At least 50 people have died, and 20,000 have been driven from their homes, in the worst-hit state, North Carolina. One government official predicts that as many as 15 percent of farmers in the state could lose their farms. The government has declared the eastern two-thirds of North Carolina to be a disaster zone, along with parts of Virginia, New Jersey, and New York. Capitalist relations shape the differential impact of the floods. Faced with such natural calamities, the banks and agricultural corporations that hold working farmers in debt-bondage respond by tightening the screws on those they exploit. The wealthier farmers who employ wage labor tend to live on higher ground, both literally and in the economic sense. They are the major recipients of government assistance when it comes. But in North Carolina and elsewhere, workers, farmers, and their families, along with proprietors of small enterprises, bear the brunt of the flooding. Their farms, homes, schools, and jobs are destroyed or jeopardized.

The lost livestock and crops represent the livelihood of working farmers and agricultural laborers. Before the flood farmers were already being driven to the wall, confronting the sharp, worldwide fall in prices for their produce and never-failing demands for payment of interest and loans from the banks. When the rains came, most had zero or limited insurance cover. A government official admitted that many farmers need grants, not loans, no matter how low the interest. But loans are precisely the form that most government assistance takes.

The national oppression that capitalism breeds and institutionalizes come to the fore in such a crisis as well. As one farmer who is Black told a Militant reporter, in past floods and droughts the authorities "always said they had run out of funds when I got there."Black families are often forced to live in lower-cost and lower-lying areas, more exposed to flooding.

Some immigrant workers from Mexico and Central America, often living in camps without telephones or means of transport, report being turned down for emergency food stamps on the illegitimate grounds that they lack Social Security cards. Meanwhile, the heavy rains from Floyd are taking their toll in Central America, creating tens of thousands of homeless people in Nicaragua, Honduras, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and El Salvador.

The revolutionary government of Cuba immediately sent a team of 32 volunteer doctors to Honduras, an action consistent with its internationalist stance, and its responses to previous disasters. What a stark contrast to the actions of the U.S. government to toilers hit by the disaster, both in the United States and internationally.

Workers and working farmers must stand together to demand immediate and massive cash relief for those affected by the flood. We should also demand:

Stop all farm foreclosures — not one working farmer should lose one acre of land.

Cancel the third world debt and provide massive aid to the countries of Central America afflicted by the flooding.  
 
 
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