and consumers to ask for. the dull flavourless substances that our poorer grandparents would have rejected out of hand. But to blame market research is to beg the question. Why market research? Why markets? And there is another side to it. intimately bound up with the production of things for the market goes the modern rush and tear which have pushed working class tastes further down the scale. A prime Scots sirloin is expensive and takes a long time to cook, unlike the pre tenderised steak, cut from low-grade mass-produced barley beef, and packed ready for (he oven. And as time is becoming daily a more important consideration, barley beef steak is ousting the sirloin.

But the Sunday Times survey was at least useful in reminding us of the truly enormous amounts of synthetic colours, flavourisers, stabilisers, emulsifiers and preservatives we consume with our foods, many of them doubtful from a health point of view, on the experts own evidence. We are reminded, too, of the pesticide danger to which Rachel Carson so vividly drew attention in Silent Spring. Following her book, the late President Kennedy appointed a committee to investigate the question in detail. Said the committee, the average American has about 12 parts per million of D.D.T. in his tissues, the figure among farm workers being 17 p.p.m., and 648 p.p.m. among workers at pesticide factories. The committee admitted the possibility of toxicity. They could hardly do otherwise in face of the wholesale destruction of wildlife and fish in the Mississippi Basin from the effects of the same chemical.

No one seems to know just how harmful the effects of ibis and other pesticides are, although according to Anthony Tucker (Guardian 1.2.66) they are real enough, “in spite of an upsurge of defensive comment from the pesticide industry itself." Uneasiness continues to grow over the whole question, meantime: in America, Germany and other European countries, some of the substances have been banned, but are still permitted in Britain—and vice versa. But the basis of the problem, remains the same everywhere—production for profit. As Elspeth Huxley again puts it:—

The chemical industry is highly competitive, and pressure very strong to move anything new on to the market before the rival backroom boys across the way get on to it. This pressure has forced new products into use before they should have been. (Brave New Victuals. PP. 115-116)

So this is the background against which the public analyst and his equivalent abroad have to work, it is little wonder that he finds it hard going. And contrary to popular belief, the mass production of today is not geared to meet the needs of an increasing population, but to meet the needs of a market. How else can we explain the crisis of over-production which hit the broiler industry, for example, soon after it started in this country, so that many suppliers were driven out of business? Today, less than 1,000 growers produce 90 per cent of all broilers marketed, and the number of chick breeders has fallen in 10 years from 3,000 to 12.

It cannot be denied, of course, that there is a problem of pest control in food production. Nevertheless, many of the chemicals turned out are quite unnecessary and overlap the effects of others. The much safer method of breeding animal and plant strains resistant to the pests concerned, is promising, but developments are necessarily slow and do not hold out the hope of quick profitability. But when all is said and done, it is only in a crazy set-up of private property that such a situation is tolerated. In a sane world, it would be unthinkable that any substance should be used which involved even the smallest element of risk to human health and welfare. And the production of any chemical would depend solely on whether, after the most exhaustive testing. it could be said to be of real benefit to human beings What other motive could there possibly be?

Eddie Critchfield

Enough food for all (2020)

From the October 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Malnutrition is caused by “the lack of access to sufficient, nutritious and safe food” due to poverty’ (UN Food and Agriculture Organisation 2017).

Within the current political system planning ahead on whatever front, the main goal will be in some way or another connected to the financial aspect. Housing, for instance, is a major problem for millions around the world even though it is designated by a UN resolution as a basic human right. In ‘normal’ non-Covid times the UK, with less than one percent and the US, with less than five percent of the global population, both have significant numbers of people living rough on the streets or in hostels whilst more than enough housing remains empty but unavailable to them. On a global level we can only make estimates of the whole picture but there is no doubt that too many millions of people are without one of the basic necessities of life.

Even larger numbers of individuals struggle to get enough to eat, especially nutritious food that would help to keep them healthy and, in most cases, that is also linked to their financial situation. Whether the poor in faraway undeveloped places, both urban and rural, or the poor in supposedly more affluent Western countries, the divisions between haves and have-nots are there in plain sight. Another supposedly human right is not available to them.

Air, water, food and shelter. The four absolute necessities for humankind. Currently a minority has these in plenty but the majority, on a sliding scale, is limited on their access to clean air, enough clean water, sufficient, varied food and shelter suitable to their environment and family needs. Again, all these are limited by a person’s financial situation.

If we value our own being as an individual in this world then surely we recognise a similar value for each and every other human being? And wherever one lives in this world, urban or rural, all have these similar basic requirements.

Imagining removing the financial aspect from our lives is the key to discovering just how different all lives could be, how decision-making becomes inclusive and relevant for all, how this could free people up from a boring and hateful treadmill to creative and inclusive new ways of organising and planning. To be able to move ahead in a way which eliminates all the major negative facts and stress which face humanity right now, to confront them with the aim of protecting both people and planet for the long term.

Cash crops

There is enough food produced currently to feed the global population but much is lost as waste from homes, from shops and from storage facilities. Much food is kept off the market, in storage, to maintain price levels. It is a criminal act, to know that people are dying for lack of food and to deny them access for lack of money. There is food for all but all are not getting it, so something radical has to change to make that happen.

Food has long been a commodity, promoted non-stop in the media – but usually as a processed product rather than a fruit, vegetable, cereal crop, animal or fish. It is something bought in a supermarket in a package. In poorer areas of large towns and cities it has become common to see customers’ baskets filled only with these processed foods because it is cheaper to feed the family this way. Also it becomes more difficult to find fresh produce in these areas – most of the locals could not afford it anyway. Those living in large urban areas may not even have access to a market where fresh food can be found. The more up-market towns may have a ‘farmers market’ weekly or seasonally but the prices tend to be out of reach of many. Globally there are very many different local situations, however similar effects and results will be found according to the earning power of the customer.

The all-consuming hype of mega-corporations and mainstream media, which are paid to push their particular brands of food, is an obstacle that should be easy to overcome when there will be no profit from such advertisements. Associations, foundations, charities and the like will all become redundant when no one is without food or housing.

A current problem in large areas of the world is that of corporate takeover, removing huge populations from productive land in favour of growing crops for profit rather than crops for food. ‘The Green Revolution ‘of the 1960s and 70s which was heralded as the solution to world hunger is a good example of this. What happened over a period of a few years was that a new modified rice, supposedly more nutritious, was grown over huge areas in India, and other parts of Asia, the seed pressed on local farmers and grown by corporations as monocrops. In Asia – the Philippines, Indonesia, India, Bangladesh, there are thousands of varieties of rice and this vast area is considered as the most biodiverse in the world for vegetables, fruit, root crops and cereals. The new rice, as many other genetically modified crops, required large amounts of nitrogen fertilisers and irrigation. The change over some years was revealed by the huge rise in diabetes, the new white rice having a high glycaemic index, with 60 percent of global diabetes occurring in Asia. Plus increasing numbers of people had reduced access to a varied diet as a result of poverty.

Now in 2020 we find another move to push yet another rice as a supposed miracle crop:

‘Agrochemical transnationals (TNCs) and collaborating institutions such as the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) are using concerns over food security during the pandemic to push for an industrial agricultural system that is already discredited’ (theecologist.org/2020/aug/19/ golden-rice-trojan-horse).

The message needed to counter this increasing control of global food is that of the enormous diversity of crops, whether grains, vegetables, fruits, nuts or livestock – fish and meat – and the health benefits of food uncontaminated by chemicals of any kind. There is evidence that much of food production over the previous few decades is proving harmful to humans through allergies, obesity and downright slow poisoning. There are numerous court cases internationally pending from farm workers suffering serious illnesses from exposure to herbicides and pesticides; ongoing information related to corporations attempting to increase the spread of genetically modified crops against the will of many farmers and illegally in some countries.

One example, India, is covered in detail by Colin Todhunter at Countercurrents (bit.ly/3bEsoCc). Recently revealed are details of the revolving door between developers, patent-holders and regulators – nothing new there then. With regard to GM brinjal (aubergine) Bangladesh is now being targeted as both India and the Philippines have so far rejected it. Although India has officially accepted only one GM crop, cotton about 20 years ago, there are examples of other trials taking place without official approval.

Without the profit motive

Without the profit motive there could be no incentive to force these various changes and communities would be free to choose their own way when looking to the future. Wide-ranging discussions would take place between all stakeholders and experts as to the efficacy of trials and possible implementation. Certainly without the current global political system true democracy could at last raise its head and provide populations with the diversity of multiple food stuffs and do it in ways which don’t pollute our water and our soil, whilst also reducing the harmful gases emitted.

UN estimates for the next 30 years show a worldwide increase in the percentage of populations living in urban areas. For the UK it is projected to be 90 percent by 2050. No doubt this will be linked to work-related projections for the convenience and most profitable conditions for the capitalist system’s way of working. Now, during the Covid pandemic, there has been an increase in UK urban areas of applications for allotments – up by 300 percent in one area. When moving towards changing to a socialist system there are a number of positives from an increase in local crop cultivation. Gardens, rooftops, walls, underground spaces (there has been one for several years under Clapham High Street) are all being used for food crops. Most of these can benefit the urban environment from increased biodiversity with plenty of scope for improving environments whilst also being productive. There is a short but interesting article on this topic at https://bit.ly/3bFYIo9.

The system we are living in now is unsustainable. The top one percent of EU households have carbon footprints 22 times larger than climate targets allow. Only about 5 percent of EU households live within the required limits. A reduction per person of 2.5 tonnes of CO2 per year by 2030 is required to reach this target. The EU average per person is 8 tonnes, the top one percent produce 55 tonnes. A global problem being given scant political attention.

According to James Hansen of Columbia University, regarding climate change, ‘the agonising efforts of scientists to avoid provoking accusations of alarmism have led to an innate optimism bias – sometimes leading to cautious underestimates.’

Until we can move away from the entrenched format of everything for profit there is little to no chance of changing the direction the planet is headed. Removing the capitalist approach to life is a better scenario for all global inhabitants, human and other. Then choices can and will be made for the benefit of all. What choice of food to be grown will be discussed and decided by people who have the right information. Releasing us from the many constraints of money will enhance lives positively. Our future choice of urban or rural living will be made freely, fulfilling personal goals. Looking ahead to the collective goal of socialism we acknowledge the vast diversity of cultures around the globe and the need to recognise and welcome all variations. After all we are just one small part of a vast, beautiful, ancient tapestry of human life. We don’t know just how all the myriad global communities will organise together but we are well aware that all the skills available will be welcomed far and wide. We need each other to protect our future generations’ well-being and whole environment.

Janet Surman