Imperialists' policies cause worldwide hunger
By
Deirdre Griswold
Published Apr 24, 2008 2:13 AM
When hungry people rebel in the streets over the high cost of food, it is only
because they have tried every other way to feed their families—and come
up with nothing.
That is what is happening around the world today—in so many countries
that those whose economic policies have created this situation are truly
alarmed. When the problem was just hunger, it was very, very low on their
agenda. But now that the problem is seen as one of “social
instability,” the huge transnational corporations that control the world
market know their “bottom line” could be severely affected.
The U.N.’s World Food Program released a report in mid-April estimating
that 800 million people are going hungry every day around the globe and
malnutrition is rampant. Many explanations are being given for why, suddenly,
so many people are in a dire situation of “food insecurity” after
so many promises that the “green revolution” pushed by agribusiness
would end world hunger forever.
Some point out that a huge and growing area of rich cropland is now producing
crops for biofuel—in other words, to fuel cars, buses and trucks instead
of to feed people. Others say it’s because the earth’s population
is getting too large.
However, the same WFP report says that food production has been rising along
with population and enough food is grown to feed everyone in the world. Yet
hundreds of millions just can’t afford to eat.
Was there any warning that a crisis like this was coming?
Absolutely. In fact, people who study food production in the developing world
have been literally pleading with the rich imperialist
countries—especially the U.S.—to change their policies.
For example, as long ago as 1999 Sophia Murphy of the Institute for
Agricultural and Trade Policy wrote an article on “WTO, Agricultural
Deregulation and Food Security,” in which she concluded that “Those
who face persistent hunger in the world do not have the money to exercise
effective demand in a ‘free’ market. ... Nobody needs to go
hungry—each person that does is the victim of conscious policy choices
and policy failures.”
What Murphy, and others who work in various organizations trying to mitigate
the effects of the “free market,” are referring to are the
Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) imposed by the World Bank, the
International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization on poor countries.
These institutions are controlled by the banks and corporations in the rich
imperialist countries and do what’s best for them, even though their
stated mission is to help the development of poorer countries by loaning them
money—at interest, of course.
It is a measure of the enormous injustice incorporated into international
agreements that the very countries plundered of their resources during
centuries of colonialism are now in the category of “debtor
nations.” They are up to their ears in debt and have been forced by these
international imperialist institutions to accept the most onerous
“adjustment” to their economies just to be able to participate in
any commerce or trade.
In fact, in this era of neocolonialism, it is the banks and the transnationals
that keep the people of the oppressed nations enslaved. This arrangement is
usually more satisfactory for the exploiters than direct rule, although the
U.S. is now attempting to reconquer in the old colonial way countries like Iraq
that exerted some real sovereignty.
The SAPs were pushed on the poorest countries in the world beginning in the
1980s. That was a time when the vigor of the Third World national liberation
movements was waning, along with the aid that had been given developing
countries by the Soviet Union and China, whose socialist commitments had been
worn down by the unrelenting pressures and costs of the Cold War.
There were two main focuses to the SAPs: privatization and deregulation.
To continue to get loans so they could pay their “debt” and
hopefully have something left over, the poor countries had to sell off what had
belonged to the state: natural resources, airports, land, even water.
They also had to end import tariffs that had protected their farmers against
the inflow of cheap agricultural products—especially products from the
U.S., where grains in particular can be grown very cheaply because of abundant
land and modern technology.
In Mexico, for example, the flooding in of cheap corn after the implementation
of NAFTA ruined millions of small farmers, many of whom have lost their lands
and must emigrate to the U.S. in order to get work.
Under the SAPs, countries also have had to eliminate subsidies and price
controls that helped keep food affordable for the people.
The imperialist bankers forced all this on the developing countries in order to
squeeze out of them even more immense profits and to take over the reins of
their economies. The result has been that, where once these countries were
fairly self-sufficient in food, much of their agricultural land has now been
taken over by transnationals, which produce cash crops for export.
Flowers, palm oil for biofuel, cattle for the huge hamburger chains, and costly
fruits and vegetables for export year-round to the colder and more affluent
countries of the North are replacing the indigenous crops that had provided a
balanced diet for most of the people.
The structural adjustment programs have completely broken down the sovereignty
of those countries drawn into their web. Economic decisions are not made
in-country, as the military say, but in the boardrooms on Wall Street and its
European and Japanese equivalents.
There will undoubtedly be many more studies that show how cruel and
unsustainable is the new world order created by imperialist globalization. What
will end this nightmare, however, is the revolutionary action of the popular
masses. The food rebellions are a signal of their desperation but also of their
hope and belief in their own power.
Articles copyright 1995-2012 Workers World.
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