‘Food Crisis’ is a Lie: There’s Plenty of Food

People have been going hungry in the world for a long time. In the US, even the government admits that at least 35.5 million people (including nearly 13 million children) live in households considered “food insecure.”

But over the past 18 months, a world “food crisis” has developed. Hundreds of millions are threatened with hunger. People in some places are eating dirt. The price of staples like milk, eggs, butter, flour and rice keeps rising. People are choosing between eating and paying the utilities. In some countries, food riots have erupted. What is going on?

First, there is no real shortage of food. Humanity is fully capable of producing all the food we need. The “food crisis” is being created by the way a market economy works.

In a market – or capitalist – economy, food is just another commodity, like oil or autos or laundry soap. The vast majority of the worldwide production of food is controlled by a handful of giant agricultural and financial corporations and speculators. They decide how much food will be produced, who will get it and how much it will cost. Their lust for profits is making people go hungry.

How is this playing itself out today? One aspect is the diversion of food crops, like corn, to producing biofuels. With oil over $100 a barrel, biofuels have become an attractive investment . If making fuel from corn is more profitable than producing food, that’s what the capitalists will do. Next year, nearly one-third of the entire projected US corn crop is expected to be used to make ethanol. And while corn production worldwide is growing, the increase is being more than absorbed by the diversion to biofuels. A related problem is that, with corn being diverted to biofuels, other more expensive grains are being used for animal feed, which drives up the price of those grains and makes them less available to feed people. One United Nations official called the diversion of food grains to biofuel “a crime against humanity.”

This process of the market economy making people go hungry is even more clear when it comes to the activities of the speculators. As the financial markets have plunged in the wake of the “credit crisis” produced by the bursting of the housing bubble, speculation in food commodity futures has skyrocketed. The hedge funds and other speculators who had poured trillions of dollars into stocks and into investments backed by mortgages have gone looking for some place else to make a profit. They have diverted a huge amount of money into food and raw materials futures. This has driven up the prices of basic foodstuffs tremendously. World prices of things like cereals, cooking oil and milk have risen dramatically since the financial crisis began in 2006. Since the beginning of 2006, the average world price for rice has risen 217 percent, wheat has gone up 136 percent, corn by 125 percent and soybeans by 107 percent. The speculators are even betting on the price of water, and we’l l see that rise as a result.

This process of speculation feeds on itself. The more prices rise, and big profits for agribusiness and speculators result, the more is invested and the more prices rise.

On top of all this, European and American agribusiness has long sought to corner the world food market and make the rest of the world dependent on them for food, for both economic and political reasons. For example, corporations like Monsanto are creating biogenetic seeds that can only be used once. This has combined with a dramatic drop in agricultural loans from institutions like the World Bank and in donations to agriculture in other countries from the governments of wealthy countries.

With modern production methods, humanity is well able to feed every person on the planet. There is no reason for anyone to go hungry. Yet half of humanity lives on $2 a day or less, and hundreds of millions go hungry. The problem is that the corporations and their market economy are in the way. We, the people of the Earth, must decide whether we’re going to continue indefinitely letting a few million wealthy people dictate the terms of life for billions of people. It can be different. The future is up to u.