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Elsewhere, food supplies are failing because the European Union and the
United Nations have pursued a twenty-year policy of retiring land from
production to arrest the fall in farm prices.

Engineering the retirement of farmland is largely a way of easing small
farmers (who had been protected under the old Common Agricultural
Policy) out of farming altogether. It has not hurt the larger
agribusinesses, which are thriving. Not surprisingly, farm goods are a
target for speculators, like 1970s corporate raider, Jim Slater, whose
new Agra Firma was started up to take advantage of booming prices. The
reduction in excess output has in the last few years pushed prices up
again, after long decades of falling food prices. In Italy, consumers
boycotted pasta because prices rose so high; in Mexico, Tortilla Rallies
protested against price rises, and in India there have been onion
demonstrations.  The Economist estimates that food prices rose by one
third in the year to December 2007 (having fallen by three quarters
between 1975 and 2005).  According to the mainstream media, the pressure
of biofuels and global warming are to blame for the shortfall in crops -
as if governments had not been involved in a twenty-year programme of
retiring land from production. Today's scarcities have been engineered,
in the name of saving the environment, but in fact to defend the
livelihoods of big agriculture.

Setting caps on energy production, industrial output, car transport and
house-building in the name of saving the environment all have the effect
of damaging people's standard of living. But as we have seen, that does
not stop individual businesses from making big profits out of those
caps. Trading in carbon rights, making windmills, carbon offsetting
schemes, and organic food are all ways of making profits out of
artificial limits set upon growth.
______

James Heartfield's Green Capitalism: Manufacturing Scarcity in an Age of
Abundance (2008) is published by Openmute. This article is based on
excerpts from the book


References:

The Green List, The Guardian supplement, page 29, 5 November 2007.

See Karl Marx, Capital, Volume Three, 'The law of the tendency of the
rate of profit to fall', London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1959, pages 211-240.

'The Origin Of The Law Of Diminishing Returns', Edwin Cannan, 1813-15,
Economic Journal, volume 2, 1892.

Amory Lovins, L. Hunter Lovins and Ernst von Wiezsacker, Factor Four:
Doubling wealth, halving resource use, London, Earthscan, page 160.

How Environmentalists Sold Out to Help Enron, PR Watch Newsletter, Third
Quarter 2003, Volume 10, Number 3.

'Tapes Show Enron Arranged Plant Shutdown', The New York Times, 4
February 2005.

PR Watch Newsletter, op cit.

The Guardian, 6 August 2004.

Jonathan Watts, 'Riots and hunger feared as demand for grain sends food
costs soaring', The Guardian, 4 December 2007.

'Cheap no more', The Economist, 6 December 2007.

http://www.metamute.org/en/manufactured-scarcity-the-profits-of-deindustrialisation

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