Notes by the Way: A Spot of Bother for the Dean of Canterbury (1949)

The Notes by the Way Column from the August 1949 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Spot of Bother for the Dean of Canterbury

In that wrongly named book “The Socialist Sixth of the World” the Dean of Canterbury endeavoured to show that all is for the best in state capitalist Russia. On page 212 of the 1944 issue (Gollancz edition) the Dean had something to say about the leaping production of “Socialist” tobacco and cigarettes.

“Tobacco is in demand in Russia as in other lands. The supply was short so long as tobacco was imported. Today the Soviet Union produces its own tobacco, the collective farms of Abkazia grow leaf equal to the finest Turkish brands, and Soviet cigars, an innovation, rapidly find favour. Variety of brands is large and increases. Professor Hanson remarked, as we stood in a tobacco shop in the Crimea, whereas two years previously he had counted a dozen varieties, today he observed a dozen times as many in that one shop alone. In 1937 the Soviet factories turned out 89,000 million cigarettes. The Soviet Union stands second in the world amongst tobacco-producing lands.”

Now read this from the News-Chronicle (24/6/49):

“The capitalist habit of smoking must be shunned by young Russians, says Dr. A. Kuznetsov in a Soviet youth magazine.

“Russian youths, he complains, tend to ‘use nicotine’ more, though they have the brightest of futures—unlike the children of capitalist countries ‘who are led to smoke by hunger, need and despair.’

” ‘In capitalist countries where the entire pattern of life drives a man to narcotics the urge for smoking can be understood,’ says Dr. Kuznetsov. But Russians do not need it. Youth must be instructed in the harmfulness of tobacco.”

Of course we do not know what is the explanation of the Doctor’s attack on smoking by Russians. Maybe the Russian Government merely wants to cut down smoking at home in order to export the tobacco; or perhaps Kuznetsov is only giving his own view and may shortly “confess” that he is a fascist-capitalist propagandist. Until the matter is straightened out the Dean will be wondering whether he ought to go on singing the praises of Russian tobacco or whether he should just cut the passage out of his next edition.

* * *

How much Unemployment is necessary to Capitalism?

An argument is going on about the amount of unemployment necessary to compel the workers to work harder. The Labour Government’s view was and presumably still is that the present condition with relatively little unemployment gives maximum production. Nevertheless all the Ministers keep on making speeches about the necessity of getting more production.

The Economist representing the tough capitalist viewpoint has long argued that unless there is a considerable amount of unemployment the workers won’t put their backs into it. In the issue for 4th June, 1949, the Economist repeated this: “As the Economist has said more than once in the past, full employment will not work without a million unemployed.”

The Economist returned to the subject in the issue of 9th July, 1949. The Economist urged the Labour Government to recognise and act on the overriding necessity of cheaper production, and said that if the Labour Government was alive to the urgency of the problem “it would insist on payment by results in every industry where a scheme could possibly be introduced. And if there were no other way of persuading the unions and their members to give value for money, it would welcome the therapeutic effect of a moderate degree of unemployment.”

The same article disclosed another interesting aspect of the capitalist attitude to the Labour Government— they think the Labour Party can put the screw on with less trouble than could a Conservative government:

“One must hope that the Labour Party will screw up its courage to undertake something of this order—for if anybody else has to do it, there is risk of serious civil commotion.”

* * *

The Capitalist Cycle : War—Trade War—War.

“Washington, Thursday.—Mr. Willard Thorp, Assistant Secretary of State, said today: ‘ Rivalries and conflicts are again beginning to appear in the world trade picture.

” ‘Some nations and interests are seeking to take over particular markets and exclude competitors.

” ‘The post-war honeymoon in international economic relations is drawing to a close.

” ‘The U.S. has made efforts to put Germany and Japan on their feet again. But those efforts conflict with the hopes of people who wish to prevent the return of those countries into the foreign trade field.’:—Express News Service.” (Daily Express, 26/6/49.)

* * *

The Workers and Nationalisation.

When the advocates of Railway Nationalisation first started their organised propaganda the chief emphasis was laid on the argument that Nationalisation would eliminate waste and overlapping, lead to economies and reduced staffs and thus provide efficient and cheaper transport. As this was not much of an inducement to railway workers propaganda turned more towards the alleged benefits nationalisation would bring to the workers.

Now that the railways are nationalised and are running at a loss the demand has gone forth for economies so that the losses can be wiped out and a profit realised. One of the Labour M.P’s, who supports railway nationalisation, Mr. Ernest Davies (Enfield), wrote to the Times (8/7/49) agreeing with another correspondent who had said that “the most hopeful source of substantial and lasting economies in the working of British Railways lies in a reduction of the total wage and salaries bill,” and that if the average wage rate is to be maintained, man-power must be reduced.

Where Mr. Davies differs from the other correspondent. Dr. Gilbert Walker, is that he does not think it possible to cut labour costs now, it must wait until the Transport Commission has complete control of the whole of the rail and road transport system of the country.

We can leave those two disputants to argue about the best way of running capitalism but the railwaymen may well ask what they have got or will get out of nationalisation.

As a footnote we may add the following:

“Tokio, Tuesday.—The Japanese State Railways today began distributing dismissal notices to another 63,000 railway workers.” (Daily Mail,13/7/49.)

* * *

Cripps on the Standard of Living.

“The Chancellor declared that for the greatest proportion of the population we had today a better standard of living than ever before. It was fantastic to say that they were worse off.” (Daily Herald, 19/5/49, report of Cripps’ speech in House of Commons.)

* * *

Drastic Strike Powers used by Australian Labour Government.

The Australian Labour Party, administering capitalism in Australia, has got into the same kind of mess as its companion party in Britain. The coal miners having made claims for shorter hours and higher pay to the Arbitration Tribunal decided to go on strike without waiting for the award. This the Government holds to be illegal and amidst a familiar denunciation of Communist agitators it took legal proceedings to freeze the funds of the Miners’ Federation.

The following is from the Times (15/7/49):

“From our correspondent, Sydney, July 14th.— Four hundred police, including more than 200 from Sydney, are tonight spread out over the coalfields as a protective force for tomorrow, when an attempt is likely to be made to move large stocks of coal standing in trucks on the coalfields to help maintain Sydney’s lean electricity and gas ration.

“There are now six union leaders in prison, including William Parkinson, acting general president of the Miners’ Federation, and Morris Michael Fitzgibbon, secretary-treasurer of the southern miners’ district, who were both sentenced today by-Judge Foster to 12 months’ imprisonment with light labour for contempt of court by failing to produce £A4,200 withdrawn from the bank and intended to aid the strikers. Parkinson had been acting president for only a day having been chosen when the president, Idris Williams, was sent to prison.”

One Feature of the Australian Strike Deserves Notice. 

Here the Government and the Press denounce strikes because they are “unofficial.” The Australian strike is officially conducted by the Union—but it is condemned just the same.

* * *

Food Production—What Could be Done.

The following news item from Rome is taken from a Report submitted to member governments by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation:

“World food production could be almost doubled in ‘a relatively short time’ by the use of modern technology.

“This estimate is made in a report of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation issued here today.

“Unexplored stretches of sea await the application of modern fishery methods to unlock new food resources, it said.

“World livestock could be stepped up by at least 25 per cent, in ten years through the general application of modern breeding methods.” (News Chronicle, 13/7/49.)

Edgar Hardcastle 

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.

Material World: Think global, act global (2023)

The Material World column from the December 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

There is an interesting report in The Conversation of a recent paper by a group of academics on optimal land use for agriculture and carbon capture (see ‘Benefits and trade-offs of optimizing global land use for food, water, and carbon’ in the journal PNAS. They ‘targeted three key ecosystem service (ES) indicators: total carbon (C) storage (indicative of climate regulation and climate-change mitigation), crop production (indicative of food supply), and available runoff (indicative of freshwater supply)’ and produced models to balance these three objectives.

This is interesting to us, because it is an example of how we can look globally at land use, looking at competing objectives (and trying to balance them) and not using money as an indicator: in short, the things necessary to engage in a planned co-operative economy. We don’t need to endorse the specific results of this group of academics to see the possibility of this level of global land use planning. But, as they state: ‘Results show a potential to increase all three indicators (+83% in crop production, +8% in available runoff, and +3% in carbon storage globally)’.

However in the article, Deepa Senapathi points up what this could mean:

‘It’s also tough to see the suggested land use as feasible or pragmatic when geopolitical and socioeconomic factors tend to drive decisions on what to do with land. For example, the optimisation suggests more cropland in most of Great Britain, with parts of Scotland and southern and eastern England left to nature. But this would require significant policy and socio-culture change in a country where 52% of land is already enclosed farmland and only 11% is woodland.

‘Only a very brave politician would suggest abandoning British farms, or taking iconic woodlands or moorland grazed by sheep and turning them into wheat fields.’

She also notes that there are other factors: flood plains, biodiversity and insect life that would need to be taken into consideration. This is true enough. Impressive though the optimisation algorithms are on a global scale, the kind of changes that this paper suggests would be necessary would require detailed local planning and co-operation to achieve. We would not believe for one instant that a small group of academics in Germany could produce wholesale a plan to tell the world how to use its land. Indeed, in our pamphlet Socialism as a Practical Alternative we note:

‘In socialism a world specialist body like the FAO [Food and Agriculture Organisation] could be concerned with co-ordination, assistance and advice. It would be in a position to provide this service against a detailed world picture of all the problems associated with the need to increase world food production in ways which would be safe within the natural systems of the environment. This is not to suggest that such world bodies would be entirely centralized and operating from a single world location. They could operate regionally and locally and their members could be involved in any scale of activity where the necessity might arise.’

Freed from the imperatives of geopolitical confrontation between property owners and the incessant drive to make monetary profit, information from such studies as this PNAS paper could be part of a worldwide debate to democratically agree a common course of action, as well as guidance for local debate on implementation. Indeed, to even make their model work, the German academics had to assume an absence of trade barriers for food and water.

Even land non-use is important, as they note that their ‘results further strengthen previous work that highlighted the importance of conserving tropical and boreal forested regions for their unique climate regulation services […] and emphasize that crop and fodder production should be focused on temperate and subtropical regions.’ The logic of capitalism would see this as a waste, as it demands that everything be put to instrumental use in making profit, deliberately choosing not to exploit a resource is outside the capacity of the market system, no matter how vital it is to human survival.

Still, it is useful to note that the paper tells us that we have scope to increase food production, as well as a useful element in fighting climate change by securing more carbon in plants and soil.

It also shows us how computer algorithms and models can be applied to solving the world’s problems, but, again, not in isolation or as a technocratic fix, but as part of an ongoing discussion and democratic decision. That’s why it is important that the paper’s authors have made some of their data and models available (github.com/slautenb/lpjguessOptim) as a part of open science.

At each stage in the debate, to implement this sort of co-ordination would require openness and accountability.

Pik Smeet

Land Grab: win-win or win-lose? (2010)

From the August 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

Corporate self-regulation or total system change?

Following the recent growing interest in land acquisition and investment in land around the world for which there are no binding regulations and also, apparently, no agreement by private industry as to whether or how to adopt voluntary self-regulation, the World Bank with the Food and Agriculture Organisation, the Institute for Food and Development, and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) convened a meeting to discuss this issue. Titled ‘Principles for responsible agricultural investment that respects rights, livelihoods and resources’ the discussion notes from the September/October 2009 meeting were published in January.

A set of seven principles was drawn up highlighting the main risks, which were perceived to be displacement of populations and undermining or negating existing rights. The first two principles were concerned mainly with not jeopardising existing land rights and ensuring that food security would not be threatened in the targeted areas.

Two more principles were focussed on transparency at all stages of the process when accessing land or other resources, to ensure that all stakeholders would be kept within the information loop. Consultation and participation were to be such that all those materially affected should be consulted and agreements from consultations would be recorded and enforced.

The remaining principles were concerned with ‘responsible’ investing, respect for rule of law, use of industry best practice and to balance returns for shareholders with significant positive outcomes for the host nation. Both social and environmental sustainability were considered important, with the need for environmental impact studies written in and the recognition that there should be no negative impacts on local populations.

In conclusion it was noted that agreement had been reached that a set of principles was necessary and that the seven drawn up were the right ones.

Response by UN Special Rapporteur

This proposed voluntary code was responded to on 26 April at a high level session of UNCTAD and the Commission on Investment Enterprise and Development in Geneva by the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier De Schutter. He is independent of any government or organisation and reports to the Human Rights Council and the UN General Assembly. His response was lengthy and apprehensive especially with regard to item five on the agenda – Investment in the agricultural sector with a view to building productive capacities – concerning the seven principles above. ‘I am worried,’ he began before going on to expound his many reasons. In a number of areas he felt that the focus was wrong, that it should be on rural development and increased incomes, not on boosting production, He referred to the ‘Green Revolution’ of the 1970s when food production increased per capita by 9 percent in South Asia 1970-1990 but the increase of hungry people was also 9 percent and in South America in the same period food production per capita increased 8 percent but the hungry increased by 19 percent.

Another concern was that with agricultural investment there was a tendency to antagonise groups of farmers who are involved in different kinds of farming, especially the small land owners who, although generally more productive, can in no way compete with the bigger mechanised farms. A further worry came from knowledge of earlier projects when land rights had been violated in investments in plantations for fuel crops, dams, tourism and large scale infrastructure projects.

His conclusion: ‘We cannot afford more dispossessed, greater inequalities, more leaving the land because it has become unviable – pastoralists to lose access to grazing, fishers cut off from their fishing grounds, forest destruction or fencing in for carbon sequestration.’

The World Bank’s and their associates’ statement and principles all sound quite reasonable if we are able to lay aside cynicism for a fleeting moment. However, if it is as trustworthy and dependable as it appears to be – transparent, fair, considerate of all parties etc etc – why does Olivier De Schutter feel the need to report that he is worried and to further expand on the principles and explain where they can go wrong? Remember the original principles were an attempt to provide merely a voluntary code to which De Schutter was compelled to call for added regulation or more careful wording, discerning the probability of win-lose scenarios.

Note there was no discussion of binding the principles in law, merely a suggestion that respecting any current laws would be favourable. The very fact that it is considered necessary to implement a (voluntary) code of conduct implies that previously (and currently as this code of conduct has not yet been agreed) dubious practices have been rife. We have to conclude that it is not the need for voluntary or mandatory regulations to protect what may be vulnerable, whether animal, vegetable or mineral, that are required but the removal of each and every agent that causes these vulnerabilities.

Few people are naïve enough in the 21st century to believe that investor agencies, corporate, financial or whatever, are altruistic in their dealings with the (mostly) developing countries being discussed in their absence. We recognise that their first consideration will be the timescale of the profit potential. Maybe the following response can throw some light onto a better way to deal with this matter if we are to be serious about focussing on benefits rather than profits. The way to make it possible for all possible third parties to benefit materially in exchange for a signature is to eliminate the profit motive. This is also the sure fire way to ensure that any outside agencies are there to assist positively rather than to profit personally. The guarantee that all communities around the world will be empowered to organise their own affairs according to their own self-determined aspirations will come from the rejection of the capitalist system in favour of a world socialist system; from the democratic decision of a majority world population desirous of a world of free association and access.

(World Bank guidelines and De Schutter’s response originally sourced from www.farmlandgrab.org)

Janet Surman

More Follies (1960)

From the August 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Ah, woe is me,” exclaims Ophelia, appalled at Hamlet’s apparent madness. What cries of woe are we today then to raise at the folly and madness of modern capitalism. At least it could be said of Hamlet’s madness that it was an “antic disposition,” put on all the better to mislead those around him. But what are we to say of the world around us which reverses the situation exactly. Every elaborate method and device is used to assure us that the present money-and profit-making society is the sanest possible way of life and that any suggestions to the contrary are sheer lunacy. All the more reason for the Socialist to persist in his condemnation of capitalism as an utterly crazy and insane system.

Take, for example, the “artichoke war” in France. Apparently this summer has seen in Britanny a record crop of this vegetable. Instead of everybody jumping with delight at this welcome bounty of nature, the growers and sellers are very perturbed and about 7,000 tons (calculated to represent 15 million artichokes) have been allowed to rot. The reason? The price offered to the growers was so low that most of them refused to sell out for a loss. To make sure the price was not further depressed, they have been driving them to disused quarries after trying unsuccessfully to sell them on the markets, and have then sprayed them with diesel oil to prevent the public getting completely free artichokes. Times, (29/6/60).

Under Socialism, of course, we would use artichokes for eating and diesel oil for running diesel engines. What a commentary it is on our present system that in France they use the one to destroy the other.

An interesting sidelight to the above affair is contained in the Times of 2/7/60. Here we find that the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations is launching an international campaign to promote a better understanding of the problem of providing enough food for the present and future population of the world. Our aim, says Mr. Sen, the Director-General, is to increase public and government awareness of the extent and cause of hunger and malnutrition. Perhaps Mr. Sen could begin his crusade of enlightenment by explaining to us why the aforementioned artichokes (not to speak of the millions of bushels of stored-up wheat in U.S. granaries) are not distributed to those in need of them. Elsewhere, Mr. Sen tells us that “hunger is seldom the result of nature’s harshness; it is often the result of ignorance and human failure.” Very true. Ignorance that the primary purpose of capitalist production is the making of profit and not the satisfaction of human needs, and human failure (including Mr. Sen’s) to replace it with a productive system concerned only with satisfying these needs.

Max Judd

50 Years Ago: Trade Unions and the Next Slump (1999)

The 50 Years Ago column from the March 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Are We Backwoodsmen?

At the Brussels Cycle Show Russian machines are on display at what the Herald calls “highly competitive” prices. The Financial Times (22/1/49) reports that the cotton industry is worried about the revival of Japanese competition and Sir Raymond Streat, Chairman of the British Cotton Board is in U.S.A. to discuss with American manufacturers what can be done about it. The Manchester Guardian tells us (25/1/49) that “employers and trade union leaders are to talk to Mr. Harold Wilson next week about the danger of German competition with the British engineering and shipbuilding industries.” Referring to this and to the cotton developments, the Guardian says: “These are early moves in a struggle that is bound, within the next year or so, to become one of the most bitter issues of industrial and foreign policy.”

Oil is another industry in which supply is overtaking demand; and the Times (24/1/49) tells us that world production of wheat and other grains is rising: “Last year’s cereal shortage has been largely overcome and during the next five years surpluses may well be in sight.” This does not mean that too much will be produced for the needs of the world’s population, but that supplies may be more than the market will take. Indeed the Director-General of the United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organisation has just said that “more than half the world’s population will go to bed hungry tonight.” (News Chronicle, 28/1/49.) If the hungry ones have not money to buy food they do not exist in the eyes of the capitalists who are seeking to sell their food-stuffs profitably.

(From Socialist Standard, March 1949)

Hungry for Change (1998)

From the May 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Aid agencies warn of famine in Sudan” (Guardian, 7 April). “Starving North Koreans on the border of despair” (Guardian, 14 April). “Famine in Burundi. Why are 600,000 people starving to death?” (Observer, 15 April).

These are indeed harrowing headlines, evoking images of stick-limbed children with oversized heads, of adults, cadaverous and saucer-eyed, scrounging, scavenging and bartering for food. The stories these headlines introduce tell of a combined total of six million facing death from starvation. On a much wider scale, 800 million are chronically malnourished and 1.3 billion inhabitants of the world will today go without food.

The latter are well used figures, and taken with the former echo the absurdity of those obese and confused government officials who gathered together several years ago to label the 1990s the “UN Decade for the Eradication of Poverty”. At that time there was only 400 million malnourished, when Henry Kissinger rose to his feet at the 1972 UN Food Summit and vowed to eradicate world hunger within 20 years.

The immediate causes of famine–drought, floods and civil war–often mask the fact that most suffering countries are capable of feeding themselves. Sudan’s arable land, for instance, could feed its population, but is instead used for cash crops such as cotton and sugar, and Burundi, as Peter Beaumont recently reported (Observer, 15 April) “is so fecund it cries out to be abundant”. Elsewhere, we find that 50 percent of arable land in Afghanistan can’t be cultivated because it is land-mined.

The UN Food and Agricultural Organisaion readily admits that the world produces more than enough to ensure “adequate food for all” (2,700 calories per person per day). In the 1970s, the World Health Organisation announced that we could feed a world population seven times its then size, and as late as 1995 admitted that Africa could feed a population six times its present size were western farming techniques to be introduced there.

Faced with these facts and while the people of North Korea are having grain rations reduced to 100 grams per day, while the poor of Sudan forage for wild nuts and grasses and while the Burundese bury their dead from starvation at a rate too quick to count, there is no shortage of organisations willing to try to remedy the situation. In North Korea, the World Food Programme appealed in January for 650,000 tons of food and the United Nations Development Programme has drawn up plans to make North Korea self-sufficient by the year 2000. UNICEF and the WHO hold conferences, apportion blame and send representatives to investigate the plight of the starving.

Interestingly, the bulk of these organisations come under the watchful eye of the US-controlled UN, and wasn’t it the US which twice in the past–and alone–voted against UN resolutions that sought to recognise “proper nourishment” as a “human right” (14 December 1981–Resolution 36/133 and 18 December–Resolution 37/199)?

The food the aid agencies succeed in sending usually ends up in cities rather than in rural areas where it is most needed. Some 60 percent of EC and 30 percent of US food aid is given to governments to sell on, mostly in cities, and which often provides money that is squandered–i.e. tanks invariably seem a better investment than seeds. And food aid tends to cut food prices, diminishing the incentive for farmers to grow crops, and fosters long-term dependency. Moreover, food aid is often provided minus the transport to deliver it where it is needed and ends up rotting on the quayside. When it can be delivered, it is often the case that camps have to be set up to dispense the aid, resulting in “food drones”, maelstroms of hunger and disease.

Charities launch campaigns, telling us what a donation of 20p, £1 and £100 will buy, holding back the more damning statistic that 95 percent of the money donated is eaten up in administration and infrastructure.

Though the relief organisations and charities are undoubtedly well meaning, they address problems for which the solution already exists. Though they have the insight to see the profit-driven market system as a cause of hunger, they err in trying to reform it in the interests of the hungry. While they wave off shipments of food top faraway lands, their own governments are ordering the destruction of food and paying farmers to take land out of production.

Under a system in which production is freed from the artificial constraints of profit, a system that has expunged the causes of war, a system that can locate people to areas less prone to flooding and drought, famine can then be a thing of the past. And this–socialism–could perhaps be brought about with less effort than goes into organising a world food summit and running the myriad of existing aid agencies. It is not some pipe dream anathema to human nature, for what can be more natural than producing for need?

John Bissett

Material World: Meanwhile in East Africa . . . (2020)

The Material World Column from the May 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

As the world’s attention centres upon the COVID-19 pandemic it is easy to forget that there are many other destructive threats happening to people. There has been another plague taking place. Swarms of locusts have ravaged the Horn of Africa, East Africa and parts of Pakistan and India. Since December, billions of desert locusts have swarmed, devouring fields filled with crops such as maize, millet and sorghum, and stripped bare grazing land, devastating pasture and threatening the livelihoods of tens of millions people who depend on farming and livestock for their survival. It is a race against time as each new generation of the insects reach adulthood and take flight to widen their spread. The United Nations has described the situation as ‘a scourge of biblical proportions’. A square kilometre of the swarm contains 40-80 million locusts and can eat the same amount of food in one day as 35,000 people. An average swarm destroys crops that could feed 2,500 people for a year, the FAO said.

One such swarm sighted in northern Kenya was reportedly 2,400 square km and contained up to 200 billion locusts which descend to feed off plants and vegetation, according to the FAO. A locust consumes their own weight in food every day. The swarms can travel up to 150 km in a day. If left unchecked, their current numbers could grow 500 times by June. Stephen Byantwale, the commissioner for crop protection at Uganda’s ministry of agriculture, said of the fast-breeding insects, ‘They are spreading like wildfire…’

The infestation poses an unprecedented risk to food supplies in an already vulnerable region with high poverty levels, plunging it deeper into crisis. Locusts are eating their way through Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Uganda and Tanzania.

In Ethiopia, the locusts have devastated more than 30,000 hectares of crops. Locusts have destroyed over 70,000 hectares of farmland in Somalia. Likewise, Kenya has more than 70,000 hectares of crops under infestation.

The locust plague was the result of recent extreme weather conditions that saw many farmers slowly recovering from three years of drought, which ended in one of the wettest rainy seasons in four decades in parts of East Africa, where floods killed hundreds. Climate scientists suggest that global warming has created the ideal conditions for the insects. The locusts arrived from the Arabian peninsula after cyclones dumped vast amounts of rain in the deserts of Oman — creating perfect breeding conditions.

‘The West Indian Ocean, including the Arabian Sea, was warmer than usual during the last two seasons,’ said the senior scientist of the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Dr Roxy Mathew Koll, ‘This is largely due to a phenomenon called Indian Ocean Dipole [blamed, too, for Australia’s forest fires], and also due to the rising ocean temperatures associated with global warming.’

Warmer seas led to more cyclones in the Indian Ocean. It was Cyclone Mekunu, which struck in 2018, and then a second cyclone which came to the area that allowed the conditions to continue to be favourable and another generation of breeding, so instead of increasing 400-fold, they increased 8,000-fold which allowed several generations of desert locusts the moist sand and vegetation to thrive in the desert between Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Oman known as the Empty Quarter.

Keith Cressman, locust-forecasting expert for the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), explained, ‘We know that cyclones are the originators of swarms – and in the past 10 years there’s been an increase in the frequency of cyclones in the Indian Ocean. Normally there’s none, or maybe one . . . if this trend of increased frequency of cyclones in the Indian Ocean continues, then certainly that’s going to translate to an increase in locust swarms in the Horn of Africa.’

One piece of perhaps good news is that the (dining) table might be turned on the locusts. The EU is expected to endorse locusts as being safe for human consumption. Christophe Derrien, the secretary general of the industry organisation International Platform of Insects for Food and Feed says, ‘We believe that insects for food is one solution for some of the biggest challenges we are facing on the planet. In the context of scarce resources, and insect production is not too demanding, you have the capacity to produce high-quality protein. That is a very promising solution’ (Guardian, 2 April).

ALJO

Poverty and hunger (1966)

Book Review from the December 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

As I Recall by Lord Boyd Orr (Macgibbon & Kee)

This is a fascinating, but also an infuriating, book.

In the introduction, Ritchie Calder speaks of the author’s frustration and anger when, time and again, he was foiled by the profit motive in his efforts to improve the diet of the poorest. He speaks bitterly of his frustrated attempt to get free milk into schools to supplement the children’s impoverished diet, at a time when there was a glut of milk because people could not afford it and skimmed milk was being poured down the drain. He quotes from one of Lord Boyd Orr’s speeches: “half the population of the world suffers from lack of sufficient food; farmers suffer ruin if they produce ‘too much food’. Adjust our economic and political systems to let these two evils cancel each other out.’’

This is why this is an infuriating book. Lord Boyd Orr shows many times that he recognises the responsibility for malnutrition and hunger lies in the capitalist system and yet, even recognising this, throughout his long life and even now, he has sought the remedy within that system.

In the section dealing with his research work, Lord Boyd Orr speaks of the brushes he has had at various times with the Ministry of Agriculture. At one time the Ministry was creating Boards to fix prices of home produced bacon, etc., and to restrict imports. He was opposed to these “because . . . this meant dearer food for the poorer half of the population who were already unable to purchase sufficient for health . . . The Pig and Bacon Marketing Board would mean that there would be less bacon imported from Denmark, and in return we would send them less coal, with the resulting increased unemployment in both countries.” This is a point which still eludes our successive Governments, who preach the gospel that “we” must import less and export more!

In his criticisms of the Agricultural Marketing Board, Lord Boyd Orr advocated a comprehensive food and agricultural policy based on human needs. He pointed out that while the poorest people spent more than 75 per cent of their income on food, the wealthy spend less than 10 per cent. Therefore rises in prices obviously affect the poor much more than the wealthy. In reply he was informed that, as the Rowell Institute (his research institute) was maintained by government grant, the Director should not be allowed to engage in propaganda against his government.

In the chapter dealing with his dietary surveys and wartime food policy, the author speaks of an interview he had with Kingsley Wood, then Minister of Health, who asked him why he was making such a fuss about poverty when, with old age pensions and unemployment insurance, there was no poverty in the country. The extraordinary thing was that Kingsley Wood genuinely believed that if people are not actually dying of starvation, there could be no food deficiency. Naturally he had never put this theory to the test at first hand!

There are many other instances of ignorance or deliberate obstruction and manipulation of facts on the part of “our” politicians. Nevertheless, Lord Boyd Orr can speak with admiration of General Smuts and say superstitiously that “God frowned on our work in Kenya” because two of his friends died there, one through cancer and the other through a motor accident.

When speaking of the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation, the author mentions the interest shown by American businessmen in schemes for world distribution of food “from a financial point of view.” However, due to the frequent opposition of the British team who, obviously, could see none of these advantages in view of the preferential tariff and price arrangements of this country with its “ex Empire”, many of these schemes failed.

The Atlantic Charter of 1941 stated as its aim “freedom from want for all men in all lands.” The author speaks bitterly of the fact that, already by May, 1943, at the Hot Springs Conference in America on world food problems, this had , been forgotten. ‘The old men had crept back into power, determined to resist any economic change which threatened their financial interests.” When addressing the delegates at the Quebec Conference he felt that, although the delegates themselves were in favour of his suggestions they, “like the delegates at the Hot Springs conference had been told what to say by politicians who had little interest in alleviating poverty, even in their own countries, and even less in eliminating hunger and poverty in the world.”

In spite of his experiences with succeeding British Governments, Lord Boyd Orr can say “my attempt to persuade Mr. Attlee to become interested in this project was rather foolish. He was doing a magnificent job . . . with many inexperienced ministers to reorganise Britain after the war . . . that he could not be expected to be well informed on what must have considered a side issue of the foreign policy.” Side issue indeed!

The role taken by the British Government at least appears to have been consistent. On one occasion the FAO, having sent a group of agricultural experts to Greece, reported that a grant or loan of 200 million dollars would be sufficient to finance the development plans agreed, to bring about a rapid increase in food production. Instead of the grant. Britain sent troops to support the government and Royal Family. 

In summing up, Lord Boyd Orr chafes against the division of the world into opposing camps and sees in World Government. the promotion of which now takes up much of his time, the solution to these problems. His references to “Socialism” and “Capitalism” show why Lord Boyd Orr still places hopes in such an organisation.

Eva Goodman

Food Production: The World Can Feed Us All (1970)

From the August 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

The main function of food is to provide the human body with energy. This it does in chemical form. This chemical energy is converted into mechanical work and into heat (to maintain body temperature). What a human being needs can be worked out in energy terms and the unit generally used to measure this is the “calorie” (or, more correctly, the kilocalorie). Many people don’t realise that this is a unit of energy, equally applicable in physics as in biology.

Depending on his age, sex, work and climate a person’s calorie needs can be worked out. If he is not getting these calories then he is underfed and can properly be regarded as “starving”.

But calories are not all that a person’s food must give him. It must also provide the various substances the body needs to develop and function properly especially proteins, vitamins and various minerals (like iron, calcium, iodine).

The bulk of people’s food is taken in the form of carbohydrates (starches, sugars) and fats. The carbohydrates, which come from corn, rice, potatoes, are cheap. Which is one reason why they are the staple diet of most people. The fats provide more calories and come from eating meats and some vegetables.

They say that you could in theory live without carbohydrates and fats; the same does not go for proteins, however. Protein-foods also provide calories (which is why they could replace carbohydrates and fats) but their main role is in supplying certain essential ingredients to the body to grow and to renew itself. The trouble is that proteins are found in the more expensive foods. Thus malnutrition arising from protein deficiency is fairly widespread. Malnutrition can also be caused by a deficiency of vitamins and minerals.

You often hear it said that “two-thirds of the world are starving”. That all depends on what you mean by starving. The Food and Agriculture Organisation estimates “that up to half of the population of the world continues to suffer from under-nutrition and malnutrition in varying decrees” (1963). But is malnutrition, as opposed to under-nutrition, properly called “starvation”? To most people starvation means not getting enough food, being almost at death’s door. If two-thirds of the world were starving in this sense then the world’s population ought to be going down as they die off. It is safer to say that up to half the world’s population is either underfed and/or badly fed. Estimates of those actually underfed put the figure at about 10 to 15 per cent; the half being made up by cases of malnutrition mainly from protein deficiency.

Faced with these terrible figures people say its the result of ignorance or of too many people or of not enough land to grow food on. In fact this problem is caused by none of these. All this human suffering is unnecessary and could be rapidly ended given the necessary changes in the structure of society.

That the natural resources of the earth and the knowledge and machines of its people are sufficient to provide an abundance of foodstuffs is a well-established fact. Listen to Professor Clark, formerly of the Agricultural Economics Research Institute of Oxford University:

  The purpose of this article is to consider whether the earth’s resources, if properly developed, would yield material goods sufficient to provide, a satisfactory livelihood for the whole human race. Although it is not usual to state one’s conclusion at the beginning, in this case it can be stated without qualification. The material resources of the world would easily suffice to make such provision, not only for the whole human race as it now is, but also for any conceivable expansion of our numbers which is likely to occur for a very long time. Whatever was the case in the past, we can certainly say now that, with modern scientific and technical knowledge, the fact that so many people fall short of satisfactory livelihood must be blamed entirely upon human shortcomings, not upon the inadequacies of nature (“The Earth Can Feed its People”, Christian Responsibility and World Poverty. A Catholic Viewpoint).

Prof. Clark is a Catholic and an opponent of birth control, but even supporters of birth control as one way to solve capitalism’s current food problems agree on this. N. W. Pirie, of the Rothamsted Experimental Station, writes in his recent book Resources: Conventional and Novel (reviewed, Socialist Standard, September, 1969) of the possibilities of increasing food production by the further application of conventional agriculture:

  At many points there is great scope for further research, but the vigorous application of existing knowledge on a worldwide scale could increase immensely the amount of food produced. The extent of the possible increase is a matter of opinion. But only a very cautious prophet would predict less than a doubling.

In 1963 the F.A.O. published Possibilities of Increasing World Food Production, a region-by-region survey of food producing potential, and declared that “it is clear that world potentials for increasing food production are very substantial indeed”. This conclusion is all the more impressive since the FAO openly assumes that food will continue to be produced for sale and traded on the world market (a great restriction on production).

It is perhaps worth running through what are these conventional methods that could be vigorously applied: (1) Cultivating more land; (2) Irrigation; (3) Better varieties of crops; (4) Use of fertilizers; (5) Use of weed killers and pesticides.

All these techniques could be further applied as soon as Socialism were established in order to increase food production immediately by a substantial amount.

Developments in agriculture are not the only ones that can allow food production to be increased. It is often said that although the food can be produced in America, Europe, Australia, the facilities for transporting it to the people who need it either don’t exist or are quite inadequate. The ports of India are said to be so overcrowded that it would be physically impossible to transport more food there. There are said to be no roads to the places where people are starving so that the food would have to be carried by porters over long distances. This may well be true but there are transportation techniques which are also not vigorously applied. When there is a war on, the logistics sections of the armed forces overcome such problems and the Indo-China war has shown that the USAF can build temporary air fields in the middle of the jungle in a very short time.

Besides the more vigorous application of conventional methods of agriculture, further research could lead to the discovery of new methods by which food production could be increased.

Food, as we saw, is energy in chemical form and, if really necessary, essential foodstuffs could be produced synthetically toy industrial processes. In the last world war, Germany had a factory producing artificial fats. Vitamins and minerals are already produced industrially. Research into ways of manufacturing proteins is also going on, as newspaper stories about food from oil and coal show.

Then there is the sea, a vast source of untapped food potential, especially of protein-rich foods. As far as obtaining food from the sea is concerned mankind is still largely in the hunting and gathering stage from which on land we developed millions of years ago. Very little farming of the sea is done as yet. Two scientists, writing in the April 1969 issue of World Health (WHO), estimate:

  If the sea’s resources were used rationally, an acre of its surface could produce twice as much protein-rich food as an acre of high-class pasture. . . . According to estimates made by the oceanographer Professor L. Zenkevitch of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, the productive capacity of the sea is more than a thousand times that of the arable land area.

Half the world is inadequately fed despite the existence of the resources to provide the food they need in abundance, not because of overpopulation nor because of nature but because of the capitalist system of production for profit on the basis of the class ownership of the means of production.

Adam Buick

Hunger amidst plenty (1993)

From the May 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

To say that millions of human beings suffer from hunger because there are too many people is to subscribe to a myth. It is an explanation of a situation which is not based on an examination of the facts. The continued existence of millions of lives endured under the scourge of hunger, malnutrition and starvation is not “natural” or “unavoidable” but is entirely artificial.

The so-called population problem is in reality a poverty problem—a problem of capitalism. Who is not moved at the sight of famine victims depicted on TV screens, newspapers and magazines? The desire to do something about such an appalling situation is natural and worthy. Socialists argue that the first step to be taken in solving the problem of hunger is to recognise that famines are artificial and that the miseries that they bring are unnecessary and avoidable.

There are three dangers to be avoided, however.

First is the danger of believing that charity is any sort of solution. The danger here is that giving money to organisations such as War on Want or Band Aid diverts attention from the real causes of hunger and does nothing to remove them. It also encourages the “it’s all right. I’ve done my bit” attitude which is the basis of political apathy.

The second is getting involved in political action to pressurise governments to give more aid. Charities themselves admit that the scale of world hunger is beyond their means and call on governments to put money into schemes meant to alleviate the suffering of poor people. Those who urge the adoption of this “solution” would do well to remember the words of Tom Clausen (President of the World Bank) who said in 1982 that it was

  not in the business of redistributing wealth from one set of countries to another. It is not the Robin Hood of the international financial set. (Quoted in Anne Buchanan Food, Poverty and Power. 1982. p. 68).

The third danger is that of blaming the victims, blaming the poor for their poverty. This attitude dehumanizes the poor so that they become “hordes”, “floods”, “a cancerous growth" or “a plague of people”. It also, by making the problem seem so enormous, saps the political will to do anything let alone take any meaningful action. In addition it patronises the Third World poor in particular as they are seen as being helpless victims unable to do anything for themselves. The attitude of the neo-Malthusians is to condemn the poorest of the poor to death because, as Paul Erlich has written, “the battle to feed humanity is already lost” (The Population Bomb, 1971, p. 15).

Enough food

World population is about 5,700 million. That figure is set to reach 6,000 million by the year 2000. Estimates of the number of hungry vary. According to the US President’s Science Advisory Council 450 to 500 million people are hungry. The World Bank's estimate (using different criteria) is 730 million without enough to eat to enable them to have an active working life: of these 730 million 340 million have diets insufficient to prevent serious risk to health and they suffer arrested mental development and have stunted growth.

The question then arises could the hungry' be fed?

Current world food production is in the region of 3,800 million metric tons. Half of that by weight is grain. Equitably distributed it would give each man, woman and child on the planet 5lbs of food per day. United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation statistics show that this food represents 2709 calorics per head per day and 71 grammes of protein per head per day (United Nations Statistical Yearbook, 37th edition, 1993. Table 24, p. 17). Nutritionists calculate that on average human beings need between 1800 and 2500 calories a day (for energy) and 45 to 50 grammes of protein (for body growth and repair).

The amount of food currently being produced would adequately feed the expected world population for the year 2100.

In the mid 1980s the US Department of Agriculture made some calculations based on actual nutritional needs and estimated that the 67 poorest countries (those with the lowest income per head of population) required 25.8 million metric tons of food to meet their needs. The FAO estimated needs to be 20 million metric tons. The 1984-5 global cereal carry-over was 294 million metric tons, not counting the butter, beef, milk powder, etc kept in storage because the market could not absorb the supplies. (It cost £1,570 million per year for the UK alone to keep it off the market).

These figures do not take into account the fertile land withdrawn from production in an attempt to keep up prices and maintain profit. The agricultural economist Colin Clark calculated in the early 1970s that world resources of agricultural land could feed 47,000 million people at maximum standards (Population and Land Use, 2nd edition, p. 153).

In the face of this overwhelming abundance why do millions of our fellow humans continue to starve? The situation is clearly intolerable.

Cartoon by Peter Rigg from the May 1993 Standard.

Not produced for need

What needs to be done first is to recognise something so obvious that it might be thought not worthy of restatement and that is this: food is not produced primarily to satisfy human need, but to be sold on the market so as to realise a profit. No profit, no production. Because the market only recognises effective demand (i.e. demand backed by the ability to pay) people starve within sight of food. The economist Keith Griffin (President of Magdalen College, Oxford) pul the problem this way:

  The fundamental cause of hunger is the poverty of specific groups of people, not a general shortage of food. In simple terms, what distinguishes the poor from others is that they do not have sufficient purchasing power or effective demand to enable them to acquire enough to cat. The problem is the relationship of particular group of people to food, not food itself. (World Hunger and the World Economy, 1987, p. 18).

That academic assessment is backed by the findings of aid charities in the field. War on Want’s Don Thomson has stated:

  Experienced disaster and officials now admit . . . that they know of hardly any famine in living memory where there has been an outright shortage of food locally. They found instead that the victims did not have the means to buy. (New Scientist, 7 November 1974).

In a world of buying and selling a bumper crop of food cannot be guaranteed to feed the hungry. Take for example the situation in Mozambique where up to 4 million people were facing starvation largely because the country's agricultural production had been wrecked by years of civil war. In 1987 neighbouring Zimbabwe had a 2.8 million ton “maize mountain”. A stack of white maize three storeys high stood alongside the railway linking Zimbabwe and Mozambique 55 miles away. The food would have met Mozambique’s needs for several years but as Pat Henderson. chief executive of the Zimbabwe Commercial Grain Producers Association said at the time:

  It's not only a human problem, it's a financial problem. We cannot give our maize away (Observer, 15 February 1987).

Henderson was right. It is commercial madness to give free access to food in a money economy. The human problem of hunger cannot be solved within the framework of production for profit.

The challenge that faces humanity is that of organising things on a different basis. Class ownership of the world’s resources must be replaced by common ownership. This will be done when the majority of the world's population—we who own no productive resources other than our ability to work—organise to take democratic political action to dispossess the profit-seekers who currently own those resources.

Gwynn Thomas

The Starvation in Somalia (1992)

Editorial from the December 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nobody can fail to be moved by the pictures and accounts of people starving in Somalia. It really is an obscene crime against humanity that people should be dying of starvation in a world which is not only capable of producing enough to feed everybody but even has enough food stockpiled to stop it straightaway. As the Observer reported on 30 August:

Britain has enough wheat and barley lying unused in its grain stores to feed the entire Somalian nation for more than a year.
 At one single centre—on a disused RAF base near Kidderminster in Worcestershire—there are four huge warehouses stuffed with enough grain to supply the stricken war-torn nation for a month.
   One of these warehouses is said to be so full that it is virtually impossible to open its large steel doors. Yet in Somalia, hundreds of people—mostly children—are dying daily.
  The Kidderminster grain mountain is part of a total of 568,000 tonnes housed in Britain—in turn part of 19.6 million tonnes of wheat and barley kept in EC warehouses.
  This massive surplus could feed Somalia—which needs 40,000 tonnes of food aid per month for its starving people—for more than 40 years.

In a sane world, one geared to meeting human needs and serving human welfare, stopping people in Somalia dying of starvation would be a question purely of logistics. Organising to transport the food from where it is stockpiled to Somalia.

But of course we are not living in a sane world. We are living in a world dominated by market forces. And it is their inability to operate in the human interest that has caused the problem in the first place and is now preventing it being solved in the simplest, most direct way.

People are starving in Somalia not because there is not enough food in the world to feed them. They are starving because they lack the means to make their demand—or rather, their absolute need—for food effective. They lack either money to buy food or access to land to grow their own. Those in Somalia who do have these things are not starving.

Those with money in Somalia can, and do, have access to food—the television has shown pictures of well-stocked markets, sometimes with starving people lying on the other side of the street. We mention this not to belittle the extent of the obscene situation in Somalia but to underline the point that famines only affect those whose access to money or land has collapsed for some reason. Famines are a social not a natural phenomenon.

Protecting the market for food in Somalia is in fact a key factor shaping the so-called “food aid” policies of governments and the UN. They know that to make available for free distribution anything but minimal amounts of food per starving person would be to undermine local markets and local market-oriented production, leading to more people coming to lose their access rights to food. And of course they are right. Given the market system this is exactly what would happen. So, quite apart from financial cost considerations, they deliberately limit the amount of free food they supply.

This is what we mean when we say that it is market forces that are preventing the immediate starvation in Somalia being solved in the way that it would be, almost literally overnight, in a sane society, one that would have to be based on the common ownership of resources: transporting the food from the warehouses of Europe to the towns and villages of Somalia.

But what of the long term? Could starvation be averted after the warehouses of Europe and North America had been emptied to feed the starving in Somalia and other parts of the world? In other words, could the planet produce enough to adequately feed the whole world’s population on a permanent, continuing basis?

Professor Vulimiri Ramalingaswami, who is chairman of the World Health Organisation’s medical research committee, is in no doubt that it can. “We have the ability as a world to produce enough food for everyone”, he told a meeting in Geneva in August. “We need to devise mechanisms so these fruits can reach those in greatest need” (Guardian, 18 August).

Professor Ramalingaswami is to chair a conference in Rome this month that the WHO is organising jointly with the Food and Agriculture Organisation. The FAO and the WHO are apparently thinking in terms of a “world crusade to end famine deaths”. Something like this is indeed what is required: a crash programme to increase world food production and distribute it on a free, non-market basis to where it is needed. But it is not going to happen. For the same reason that the warehouses of Europe are not going to be emptied to immediately stop the starvation in Somalia. It would undermine the market.

Not this time the local markets in some famine-stricken part of the world, but the world markets for wheat, maize, rice and other world commodities. As long as all things are produced for sale on a market with a view to making a profit, food is never going to be produced to feed people who can’t pay for it. As long, in other words, as food remains a commodity people will starve and Somalias will continue to happen.

Abundance and Poverty (1961)

From the May 1961 issue of the Socialist Standard

Some time ago, under the above caption, the now defunct News Chronicle, in a leading article, asked “is it really beyond the wit of man to devise a means of sharing out more fairly the world's bounty?" This was by no means the first challenge to society to meet the paradox of want in the midst of plenty, and the report that to-day, in Toronto, thousands of children are starving, provides ample evidence that the challenge has not been met

The statement comes from Dr. Morris Zeidman, a Presbyterian minister who runs the Scott Mission, which has “opened its doors to feed the hungry children of the city’s unemployed.” Referring to a woman who could not drink the soup provided, a mission worker said, “Some of these people have been subsisting on so little that they now find it hard to stomach ordinary food ” (The Guardian 10/3/61).

Is this, we may ask, part of the heritage of freedom for which members of the working class fought and died in two of the bloodiest wars in history? Must people go without the basic essentials of life at a time when productivity has increased to heights never known before? When man was the slave of nature, shortage and want could be explained in something like intelligent terms, but to-day, when his productive capacities are virtually unlimited, he must find some other answer.

Thirteen years ago, Lord Boyd Orr, then Director-General of the World Food and Agriculture Organisation, could say “There was no difficulty about producing 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 in the countries that needed it?’’. Seven years later, the Oxford economist, Mr. Colin Clark, remarked that in two years no authority had disagreed with Professor Dudley Stamp, who pointed out that if Danish agricultural standards were to be practised on the available cultivable land, there would be enough food produced to give an excellent diet to probably seven times the world’s present population.

What Lord Boyd Orr and Mr. Colin Clark failed to recognise, or at least make no mention of, is the fact that however capable man may be of producing wealth, it is ultimately the question of ownership which decides whether or not he will partake of that wealth. Food, like every other commodity in our modern world, is produced primarily for profit, and the fact that it eventually may satisfy hungry children in Toronto or elsewhere is incidental and of secondary importance.

The answer to the News Chronicle’s question will not be found in the speeches of politicians and economists; if it could, the question would not be asked after a century of Parliamentary Statutes and fact-finding Commissions, designed to reform capitalist society in the interest of those who make it tick.

A. F.

The World of Plenty? (1957)

From the November 1957 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists have always said that under this capitalist system the most decisive factor in production is the profit motive, and that production itself is geared to a marketing system that does not take any account of the real social needs of the community. We have said that capitalism channels all men's efforts down the narrow inhibited path of commerce and reduces his vast potentialities in the field of production to within the bounds of profit making. These assertions and the whole tragedy of capitalism and its contradictions are exemplified nowhere with more grim irony than in the problem feeing the American Government, the problem of agricultural surpluses, the ever-increasing accumulation of unsold stocks of food in the U.S.A.

To release these huge surpluses on the world’s markets would inevitably cause a slump in prices of agricultural commodities, bringing in its wake disaster for the farming community, whose repercussions might extend even to an industrial crisis. From there might ensue a repetition of conditions that existed all over the world in the early 1930's.

Since 1940 production on U.S. farms has increased one-third. This is due largely to the modernisation of farming methods, more machinery, better fertilisers, etc. The world's markets could not consume the increased supplies at the existing prices, so to offset a fall in the prices of farm produce, and prevent large numbers of unemployed in agriculture, the U.S. Government employed a method of buying up all the surplus at subsidised prices This was not a great philanthropic gesture on the part of the Government directed towards the farmer. Besides the economic necessity of maintaining stable conditions in agriculture, this policy was also part of a political campaign to woo the vote of the farmer. This is a very important vote, as the agricultural community comprises a very powerful pressure group, and any party that antagonises them can expect at least vastly reduced support, if not electoral death. The policy of subsidising farm products resulted in even greater surpluses, for the subsidy was made flexible and higher prices were paid out in accordance with the success of overseas sales. In view of these price guarantees, even greater over-expansion was caused, with the consequent boosting of production.

These surplus food stocks are not only very costly (five billion dollars a year), but are becoming a great embarrassment to the U.S. Government.

An investigation was made by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation into the advisability of diverting food surpluses to the under-developed countries of the world, but the difficulties arising out of such a project were found to be so wide and varied that very little was done about any proposals put forward by this organisation.

The American Government, with an eye to increasing its political prestige in Poland during the disturbances there in 1956, made generous offers of help in the way of food supplies to the Polish Government. These offers met with stiff opposition from countries like Canada, who hold the markets in Poland, so this offer had to be withdrawn.

However, the most important effort made by the U.S. Government to reduce these agricultural surpluses was the creation of the Soil Bank in 1956. This is a system whereby farmers are paid to take acreage out of production; e.g., for 1957 the U.S. signed up 233,453 farmers to take 12,784,968 acres of wheat alone out of production in return for $230,974,475 in payments. This system was to operate over a period of three years.

Ezra Benson, the Secretary of Agriculture, did not want to put this scheme into operation until 1957, but politicians, with an eagle eye on the General Election of November 1956, brought such pressure to bear that he was forced to start making payments to farmers in 1956. The Soil Bank was hailed by the two major political parties as the solution to the farm problem, but they reckoned without the narrow individualism of men in business under capitalism.

In 1956 260 million dollars were paid out to farmers, and the organisation of the Soil Bank was so ineffective that money was even paid out to farmers who had already tried to grow crops on the acres they had donated and failed. Wheat farmers who received payments for taking wheat out of production grew barley or rye instead. In some cases the top soil was sold and the barren ground that was left was put into the Soil Bank. Pasture land was ploughed up and sown with crops. Fertiliser was piled on, and rows sown closer together. The combined result of all this was that in 1956 agricultural production broke all records.

Now let us turn to the desperate need for food that exists among millions of the world's population. The Agricultural Review (October 1956) had this to say:—

 "Nutritional experts affirm that more than one-half of the world’s inhabitants, including many engaged in agriculture itself, are still not getting enough to eat."

While the minimum subsistence level is assessed at 2,200 calories per day, it is stated that 1,166,000,000 people consume less than 2,200 calories. The poverty-ridden countries of India, Pakistan, China and Japan make up the majority of this number, but there are workers in every country suffering from malnutrition, including large numbers working in agriculture itself.

These conditions exist because of the very nature of capitalism itself. There is no question of organising production so as to meet the needs and requirements of humanity. What is needed is a system of society wherein the means of production shall be held in common ownership by all of humanity instead of a privileged few.

Wherein production can be consciously regulated to meet human needs and requirements. Wherein commodities are not produced for sale to the highest bidder, but are produced for the benefit of all mankind. Only in Socialism can there be found the answer to the problems of the working classes of this world. 

Joan Lawrence