BQUIPE
"Wouldn't it be better to move toward an immediate solution to hunger and malnutrition through a more rational form of social organization.
[The following article appeared in the February 11-17 issue of Cuadernos Para el Dialogo, a Spanish weekly magazine. The introductory note is by Cuadernos Para el Dialogo. The translation is by Intercontinental Press/ Inprecor.]
The third world war has already begun. It is a war for world control of the production, distribution, dumping, and pricefixing of basic foodstuffs. It is a struggle by the chemical industry for control over phosphate deposits and other elements used as fertilizers to increase the productivity of the land. (This is what is behind the Sahara conflict.) The third world war is already being fought. It is a full-scale, total war, even though the fighting is silent. Silent because the screams of the millions of human beings who die every year from starvation, malnutrition, and plain hunger do not reach the little oases of the advanced world.
Ernest Mandel, a fifty-four-year-old economist and the most representative theoretician of the Fourth International, describes below, in an article written for Cuadernos, the "way the population of the Third World has been condemned to death by starvation in the name of the sacred market economy.
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The famine of 1974 has already been forgotten. Last year's harvest in the Northern Hemisphere-except for the Soviet Union—was excellent. From 1972-73 to 1976-77, world production of all types of cereal grains grew from 1,270 to 1,477 million tons; in other words, it increased by more than 16 percent. The production of wheat increased by 23 percent, going from 337 to 416 million tons.
You might think that, in face of the bad world economic situation, there is at least some cause for rejoicing in this one bright spot of the international economy. But that would not take into account the perverse logic of the market economy. Because for the market economy, "overproduction"-even of foodstuffs and even in a world where half the people do not get enough to eat-is bad news, not good news. It is a disaster for food producers, both large-scale and small-scale. It causes a drop in prices. In fact, the price of wheat on the world market dropped within two years to less than half its record 1974- 75 level.
So the "logical" thing happens: production is curtailed in order to "protect" prices. On August 12, 1977, the deputy director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture told a White House news conference that the Carter administration had decided to require American wheat producers to leave 20 percent of their usable land untilled, if they wanted to take advantage of administration measures to keep prices up. There was to be a 10 percent reduction in land devoted to fodder and grain for livestock.
Just as similar policies in the late 1960s and early 1970s caused famines in the Third World during the period 1972-74, so the measures being taken today to restrict production artificially in order to force up grain prices will cause new famines by the end of this decade. It is an insane merrygo-round. And our great economic and political experts still stubbornly insist that it is better to condemn millions of farmers to uncertain, fluctuating, and generally inadequate incomes, to condemn millions of inhabitants of the Third World to living permanently under the shadow of hunger, than to sacrifice the principle of the sacrosanct "market economy."
The world prices of cereals are determined by the fluctuations in supply and demand of the agricultural surpluses produced in the big exporting countries (the United States, Canada, Argentina, Australia, and to a lesser degree France). These world prices in turn determine the cyclical expansion and contraction of the amount of land surface that is sown and the size of the harvest. Obviously you would have to be a perverse and totally utopian "subver sive" to suggest that it would be better for everybody if farmers were guaranteed incomes equal to the national average (or the average industrial wage), on the condition that they increase their production in order to maintain stable, low food prices and assure a surplus to be distributed free to the poor of the Third World and the imperialist countries. The strangest thing of all is that, in the long run, this "subversive" and "utopian" solution would be less costly from a "purely" economic point of view. But can we as human beings ever approach things on a "purely" economic basis when the ability to eat-that is, the survival-of millions and millions of people is in question?
It simply is not true that hunger is caused by some Malthusian inevitability, according to which population increases more rapidly than food production. In the course of the fifteen years since 1962, world production of cereals has increased more than 50 percent, much more rapidly than the population of our planet. The annual rate of increase of the population has averaged 1.9 percent; the rate of increase of cereal production, on the other hand, has averaged 2.9 percent.
The fact that hunger continues to exist, casting its shadow over entire nations, is ascribable basically to three things: sharp annual fluctuations in production, caused by sharp shifts in world market prices, that is to say, in the profits to be made; the growing shortage of grains in the Southern Hemisphere, which is caused basically by the increasing penetration of capitalism into the countryside and the commercialization of primitive agriculture; the problems of buying power and profits, which mean that malnutrition, lack of food, and outright hunger can increase even in face of overproduction.
In other words, if hunger continues to increase, it is not because too many babies are born. It is because of capitalism, with its chain of irrational and inhuman consequences.
"Capitalism has nothing to do with it," some people will say on the basis of the simple thesis that grain shortages in Third World countries are essentially the result of the backwardness of agricultural technology, that is to say, the very low return per unit of land. Antiquated technology, tools, and methods of work: that's the source of the problem.
Obviously there is a grain of truth in this. A large-scale modernization of agricultural production in the Southern Hemisphere would undoubtedly double or triple production, and thus make it possible to feed two or three times more people than live there now (with ecological consequences still to be studied).
But modernization of agricultural techniques and procedures under capitalism would lead to results not foreseen by the so-called "experts" in technology and economics, results that are unfavorable from the point of view of the average nutritional level of the local population. Among "backward" populations, almost all agricultural production is subsistence farming, basically of foodstuffs. The introduction of modern techniques, combined with private ownership and private enterprises, replaces the criterion of nutrition (how many human beings can be fed?) with the criterion of private profit (how much money can be made?). And therefore commercial products, almost entirely for export, replace foodstuffs.
The logic of production for private enrichment is inevitable. When you can make more money growing cattle feed to be sent to Europe (eventually producing a surplus of milk and butter in the Common Market countries) than in growing food for the local population, then that is the direction agriculture will go. In Mali, for example, while tens of thousands of children were slowly starving during the great famine that swept the Sahel in 1974, the export of peanuts and peanut oil increased.
The "green revolution" produces much less positive results in terms of nutritional levels than might be supposed. In addition to the disastrous ecological consequences of the massive use of chemical fertilizers on irrigated land, there are even more terrible social effects.
The "green revolution" has above all meant the introduction of capitalist agriculture into areas previously overwhelmingly dominated by subsistence farming. The transformation of this type of farming into capitalist agriculture means an inevitable social polarization among the population, a constant increase in the number of landless peasants, a growing cutting off of poor peasants from access to the land, a massive exodus from the countryside, and the progressive replacement of human labor power by farming machinery.
And since there is no parallel expansior. of industry and of employment in industry, this whole process means that a growing proportion of the former peasantry is pushed to the fringes of society, either in the countryside or in the slums of the big cities. And the more this impoverished poulation is cut off from direct access to the land, the more seriously it suffers from malnutrition, even if its cash income rises a little (primarily through occasional work in the service sector, a hidden form of unemployment).
Finally, there is the problem of the distribution of foodstuffs. Food consumption and nutritional level are not direct functions of the production of foodstuffsat least not under capitalism. It is also a function of the distribution of wealth. Hence the fundamental paradox of capitalism that you can have increasing undernourishment of entire layers of the population while at the same time there are growing, unsalable "stockpiles" of food. This has happened repeatedly in the past, most recently during the 1930s. It is happening again today.
At the end of 1977 there was an unsold "surplus" of 300,000 tons of butter, 400,000 tons of beef, millions of liters of wine, and a million tons of milk in the Common Market countries. But at the same time, as a result of massive unemployment, there were millions of families in Western Europe-without mentioning the innumerable old people on social security-eating less and less butter and meat because they could not afford them.
In Britain, formerly the "ideal" welfare state, 15 percent of the population now live under the poverty level, which is characterized above all by chronic undernourishment. And do we need to point out that a few dozen kilometers from the "tourists' paradise" of the southern coast of Spain, there are 300,000 Andalusian agricultural workers who make do with a diet of bread and tomatoes for the better part of the year because of underemployment?
Wouldn't it be better to move toward an immediate solution to the problem that exists today of hunger and malnutrition through a more rational form of social and economic organization, rather than concentrating on some imaginary population explosion that is supposed to cause terrible shortages ... in a century or so?