An End to The Silent Famine
Across the globe, food prices have climbed over 80%
in the past three years. PHOTO/ISTOCK
By Cathleen Williams
I walked up the levee one evening last week with Paula from the Sacramento Homeless Organizing Committee to deliver some food to the folks who have put up tents by the river and have been living out there all winter. Now the willows are fully leafed and the poppies are flaring in the thick grasses. We weren’t sure who we would find – communities of homeless people are well-kept secrets, their shelters tucked into thickets and abandoned places where machinery from the last century has been left to rust, in the hope that they will escape detection for a while from the roving black and white cars of the police.
Before long, though, as we climbed the asphalt path we saw three campers, a woman and two men, middle-aged, warmly dressed against the coming night. One carried a big jug to get water from a nearby faucet. “We have some food,” I said, and they stopped, looking a little weary, but friendly, and dignified. “Ah,” said one of the men, “We were wondering where our next meal was coming from.”
Where is the next meal coming from? Across the globe, food prices have climbed over 80% in the past three years. This question is a burning demand world wide, one which has led to protests in the streets over the past weeks – food riots have swept across Africa, including countries as diverse as Egypt, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, and
Ethiopia; across India, the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, and Latin America, as well as Yemen, Uzbekistan, and Italy. Food prices have risen by 300% in Senegal; in Haiti, five people were killed in protests during the first week of April against 50% price hikes in the cost of rice, beans, and fruit.
What has happened is that all these countries are dependent upon the imports of food, and the price is manipulated for profit, and for profit alone, by gigantic agricultural producers and speculators. Many are based in the United States, which is responsible for 70% of the maize (corn) exports on the world market. Nations from Haiti to Senegal, unlike most of Europe, must import grain in order to eat – a result of so-called “free trade” policies which have flooded their markets with U.S products and driven small-scale farmers out of business, with a devastating impact on rural communities, workers, and the environment. “These countries have no reserves, no recourse,” said one food expert recently on Democracy Now, Amy Goodman’s daily radio/tv program.
Here in the United States, rising food prices are forcing U.S. households to choose between food and other necessities. The price of eggs jumped almost twenty five percent last year, and milk and other dairy products cost 13% more. A family of four is only eligible for a maximum of $542 in food stamps per month, which was never enough to last the whole month. Now it doesn’t last two weeks.
Don’t let any one tell you this emergency is due to natural causes, like the weather in Australia, or to the increased consumption of meat in China. There is no scarcity of food. What ordinary people are facing is a capitalist economic system that is exploiting the need for food in order to maximize profit. It’s been called the “silent famine” – but the people pouring onto the streets and demanding bread are silent no more.
Wall Street. PHOTO/JIMWESTPHOTO.COM
Without Redeeming Social Value
By Sheridan Talbott
They’re a small percentage of the world’s people, and they live fabulous lives. They’ve garnered untold riches for themselves and hoarded it. They respect no law, no rule, no principle, and are capable of any atrocity against other human beings to protect what they have and increase it. They are the corporate owners, the bankers, the coupon clippers. And they are whores, social whores, “utterly without redeeming social value.”
With a little help from their friends at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, among others, they are sucking the life from the world’s people. If there’s a drop of profit to be made anywhere, they find a way to wrench that value from those who created it, even if it means using clandestine operations and military fire power.
But we need not look to Central and South America or to Africa to see the human cost of their practices. Homelessness is but four blocks from my front door. Across Southern Illinois factories have shut down. Hospitals have been privatized, others closed. Utility rates have doubled and tripled. Our educational system continues to struggle. There is hunger here. Our standard of living is under direct attack; our future, bleak at the moment.
They don’t like us using the term “class warfare.” Well, they should stop waging one—but that’s not going to happen. The sacred cow of profit drives their every action, and they protect and increase it at all costs. They can only do so by plundering our “social product” and impoverishing the rest of us. Like it or not, we are locked in class battle.
Economics demand corporate owners take from us what is ours, take what we have built. Republicans and Democrats alike are their faithful servants and allies in this war waged on our standard of living—always protecting and advancing the interests of the rich. Place our hopes and trust in either, we lose.
“The people,” though, are fighting for what is our right. In Highland Park, Mich., people are resisting their water system being privatized. In Atlanta people are organizing for the rights of the homeless. In New Orleans people march on city hall just to be treated as human beings and keep what is theirs. In California, people are standing against a “voucher” program which is just a sneaky means of privatizing education through the back door. In Illinois, opposition is developing against the Democrats’ budget cuts.
Well over 50% of the American people want the Iraq war ended, want American troops brought home. But the U.S. government doesn’t care. The energy industry, along with a lot of other big corporations, are making a lot of money off this war. That they’re plundering our social wealth to wage it is of no matter to them. We could be investing our wealth in schools, in housing, in health care, in roads. We could be using that money to meet human needs.
And there’s Benton Harbor, Mich. The people of Benton Harbor are simply fighting to stop Whirlpool, a huge corporation, from taking their modest homes and turning their property into another wonderland for the elite rich. And Whirlpool’s getting a lot of help from the politicians and the “law”—which side are you on?
This summer, if there is a march in Benton Harbor, Southern Illinois will be represented. What Whirlpool is doing in Benton Harbor, what they did in Iowa, in Arkansas, they’ve done in Southern Illinois. So we’ll come and march with our class, our people. We’ll march for Rev. Edward Pinkney—who they’ve jailed for speaking out. We’ll march for the working people of Benton Harbor so maybe they can keep their homes. But we’ll be marching for ourselves as well and for working people everywhere.
These corporate owners, these bankers, these coupon clippers, they want us to believe that we need them, but we don’t. Our strength is in our unity as a class, our weakness in that we’re fooled again and set against each other. We will not go quietly into deeper poverty—not this time. This time we stand together united in our class for “the last fight we face.”
This article originated in the People's Tribune
PO Box 3524, Chicago, IL 60654, 773-486-3551, info@peoplestribune.org.
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PO Box 3524, Chicago, IL 60654, 773-486-3551, info@peoplestribune.org.
Feel free to reproduce unless marked as copyrighted.
Please include this message with reproductions of the article.
