“Arise, ye prisoners of starvation” (2/3)

The issue of food is popping up everywhere and wherever you look the horrific state of food production hit the headlines but the current protests about food are just the latest crisis brought on by the way capitalism operates. Industrial food processing has gone hand in glove with the rise of capitalism, as mass production processes developed to provide cheap food to concentrated working-class, urban populations that became dependent on the market for their nutritional sustenance. At the turn of the 20^th Century Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle, the story of the meat trade in Chicago. Today, many writers are still angrily describing much the same conditions. The damaging and dangerous aspects of our food supply have arisen out of its complete subordination to the dictates of the free market. Maximisation of profits has trumped all other considerations.  Plenty has produced waste, not health; science has poisoned us instead of fed us; and technology has intensified, not alleviated, poverty. Why, in a world full of food, should anyone be hungry? We are surrounded by an unbelievable abundance of food. Walking around one of the giant supermarkets, you might sometimes wonder if anyone actually buys anything, because the shelves are kept fully replenished. Yet millions of people are not getting the food they need, not only in other places, but right here at home. And it’s because food is not produced first of all for people to sustain themselves and enjoy, but to make money. Human beings currently exist in conflict with nature because capitalism sees nature as a means to an end: profit.

Feeding billions of humans is a mass-production industry. Products that are farmed all over the world are harvested, shipped, and processed to serve millions of people in distant markets. Even mundane products like apple juice may be made from apples from China, Mexico, and Canada. But food production, like any other industry, is not really about feeding people; it is about what commodities generate the largest profit margins for a handful of enormous conglomerates who process and distribute products. This means the bigger a company is, and the more transport and logistics it does, the cheaper it is for that company to be in the business. You need to be rich to do business. The small fry have all been devoured by the big fish and these few companies control the gateways from farmers to consumers that gives them market power both over the people who grow food and the people who eat it. While there are still millions of local producers of the raw materials of food (grains, fruits, young animals, etc.), the vast majority work under direct contract to larger conglomerates who mill, ship, or process their output, or have only one buyer with whom to deal at harvest time. Raj Patel describes in ‘Stuffed and Starved’ how a kilo of coffee grown by farmers in Uganda costs 14 cents; by the time it reaches a Nestlé processing plant, it has risen to $1.64. But this is where the real magic happens: when it emerges from the plant, it will be an astounding $26.40 a kilo. Nestlé, one of the largest food conglomerates on the planet, not surprisingly sold $107 billion in food and beverages in 2008. Between the more than 2 million family farms and corporate farms in the US and the 300 million consumers, there are 7,563 wholesale purchasers, 27,915 food manufactures, and 35,650 retail wholesalers. This hourglass shape provides for large profits for those sitting in the middle: in 2004 retailers made $3.5 trillion, food processors $1.25 trillion, and the agrochemical industry $31 billion. The most famous example of the utter dominance of the few with a chokehold on grocery sales is Wal-Mart determining, with a few other giant retail supermarkets, what will make it onto your dinner plate long before you visit the store. A retail chain like Wal-Mart can and does dictate the terms of sales to producers, including price, driving the cost to retailers down, even while they increase prices.

Within agriculture they are busy researching, developing, and demonstrating feasible alternatives to the high-input and ecologically damaging system of agriculture that we now have. They're proving that is possible to grow food-grains in an ecologically sound way. But in narrow market terms, this approach would not win out over agri-business. It's actually cost-effective for agri-business to grow annual grain crops that require huge amounts of herbicides and pesticides. You manage these crops in a certain way, you get huge, standardised output, and on the cost and profit side, it works— for agri-business, not for the farmer who does the actual growing. But once you start considering the effects on ground water, soil erosion, and public health, then the social costs go way up. The problem— and this is built in to the market mechanism —is that the market doesn't register the long-term and social effects of economic activity. Health and pollution don't show up in the supply- demand and profit maximisation framework of price and profit. That's what happens when profit is the starting and end-point.

Food policy is as destructive a force in the lives of billions of people as the use of fossil fuels or military intervention. The food system does not respond to the needs of people, nor to sustainable production based on respect for the environment, but is based on a model rooted in a capitalist logic of seeking the maximum profit, optimization of costs and exploitation of the labour force in each of its productive sectors. Common goods such as water, seeds, land, which for centuries have belonged to communities, have been privatised, robbed from the people and converted into exchange currency at the mercy of the highest bidder. Governments, international institutions and NGOs have bent to the designs of the transnational corporations and have become accomplices and co- profiteers, in this unsustainable food system. Never in history has there been so much food as today. But for millions of people who spend 50-60% of their income to purchase food, a figure that can rise to 80% in the poorest countries, the price of food has made it impossible to gain access to it. The problem today is not the lack of food, but the inability to pay for it.

Socialism with its democratic planning is the only solution to feed the billions of humans on the Earth in an ecologically sustainable way. The skill and science of sustainable farming already exists. How to implement sustainable models for larger and more urban populations will be a challenge for those who will build a new society. What to grow, how, where; how to prioritise land use; irrigation; transportation; storage and processing; the uses of animals; all these questions about agriculture will have to be debated and decided by producers who are not driven by Wall Street numbers and market share. The vision of human beings’ relationship to the Earth will not be of abuser or owner, but of a steward of the natural world, able to use the collective intelligence of generations to not just consume, but live harmoniously and heal capitalism’s damage to the environment.

 Political action with the aim of achieving real change is essential. The socialists who make up the World Socialist Movement envisage free access to food and other necessities of life, which simply means that workers will be allowed to take freely of the goods and services available to them, and in which they had a hand in collectively producing. Common sense will prevent over consumption, and due to the fact that we will be allowed to work at jobs which we have a natural interest and aptitude in, the enforcement of work entailed by labor vouchers will be seen as unnecessary. Therefore, free access consumption will not be based on how many hours we work, but on the self-defined needs of the individual. Of course, if we don't collectively agree not to over consume, or if we collectively choose not to work, socialism in general and free access in particular will not work. However, since everybody in a socialist society will be working at jobs in which they have an aptitude for and personal interest in, and since work will encompass only a fraction of the time for each worker that it does under capitalism (with far more leisure time available to workers than under capitalism), the need for some medium to enforce work will be unnecessary. Give people what they need: food, medicine, clean air, pure water, trees and grass, pleasant homes to live in, some hours of work, more hours of leisure. Don’t ask who deserves it. Every human being deserves it. Socialism will be the greatest gift to humankind - the right to collectively choose our destiny without a political state or ruling class to decide for us. Food production is too important to leave in the hands of profiteers. They don’t care who starves or who gets sick.