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

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

Financial wizards or great pretenders? (2001)

From the October 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the 1990s when, under the cunning guidance of the IMF and the World Bank, the Ghanaian people were literally being strangled by the Economic Recovery Programme of the Structural Adjustment Programme, the financial advisers to President Jerry Rawlings always managed to conjure figures and statistics which indicated that the economy was doing excellently well. These statistics not only earned Ghana the epithet “darling state” of the West but Rawlings himself was so glad with his economists that he bestowed upon the title “financial wizards”. But the truth is that these accolades were for the purpose of damage control. Rawlings knew deep within his heart that his “wizards” were in reality great pretenders like himself as together they had been stashing away huge sums in foreign banks.

The history of the struggle for economic development in Africa and the forces dictating the pace thereof are not in the least different from the scenario that the West, Rawlings and the economic advisers enacted in Ghana.

Groping in the dark

Immediately African countries were pronounced independent by the colonial masters, the leaders rolled up their sleeves and set to the arduous task of nation-building. Although a few may have seemed to genuinely have the welfare of the masses at heart, many of these leaders and their ministers were deeply engaged in stomach politics. Be that as it may, these leaders, day in day out, saw the plight of the masses getting worse and worse.

A great number of African countries became independent in the sixties. This period also happened to be the peak of the so-called “cold war”. The West and the East struggled to control these newly-independent nations to enhance their (West and East) own economic interests. The result was that these African countries found themselves in a kind of trial-and-error methods of trying to extricate themselves from growing poverty.

At first the state got involved in business by setting up marketing boards. These bought up cash crops from the farmers and exported them. The state thus acted as a middleman. The state also created development boards, authorities and corporations in the hope of making money to move their countries forward. In some extreme cases some governments resorted to outright nationalisation of private business. However all these efforts by no means arrested the downward trend in the living standards of the masses. They still paid dearly for imports and received peanuts for their exports.

To overcome this problem of high prices of imports, the policy of import substitution was introduced. By this, companies producing such imported commodities as milk, beverages, matches, canned foods, bottled drinks, etc were encouraged to come and establish factories and carry out production here in Africa. Many companies responded positively but the outcome of this policy was a deepening impoverishment of the masses. They served as cheap labour in these factories. In fact only a few could afford to furnish their families with the commodities they got involved in producing. African leaders were baffled as what tended to happen was that nothing happened. No wonder there were lots of attempts at and successful coups d’état during the sixties and seventies.

It was during this period of beating about the bush for economic direction that the IMF and the World Bank joined in the fray. They came along with a novel package that was going to miraculously propel African economies to the highest degree of development. This new policy was the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP). This SAP idea condemned the previous method of development as unworkable and maintained instead that making structural changes, including the expansion and re-orientation of production, was the only way forward. African nations were to put the production of “non-traditional exports” and tourism into a higher gear. Thus in a country like Ghana where the traditional exports were mainly cocoa, timber and gold, under the SAP crops like pepper, pineapples, yams, maize, and oranges were to be turned into cash crops and exported. SAP also stipulated that private capital was to be the “engine of growth” and that “governments have no business doing business”. It did not however take long for the people to understand that they were once again fooled by official policy. Hardship and suffering increased a thousandfold. The masses had been moved from the frying pan into the fire.

Today the SAP is still the invisible hand directing affairs at our finance ministries in the interests of the owners of the World Bank and the IMF and to the detriment of the masses of Africa. However this time around there is a formidable group of foot soldiers preparing the grounds for, facilitating implementation and soothing the pains of these anti-people policies. These are the NGOs. There are hordes of them in every African country. All the misinformation propagated in the form of catchy phrases and slogans by the IMF and WB are picked up unquestioningly by these NGOs and parroted all over the place. The NGOs assist governments in deceiving the people by embarking on projects which are either white elephants or never even take off the ground. Meanwhile the wealthy companies keep selling their obsolete equipment to Africa in the name of appropriate technology.

Socialists or capitalists?

On Thursday 23 August the BBC Focus On Africa programme broadcast the news that Jose Edouardo dos Santos of Angola had announced that he would not be standing for re-election in he next presidential elections. Interestingly the BBC referred to the man as a “former Marxist”. This reminded me of others like Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania and a host of them who were also said to be “Marxists” by which they meant “communists” or “socialists”. Of course the West and East tagged these people thus for obvious reasons—whereas the West saw the as “dangerous”, the East considered them “good boys”. But the truth is that none of these leaders who championed the struggle for independence actually understood the global system. At best they only had hazy and confused ideas of soviet-style “socialism” (state capitalism). And, sadly, the present crop of leaders are even more bankrupt and myopic than their predecessors. If so, who gave the precursors advice and who advises the current leaders?

On the attainment of independence many African countries still depended on the former colonial masters for advice and guidance. In fact this is true of most of the francophone nations. Others, like Gamel Nasser’s Egypt, Nkrumah’s Ghana and Sekou Toure’s Guinea were so radical (though not revolutionary) that they openly castigated the West and courted the friendship of the former USSR. But in reality they did not escape the domineering influence of the existing global economic system since the East also practised capitalism. The finance ministers and economic advisers thought there were differences between the West and East in their theories and strategies for development and that thinking was partly responsible for the trial-and-error methods of development the newly-independent countries adopted – they were just variations of the same rule of capital.

The situation is different is different today. There are thousands of “experts” working day and night in seemingly harmless institutions and commissions and advising governments on their economic policies. The IMF and WB are still the main determinants of the path African economies must chart. But in order to lend some credence to their nefarious activities, they keep creating, from behind the scenes, economic institutions which are outwardly African in nature. And even if the IMF and WB have no hands in the creation of some of such institutions, they still manage to control them by picking up some of their bills. These bodies serve as economic think-tanks and advisers to governments. Some of them even assist in soliciting loans for governments. These include the Economic Commission for Africa; Economic Commission of West African States (ECOWAS); African Development Bank (ADB); Southern African Development Committee (SADEC);West African Monetary Institute, etc. There are groups spearheaded by individuals like Adebayo Adedeji, Julius Nyerere and others. The experts in these institutions hold regular meetings not to seek genuine ways and means of salvaging the African masses but, pretenders as they are, to wine, dine and go home with per diems which are sometimes higher than the monthly salaries of employees in the high income category. They waste huge quantities of paper-producing volumes of reports which sit on shelves gathering dust. But even if these “experts” are genuinely engaged in helping, their efforts will always come to nil.

The reason is that like their bosses in the IMF and World Bank, they are trying to reform a system which is inherently flawed. The system in operation in today’s world is profit oriented. Every idea put across and every step taken is to make profit not to satisfy human needs. Based on money, the belief is that without money nothing can work. Therefore governments are advised and sometimes coerced to take loans. The few with big money invest in our countries. Since investors are looking for profits the end result is that the human and material resources are mercilessly plundered.

But the truth is that production is carried out by people not money. Problems are solved by human beings, not money. The main problems Africans face are food, healthcare, shelter, education, clothes, and so on. These are produced by human labour acting on natural resources,. Africa has more than enough of these human and natural resources but because they system is based on money, these resources are accessible to only those who have money. These are a negligible minority who own all the means of production and distribution of wealth. But since they will use their wealth to produce only what will fetch them more money, they may produce what people do not need. For instance vast tracts of land are used to cultivate cash crops like tobacco, cashew, and cocoa for factories in the West yet what we need more here are maize, rice and other food crops. These latter are not very profitable so despite their importance, they are not produced. This is capitalism.

Any hope for Africa?

In the increasing problems facing Africans are a result of the economic arrangement in which every action is determined by money and profit, then the surest way of arresting the sorry situation is doing away with money. This is only possible on a global basis. The profit system is universal and so getting it off our backs requires the concerted efforts of the global working class not just in Africa, Asia or Europe. When the means of production and distribution of wealth pass from private ownership to collective ownership then the products will also be collectively shared. People will, in this higher and humane system of ownership, willingly contribute whatever efforts they are capable of providing since they know they can freely take from the produce how much they need. In this new social organisation money will have no place and all institutions and people related to money like markets, banks, credit cards, cheques, tickets, bills, accountants, cashiers, sales-girls, etc, etc will vanish. The people engaged here will be available to get involved in the real work of producing clothes, food, medicines, education, etc. This is socialism.

However, this civilised system of production relations can only materialise when the majority get to understand it and want it implemented. It is only then that Africa and the whole world will rid itself of pretenders posing as financial wizards.

Suhuyini

Famine in Africa (1984)

From the October 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

The hut we came to is open to the sky in several places and tinged orange with light reflected from corncobs drying on the roof. Inside there are two children, one sick and one very sick; also a fat shy woman with a young goat nibbling at her skirt. The floor is strewn with loose hay and a young chicken gets killed when it runs under our feet. The child we have come to sec is dying. Blinded with the pus running from his eyes and gasping with painful respirations. Occasionally his body is shaken with long fits of coughing. It is useless to prolong his suffering. We offer soap, which can do no harm, and eye ointment for the other child. The dying child seems to be no more than 18 months old but with his thin limbs and dried skin he looks prematurely aged. His mother says he is five years old. [1]

Today Africa faces, in the words of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, “the imminent danger of famine on a massive scale”. Already some 150 million people, or a third of the entire population, endure critical shortages of food. According to the World Bank, unless a huge increase in food aid is forthcoming, several African countries could “collapse entirely and revert to bush economies” with “disastrous consequences for world health, world trade and international security”. [2]

Much of the continent is presently in the grip of a catastrophic drought. In Ethiopia and its bordering states the landscape has in parts become a desolate wilderness, thinly littered with the horns of dead cattle. On the other side of the continent, in West Africa, the threat of a disaster eclipsing that the great Sahel drought of ten years ago has receded, but lack of rain has let loose a plague of leaf hopper insects. In Northern Mali, for instance, a three-inch-long beetle which causes blisters on the skin has ferociously attacked surviving crops of millet.

In much of Eastern and Southern Africa conditions are deteriorating as the drought enters its third year, cruelly punctuated by the occasional flash flood. Possibly the hardest hit of all is Mozambique, straining under the additional burden of a costly civil war. Even South Africa, its wealthy neighbour, has had to import several million tons of grain from abroad, in contrast to previous years when it produced substantial surpluses.

But the drought — reputedly the harshest in a century — is clearly not the only factor in Africa's worsening food situation. Per capita food production has been steadily declining over the last 20 years (by eleven per cent since 1970), drought or no drought. In this respect Africa is unique, for elsewhere in the world productivity has generally increased (though this does not mean the problem of world hunger is any nearer a solution). In the book Food First (1982) Frances Moore Lappe and Joseph Collins stress the difference between drought and famine:

Drought is a natural phenomenon. Famine is a human phenomenon. Any link that does exist is precisely through the economic and political order of a society that can either minimise the human consequences of the drought or exacerbate them.

According to some writers the whole problem began with the colonial conquest of Africa by European powers. Walter Rodney, a Guyanese historian, epitomises this point of view:

Colonialism created conditions which led not just to periodic famines but chronic undernourishment. malnutrition and deterioration of the physique of African people. If such a statement sounds wildly extravagant it is only because bourgeois propaganda has conditioned even Africans to believe that malnutrition and starvation were the natural lot of Africans from time immemorial. [3]

While there is undoubtedly some truth in this argument, it does rest upon an idyllic view of the pre-colonial era. There certainly were famines before the colonisation of Africa, although they were admittedly less severe than those that followed. In 1520 the Portuguese priest Alvarez had this to say after returning from Ethiopia:

It seems to me that in the whole world there is not so populous a country or one so abundant in crops. And because I was amazed the inhabitants said to me “Honoured guest, do not be amazed, because in the years that we harvest little we gather enough for three years plenty in the country; and if it were not for the multitude of locusts and hail, which sometimes do great damage, we should not sow the half of what we sow because so much remains that it cannot be believed. [4]

But as the Ethiopian economist Ewinetu has pointed out, traditional Ethiopian society became increasingly unable to prevent shortages occurring from time to time. This was because the mass of the population were less and less inclined to hold reserves of food — thus leaving themselves vulnerable to drought — out of fear that such reserves would only be “an invitation to the exactions of feudal lords" in whose hands the granaries came to be concentrated. At least 23 major famines were recorded by Ethiopian chroniclers in the period 1540-1800.

Around the time Alvarez set foot in Ethiopia there began the infamous transatlantic slave trade, which lasted into the nineteenth century. Estimates of the numbers of captives landed in the Americas throughout this period vary between ten and twelve million, although this does not take into account the many millions more who died in passage, before enshipment or as a result of slave raids. Such a massive haemorrhage of people from Africa's shores — usually the more economically productive members of the community — had debilitating effects on African society and agriculture. Yet, as Marx observed, "the turning of Africa into a warren for the hunting of black skins” was also one of the “chief moments of primitive accumulation”, heralding "the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production”. [5]

In turn the emergence of industrial capitalism in Europe made new demands on the African continent. The decline of the slave trade saw a redirection of effort from the shipment of human beings into export of the fruits of their labour in the form of agricultural products. This move towards cash crops was first apparent on a significant scale in West Africa. The most important product from this region at the time was palm oil, Europe needing more and more soap as her factories grew in number and her cities in filth. The palm oil trade, initially controlled by Africans, was later dominated by European merchants on the coast with the military support of their governments.

In the final two decades of the nineteenth century virtually the entire continent was carved up by European powers in the Scramble for Africa. Belfort Bax, anticipating Lenin’s fallacious theory of Imperialism, claimed in an 1888 issue of Commonweal that this colonising presented the possibility that the capitalist world might "take a new lease of life out of the exploitation of Africa" (Britain at the time was in the throes of the Great Depression). Nevertheless this extension of European control did much to increase the spread of cash crop production at the expense of traditional subsistence agriculture.

Where an unfavourable climate discouraged settlement, African peasants were sometimes coerced by gun and whip into growing crops for export. Perhaps the most brutal application of violence to be found anywhere in Africa was in the Equatorial Zone, where cut-throat concession companies operated a ruthless system of forced labour, razing villages to the ground to compel the local population to collect wild rubber or ivory for export. More typically however, economic pressure was applied by levying taxes on land, cattle or huts for which peasants had to earn money through the sale of crops. Such revenue helped to finance the colonial administration of these territories and thus represented an additional incentive to promote cash crop production.

Sometimes huge tracts of land were acquired by European settlers themselves for the purpose of growing cash crops (Lord Delamere. for example, purchased 100,000 acres of some of the best land in Kenya at a bargain price of one penny an acre). Often this direct takeover of the land was accompanied by a prohibition on local peasants competing by producing these same crops themselves. This, combined with the reduction in the amount of land available for peasant farming, drove impoverished Africans to seeking work on European farms.

Furthermore in several African countries a significant mining sector developed which, like cash cropping, had severely disruptive consequences for traditional agriculture. As Fanning and Mueller point out:

In the advanced capitalist nations, the exodus from the rural areas which accompanied the process of industrialisation was preceded by a dramatic increase in agricultural productivity. By contrast, industrialisation in the underdeveloped countries of Africa was the cause of a massive decline in rural productivity. [6]

South Africa

Nowhere was this clearer than in the case of the "native reserves" of South Africa established by the British in the mid-nineteenth century. The first, in Natal, was attacked by the white farming community on the grounds that it represented a standing military threat— the Zulu had not yet been finally crushed — and that it would stem the flow of labourers to the farms. As late as 1903 Louis Botha, soon to become the first prime minister of a unified South Africa, threatened to break up the network of reserves in the country in order to secure a greater supply of labourers. But in fact Botha's view was already outdated, for the existence of the reserves no longer impeded the flow of labour: their purpose had been transformed from a paternalistic one of temporarily sheltering the African into providing a vast reservoir of cheap labour that could be tapped at will.

The major impetus behind this transformation was the discovery of immense mineral wealth in South Africa in the second half of the nineteenth century. The tycoon-politician, Cecil Rhodes, in sponsoring the 1894 Glen Grey Act which severely limited the size of lots Africans could farm in the Glen Grey valley of the Ciskei, pioneered the adaptation of reserves to the needs of the mining industry of which he himself was a prominent beneficiary.

But it was the 1913 Natives Lands Act which dealt the most crushing blow of all to African agriculture and laid the foundations of apartheid in legislation. In terms of this Act, Africans (who vastly outnumbered Europeans) were prohibited from purchasing land outside the reserves designated for them, which amounted to a mere 7.3 per cent of the area of South Africa. De Kiewict, in his assessment of this Act. wrote:

The congestion of the reserves, the backwardness of their methods and the exhaustion of their resources accounted for the departure each year (50 per cent in 1925) of the able bodied men to earn money as labourers . . .The natives were the victims of too few acres. [7]

Thus, undermining of subsistence agriculture dovetailed neatly with the interests of the mining sector which, because of its labour intensive nature, required an abundant supply of labour. White agriculture benefited too despite the fact that it competed with the mines (and later manufacturing industry) for labour. Firstly there was the direct benefit that went to white farmers who no longer had to face competition from Africans. Secondly the prosperity of the mining sector, which depended very much on the availability of African labour, contributed massively to government revenue. This, in turn, enabled the government heavily to subsidise white agriculture, not least because this was where its traditional power base lay.

After the war the Nationalists sought to implement a policy of separate development. Verwoerd. hoping to reverse the tide of black urbanisation accompanying South Africa’s industrialisation, entertained the idea that the reserves might become self-sufficient agrarian economies capable of supporting the populations living within their borders as well as — in due course — those resident in "white" South Africa. In this way. it was felt, the vexed political issue of how to justify the continued denial of rights to Africans might be defused.

But of course separate development as an ideal was totally impracticable and soon acknowledged to be so. Far from becoming less dependent on one another, the reserves and white South Africa became ever more so. While the proportion of land occupied by the reserves was increased to 13.6 per cent of the total area in 1936 — roughly that of the ten "ethnic" homelands of today — this did not serve to arrest the process whereby Africans were driven in increasing numbers to look for work in white South Africa. Ironically, while separate development sought to develop the homelands as self-sufficient economics, the removal of millions of so-called economically unproductive Africans to the homelands in the name of separate development has only compounded the desperate poverty there. Ironic, too. is the fact that within a country as wealthy as South Africa there is to be found an enduring pattern of starvation resembling that which one might expect to find in some of the poorest countries of Africa.

Elsewhere in Africa the first plantation companies appeared on the scene in the early part of this century. Like the mines they relied on migrant labourers who were paid a pittance, rationalised on the grounds that the dependants of plantation workers could support themselves by subsistence farming. The reality was that subsistence farming was being eroded by the very system of migrant labour on which the plantations relied.

By establishing their own plantations these companies were able to ensure the enormous quantities of agricultural produce needed for the scale of production of European factories. Indeed, the arrival of the plantation company coincided with a massive expansion of trade in agricultural products, over 90 per cent of which was geared to external markets. But it was not the plantation itself that spearheaded such growth for by now the (tax induced) peasant production of export crops had become significant.

One of the earliest of the plantation companies was set up by William Hesketh Lever in 1911. Unilever is today the world’s largest food corporation with a turnover of $10 billion by 1978 which exceeds the combined GNP of 25 African countries. To begin with however Lever brothers, having established a foothold in the Congo, experienced great difficulty in operating plantations in Nigeria. Throughout West Africa, except in the German colonies of Togo and Cameroons, the colonial authorities were generally opposed to plantation agriculture since the peasant production of cash crops was well established in this region compared to other parts of Africa. In the case of Nigeria this policy was only reversed in the 1930s when there was a slump in the price of cash crops. Until then the British authorities in Nigeria maintained that plantation agriculture would inevitably lead to a large-scale drift from the land and that the violent resistance this would provoke could prove costly to quell. In addition, it was felt that creating a landless proletariat would pave the way to “communism” — an entirely misplaced fear at the time but one that was fuelled by the rhetoric of the Bolsheviks who had recently come to power in Russia.

Needless to say it was not "communism" but black nationalism that came to power throughout Africa, and within a remarkably short space of time. But the grinding poverty of the great majority proved as intractable in the face of so-called national liberation as it did under colonial rule. Some writers have attempted to account for this as a phenomenon called neo-colonialism. In other words. Africa's predicament today is held to be the legacy of its colonial past which served to constrain subsequent economic development along lines that worked against the interests of the African states themselves.

Robin Cox

References

1 The Growth of Hunger. R. Dumont and N. Cohen. 1980.

2 The Observer, 18/3/84.

3 How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, W. Rodney. 1972.

4 The Guardian. 27/8/80.

5 Capital, Vol.l.

6 Africa Undermined. G. banning with M. Mueller, 1979.

7 A History of South Africa: Social and Economic, W. de Kiewiet, 1941.