Feed the World

Many people still believe that hunger is caused today by over-population and that if there were fewer people in the world, then, and only then, could they be adequately fed. This is not so. In the first place, the resources and technology exist now to feed the world’s population many times over. Second, even if the population did decrease substantially, there would still be a hunger problem, since hunger like homelessness is essentially an economic problem, a poverty problem. 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. The Socialist Party argues 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. The amount of food currently being produced would adequately feed the expected world population for the year 2100.

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

In the 1980s economist Keith Griffin (then President of Magdalen College, Oxford) put 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 eat. The problem is the relationship of particular group of people to food, not food itself.”

Back in the 1970s, Don Thomson who worked for War on Want 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.”

Today that assessment is still backed by the findings of aid charities in the field. People can buy food if they have money, but hungry people do not have money. The hungry have no money to buy food at existing prices, so they do not constitute a market. Under capitalism food is a commodity and commodities are only produced when there is an effective economic demand. People experiencing hunger is not the same thing as “economic demand for food”. The world’s food problem does not arise from any physical limitation on potential output or any danger of unduly stressing the ‘environment’. The limitations on abundance are to be found in the social and political structures of the exchange economy.

The 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. Capitalism has neglected the enormous potential of developing countries. The land is there, much of it unused, capable of feeding many times the world’s present population. Producing enough food to feed the world’s growing population is not a problem in itself. We have the technology to get the rest of the world into the position of food surplus that the West has enjoyed in recent years. Producing more food is not the greatest of problems, from the scientific point of view. All we have to do to maintain the world’s population in food is to measure now much food we needed, apply the technology and knowledge we already possess and then grow the food required. In a socialist world this essentially is all we would have to do. The problem, of course as already been stated, is poverty. The hungry people of the world simply do not have the money to buy the food they need and so do not constitute a profitable market. Food production is limited to what can be sold profitably, and its rate of expansion is governed by the rate of expansion of the market for food.

Too many environmentalists adopt positions blaming the victims, the poor, for their poverty. This attitude dehumanises 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 World’s 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. The only framework for a rational solution of this problem is production to meet human needs on the basis of the common ownership of the world’s resources. This means an end to finance and trade, and the problems they bring, and the institution of the planned distribution of food to where it is needed. The answer is really quite simple. The land should belong to all and food be produced to eat and not for sale with a view to profit. We cannot pretend that the object of present society is concern for human welfare. The production and distribution of food is organised as a world business.