The human and ecological crisis we face is simply not just the
product of mismanaged capitalism – the result of greedy, power-hungry people at
the helm of business and government. It is the inevitable by-product of the
profit system. Reformists have long condemned socialism as a pipedream but at
the same time rarely explained how their promises can be achieved within the
constraints of capitalism. The reality, however, is that meaningful reform
within capitalism is the pipedream.
We live in a world capable, in principle, of providing a
diverse and healthy diet for all, and yet one quarter of its people suffer from
frequent hunger and ill health generated by a diet that is poor in quantity or
quality or both. Let us repeat that so it is perfectly clear. There
is no shortage of food in the world today. Abundance, not scarcity,
best describes the supply of food in the world today. A quarter of the world’s
population eats too much food, food that is often heavy with calories and low
on nutrients (colloquially called ‘junk food’). This quarter of the world’s population
risks diabetes and all of the other chronic illnesses generated by obesity. Food
is absolutely essential for human survival. The very least that humanity should
expect from any social system is that it try to prevent starvation — and above
all that it does not promote policies which deny access to food to hungry
people.
Rather than asking how to increase food production, our
first question should be why, when so much food is available, are over 850
million people hungry and malnourished? Why do 18,000 children die of hunger
every day? Why can’t the global food
industry feed the hungry? Once more let it be clearly stated so there is no
misunderstanding. The answer is the global food industry is not organised to
feed the hungry; it is organied to generate profits for corporate agribusiness.
The shift to industrial agriculture has driven millions of people off the land
and into unemployment and poverty in the immense slums that now surround many
of the world’s cities. The people who best know the land are being separated
from it; their farms enclosed into gigantic outdoor factories that produce only
for export. Hundreds of millions of people now must depend on food that’s grown
thousands of miles away because their homeland agriculture has been transformed
to meet the needs of agribusiness corporations. Industrial farming in the Third
World has produced increasing amounts of food, but at the cost of driving
millions off the land and into lives of chronic hunger — and at the cost of
poisoning air and water, and steadily decreasing the ability of the soil to
deliver the food we need. Industrial farming continues not because it is more
productive, but that’s where the profit is, and profit is what counts, no
matter what the effect may be on earth, air, and water — or even on hungry
people.
Capitalism requires that capitalists continually shift
production from goods and services that are unprofitable (and will, in due
course plunge them into bankruptcy) to goods and services that are profitable.
Since competition forces them to maximize short term profits, it is this focus
and not that becomes the over-riding goal. If a capitalist learns that by
adding more sugar to food, profits will increase both because sugar is a very
cheap input then a rational capitalist
would do this, despite many studies that show a craving for sugar that borders
on addiction can be established very early in children through a diet of sugar
dense foods. The capitalist cannot afford to be concerned with the lifetime of
obesity and connected illnesses that such a diet might generate. In short, in
order to be rational, a capitalist needs to focus on profits and not the
quality of life of humans unless that quality can be converted into profits.
Similarly, if the market for palm oil is profitable, and the easiest way to
expand its production is to cut down the rain-forests of South East Asia, then a
rational capitalist would not hesitate to do this. Finally, if capitalist
farmers profit from paying low wages to undocumented field workers, then any
capitalist farmer who does not do this is likely to lose out to the
competition.
The producers of junk food that profit from the ease with
which people become quasi-addicted to sugar, fat, and salt provide consumers
with lots of calories but few nutrients. Hooked on junk food and lacking the
income to afford more nutritious food, people consume too many calories and not
enough nutrients. This is a recipe for obesity, a weakened immune system, and
ultimately illness and early death. The food industry always emphasizes the
enormous choice it offers the modern consumer, but this is an illusion. First
of all because most people in the world are too poor to buy any but the
cheapest of foods. Second, those that have the money are confronted with a huge
array of processed foods that are largely rearrangements of soya, corn, fat,
sugar, and salt. Food indoctrination is so widespread that most food choices
are already heavily conditioned by powerful marketing techniques of the giant
supermarkets and food manufacturers.
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