World Food Day 2004: The political Economy of Hunger

by Sean Cain

In October, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations celebrated World Food Day, an annual event started in 1979. This year’s theme was “Biodiversity for Food Security” and focused on the massive loss of genetic diversity of agricultural crops over the last century.

While global capitalism puts humanity’s food security at risk, agricultural diversity is threatened by greater corporate concentration of food production and trade. Despite this, farmers around the world are challenging corporate domination and are finding alternatives.

Of all the serious failures of global capitalism, starvation and malnutrition are among the most devastating, the most shameful, and—compared to other seemingly “important” issues covered by the corporate media—the most ignored.

The numbers are staggering. According to the United Nations, starvation and malnutrition (or hunger, officially defined as a chronic absence of proteins and caloric energies that lead to declining health and in extreme cases, death) takes the lives of approximately 24,000 people every day, or almost nine million a year. Children supply 75 percent of these deaths.

Some 840 million people, or approximately 14 percent of the world’s population, are currently malnourished. Two billion people, almost a third of our world, suffer from anaemia, a red blood cell disorder caused by a lack of iron, vitamin B12, and folic acid. The World Bank states that of the four billion people who live in developing countries, 1.3 billion have no drinking water.

Since the founding of the FAO in 1945, it is estimated that 400 million people have died from hunger and poor sanitation, more than three times the number of people killed in wars fought during the entire 20th century. Yet the basic nutrition and health needs of the world’s poorest people would cost only $13 billion a year, or roughly 10 percent of what the U.S. government has spent on the war in Iraq.

These numbers mirror some of the great famines of the 20th century. This includes the estimated 13 million who died in the Soviet Union from 1929 to 1933, the 30 million who perished during Mao’s Great Leap Forward in China over a four-year period from 1958 to 1962, and most recently, the 2.5 million who died in North Korea during the late 1990s, according to Dr. Margaret Zeigler, deputy director of the non-profit Congressional Hunger Center.

Yet whereas the barbarity of Stalinist rule is condemned for these tragedies—and rightly so—the free-market system seems to be let off the hook by today’s business economists for its own crimes against humanity.

We are supposed to believe that hunger and malnutrition are not caused by the unemployment or poverty created by global capitalism, but largely by overpopulation, a lack of food production, war, or bad weather. These myths perpetuate the false idea that hunger or malnutrition cannot be stopped, and that they are simply a “natural” occurrence in today’s world.

At the most extreme, the thoughtless and racist idea that “feeding them now will only result in more children and even greater malnutrition in the future” has also been used by the right wing to excuse global hunger.

It may surprise some to learn that war and famine together account for only 10 percent of hunger deaths, or that many industrial countries suffer from the same kinds of flash flooding and extreme heat waves that poor countries face. The only difference is that wealthy countries can afford such technologies as refrigeration, advanced watering methods, and highly developed transportation systems (not to mention government subsidies and protective trade barriers), which significantly enhance the ability to protect food stuffs from the elements and deliver it to communities in a timely fashion.

The huge scarcities created by global capitalism do not allow most poor countries to afford such tools. Ironically, the FAO maintains that our world produces enough food to provide every person with at least 2720 kilocalories (kcal) every day—more than enough for everyone to enjoy a healthy lifestyle.

The other causes of world hunger are more obvious. The global debt trap is certainly one of them. The World Bank has admitted that the developing world now spends $13 on debt repayment for every $1 it receives in grants. Tens of billions of dollars that could be used for investments in water systems, infrastructure to rural communities, education, and health care are instead being used to pay off debts to Western banks. At the same time, pro-corporate trade policies have the peculiar effect of opening markets for them to sell products to developing countries (which helps put small farmers there out of business), while allowing poor countries where malnutrition already exists to export other foods to the industrialized world. This is an activity that many economists do not seem to have much trouble with.

Over the last 10 years, little progress has been made, with worldwide malnourishment decreasing by only 2.5 million people each year, which even the FAO admits is a drastic slowdown in comparison with previous trends. It is nowhere close to matching the 2015 targets originally laid out at the 1996 World Food Summit. When it comes to food security, global capitalism can be called nothing but a spectacular failure. Like fascism, Stalinism, or any other form of tyranny that has bloodied the pages of human history, it should be condemned as a monstrous crime. The most right-wing free-market economists no longer even pretend to believe that the market can properly provide the basics of life to everyone on earth.

If hunger and malnutrition are ever to be brought to an end, than there must be a massive redistribution of wealth and power to the world’s poor, including the cancellation of debts to Western banks and the breaking up of large, mono-cultured, corporate-based “factory” farms into smaller plots controlled and owned by family farmers and rural communities (which, according to recent evidence, actually produce higher yields).

Improving equal rights, education, and access to fairly paid work and land for women would also improve food security. Large-scale investments would also have to be made to rural areas, improving health care, housing, and transportation systems for farmers. Global dominance of agriculture by big business must give way to social ownership, economic democracy, and agricultural diversity at the local level—in other words, socialism.

What is most hopeful about these ideas becoming a reality is the massive uprising of farmers’ groups and peasant-based organizations throughout the world. As reported by independent media—and ignored by the corporate press—tens of thousands of farmers from Indonesia to Mexico to Brazil have taken up the struggle to seize agricultural lands and use them cooperatively for the benefit of local communities and the poor.

In other countries, like India, in the face of corporate interests that want to patent life and other agricultural products, farmers united and fought to retain ownership of seeds, which have been used by rural communities for thousands of years.

This is only the beginning. From these developments, people in the industrialized world are becoming increasingly aware of the issue and are taking action. Future socialist governments, under the democratic control of working people, will do the same—so that World Food Day will no longer be necessary.

The article above first appeared in the November 2004 issue of Socialist Action newspaper.