WORLD FOOD CRISIS BEGINS TO BITE

by Jack Ferguson

THE world is currently being gripped by a devastating food crisis.
Prices of many basic foods, such as crops like wheat or rice, or the animals that are fed on them, have rocketed in price in recent months.
The reasons for this are complex, but the consequences have been brutal for millions of poor people across the world. As the cost of feeding their families shot up, they have been protesting and rioting from Mexico to Mongolia.
The causes of this crisis lie in the mad way that we produce the food we need in the capitalist world system.
All across the world poor countries have been encouraged and forced to open their economies to ‘free trade’, removing all restrictions on what can be imported and exported. The consequence is that poor farmers have been thrown off their land, and growing urban populations became dependent on the products of big business plantation agriculture.
Poor countries have been turned into giant plantations for cash crops. Instead of farming to meet their own needs they farm products that will make a profit (most of which will never be seen by the growing country) like tobacco or coffee. Their population is dependent on cheap imported foods.
The problem is that this global food system is now starting to unravel, as the rich world increasingly looks to use agricultural products like corn to make biofuels, and feed cars instead of people.
More and more food being diverted to biofuels has driven up the cost of eating.
The other huge problem is the dramatic increase in oil prices. Many countries that produce oil are facing major political problems disrupting supply, the most obvious being the idiotic US decision to go to war in Iraq, bringing chaos to the Middle East.
Modern agribusiness is dependent on oil, to make synthetic fertilisers and pesticides, and petrol to fuel the huge machines used in mechanised farming. It wouldn’t be unfair to say that the way that big business farms today means we are eating oil a couple of stages removed. And now the huge shocks the world economy has felt as a result of the highest oil prices in years are being felt in the price of food.
Overall world food prices have risen 40 per cent in the last nine months, although in many regions the price of some key foods has risen far more steeply. The UN World Food Programme has warned that stocks are at their lowest for 30 years, meaning people dependent on international aid to survive will soon be facing starvation.
Socialist President of Venezuela Hugo Chavez recently described the food price increases as a “massacre”.
“It is a true massacre what is happening in the world,”
Chavez said in a televised speech, citing UN statistics about deaths caused by hunger and malnourishment.
“The problem is not the production of food ... it is the economic, social and political model of the world. The capitalist model is in crisis.”
Of course, the huge agribusiness corporations, and their backers in western governments and international financial institutions, haven’t learned anything from the tragedy unfolding before them.
The agribusiness and chemical mega corporations like Monsanto and Novartis are trying to exploit events to push their products on to countries around the world.
The biotechnology giants have long tried to portray genetically modified (GM) foods as the solution to world hunger, allowing ever increasing yields of crops.
However, for years now a successful international movement has fought back against GM, arguing that corporations who hold patents on crops will use them to extract the maximum profit they can from poor farmers.
This has been seen all over the world, as agribusiness forces farmers to buy their seeds from them instead of collecting them at the end of the season, and to become more and more dependent on artificial pesticides and fertilisers. The cost of meeting the payments has driven thousands of Indian farmers to commit suicide in the last decade in despair.
Recently a UN-backed body of thousands of experts around the world issued a major report about what needs to be done to be able to feed the Earth’s growing population. The International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) made some proposals that were far from radical, but would make an improvement to the situation.
They called for land reforms to put more land in the hands of poor farmers, and programmes to be put in place to make sure their incomes were guaranteed.
The biotechnology industry walked out of the process, and refused to endorse the final report. They threw a gigantic huff when they realised that the world’s agricultural experts weren’t going to support their crazy claims for GM foods and biotechnology.
Far from solving the world’s food crisis, biotechnology would in fact deepen it. It would encourage huge plantation style agriculture that is totally dependent on oil. And it would do nothing to address the real reason underlying the recent rise in food prices-the madness of the way food is produced and distributed under capitalism.
But despite what the food corporations might say, they know all this. Their promotion of biotechnology and GM food is nothing to do with feeding the poor and everything to do with increasing their profits and control over poor farmers.
Agribusiness is the second most profitable industry in the US after pharmaceuticals, and the two are trying to merge their companies to create a vastly powerful drugs/food/chemical alliance.
This wouldn’t just be good for the companies, but is also of key importance for the plans of the US government to gain control over the rest of the world for the next century.
If the US can control access to the seeds and chemicals needed to make agriculture work, then they can dictate terms to the world’s hungry people.
The Pentagon’s National Defence University took note in a 2003-issued paper - “Agribusiness (now) is to the United States what oil is to the Middle East.” It’s now considered a “strategic weapon in the arsenal of the world’s only superpower,” but at a huge cost to consumers everywhere.
There is only one way forward if we are to be saved from the horrific spectacle of millions dying at the hands of corporate agribusiness.
Socialists, environmentalists, farmers and consumers must get together to build an international movement that challenges the capitalist control of our food chain.
All across the poor world people are already getting political about the food crisis and demanding action. The challenge for activists in the rich countries is to build solidarity with them and take on our companies and governments. Now more than ever the world needs a completely different model of farming, based on protecting poor peasants around the world who have historically been the ones that always fed humanity. We must move towards a more organic form of agro-ecology, farming in a way that protects other species and enriches our soil for future generations. If we leave farming to the capitalists they will rob all life from the soil and sacrifice the poor on the altar of ever greater profits for the few.