food and profits

SOYMB often comes across commentators that have reached similar conclusions as the World Socialist Movement. This seems to be another.

"Many millions of people live fat and happy lives in the arid deserts of North America and the Arabian Peninsula. Certainly there is drought in the horn of Africa, but there is also drought in China, Texas and, until recently, Australia. No famine occurred in Texas or Australia or appears likely in China. The crisis in Africa is terrible enough, but what makes it particularly appalling in today’s world is that more than enough food is grown. We have the technical and logistical capacity to get it where it needs to go. But we do not.

In the developing world as much as 40% of produce is lost to spoilage, pests or just plain wastage from inadequate storage, refrigeration, packaging and transportation.

In the developed world, a similar proportion of food is lost from supermarkets, shops, cafes, restaurants and homes when it is thrown away, un-consumed.

Finally, the world’s food supply chain is hostage to the profit motive. Simplistically, food is a commodity that is produced and sold for profit. Corporations whose primary objective is the generation of profit prefer to sell (relatively) expensive and profitable foods to wealthy consumers than (comparatively) cheap, low-profit produce to poorer ones. Few businesses want to sell products to consumers with no money. Fewer still want to work in environments — such as the Horn of Africa — which are dangerous and corrupt. Yet we have no alternative to the commercial distribution of food except for a strained and straining food aid system...The famine in the Horn of Africa is less about drought than about the exclusion of people from food...Impoverishment has become so bad that people simply can’t afford to eat. Without customers, few providers will come to sell.

Agri-industrial technological solutions cannot solve these problems. Nor can they be explained by supply and demand curves. Food security, instead, needs to focus on the hungry, impoverished and vulnerable. It needs to recognise that systems of governance and the profit-centric economic systems of distribution play crucial roles in perpetuating impoverishment and hunger."

It is always disappointing for SOYMB that instead of remedying the problem by abolishing capitalism and the production for market system, the alternative offered is palliative reform measures, as if governments in thrall to business interests will ever seriously apply them.