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Sunday, December 22, 2019

Enough is Enough

The rich and powerful have decreed that profits are more precious than life itself. The conscienceless elite in power are confirmed sociopaths who do not hesitate to take what they want by any and all means. Conflict is everywhere. Capitalism requires continuous economic expansion and an ever growing market.

What would a post-capitalism world look like and how might it work? The egalitarian societies of the future will look radically different from the capitalism of today. A money-free economy based upon need must supplant the current profit-driven system of exploitation. Every member of a socialist community is a leader. There will be no social or economic stratification. No one shall have privileges or rights that are denied to others. Every member of the community must be equally empowered and equally valued. Rather than the callous competition and exploitation nurtured by capitalism, communities will be organized around the principle of cooperation and social need. The welfare of the individual is dependent upon the well-being of the community—and vice versa. 

No one will be left behind. All of us shall rise together. There are no clear blueprints to follow. When we speak of the revolution and how it may take shape we must necessarily speculate.  None of us can actually know what’s going to happen.  And it is, of course, quite possible that once the movement reaches what we – somewhat nebulously – call ‘critical mass’ there will inevitably be a sudden mushrooming of socialist ideas. We could live in a class-free, state-free, money-free society based on common ownership and democratic control tomorrow if the political will were there to establish it. 

Roger Revelle former director of the Harvard Center for Population Studies estimated that Africa, Asia and Latin America alone, simply by using water more efficiently, could feed 35 billion to 40 billion people – seven to eight times the current world population – and that assumes no change in technology.

The former director of the Agricultural Economic Institute at Oxford University, Colin Clark, has estimated that if the world’s farmers were to use the best methods of farming available, an American diet could be provided for 35.1 billion people. 

If a Japanese-style diet were provided, this number would be trebled. Global agriculture currently produces 4,600 calories per person per day, enough food to feed the world population.

The University of Michigan – a switch to organic agriculture would be more than enough to support an estimated population peak of around 10-11 billion people by the year 2100.

We have shown that it is possible to both feed a hungry world and protect a threatened planet,” explained Jonathan Foley, head of the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment.

Eco-farming could double food production in entire regions within 10 years while mitigating climate change, according to a new U.N. report.

In 1996 the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimated that the world was producing enough food to provide everyone with 2,700 calories a day, 500 more than is needed by the average human.

According to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1997, 78 percent of all malnourished children aged under five live in countries with food surpluses.”

The problem is that many people are too poor to buy readily available food. “…Even though ‘hungry countries’ have enough food for all their people right now, many are net exporters of food and other agricultural products.”

Since 1948, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, annual world food production has outpaced the increase in population by about 1 percent.

Despite sufficient national food production to meet the needs of Pakistan’s 170 million people, according to WFP, some 83 million people, almost 50 per cent of the population, were food insecure by 2010In the 2009-2010 crop year, the world produced 2.26 billion metric tons of cereals.

Approximately 0.2 metric tons (440 pounds) of cereal grains provide the food energy an average human needs for a year. Dividing the 2.2 billion metric tons produced by 0.2 metric tons required per person shows that current grain production could feed 11 billion people

.”Can we feed a world of 9 billion? I would say the answer is yes,”  said Robert Watson, chief scientific adviser to Britain’s Department of Environment and Rural Affairs and a former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.”Hunger is not a food production problem. It is an income problem.”

 Robert Fox of Oxfam Canada. “There is no food shortage in the world. Food is simply priced out of the reach of the world’s poorest people.”

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala , World Bank Managing Director – “There is not a global food shortage — there is a price crisis”The Financial Express of Bangladesh

 “…if all the earth’s available arable land, water and technology were to be used to produce food, it could feed sixty billion people, according to one FAO estimate.

Hunger is caused by poverty and inequality, not scarcity. For the past two decades, the rate of global food production has increased faster than the rate of global population growth. The world already produces more than 1 ½ times enough food to feed everyone on the planet. That’s enough to feed 10 billion people, the population peak we expect by 2050. But the people making less than $2 a day — most of whom are resource-poor farmers cultivating unviably small plots of land — can’t afford to buy this food.

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