Third World hunger: Made in U.S.A

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TORONTO-Dr. Henry Morgentaler's Toronto abortion clinic reopened in early January and is providing full services. Despite growing attempts by antichoice demonstrators to disrupt the clinic, the medical staff is working to capacity, providing safe abortions in a supportive environment.

The police have also stepped up harassment. They have followed several patients home and succeeded in intimidating one unescorted patient, an undocumented immigrant from Honduras, into making defamatory and false statements to the press about her treatment at the clinic.

This story, while widely publicized, has not decreased the number of women coming to the Morgentaler clinic seeking a service they cannot easily In mid-January, Dr. Morgentaler and Judy Rebick, spokesperson for the Ontario Coalition for Abortion Clinics, are making a tour of Western Canada to urge the women's movement to mobilize support around this issue. The possibility of opening abortion clinics in Calgary and Edmonton, Alta., is 16 SOCIALIST ACTION FEBRUARY 1985 While famine in Africa holds the attention of people on five continents, slower death from malnutrition is shortening the lives of millions in other parts of the world. It is estimated that 500 million people subsist on only one meal a day or less—not just during the emergency of a drought, but for a lifetime of hunger and malnutrition.

Hungry people are found all over the world: in India and Pakistan, in Africa and Latin America, throughout the lush tropical islands of the Pacific, and here in the United States. How can we explain that most hungry people are found in countries where the main occupation of its citizens is agriculture?

Neo-Malthusians say hunger is caused by people having too many babies. The population is outrunning the food supply, they say.

Frances Moore Lappe and Joseph Collins debunk the myth of potential food shortages in their book, "Food First."

They point out that Africa, where famine is raging, is underpopulated. There are 2.5 acres of cultivated land for every inhabitant. This is more cropland per person than in the United States. And Africans are cultivating only 12 percent of their potential farmland. Unlimited population growth may present problems, but shortage of food need not be one of them.

Such advances have been made in the science of agriculture that it has been called the Green Revolution. Strains of rice, beans, and other crops have been developed that can triple and quadruple the yield per acre. With the birth of the first new seeds 30 years ago, it appeared that the problem of world hunger was about to be solved. But today, a generation later, there are more hungry people in the world than before. However, the fault lies not with science but with economics and politics.

Imperialism brings hunger

The European imperialists first brought hunger to the Third World. They saw their colonies as vast plantations to raise cotton, rubber, sugar, or CAPE VERDE SAHARA DESERT MAURITANIA SOMALIA MALI CHADE NIGER:

SUDAN AFRIÇA ETHIOPIA SENEGAL RWANDA BURUND KENYA BOURKINA FASSO TANZANIA ANGOLA ZAMBIA Drought MOZAMBIQUE Area BOTSWANA ZIMBABWE SOUTH AFRICA LESOTHO bananas for the people of Europe and America. Indigenous farmers who were raising food for themselves were thrown off their land and converted into laborers producing crops they could not consume. In Cuba before the revolution, cane cutters lived on high-priced canned goods from the United States even though their fertile soil could grow food crops in abundance.

The imperialists no longer rule their former colonies directly, but they still hold them in a tightly knit web of capitalist property relations. In the neocolonies, a small group of big landowners and merchants hold economic and political power. They continue to raise cash crops for export and continue to push the small farmers off the most fertile land.

Many of the small farmers give up and move to the cities, where they swell the already huge urban populations. Mexico City is now the world's biggest metropolitan center. To avoid discontent in the cities, Third World governments keep food prices down by paying the farmers as little as possible for their crops. This further discourages the farmer who sinks further into debt and often loses his land.

The result is a fall in food production in countries where the population is rising. In the last 10 years in Mexico, cropland devoted to food producton for the domestic market has dropped 25 percent. In the same period, deaths of children from malnutrition have risen 10 percent.

Big landowners in Mexico could raise corn for the domestic market, but they can make four times as much by raising tomatoes for American consumers. Multinational food conglomerates also reap huge profits by raising crops in Mexico for their supermarkets at home. They are searching the world for regions where they can buy up fertile acres and hire cheap labor.

Bud Antle Corp., a California-based agribusiness concern, is raising fruits and vegetables in the Sahel region of Africa, not far from the scene of drought and famine. The produce is flown to Europe where the wealthy can eat strawberries in winter—while African children starve.

So long as the landlords and multinationals hold power in the Third World, even the most well-meaning efforts to aid the poor farmers will fail. The superseeds of the Green Revolution do the farmer little good. He cannot afford the expensive fertilizer needed to make them grow.

He cannot afford tractors. When the wealthy landlord buys them, the tenant farmer loses. With the tractor the big farmer can plow more acres; so he pushes the tenant off his land and farms it himself. The crop he raises may be feed for livestock-for meat that the worker and peasant cannot afford to buy.

International loans enrich the elite of the Third World but intensify the drive to produce more coffee or cotton to pay Werner Bischof interest to the bankers in New York. The result: More food has to be imported and the international debt grows bigger.

Cuba defeats hunger

Cuba has shown how this vicious cycle can be broken. The big landowners are gone; the multinationals are out. Production of food for the people of Cuba is the first priority; no more high-priced canned goods from America. Cuba's farmers are given every encouragement to increase food production, whether in individual plots, in cooperatives, or on state farms. Where shortages exist, rationing assures every Cuban an equal share.

The Cubans still have to raise sugar to produce foreign exchange for necessary imports. But national planning balobtain elsewhere.

being discussed. ances the two sectors of agriculture so that the minimum needs of every citizen are met. Meanwhile the government and farmers are cooperating in trying new crops and new techniques that take advantage of Cuba's fertile soil and subtropical climate.

The Cubans do a better job of feeding their people than the government of the United States. Here warehouses are bulging with "surplus" butter and cheese, while children and adults on welfare suffer malnutrition. Obstacles are put in the way of distributing cheese to the needy by supermarkets that complain of "unfair competition."

Welfare payments are too small to provide an adequate diet for the average family. Many welfare mothers run out of money before the month is up and have to take their children to soup kitchens run by churches and various charities. Soup kitchens sometimes run out of food before everyone has been fed. The response of the American ruling class to this grim situation is further cuts in social services.

Food—not profits-first

Apologists for agribusiness argue that they are more productive than the peasant tilling his little plot of land. Producing a single crop on thousands of acres and pouring on pesticides and fertilizers is the way to go, they say.

Lappe and Collins, in "Food First, demonstrate that this is not the way to go. The farmers of India and China, they say, produce more food per acre than corporate farms in California. Agribusiness looks only to big profits in the short run. Pouring on pesticides leads to new mutant strains of insects that call for ever more powerful poisons. The accident in Bhopal, India, indicates the sort of stuff they are spraying on our fruits and vegetables today.

Excessive irrigation and use of fertilizers is turning parts of California's Imperial Valley into salt beds unfit for cultivation. That is one reason agribusiness is looking for new acres around the world. So long as their profits-first techniques of farming continue we are heading for an ecological disaster.

Agriculture cannot be organized for the long-term benefit of mankind so long as profits for the few are put first. Farmers and workers of the world must get the landlords and bosses off their backs. Then the experience of generations of farmers will be combined with the new discoveries of science to put the horrors of famine behind us forever.

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"Agriculture cannot be organized for our long- term benelit so long as profits come first."

Toronto abortion clinic defies harassment