Vol. 72/No. 17      April 28, 2008

Mouthpieces of big business say the problem is scarcity. We’ve reached the earthly limits of the capacity of human labor and nature to produce food, they say.

“Everyone wants to eat like an American on this globe. But if they do, we’re going to need another two or three globes to grow it all,” Daniel W. Basse told the New York Times. Basse is president of AgResource Company, a firm that analyzes crop prices for farmers and wealthy speculators on the commodities market.

This is false—and pure imperial arrogance.

“Scarcity has nothing whatsoever to do with why more than a third of humanity has no access to electricity today, or goes to bed without enough food, or has no access to potable water,” said Jack Barnes, national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party, in a 2001 talk published under the title “Our Politics Start with the World” in New International number 13. “Those are social questions, class questions, political questions: questions of capitalist income distribution and its continual reproduction.”

Capitalism has produced tremendous technological advances that have the potential to resolve the food crisis. But, as Karl Marx explained, the capitalist class, in its competition for profits, develops these techniques and social processes of production only by “simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth: the soil and the worker.”

This takes place in the advanced capitalist countries, where workers are feeling the squeeze of higher prices, as well as in the least developed nations. But the crisis is especially sharp in the semicolonial world.

For more than 100 years the centers of world finance capital—the United States, the Western European powers, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand—have dominated economic life in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Pacific.

Their policies guarantee that those nations lag further and further behind in agricultural and industrial production. On average there are 16 tractors per 1,000 acres of land in the imperialist states, compared to 3 tractors per 1,000 acres in the rest of the world.

In sub-Saharan Africa, fertilizer use is less than 10 percent of the world average. Three-fourths of the farmland lacks nutrients needed for crop production.

The workers movement needs to advance a program that addresses this gross inequality.

We should oppose protectionist measures Washington uses to block imports of goods produced in countries oppressed by imperialism. And support efforts by those countries to defend their markets from the predatory trade policies of the imperialists.

We should expose and fight the drive by imperialism to prevent these nations from gaining access to energy sources, including nuclear power.

We should demand cancellation of the onerous and unpayable Third World debt.
 
 
Related articles:
Strikes, demonstrations demand relief from inflation, food prices
Haitian workers, peasants protest high cost of food  
 
 
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