can't pay - can't eat

"Hunger is not a food production problem. It is an income problem." said Robert Fox of Oxfam Canada. "There is no food shortage in the world. Food is simply priced out of the reach of the world's poorest people."

It is clear now however that, for every death from hunger, there is no genuine technical cause. For every child's life that hangs in the balance, sufficient food has always been available within a matter of hours – if not in some cases minutes – distance. It’s not a logistical problem or a matter of distribution.

Neither is it an error in the market: the system is operating as it is meant to.

In reality the signal which the market often responds to is not one regarding supply and demand but the one identifying profitability. The entire edifice of the money system is not geared to satisfying the needs of people for even the simplest means of living, such as food. Instead the objective is nothing more or less than profit, and it is an objective shared by the small minority who own and control the means of producing wealth to the exclusion of the rest of us. The invisible hand of the market can send all the signals it wants, but there is often an invisible hand picking up a telephone to tell fellow capitalists to keep stocks back, restrict sales and keep prices high.