While the G8 leaders were all Heiligendammed by Bob Geldof's recent expletives, we should ask if his anger over the failure of the G8 to make any real progress on world hunger is really aimed at the right target. This writer has no illusions as to what sort of dysfunctional, arrogant and patronising sociopaths probably reach the top table at the G8 shindig, but even if they were not all (in Geldof's words) “fucking creeps", would it make any real difference ? After all they still have a global economic system to serve that is united in little but the supposedly immutable law that wealth (including of course, food) should only be created where it can ultimately turn a profit for its owner.
Geldof's outburst will doubtless help retain some of his credibility with frustrated poverty campaigners - at least until Japan in 2008, when the next AGM of Planet Earth plc occurs. Crucially, despite all the bleeps in his post-G8 press conference he seems happy to come back for more, on the basis that "there isn't another option". Needless to say it shouldnt be forgotten that the world unarguably has the technical capacity to easily feed many times its population (see 'Socialism would solve global hunger') yet the market mechanism appears wholly incapable of matching demand to supply.
At the Gleneagles summit two years ago, world socialist activists handed out literature saying that despite the rhetoric nothing substantial would be achieved, and the “Make Poverty History” campaign itself was likely to be as ineffective as the G8 summit. Since then, while reformers have waited for crumbs to fall from the overflowing plates of world capital, the hunger holocaust has continued: another nine million fellow members of our species will die slow and needless deaths by the time the appetisers arrive at the next G8 summit banquet.
BG
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