December 19, 2009
The UN reported that 1 billion people world wide are currently going hungry. This is the largest number of hungry people ever, up sharply from 2008. There is no food shortage. Natural disasters and local famines account for a tiny minority of the world's hunger. Indeed, we live at a point in history where the world produces more than enough food to feed everyone, and global caloric production is actually up. The cause of hunger, almost throughout the entire world is not a lack of resources. Hunger and starvation exist because food is distributed for the personal profit of the global elite.
The world's food production is increasingly in the hands of global agribusiness. The largest commercial producers of food have as their primary motive the creation of profits for stockholders rather than the feeding of human beings. This is not an abstract question. Because there is ample evidence that these companies don't give a shit about the proles.
It is also worth noting that these companies have been making a drive in the last few years to copyright plants. In the third world this has already amounted to companies trying to force farmers to buy genetically modified (and thus, patented) seeds. The food is then sold at grossly inflated prices. In the United States the percentage of food consumed that is patented will probably shock you. While the situation is not as bad as say, Mexico guess where you're about to be living.
I wholly reject neo-Malthusian arguments on world starvation. Food is frequently thrown out, and not just at the local scab-friendly, anti-health care blue state big box run by a raving right-wing loon. I'm talking about huge silos of grain that get dumped, or left to rot, massive amounts of food. If you only look at one of these links check out this gallery of corporate food waste.
And the "green" movement wants to sensationalize stuff like this. How pathetic. The food wasted at a college campus can't be shipped to starving people. A drainage ditch full of "imperfect" bananas can. Frugality may be a virtue, and waste a vice but it has absolutely fucking zero to do with why people are starving.
The idea that there is a scarcity of food serves a very specific, right-wing political purpose. It is a propagandistic lie designed to get those of us who have nothing bickering at each other over the crumbs falling off the master's table. It conveniently and effectively masks the real issues. There is no food shortage, and yet, people are not only hungry but starving. As Hakim Bey said, the ancient world knew starvation and famine, but it did not know hunger. The tribe either reaped a bountiful harvest, or the elements were cruel and they starved. Now the world not only knows hunger, but people profit from it, and quite handsomely.
Hunger and starvation are no longer tragic or unfortunate. They are unnecessary. And I would argue, criminal.
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Nick Pell
Grandmaster, Black Sun Gazette
www.blacksungazette.com
