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Let them eat ethanol
Submitted by dontlook on Wed, 04/09/2008 - 12:24.
SHARON SMITH explains that the source of worsening global hunger is a system that puts greed first. WALL STREET millionaires have spent months mourning their losses from once ridiculously overvalued investments. Yet these same free-market cheerleaders remain blissfully unaware of the magnitude of the crisis facing the real victims of the unfolding global meltdown they so enthusiastically enabled. For the 3 billion people who survive on less than $2 a day, the upward spiral in global food prices has meant a struggle for the most basic of human rights--the right to eat. Rice, bread and tortillas are the staple foods for this half of the world's population. As the Observer noted on April 6, "A global rice shortage that has seen prices of one of the world's most important staple foods increase by 50 percent in the past two weeks alone is triggering an international crisis." Within the last week, mass hunger has spawned violent rioting from Egypt to Haiti. On April 4, thousands of angry Haitians protested in the southern city of Les Cayes, attempting to set the UN police base on fire while stealing rice from trucks. Eighty percent of Haitians live on less than $2 per day and have grown tired of subsisting on what has become the common diet: clay, salt and vegetable shortening. "Down with the expensive life!" is the graffiti now scrawled around Port-au-Prince. In Egypt, where protests and strikes are illegal, thousands of residents and striking workers from the textile center of Mahalla el-Kobra nevertheless rioted against high food prices and low wages on April 6 and 7, setting buildings on fire and throwing bricks at police tear-gassing them. Roughly 40 percent of Egyptians survive on less than $2 per day, while the price of bread rose by 10 times in recent months and the cost of rice doubled in a single week. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - But this crisis reveals that it can no longer be claimed that all of those residing in the global North gain prosperity at the expense of the global South--for the unregulated greed unleashed over 30 years of neoliberalism that wreaked havoc on the world's poorest countries is now exposing the class divide in the world's richest. Hunger is also rising in the U.S. to a level not seen in decades, with food staples such as milk rising 17 percent over the last year; rice, pasta and bread rising over 12 percent; and eggs increasing by 25 percent. As job losses mount in the current recession, an unprecedented 28 million Americans are receiving food stamps to survive. One in six people in West Virginia and one in 10 in Ohio are relying on food stamps, while one in three children in Oklahoma have been on food stamps over the last year. Food stamp "entitlements" are far from generous in the world's most affluent society. The average subsidy amounts to roughly $1 per meal per person. And 800,000 mostly elderly and disabled food stamp recipients receive a mere $10 per month--the same amount as 30 years ago. The agricultural/food business is now the second most profitable industry in the world, lagging only behind pharmaceuticals. Indeed, the automaker Mitsubishi, which also controls the second largest bank in the world, has become one of the world's largest beef processors, demonstrating the degree to which capital has flocked to the agribusiness sector. Just as agribusiness wiped out small U.S. farmers in the 1980s, it has repeated this pattern around the world ever since. As global justice activist Vandana Shiva wrote in 2006, in India, "without market regulation, agribusiness corporations will make profits selling costly seeds, buying cheap farm produce and locking farmers in debt. This has been the process by which the small family farmer has disappeared in the USA, Argentina, Europe." Now, the law of supply and demand has dictated that the market for biofuels should reduce the production of corn for food by 25 percent in the U.S., triggering a rise in corn prices that has encouraged speculators to hoard crops on the expectation that prices will rise further. Investors around the world have been fleeing the falling dollar to buy up commodities such as rice and wheat, adding to the speculative momentum, while forcing staple prices higher for the world's poorest people. As such, the neoliberal agenda has long since lost its shine for the vast majority of the world's population, although its most earnest proponents are the last to recognize this stubborn reality. The World Bank's World Development Report 2008 commented, even as the sub-prime mortgage crisis was unfolding, "The private agribusiness sector has become more vibrant. New, powerful actors have entered agricultural value chains and have an economic interest in a dynamic and prosperous agricultural sector and a voice in political affairs." Perhaps these out-of-touch policy wonks should suggest that the world's poor start eating ethanol, in keeping with their longstanding bourgeois tradition. And U.S. workers now teetering into the neoliberal abyss should consider following their brothers and sisters around the world in fighting back. A definition of "neoliberalism:" Food Stamps: DISCUSSION IDEAS: Do you think that food prices should be affected by market forces beyond the demand created by hunger and the supply as affected by crop health? How do you feel about the tone of the final paragraph of this article? Source: |
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