Without comment (1986)

From the November 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

For more than a decade now. the gap between population growth and food production in Africa has been widening. On present trends, says the FAO. the continent will have 650m more people and an annual deficit in cereal supplies of 100m tonnes by the year 2010 — more than the current yearly volume of world trade in wheat. 

Such shortfalls in the developing world have come to seem particularly offensive at a time when industrialised countries are struggling with budget-busting food surpluses that they cannot sell. The contrast between the two is probably the most striking and frustrating paradox of our age. 

It leads many sympathetic people to suggest that the problem is not one of food production, but one of food distribution. Find a way of recycling the food surpluses of the North to the food deficit areas of the South, they argue, and the problem will be on its way to a solution. But that hardly seems an adequate long-term answer to the problems of hunger in countries which are without exception still agriculturally-based, and likely to remain so for many years. 

The conundrum can be put another way. There is a problem of distribution, to be sure, but it is more to do with money than with food. People are not hungry these days because food supplies are not available; they are hungry because they are poor. 

(Financial Times 4 September 1986)

Famine in India (1946)

From the June 1946 issue of the Socialist Standard

” . . . If this country does not get 4,000,000 tons of grain quickly, anything between 5,000,000 and 10,000,000 people are going to die. They will not get that much help, so they will, in fact, starve.” You remember the Bengal famine. This will be worse. Not so spectacular, perhaps, but worse. In this queer land where the few are fantastically rich and the many are unbelievably, grindingly poor, the poor are going to be thinned out this year by something like the population of London. . . . .” (Daily Express, 23/4/46.)

One of Lord Beaverbrook’s team of high-pressure journalists, James Cameron, writing from Madras, makes this prophecy of what is going to happen in India this year, and there seems to be no reason to doubt his words.

Large numbers of Indians have, of course, died every year through starvation or semi-starvation, but the figure this year promises to be so staggering that even the Daily Express cannot tuck the news away in some odd corner, or ignore it entirely. The Daily Express not only records the facts, but on the same page as Cameron’s article tells us the cause. It says :—-

“The world famine has little to do with the war. Real cause, drought; drought last year in Australia, the Argentine, Canada and the United States; drought which brought total supplies in those four wheat-producing countries down to 68,500,000 tons this year from 90,000,000 tons in 1942-43 . . .”

But Mother Nature seems to have been in a selective mood in withholding her bounties in India, for Mr. Cameron notes that it is the “unbelievably, grindingly poor” who are going to starve.

The Daily Express’s ready-made explanation may comfort the complacent, but it fails to deceive those who know that wide-spread famine is one of the perpetually recurring horrors of the present system of society. Millions are going to starve in India this year for the same reason that millions have starved there and in other parts of the world for many years past in peace and war whether the crops have failed or not. They starved during the boom years as well as during the great industrial depression between the wars, when crops were being destroyed in an effort to maintain prices. Millions will starve in the future as long as “the few are fantastically rich and the many are unbelievably, grindingly poor.” A million and a half died of starvation in Bengal in 1943, and the report issued by the Famine Inquiry Commission (reported in Forward, 19/5/45) said: —

“After considering all the circumstances, we cannot avoid the conclusion that it lay in the power of the Government of Bengal, by bold, resolute and well-conceived measures at the right time, to have largely prevented the tragedy of the famine as it actually took place. . . . Enormous profits were made out of the calamity and, in the circumstances, profits for some meant death for others. A large part of the community lived in plenty while others starved, and there was much indifference in the face of suffering. . . .”

But starvation is not just an Eastern problem. Sir J. B. Orr’s investigations (“Food, Health and Income,” 1936) showed that no fewer than four and a half million persons in this country existed on a food expenditure of 4s. per week, and there was no suggestion that these went hungry for any other reason than that they were poor. This is the one thing common to all these tales of hunger. The hungry ones are always the poor.

Mr. Cameron savs: —

” …. It has been said that the great expanse of India’s soil, if properly worked, could feed the world. Instead, the world is called on to feed India. The answer, of course, is water. These are not the richly irrigated lands of the Punjab. Here it all must come from the sky, and it has not …. But there again it is not wholly the fault of the drought. Arable land in the South of India has been worked and worked for centuries, till it is worked out . . .” (Daily Express, 23/4/46.)

Why were the fields not irrigated and why has the land been worked out? It must be because there was no profit in vast irrigation schemes and a properly balanced agriculture. It cannot be beyond the powers of industry and science, which produced Mulberry harbours and imprisoned atomic energy, to carry the water of India to the places where it is needed, or restore the fertility of an exhausted soil.

Who cares about the starving Indian poor? Certainly not those, coloured and white, who have built colossal fortunes by the impoverishment of the Indian masses, whose main diet at the best, according to Cameron, consists of “a strange, malleable, doughy lump, in almost every way resembling putty . . . ,” made from seeds seen in England only in a parrot’s tray. He says that these people are unable to digest any other form of food, but we shall examine this extraordinary statement a little more closely if it can be shown that the “fantastically rich” also possess peculiar digestions like these.

We shall not forget this latent crime of capitalism. We know that even if Messrs. Jinnah, Nehru, Ghandi, Cripps and the rest can decide who is to have the privilege of presiding over the miseries of the Indian poor, they will not then proceed to remove the yoke from their necks. Can we, the wage workers in Britain, do anything to help capitalism’s victims in India? Yes, by building up the revolutionary movement of socialism, nationally and internationally, until it is strong enough to take over the powers of government to establish a system of society based on the common ownership of the means, of production and distribution. There is no other road that the world’s workers can take to free themselves from hunger and misery.

GEE.

Editorial: Capitalism and the food shortage (1946)

Editorial from the March 1946 issue of the Socialist Standard

THE Governments of the world are worried about the food problem. Mr. Herbert Lehman, Director- General of U.N.R.R. A., declares that: “More men, women and children in Europe and the Far East are hungry this winter than at any time in modern history." He calls it “the greatest critical emergency which has faced the United Nations since the end of the war.” The defenders of capitalism do not admit that the existence of the problem and the inhuman and bungling way in which it is being handled are evidences of the inherent defects of that social system, but that is what they are. It is not true that the shortage exists only as a bye-product of war, for in pre-war years, when there were great surpluses of wheat and other products there were, alongside of them, millions of undernourished workers and peasants too poor to buy the food they needed. War is itself an inevitable outcome of capitalist trade rivalries and has, too, a result that is welcome from the capitalist standpoint, of removing for a time the huge unsaleable surpluses of raw materials and foodstuffs. One of the reasons why war propaganda like that of the Nazis was listened to by the workers was that it was linked up with promises that territorial expansion would provide more food. Presumably with this in mind, Mr. Clinton Anderson, Secretary of Agriculture in the United States, demanded, in a broadcast in October, 1945, that: “hunger must be eliminated as a primary cause of war,” and “ the United Nations must not permit the pangs of hunger to bring about the basic fears and greeds which result in war.” —The Times, 15 Oct., 1945.

He went on to say that “two-thirds of the world’s population was undernourished, yet science and technology had advanced to such a point that the earth’s agricultural resources could fill the need of all.”

In a Socialist world, if a general or local shortage of food existed all the resources of the world would at once be available to move foodstuffs to the area where they were needed, or to increase total production if that was necessary. If, as a temporary measure, consumption of food generally had to be reduced to help a locality where shortage existed, there would be no obstacles in the shape of private ownership and the profit motive.

In the world as it exists to-day not even the realisation that starvation or semi-starvation threatens millions of people can prevent capitalism from functioning in its normal way. People in Europe need dried eggs, while in America, according to the Daily Express (8 Feb., 1946), there is “a glut of eggs” and “poultry farmers are facing ruin as a result." In the same country farm output could have been increased, but because farmers consider the price offered for their grains is too low “ they prefer to feed them to their stock rather than to sell" (The Times, 9 Feb.), and they have deliberately kept output below what it could have been (Daily Telegraph, 9 Feb.). American farmers had not forgotten the ruin that faced them before the war because they had produced too much, not too much for the needs of the population, but more than they could sell at a profit. The Times (9 Feb.; says that with the ending of the war the “fears of agricultural surpluses which haunted the United States between the wars were revived. In spite of the golden prosperity brought by the war years, the farmers recollection of the deep agricultural depression of the twenties and thirties is as active a political force as the ghost of the hungry forties was for a long time in the political history of this country. But the fear of being under an avalanche of farm surpluses, attended by a catastrophic collapse of prices, has proved to have been a misreading of the portents, and the miscalculation has been aggravated by the determination of farmers to hoard grain as a protest against the price levels imposed by Washington.”

At the same time that millions are undernourished—in U.S.A., as well as in other countries—because they cannot afford to buy more, there is not a country in the world in which the rich cannot buy the best food; either openly or in the black market, in unrestricted amounts. In every country labour and resources that could be used to supply the needs of the ill-fed and ill-clothed masses of the population are being used, often with the deliberate encouragement of the Governments, on production of luxury articles for the wealthy or goods for the export drive, or armaments. Hundreds of millions of pounds being spent by the leading Powers on perfecting the bomb or building up peace-time armies, navies and air forces. In Britain, simultaneously with the declaration about the need for more food, we read of booming exports of British cars and other products. The Evening News (9 Feb.), under the heading “British Car Exports Booming,” reported that the Nuffield organisation alone will have sent abroad 20,000 cars by the end of June, when its production will have grown to 1,000 cars a week.

Britain is short of food and because we live under capitalism low-paid agricultural labourers are so anxious to escape to the relatively better paid work in industry that the Labour Government—while refusing to carry out the Labour Party’s own oft- repeated demand that land workers should have wages not less than those in industry—uses the war-time emergency powers to tie agricultural workers to their jobs.

Capitalism is indeed a mad and sorry system, which has long outlived its usefulness

Hunger and plenty (1949)

From the November 1949 issue of the Socialist Standard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

J.P.

Food, insecure food (2024)

From the November 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

It goes without saying that food is the most basic need of human beings. Survival, health, growth: all depend on sufficient quality and amounts of food. Indeed, human history can in part be seen as an effort to acquire adequate food, whether from gathering, hunting or growing.

But despite the advances in technology, plenty of people today still struggle to provide enough food for themselves and their family. They suffer from food poverty or food insecurity, which can be defined as ‘when a person is without reliable access to enough affordable, nutritious, healthy food’ (redcross.org.uk), or as ‘insufficient or insecure access to food due to resource constraints’ (sustainweb.org). This does not only apply in the global South, but in so-called developed countries too. It has been estimated that over seven million people in the UK were living in ‘food insecure households’ in the UK in 2022–3 (an increase of 2.5 million over the previous year). This included one child in six and one working-age adult in nine. One solution that has been proposed is to provide free school meals to all children. Things may get worse if some farmers reduce production, as may happen, largely due to labour supply problems.

In the US the situation is also deteriorating. In 2023, almost 18 per cent of households with children were food-insecure, a small rise from the previous year. In 2009, the proportion was just over one in five; the figure fell after the financial crisis but then began to rise again during Covid when school lunches came to an end.

Yet it is in underdeveloped parts of the world that food insecurity is at its most serious. A recent UNICEF report stated that 181 million children worldwide under the age of five lived in severe food poverty (one child in four). Global food security deteriorated between 2019 and 2022, worst of all in Syria, Haiti and Venezuela. Large parts of Africa are in really dire straits, as is much of South Asia. In Somalia almost two-thirds of children live in ‘extreme food poverty’, while in Gaza the figure is nine children out of ten.

Famine, as defined by the UN World Food Programme, involves such criteria as 30 percent of children suffering from acute malnutrition, which is far more severe than food poverty. No countries currently meet the definition, but that does not stop the overall food situation from being dreadful.

The UN Environment Programme recently issued a Food Waste Index Report 2024, which contains some quite astonishing facts and figures. Globally, over a trillion US dollars’ worth of food is thrown away each year; this leads to perhaps a tenth of greenhouse gas emissions and occupies nearly thirty per event of agricultural land. The waste occurs in various places, including households, retail and supply chains, though it has to be remembered that the data in middle- and low-income countries is probably pretty unreliable. And some inedible matter is included, as the distinction between edible and inedible is not always clear. Reducing food waste is obviously a good thing, but in a world based on profit and with billions of impoverished people it is not straightforward.

According to Action Against Hunger, 733 million people (one person in eleven) go hungry. Rising temperatures and extreme weather have worsened the crisis, as have Covid and conflicts. But, as they say, ‘There’s more than enough food produced in the world to feed everyone on the planet.’ It does not reach all those who need it, partly because of food waste, but also because of poverty. The UN Environment Programme states that it is perfectly possible to feed ten billion people, if the world population reaches that figure. Reducing CO2 ‘could positively impact the nutritional value of the food produced’, while restoring biodiversity would make it easier to cope with pests and disease. An increase in plant-based diets would produce less greenhouse gas and need less water. Replacing monoculture with regenerative farming, using rotational methods, would restore wildlife and soil.

One of the immediate priorities in a socialist world will be ensuring that there is enough food for everyone, that nobody suffers from food insecurity. We cannot say now just how this will be carried out, as we do not know what the food situation will be at the time that socialism is established. But we can say that scientists and farmers know how to go about growing enough good-quality food for all, and know how to co-operate with others to make food insecurity a thing of the past.

Paul Bennett

Material World: Famine in the Horn of Africa… Again (2011)

The Material World Column from the September 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Although the current drought conditions are affecting a wide area in the Horn of Africa including Kenya and Ethiopia, the main media focus has once again fallen on Somalia, a country with a complicated and turbulent colonial history. The story is always the same: following a devastating drought there is a famine; the problem is not lack of food but lack of the ability to pay for food or lack of access to land to grow it. The world is stockpiled with food but giving it away would negatively affect the market.

This time around we hear that 3.5 million Somalis and 12 million Ethiopians within the drought region are under threat of starvation. Droughts are not new to the region, they are a regularly occurring phenomenon, but with the UN Famine Early Warning System in place for a number of years now, expectations would surely have increased for improved handling of the situation. Warnings did go out early this year predicting starving millions in the south of Ethiopia but the regime continued with its policy of selling and leasing great swathes of land to other countries to grow crops for foreign consumption. Last year 10,000 tons of rice were exported to Saudi Arabia alone.

Thomas Mountain, a US journalist who has lived in Eritrea since 2006, comments that while southern Ethiopians are suffering the worst drought and famine for 60 years those in the north are hungry because of ‘near record high food prices.’ This he contrasts with what is happening in neighbouring Eritrea, which is a result of totally different governmental policies. Here, within a handful of years, a move from rain-fed crops to a micro dam-fed irrigation system has led to better, more secure crops and dramatically falling prices of staple grains. According to the World Bank, life-expectancy improvements are ‘dramatic’ and Eritrea is one of the countries which will meet the Millennium Development Goals especially in the areas of children’s health, malaria mortality prevention and AIDS reduction. (http://www.countercurrents.org/mountain050811.htm)

News coverage of unfolding events in the area is patchy and can be biased according to allegiances or contracts of employment. Reports of facts on the ground are often distorted, depending on who’s pulling the strings. Currently Eritrea is a ‘state sponsor of terror’ according to Hillary Clinton who claims it supplies weapons to Al-Shabaab in Somalia. As a result, the media can say nothing positive about it.

Without doubt, the ongoing civil war in Somalia is exacerbating the crisis affecting so many of its people. The most problematic areas of Somalia for needy recipients of food aid are controlled by Al-Shabaab, a ‘rebel organisation with links to Al Qaeda’, which is unwilling to allow a number of food-aid agencies access for fear they are infiltrated by the CIA. The CIA is working closely with the official Somalian central government in Mogadishu, a government widely recognised to be in control of only a portion of the country. 

The whole of this region has suffered long and hard throughout its colonial history and is continuing to suffer as colonial powers attempt to subjugate regimes or leaders of regimes in pursuit of profit through the exploitation of natural resources and land accumulation. As explained succinctly in the article ‘Africa, starvation and speculation’ in last month’s Socialist Standard, the small elites in control of natural resources are only too happy to profit personally while exposing millions to penury and starvation by driving them from their land through international land deals. Different regions of the Horn of Africa are affected in different ways by the diverse conditions on the ground – but whichever way the story is spun, the competition for profit and accumulation underlies the neglect of the population’s needs.

Droughts are a well-known fact of life in a number of regions of the world and will continue to affect this region of Africa. Forecasts predict they will become more severe as problems with climate change increase. But it is not inevitable that there should be famine after drought. Famine results from the denial of land, placing restrictions of the free movement of populations, treating food as commodities and the growing commercialisation of agriculture, especially for export. All this is compounded by bad planning, inadequate water storage and management, poor infrastructure and logistical organisation. Socialism could not prevent natural events such as lack of rainfall (but it could prevent droughts by an adequate infrastructure) but in those circumstances, no one would starve as food would simply be released from warehouses or transported from other parts of the world.

Janet Surman

Is food produced to eat? (1974)

From the Special 300th issue of The Western Socialist

So! You thought all along that food Is produced because mankind must eat That this is the one really important reason for existence of farms, food processing plants and supermarkets. Oh certainly you have heard it said, chiefly by those who disparage the profit motive, that food — like all goods and services in capitalist society — is produced mainly for sale and at a profit. But somehow this didn’t seem to be such an earth-shaking bit of information. You probably tucked the thought away, and went about the business of stretching your food dollars in the markets.

But suddenly you find your dollars shrinking almost from day to day. You stand at the meat counters and gaze, emotionally, at the price tags. You have a family of growing boys and girls who can put away quantities of that food, and you wonder how you can possibly put meat on the table more than once a week, and maybe not that frequently. Or maybe you are a pensioner on a modest fixed income, and you are painfully aware that your check is not designed to include very much of what you might have been used to eating in your more affluent days.

What is it all about’ Why can’t cattle, hogs and fowl be raised in sufficient quantity, as they once were, to make prices more reasonable? And you remind yourself of what you have read in the papers and heard on the newscasts. The growers and processors are either holding back, going out of business or threatening to do so. Why? Because feed grains, it seems, have become so expensive that those producers cannot continue to operate normally under present price freeze conditions. No profit, no food production, they tell us, and so they smother their baby chicks instead of raising them for the table, because it would cost them more to raise them than they could get in their market, and one cannot run a business on losses.

So! It is true then what socialists have been saying all along. The prime reason for producing food — or anything else under capitalism — is not to satisfy the needs of mankind but to sell at a profit. True enough, it is explained today, that there have been serious crop failures due to drought conditions not only in America but throughout much of the world. And there have been those big grain sales to Soviet Russia and Red China that have added to the shortages here. And these are behind those ridiculous prices in the supermarkets.

But then another nagging thought hits you. How about those times, and there were many of them over the years, when there were none of those problems, and when all sorts of grains and vegetables and fruit were grown for the market, and when great quantities of these vital necessities were dumped in the oceans, plowed under, or burned? There was such an abundance that the growers and processors could not get a price that made it profitable for them to sell the food. Oranges, mountains of them, in California in the Thirties, were burned. Potatoes In Idaho, thousands of bushels of them were dumped, even in recent times. Coffee in South America and fish in New England destroyed. Why? Because of Government price freeze policy? Of course not. There was no need for Government intervention then. The problem was glutted markets.

So the difficulties in the supermarkets today are not caused by drought conditions, previous crop failures, big business deals with the so-called Communist nations. It is not that it is impossible to produce enough feed grains or vegetables or fruit or meat. The problem is that the owning grower-capitalists must make a profit, and economic conditions are such that they are being squeezed by rival capitalists. Would it not make sense, then, to get to the source of the trouble, the capitalist mode of production, abolish it, and introduce a socialist society in which the things mankind needs to survive are produced only because mankind needs them? We think it does.

Cooking the Books: The market fails again (2005)

The Cooking the Books column from the October 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Within a month of the Live8 concerts that were supposed to influence the leaders of world capitalism to do something about poverty in Africa, the charities had to get their begging bowls out again. This time for a famine in Niger, an ex-French colony to the north of Nigeria with a population of over 11.6 million.

In October last year various international agencies including the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation signalled that, due to a bad harvest and an invasion of locusts, cereal production in Niger in 2004-5 was likely to be 7.5 percent below normal. In accordance with the law of supply and demand the price of millet, the main cereal grown and consumed in Niger, began to rise, with the result that the farmers whose crop had failed were unable to afford to buy enough food for their families. Malnutrition, especially amongst children, grew.

The government reacted by bringing in a scheme to sell millet at a reduced price, but although this was below the market price it was still two times higher than the price the farmers had received for their 2003-4 crop.

Dr Isabelle Defourny, of Médicins Sans Frontières, takes up the story:

“In early June, Niger’s prime minister acknowledged that the government’s response was ineffective when he noted that hundreds of thousands of the 3.5 million people threatened by the food shortage were too poor to be able to purchase cereal, even at a low price. Those most severely affected by the food crisis have the least resources, including farmers whose harvests were poor and cattle producers and craftsmen. Many had already exhausted their resources, selling goods and animals to feed themselves.” (Messages, MSF newsletter, July-August, www.msf.fr/documents/base/2005-07-01-Messages137VA.pdf )

MSF urged that “free food distribution is the only way to keep the situation from worsening and to prevent large numbers of deaths”, a perfectly reasonable proposal if we were living in a society geared to serving human needs and welfare. But we’re not. The authorities took a different view, for reasons explained by social researcher, Jean-Hervé Jezequel, in an interview in the same issue of Messages:

“ . . . in early June, at a meeting of the Joint Commission for Consultation, the decision-making body of the ‘action plan’ which includes representatives of the state and of institutional donors, the government of Niger declared that despite the seriousness of the food crisis, it would not set up free distribution operations. The only political reaction from the institutional donors came from the ambassador of France, who was glad there was a ‘policy that will not destabilize the markets’. The ambience was almost surreal: ignoring the emergency food situation, economic considerations were, without hesitation, given priority over the fate of endangered people.”

The French newspaper Libération reported that some cereal merchants had held back stocks to drive up prices further and that others had “disposed of their stocks in neighbouring Nigeria where the population has a higher purchasing power” (9 August).

So, yet again, as in every “food crisis” since the Great Starvation in Ireland in the 1840s, the workings of capitalism have produced the obscene spectacle of the export of food from an area where people are starving because, not having money, they don’t constitute a market and so don’t count.

Poverty and famines (2007)

From the October 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Why do famines occur? Because there’s not enough food or because people haven’t enough money to buy it?

To many people famines are caused by not enough food being available. This seems reasonable enough: why would people have to starve if there was enough food to feed them? It’s a good question, but it assumes that today food is produced to feed people whereas in fact this is not the case. It should be, but it isn’t. And it isn’t, because we are living in a capitalist society where food is not produced simply to satisfy people’s need for it but – like everything else – to be sold on a market with a view to making a profit. Food is a commodity which, like all commodities, can only be acquired if you have money (or something else) to exchange for it. If you don’t, then you starve. It’s as simple as that.

In 1981 the International Labour Organisation in Geneva published a study on famines by Amartya Sen, an Indian academic working in England, entitled Poverty and Famines. An Essay in Entitlement and Deprivation. Sen studied five famines: the Great Bengal famine of 1943, the Ethiopian famines of 1973 and 1974, the Bangladesh famine of 1974, and the Sahel famines of the 1970s.

His conclusion was that the widespread “food availability decline” theory of famines was mistaken. In its stead he proposed that they should be explained on the basis of a failure or a decline in some people’s “entitlement” to food, i.e., in the end, on their not being able to acquire enough money to buy it or enough of it:

“Starvation is the characteristic of some people not having enough food to eat. It is not the characteristic of there being not enough food to eat”. (p. 1, his emphasis).

“Starvation . . . is a function of entitlements and not of food availability as such” (p. 7).

Sen went on to win the so-called 1998  Nobel Prize for Economics (actually a prize awarded by the Bank of Sweden, not the Nobel Prize Committee) for  his work on famines, welfare economics and political liberalism.

Socialists recognised that Sen, in saying that famines were not caused by there not being enough food or by there being too many people, was saying something very near to what we had always said. Modern-day famines arose in the  context of the capitalist profit system under which people had to buy what they needed to live and to do this they had to have first acquired money, either by selling their ability to work for a wage or a salary or by growing and selling some cash crop. When, for whatever reason, some people find themselves unable to acquire money, they would not be able to acquire food. If this was widespread, as periodically happened in different parts of the world, then there would be a “famine”, irrespective not only of the capacity to produce enough food but even in the presence of adequate supplies of food.

Sen, however, was not a socialist, but a left liberal supporter of the capitalist market economy. Hence his solution was not to abolish a system where people’s “entitlement” to food (and everything else) depended on their having money; it was to increase such entitlements by arranging for them to have more money or at least a regular supply of money. He wanted to reform the money system not abolish it.

Socialists have no quarrel with Sen’s definition of famine, but they do challenge his definition of “poverty”. Sen defines poverty in terms of lack of access to means of consumption, to not having enough to live at some minimum level of nutrition or comfort or decency. This means that he and others who think like him have to try to fix what this minimum level is. Inevitably, the result is a more or less arbitrary definition that only applies to a minority of the population; most people not being considered poor because their income is above this low level. The “poor”, in other words, are defined in such a way that they will only ever be a minority of the population. The Christian bible may say that “the poor ye shall always have with you” – but, according to Sen and other economists, this will be only as a minority.

Marxists define poverty in terms of lack of access to means of production.  Anybody in this position is obliged to obtain their living by selling the only thing they do possess – their ability to work – to some employer. They are poor in terms of not owning means of production. Some, indeed most, may be able to obtain a monetary income above the “poverty line” defined by economists such as Sen but, being deprived of means of production, they still suffer from poverty.

It is true that, under capitalism, where “entitlement” to food, clothing, housing, etc depends on having money, there will always be some people who (through, illness, incapacity, old age, etc) can’t sell their ability to work or, because of its low quality, can’t sell it for a high enough price to cover their basic needs and so, without hand-outs from the State, would be destitute. This – destitution – is the proper term to describe their situation, not “poverty”. In the Victorian England of Marx’s day it was called “pauperism”. It is true that only a minority of the working class find themselves in this situation. But this does not mean that the rest — those in regular work — cannot be described as suffering from poverty, deprivation. In the wider, Marxian sense, if you don’t own sufficient means of production to live without having to work to obtain money then you are deprived, or poor. Which is the situation of the vast majority of people under capitalism.

As to solutions, as a self-confessed left-wing Keynesian and “welfare economist”, Sen sees the solution to “poverty and famines” as lying in increasing the “entitlement” of “the poor” by giving them or allowing them to acquire more money. It is not difficult show why, on theoretical grounds, this would not and could not work as it goes against the whole logic of the capitalist system.

Capitalism operates by extracting surplus value — which the employing capitalist hopes to turn into money — from the working class. The monetary expression of surplus value — profit — is the lifeblood of capitalism and any attempt to tax it away risks clogging up the whole economic mechanism, thereby provoking an economic slump. Attempts to transfer money from the rich to the poor by various left-wing governments (whether Labour, Social Democratic or “Communist”) have always failed, with the leftwing government either being voted out of office or accommodating itself to having to give priority to profit-making over meeting people’s needs. The capitalist system simply cannot be made to work in the interest of the majority class of wage and salary workers. It runs on profits – extracted from the working class – and can only ever work in the interest of the profit-taking, capitalist class. The sort of reformism advocated by Sen is futile.

Under capitalism, the working class are not entitled to – have no “right” to – anything. They are only allowed to work if some employer thinks they can make a profit out of selling what they produce and, if unable to work, are only maintained by the State (out of the surplus value produced by the working class) at a level sufficient to stop them rioting or turning to crime. The solution lies not in trying to transfer money from the rich to the poor but in abolishing the money system altogether on the basis of the common ownership by the whole people of the means of production.

This would end the poverty of the working class as well as the destitution of the minority dependent, if lucky, on State hand-outs or charity. “Entitlement” to food and all the rest would not then depend on having a source of money, but simply on being human, a member of society. Everybody, not matter how little they might be able to contribute, would still be entitled to live and live as well as society can afford. In other words, “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs”. Common ownership not class ownership. Production solely for use not production for profit. That is the only way to abolish “poverty and famines” from the face of the Earth for ever.

Adam Buick

Population: Feeding the Six Billionth (1999)

From the September 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the year 1800, there were one billion humans alive. Seventy years ago, the world had two billion human inhabitants. Thirty years ago, that figure had doubled to four billion. On October 12 of this year, at 1.24 am New York Time, the UN Secretary General will announce to the world that the six billionth human has been born.

By all accounts, the six billionth baby will be born into a life of poverty and misery. While the population trend in the industrialised world is stability or declining numbers—with Europe’s population, for instance, expected to drop by 25 percent in the next 50 years—97 out of every 100 children born live in the developing world.

At present, the increase in the world’s population stands at some 78 million per year. By the year 2050, Earth is expected to have 8.9 billion human inhabitants, with the UN forecasting that the global population will level off at about 11 billion round about 2120.

Come this October, we can no doubt expect a glut of newspaper articles highlighting Kofi Annan’s statement, many in the Malthusian tradition, arguing that population cannot grow beyond the means of subsistence and that we can expect increased rivalry for scarce resources, civil unrest and a breakdown in law and order. We can expect to be reminded that we cannot grow the food for increased future generations and that the world’s fresh water supplies are dwindling.

Firstly, under capitalism rivalry for resources, scarce or in abundance, has always been the norm. Secondly, it is important to point out that what scarcity there is—whether it be food or water—is artificially brought about.

It is no state secret that food is not primarily produced to eat. It is produced for the market and with a view to make profits. The 1.3 billion humans in the underdeveloped world who go without food on any given day do not constitute a market because they cannot purchase what they need. Hence, we find governments ordering land to be taken out of production because the surplus cannot be sold at a profit. We find governments the world over ordering the destruction of mountains of food to keep prices high. We are informed of the dwindling supplies of fresh water, but the technology has existed for quite some time to enable us to convert sea water into fresh water for irrigation and domestic use.

The paradox that there is hunger and thirst in the midst of plenty was hinted at as far back as 50 years ago when the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organisation was formed. Its first Director General, Lord Boyd-Orr, observed in the Times of 22nd July 1949 how:

There was no difficulty about producing enough food for the present population of the world, or even twice that number, but the problem was, could politics and economics arrange that the food that was produced was dispersed and consumed in the countries that needed it?

The problem becomes not one of feeding the world’s growing population, but of organising production and distribution on a rational basis. While we can expect the Malthusian prophets of doom to remind us that every new child means an extra mouth to feed, they will neglect to add that it also means an extra pair of hands, an extra brain, capable of contributing to the common good .

Socialists ask whether the present social system will allow these hands and this brain to be used wisely, to produce the extra wealth needed for a growing population. So long as the market system prevails the answer is no. Capitalism is not only a system of artificial scarcity, it is also a system of organised waste. Countless millions of workers are to be found in the armed forces, many more in the security and law and order business, with many times that number employed in the field of commerce and finance.

And its not as though there is a problem with there being enough workers to produce what we need. It has been estimated that within 25 years, just 2 percent of the world’s population will be able to produce everything needed—and this takes into account the insane and artificial constraints imposed by the profit system.

Present and projected increases in the global population only pose a problem under the conditions imposed by capitalist society—the laws of profit first and can’t pay, can’t have. Socialist society will see an end to the “planned and subsidised under-production” that President Kennedy observed almost 40 years ago. It will see an end to scarcity and a removing of the artificial barriers that presently curb production. Socialist society will ensure that the resources of the Earth are used in a manner that ensures every man, woman and child is adequately fed, clothed and sheltered—something capitalism has never been capable of overseeing.

John Bissett

So They Say: Bigger Crumbs (1975)

The So They Say Column from the April 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

Bigger Crumbs

Sir Andrew Gilchrist, chairman of the Highlands and Islands Development Board, has recently been pouring cold water on the idea that Scottish workers were all about to share in the much publicized “Oil Bonanza”. Writing in his Board’s journal (North 7) on 5th March he announced:

There were large areas (in Scotland) which would not secure a direct share of the massive investment needed to get oil out of the seabed and which would have no part in the well paid employment prospects.

(The Times, 6th March ’75)

“Areas” of course are not employed, it is workers who are employed; nor can any of them hope to “secure a direct share of the massive investment”, they are paid wages. Bearing in mind that Sir Andrew’s chief function is to act as a form of capitalist missionary in the north, even those workers who will be concerned in oil and affiliated industries would do well to remember that “well paid employment prospects” simply means that bigger crumbs will fall from the capitalist’s table.

For the others, Sir Andrew has been busily at work seeking out ways to make them useful:

We must look beyond oil and its present benefits. These are reasons enough for continuing and sharpening our effort to strengthen existing industry and to encourage new types of enterprise. If we are to have any hope of a balanced growth these things are essential . . . In the past nine years nearly 3,000 prospects of different kinds and different sizes have been brought to locations in the Highlands and islands. With them they have brought nearly 10,000 jobs. That is what Highlands development is about.

The interests of the "we” and the “our” refer to the capitalist class. That is what Highlands development is about.

War on Want

In a letter to The Times on 10th March, Mr. Peter Burns, General Secretary of “War on Want”, put forward the following view on the “world food crisis”:

The problem is essentially one of insufficient demand not insufficient supply. There is food available that the poor do not have the means to buy. Only poor people starve.

Considering its source, this is a most peculiar form of argument. If people are starving is there not a demand? The simple answer is that there is, but the capitalist answer — which Mr. Burns has clearly accepted — is that if men and women cannot afford to buy food there is no demand. He goes on to argue that supplies of food in the form of foreign aid merely “stifles incentive to invest in rural development” and the answer must be on a local basis to

increase food production and its availability to those in need within the Third World, there must be land reform, guaranteed food markets and prices for the Third World, and aid and development programmes directed toward the landless and the poor peasant farmer. These are the policies to tackle poverty, which is the real enemy that tightening one’s own belts will do nothing to combat.

Look again, Mr. Burns, at the world around you. Why imagine that such projects as your “guaranteed food markets and prices” will prove any more satisfactory than those already existing? The basis will remain unaltered, those who can make a profit from selling food will produce it. Those who cannot afford it will starve.

To make “War on Want” you will have to "make war” on the system of society which gives rise to such lunacy as starvation while food is both available, and is even deliberately destroyed for the "benefit” of its "markets.”

On the Bandwagon

The Church of England is always scouting around for some current events on which they can make meaningless remarks in an attempt to bring us all back into the fold. In this respect they have regarded the economic phenomenon of inflation with what could be described as a jealous reverence for some time. Now however a report has been published (6th March) “on behalf of the industrial committee of the board for social responsibility” which feeds out the C. of E. line to its followers. Among other things we note they recommend:

A more rational and institutional way of determining levels of income was needed to re-inforce the social contract, for unless wages and salaries were held to reasonable limits a situation would arise in which a statutory incomes policy would become a moral incentive.

(The Times 7th March ’75)

That word “reasonable” has been slipped in again, and when the Church talks of “reasonable limits” they mean just what the capitalist means — as low as possible. However the report does not apply the same criterion to the rate of inflation. It produces instead a dynamic new theory which will surely have even the confused capitalist economists rocking in the aisles:

Inflation, the report argues, is a sign of a society that has lost its way. 'In some ways it can be seen as the climactic by-product of a relaxed society’.

We fail to observe much that is “relaxed” about capitalist society, except perhaps the benign ignorance of the Church of England, but we would be interested to learn if successive governments since the war have realized that by increasing the supply of inconvertible paper money they failed to recognize “the sign of a society that has lost its way” and can now see this contemporary burning bush as clearly as the C. of E. does.

An Out-of-Date Creature

As various strange bedfellows begin to join together for or against Britain’s continued membership of the European Economic Community, Mr. Len Murray, General Secretary of the TUC, has given notice that his organization is opposed to membership. His reasons appear to be that the EEC as at present constituted is in some way harmful to “the social welfare” of the “British People.”

Unions in every EEC country were less than satisfied with the operation of the Community: many thought that it had started off with too much competitive purpose and too little community purpose: too much of economics and too little of social welfare: too much about fair business practices and too little about fair social practices. ‘I am afraid that your Market is rather out of date, a creature of its times, and its times were some time ago.’

(The Times, 8th March ’75)

Not that Mr. Murray has any basic objection to capitalism or the exploitation of the working class here or abroad,

We shall need to be satisfied that decisions are taken in ways which give due and balanced weight to common interests and to what the member countries themselves see as their essential and proper national interests.

We can reassure Mr. Murray that the capitalist class will most certainly take steps to realise their “essential” interests: in or out of the EEC. And they will continue to do so while men like Mr. Murray misleads his members into believing that “fair social practices” can have any relevance or application to capitalist society.

The Other Side of the Same Coin

To balance the issue, the Times report of Mr. Murray’s Utopian mouthings was adjoined by a report of Mrs. Margaret Thatcher’s “opening salvo” for her Keep-Britain-in-the-EEC campaign. That Mrs. Thatcher is capable of making any kind of “salvo” is open to conjecture; she did however make a realistic comment on the Government attempts to revise the terms of membership. Having wished Mr. Wilson success in this field, she said:

No doubt, she said, Mr. Wilson would return claiming that his renegotiated terms were vastly better than anything the last Conservative Government had been able to achieve. ‘In fact of course, they will be but the latest stage in a continuing process of adjustment between the members of what is essentially an evolving partnership.'

The evolving partnership she refers to is that between the various capitalists, and she is quite right in assuming that they will be constantly competing against one another for more favourable terms. The honour among these thieves will no doubt be sorely tested after Mr. Wilson announces the new rules of capitalist competition in Europe.

During the course of her remarks, Mrs. Thatcher expressed her willingness to “fight alongside all men and women of good will, from all parties and from none, who wanted to put the future of Britain above partisan quarrels.”

While noting this almost libertarian gusto, we can’t help remembering that Len Murray also wanted to put the future of Britain first; only he suggested doing so by leaving the EEC. How on earth then are we, “all men and women of good will”, to decide upon this momentous issue? It is all very puzzling and a report (“The Grudging Europeans”) published by Social and Community Planning Research on 5th March confirms this bewilderment. There is throughout Britain

a grudging acceptance of our need to rely on Europe, an almost petulant acknowledgement of the benefits to be derived from partnership, there is precious little enthusiasm either for the idea or the reality.

(The Times, 6th March ’75)

The answer is that with Britain in or out of the EEC, the international working class will remain shackled to a system of private property ownership. To believe that this relationship can be altered by leaving (or remaining in) the EEC is time-wasting nonsense and only further delays the job which all workers should be undertaking to establish Socialism.

Alan D'Arcy

We can feed the world (2021)

From the July 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Jack Kloppenburg, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, noted that hi-tech agriculture is frequently justified by the rationalisation that it will feed the world. Kloppenburg says that is the wrong approach.

‘People need to feed themselves — they need to be allowed to feed themselves’ (Link).

We should concentrate attention upon the economics which drives agriculture and the food industry rather than disproportionately focus upon specific technologies and techniques.

The farming industry rarely asks ‘What do we grow that is best for the land?’ or ‘What can we grow that will benefit our community the most?’ or ‘What crop will be most nutritious and damage the land the least?’ Those are not questions that the food corporations ask. Instead they usually have just one question, ‘How much money can be made out of the land?’

The Malthusian overpopulationists gained popularity with the publication of Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (propped up by Garret Hardin’s later ‘Tragedy of the Commons’) which claimed that the world population was exploding and food production would fail to keep up with the numbers of people.

It led to what is known as the Green Revolution, and it is a policy still being emulated in modern times by the Bill Gates Foundation. What it did was basically to take fertilisers and pesticides, an integral part of intensified industrial farming methods, and transfer the practices elsewhere to increase production. Today Gates and the Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa have joined various corporations such as Monsanto, manufacturers of the Round-Up herbicide, to introduce genetically modified crops with the same end of increasing harvest yields.

However, such pessimistic predictions did not materialise because the rate of population growth dropped. The world population no longer is expected to reach the earlier projection of 12 billion. Now the estimate is 9 billion or even 8 billion and the world already is well able to supply sufficient food if wastage is reduced.

Sweet-sounding statements from government ministries are frequently rendered meaningless by businesses bent on maintaining their expansion and growth. Capitalist accumulation is limitless. The purpose of capitalism is endless expansion of production for profits and an ecological nightmare has arisen from irrational, unplanned, undemocratic production, rather than a rational, democratically planned economy. Capitalism will poison and pollute the planet beyond recovery if it is not replaced.

Spurred by UN population projections and its calculation of the degree that food production has to increase, ie that the world must produce 70 percent more food by the year 2050 through yield growth to feed the expected rise in population, many commentators determined that the world needed to upgrade its farming methods with innovations such as genetically modified seeds and foods. We are told that the agribusiness corporations manufacturing fertilisers and pesticides, and the food processing companies, are the only sector capable of feeding the planet’s population and that family-owned, small farms are not equipped to do so. The food industry has no motivation other than to derive more profits from the food chain. Corporations expend a huge budget on public relations in defence of their business plans.

Yet there is no global or regional shortage of food other than some localised supply deficiencies caused by armed conflicts or temporary pest problems like, for example, a locust plague. Many countries are net food exporters. Wherever we look, farmers are already producing a surplus. There is no food scarcity. Food security could be provided for all people, all the time. Currently substantial crop harvests go to bio-fuels to drive vehicles. Crops that could fill the empty bellies of the hungry are diverted to fill fuel tanks or to fatten up cows and pigs. A 2013 estimate is that 4 billion additional people could be fed if animals were absent from the global feed chain, and that figure excludes nomadic pastoral livestock rearing, which often takes place on marginal land less suitable to arable farming and could easily continue to be practised.

Then there are plantations growing cash crops such as palm oil, coffee and tea. Cut flowers are a major export of Kenya’s horticulture. These may bring in valuable foreign currency for local elites but has very limited ability to feed the local people. World agriculture possesses the possibility to substitute non-edible crops for nutritious sustenance but Big Ag chases the stock market as well as the food market and states assist by providing generous financial and tax subsidies to it.

We cannot lay out any detailed alternative but we can broadly predict that in socialism the people would likely adopt a more flexitarian diet, supplied by the use of mixed cropping, agro-ecological production systems, and conservation agriculture, using more appropriate soil and watering procedures and requiring much less chemical input. A method called the System of Rice Intensification (SRI) has the potential to feed a further seven billion if universally applied.

The World Socialist Movement long ago determined that increasing production does not solve hunger as it is not a technological issue but a political and economic problem.

An editorial in Journal of Sustainable Agriculture agrees:

‘Hunger is caused by poverty and inequality, not scarcity…the world produces more than 1 1/2 times enough food to feed everyone on the planet. That’s already enough to feed 10 billion people, the world’s 2050 projected population peak. But the people… cannot afford to buy this food…The call to double food production by 2050 only applies if we continue to prioritize the growing population of livestock and automobiles over hungry people’ (Link).

In anticipation of more people living on the planet, we already have the knowledge and skills to feed those extra mouths. Socialism will exercise these to provide sufficient nourishment and end scarcity whereas it is in capitalism’s interest to maintain malnutrition and food shortages to keep prices up.

ALJO

World hunger — why? (1983)

From the July 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is now common knowledge that up to two-thirds of the world’s population suffer from malnutrition while millions actually die from starvation each year. Why is this? Why in a world of potential plenty is so elementary a human need as food neglected for so many people?

Some would deny that we live in a world of potential plenty and claim that the cause of world poverty and hunger is natural scarcity. That, in other words, some people starve simply because not enough food can be produced. Certainly today sufficient food is not produced, but this is beside the point. What we need to know is whether or not, in the present state of scientific knowledge and productive techniques, enough food could be produced adequately to feed the whole population of the world.

There can be no doubt about the answer to this question: agronomists and other scientists who have studied the problem are all agreed that the world has the potential to produce enough food to adequately feed its present population, and more.

Here, for instance, is the view of one of the contributors to a special issue of the Scientific American on Food and Agriculture in September 1976. In his article on “The Development of Agriculture in Developing Countries" W. David Hopper writes:

  As one considers the tropical farming world and the technology now available or soon to be available, there can be no grounds for pessimism about the latent potential of the world to feed increasing numbers of people for a long period ahead. Whether that latent potential will be harnessed to the benefit of man is the question.

  It is important to recognise that the world’s food problem does not arise from any physical limitation on potential output or any danger of unduly stressing the “environment". The limitations on abundance are to be found in the social and political structures of nations and in the economic relations among them. The unexploited global food resource is there, between Cancer and Capricorn. The successful husbandry of that resource depends on the will and the actions of men.

World malnutrition and starvation, then, is not a natural but a social problem. Its cause must be sought not in any lack of natural resources but in the way society is organised.

World society everywhere rests on the basis of the monopoly of the resources of the world, natural and manufactured, by minorities, either privately as individuals (as generally in the West) or collectively through the state (as generally in countries like Russia and China). As a result the world’s resources are used to produce wealth, not to satisfy human needs but to be sold on a market with a view to profit.

Each economic or political unit (enterprise or state) into which the world is divided is in competition with every other such unit, both to acquire raw materials as cheaply as possible and to sell its products as profitably as possible. This economic competition brings into being economic forces — the world market — which are beyond the control of any of the competitors and to which in the end they must submit.

It is in fact the world market that rules the world. Acting like a natural force beyond human control it has much more power than any national government and forces governments to comply with its economic laws whether they want to or not. At the moment the world market is in the depression phase of its economic cycle, an economic fact about which governments can do nothing and to which they must adapt their economic policies. In other words, as the French Minister for Economic Affairs, Jacques Delors (who speaks from first-hand experience) has put it. the world "is in the grip of forces which nobody masters" (Club de la presse, 19 December 1982).

It is this anarchical world market system of artificial scarcity and organised waste that is responsible for poverty and hunger in the world today. The law which governs production everywhere is “no profit, no production”. Which means that if there is no profit to be made from producing and selling a good then that good will not be produced, even if people desperately need it. As the mass of the unemployed or underemployed in the so-called Third World do not have any money incomes and therefore do not constitute a market, they do not count for the present system of production geared only to meeting profitable market demand. Their very real human need for food is not “effective”, to use the jargon of modern economics, so they are badly fed and, in many cases, starve to death.

What makes matters worse is that under the present system every year, despite mass hunger, food is destroyed: fruits are left to rot, milk is poured down mines, coffee is used to fuel trains, and so on. From a human point of view this is quite scandalous but we are dealing with a system that has a logic other than the satisfaction of human needs, as is also shown by the well-established American policy of paying farmers not to grow food. The Common Agricultural Policy in Europe too has paid farmers to pull up trees and to slaughter cattle as a way of maintaining price and profit levels. But giving away these alleged "surpluses" is no solution. Quite the reverse, for within the context of a market system giving food away free makes matters worse by narrowing even further the market and so discouraging production.

The present world system is also one of organised waste — the most obvious being armaments — which is directly linked to the competitive, ever-raging struggle for profits. For, although in the end it is a state’s economic strength — its competitiveness — which enables it to succeed, its political strength — its armed clout — is also an important factor.

When a conflict arises (over markets, sources of raw materials, trade routes, investments, outlets) it becomes a trial of strength and, even if the matter is settled peacefully by negotiation, the outcome still depends on the relative strengths of the two sides. The Labour Foreign-Minister-who-never-was, Aneurin Bevan, once expressed this fact of present-day life quite well when, opposing CND at a Labour Party Conference, he said that he didn’t want to go into the conference chamber naked. No statesman wants to do this, which explains why each state (including those in the so-called Third World with underfed and starving populations) seeks to have the most powerful armed forces that it can afford. The waste of armaments is immense, not just the arms themselves and military expenditure generally but also the destruction caused by the wars which are always going on somewhere in the world.

If all this waste and destruction were eliminated and the resources involved redirected to constructive ends then the world could more than adequately feed, clothe and shelter its present population. World poverty, hunger and ignorance could be completely eliminated. But this would require the abolition of the present system of minority ownership and production for profit, and its replacement by a new system organised on a completely different basis.

During the early stages of the discussion of the law of the sea-bed. President Nixon (of all people) referred to the oceans as "the common heritage of all mankind”. The same phrase occurs in the treaties about Antarctica and the moon. These treaties declare that no state can establish territorial rights nor any individual private property rights over these areas — that, in other words, they belong to nobody. What is required is that this same principle should be extended and applied to the whole globe: all that is in and on the Earth should become the common heritage of all humanity.

On this basis there would be nothing to prevent the world’s people organising the production and distribution of wealth simply and solely to satisfy their needs as individuals and as a community. Production would no longer be restricted by the law of “no profit, no production” nor any longer governed by the blind economic force which the world market represents. Instead it would come under conscious, democratic social control and be oriented to what after all is its only rational end — satisfying human needs and wants. In these circumstances production could be rapidly increased to levels which would ensure that every man, woman and child on this planet was adequately fed, clothed and sheltered. The mass hunger and deaths from starvation which characterise the world today would remain only as bad memories of what no doubt will be commonly agreed to have been a barbarous past.

The Earth the common storehouse of all humanity; the production of wealth solely for use not sale or profit; a world without arms — is this an unrealistic Utopia? Not at all. It is the only logical and rational way to run the world given the present high stage of development of the forces of production. Because a solution is so simple and obvious does not mean that it won’t work.

Adam Buick

Meat, Money and Malnutrition (2005)

From the March 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Vegetarians International Voice for Animals (VIVA) make the claim that meat causes famine. Is this really the case, or does the real problem lie in the profit system? Rob Stafford investigates.

The Bristol-based charity Viva! in a recent pamphlet Join Viva! Join the Fight for Life claim that “millions of children in the developing world die from hunger alongside fields of high quality food, destined for the West’s farmed animals. The startling truth is that meat causes starvation.” Despite claiming that they monitor “the latest research from all over the world in the environment and development issues and argues for change with hard science” Viva provide absolutely no supporting evidence for their contention. Furthermore, a request for such material has yet to be answered.

Viva’s position is accepted as a common truth by other campaigning groups and individuals including Animal Aid, George Monbiot, Peter Singer, and repeated in some sections of the press, such as the Guardian and New Internationalist. While there is no doubt that growing crops as a source of food for the production of meat rather than feeding humans directly is less efficient in terms of land and energy, is there a direct relationship between meat and starvation? Consider a field of corn standing next to a group of starving children. The corn is destined for export as animal feed. Hence meat causes starvation. But if the corn was not grown for use as animal feed would the children be free to eat it? Indeed, would it even be grown in the first place? Simply because two effects (corn, starving children) are found side by side does not imply that one caused the other. Perhaps, however, the supporters of this position consider we have reached the limit of agriculture on this planet and therefore because some people eat meat fed on grain others, as a direct result of this practice, starve.

Over twenty years ago WHO stated that the technology existed to feed a global population twelve times its (then) size. The American Association for the Advancement of Science reported in 1997 that 78 percent of all malnourished children under the age of five in the developing world live in countries with a food surplus. Just over five years ago the United Nations reported that Africa could easily feed a population five times its current size if western technology were introduced. (And what of future technology?)

There is, in fact, a wealth of evidence to support the view that “famine exists largely because the hungry cannot afford to buy food, not because there is insufficient food produced” (New Scientist, 3 September 1994). Agricultural economist M. S. Swaminathan stated earlier this year that the “problem of undernutrition . . . is a lack of purchasing power” (Newsweek, 31 January). Even an establishment figure such as Sir Jonathan Porritt in his introduction to Compassion in World Farming’s report entitled The Global Benefits of Eating Less Meat (2004) is not blind to such facts. He quotes approvingly from Colin Tudge’s recent book, So Shall We Reap, and states that the author “develops an eloquent argument demonstrating that contemporary food and farming policy has very little to do with meeting human needs, guaranteeing food security, providing high and consistent levels of nutrition and food safety…Much more simply, it’s all about profit: squeezing the maximum financial yield out of every link in the food chain to benefit a tiny number of an already inconceivably rich minority of citizens” .

And those inconceivably rich do not just live in the West as Porritt states. For example, at the peak of the 1984 famine in Ethiopia such people enjoyed the benefits of exporting crops to the UK and taking delivery of Scottish malt whisky. This was just business as usual. Thus it should come as no surprise to learn that although the value of food exported by Ethiopia and other countries in the Horn of Africa during 1983 exceeded imports by $1 billion, hunger in this region increased (World Hunger: Twelve Myths. Frances Moore Lappe et al, Earthscan, 1998).

 

For some – but certainly not the 840 million malnourished (or the more than a billion existing in a state described by the UN as absolute poverty) – the ‘problem’ is an inconceivable embarrass de richesses. Try and imagine yourself as one of the 225 individuals owning wealth equivalent to that of 47 percent of the world’s population. Consider that the wealth of just three of these individuals exceeds the Gross National Product of the world’s 47 poorest nations. And that for four percent of the combined income of the three wealthiest people we could provide universal access to basic education, health care, adequate food as well as safe water and sanitation for all.

 

OK, so is it perhaps not meat on its own that causes starvation, but that it is one of a number of possible factors including problems relating to distribution, drought and natural disaster as well as war and poverty caused by unfair trade, third world debt, insufficient aid, etc? Well, the US recently was able within a few months to send 130,000 people (with supplies) half way across the world. Alas, their mission was one of death and destruction rather than to rescue, provide food, shelter and deliver other essentials to the suffering multitudes. War and poverty even after hundreds of years of social activism are still, patently, with us. But why? Oscar Wilde, writing over a hundred years ago about charity, provides some clues. “[T]heir remedies do not cure the disease; they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease. They try to solve the problem of poverty for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor. But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible” (The Soul of Man under Socialism).

It is to be hoped that historians living today will in the not distant future look at present day society and recognize that by failing to see starvation as one of many symptomatic problems that no amount of ‘band aids’ could cure, Viva and other well intentioned but misguided groups delayed the use of effective treatment. The activities of such groups will however probably be seen as benign in comparison with the likes of the Animal Liberation Front and PETA – who have more in common with companies such as Monsanto than either would like to admit – and other Malthusian-inspired misanthropes. All will be on record as failing to see the economic law which transcends government and companies however large or powerful: no profit, no production: can’t pay can’t have.

These future historians will indeed be deeply saddened that we took so long to see the link between this law and a myriad of contradictions (clues) in plain view today: people starving while food rots; brick mountains and empty homes existing alongside unemployed builders and the homeless; millions dying of curable diseases. On this last point, pharmaceutical chemist Dr Victoria Hale has made the telling observation that  “parasites and poverty are inextricably linked”. Referring to conditions such as leishmaniasis and Chagas disease, found almost exclusively in areas of the world where grinding poverty for the vast majority is the normal way of life (and death), she went on to say: “People with these diseases are not in sight as they cannot pay” (New Scientist, 25 September 2004).

Revealingly, Tudge is on record as proposing that if food production were designed to feed people rather than make a profit, then there would be no problem. Eureka! Imagine that: a world in which everything is produced for need, not profit! However, in asking “why we, humanity, allow the world to be run by people who have long since lost the plot?” (New Scientist, 13 March 2004) Tudge implies a change in leadership might suffice. But, two hundred years earlier, the Marquis De Sade saw through leadership and in doing so glimpsed the answer to securing “a saner sustainable future”: “You can only govern men by deceiving them; one must be hypocritical to deceive them; the enlightened man will never let himself be led, therefore it is necessary to deprive him of enlightenment to lead him as we want”.

Rob Stafford