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Growing Hunger

by Sharon Smith

CounterPunch (Apri1 11 2008)


Wall Street millionaires have spent months mourning their losses from
once ridiculously over-valued investments. Yet these same free market
cheerleaders remain blissfully unaware of the magnitude of the crisis
facing the real victims of the unfolding global meltdown they so
enthusiastically enabled.

For the three billion people who survive on less than two dollars a day,
the upward spiral in global food prices has meant a struggle for the
most basic of human rights - the right to eat. Rice, bread and tortillas
are the staple food for this half of the world's population. In 2007,
the price of grain rose by 42 per cent, and dairy products by eighty per
cent, according to UN figures, and food inflation has accelerated
further in recent months.

As the Observer noted on April 6, "A global rice shortage that has seen
prices of one of the world's most important staple foods increase by
fifty per cent in the past two weeks alone is triggering an
international crisis". In recent weeks, mass hunger has spawned violent
rioting in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Egypt, Indonesia, Ivory Coast,
Mauritania, Mozambique, Senegal and Haiti.

Six straight days of rioting rocked Haiti this past week. Haiti is the
poorest nation in the Western hemisphere, where eighty percent of the
population lives on less than $2 per day and the typical adult diet
consists of just 1,640 calories - 640 calories less than the average
adult requirement - according to the World Food Program. Haitians have
grown tired of subsisting on what has become the common diet: clay, salt
and vegetable shortening. "Protesters compared the burning hunger in
their stomachs to bleach or battery acid", noted the Guardian on April 9.

On April 4, thousands of angry Haitians protested in the southern city
of Les Cayes, attempting to set the UN police base on fire while
stealing rice from trucks. The rioting soon spread to Haiti's capital,
Port-au-Prince, where thousands stormed the presidential palace
demanding the resignation of the US' hand picked president, Rene Preval.
Fortunately for Preval, UN "peacekeepers" eventually managed to disburse
the starving masses with tear gas and rubber bullets. Their brutal
suppression perhaps prevented Preval from meeting the same fate as
Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier, the US-backed dictator overthrown by a
popular rebellion in 1986.

Preval has done nothing to stabilize skyrocketing food prices or to
assist those on the brink of starvation - and he made clear in a
televised speech on April 9 that he has no intention of doing so now. In
a Marie Antoinette moment, Preval scolded Haitian citizens, "The
demonstrations and destruction won't make the prices go down or resolve
the country's problems. On the contrary, this can make the misery grow
and prevent investment in the country."

* * *

In Egypt, where protests and strikes are illegal, thousands of textile
workers and supporters in Mahalla el-Kobra rioted against high food
prices and low wages on April 6 and 7. Police occupied the state-owned
Misr Spinning and Weaving plant overnight to prevent workers from going
on strike as they had planned, but protesters responded by setting
buildings on fire and throwing bricks at police tear-gassing them.
Police repression did not succeed in frightening these protesters but
rather only further fueled their anger.

Roughly forty percent of Egyptians survive on less than $2 per day,
while the price of unsubsidized bread rose by ten times in recent months
and the cost of rice doubled in a single week. The national minimum wage
has remained unchanged since 1984, at 115 Egyptian pounds per month. The
Mahallah workers have called for a national minimum wage of 1,200 pounds
per month - which would still leave a family of four living under the
poverty level of $2 per day.

This week's rioting in Mahalla is the latest episode in the rising class
struggle now reaching deep inside Egypt's working class. Middle East
Report editor Joel Beinin argued of the growing strike movement, "This
is potentially the broadest-based gathering of dissent the Mubarak
regime has ever faced. The combination of repression, apathy and
political demobilization that has sustained autocracy in Egypt for over
half a century is being forcefully challenged, making it increasingly
difficult for the Mubarak regime, if not its capitalist cronies, to
conduct business as usual." Indeed, Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif rushed to
Mahallah on April 8 to announce he is granting the workers a thirty-day
salary bonus and will address their demands on healthcare and wages.

* * *

Hunger is also rising in the US. The unregulated greed unleashed over
thirty years of neoliberalism that wreaked havoc on the world's poorest
countries is now exposing the class divide in the world's richest. It
can no longer be claimed that all of those residing in the global North
gain prosperity at the expense of the global South.

To be sure, growing hunger in America has only earned passing reference
from US media outlets, which still largely take their cue from Wall
Street and the White House. On April 7, for example, Tribune Newspapers
preposterously featured an article on the plight of that tiny slice of
Americans now curbing their exorbitant spending habits. The article
feature a down-on-her-luck mortgage broker forced to forego the Botox
treatments for which she once regularly dropped $1,800. "I would rather
have Botox than go out to dinner", the woman told reporters - who
reported it without irony.

Food inflation in the US has reached a level not seen in decades, with
food staples like milk rising seventeen percent over the last year,
rice, pasta and bread rising over twelve percent and eggs increasing by
25 percent. As job losses mount in the current recession, an
unprecedented 28 million Americans are expected to receive food stamps
to survive this year. One in six people in West Virginia, and one in ten
in Ohio and New York, are now relying on food stamps to survive. And one
in three children in Oklahoma have been on food stamps at some time in
the last year.

Food stamp "entitlements" are far from generous in the world's most
affluent society, and it safe to say that most people suffering from
rising food prices do not qualify for help. According to guidelines
posted on the USDA's website, a family of four is eligible to receive
food stamps only if their net monthly income is at or below $1,721. This
same family of four is then entitled to a maximum monthly food stamp
allotment of $542 - the same amount as in 1996. The average subsidy
amounts to roughly $1 per meal per person. And 800,000 mostly elderly
and disabled food stamp recipients currently receive the minimum benefit
of a mere $10 per month, according to the New York Times.

* * *

Mainstream economists have usually described the global food crisis as a
food "shortage", but the shortage has been greatly exacerbated by the
merciless laws of the free market. In many cases, the problem is not an
immediate shortage of food but merely a shortage of the money to pay for
it. World Food Program Executive Director Josette Sheeran recently
remarked about Sub-Saharan Africa, "We are seeing more urban hunger than
ever before. Often we are seeing food on the shelves but people being
unable to afford it."

The agricultural/food business is now the second most profitable
industry in the world, lagging only behind pharmaceuticals. Indeed the
automaker Mitsubishi, which also controls the second largest bank in the
world [sic], has become one of the world's largest beef processors,
demonstrating the degree to which capital has flocked to the
agribusiness sector. The World Bank's World Development Report 2008
heaped approval on the role of agribusiness, commenting, "The private
agri-business sector has become more vibrant. New, powerful actors have
entered agricultural value chains and have an economic interest in a
dynamic and prosperous agricultural sector and a voice in political
affairs."

But just as agribusiness wiped out small US farmers in the 1980s, it has
repeated this pattern around the world ever since. As global justice
activist Vandana Shiva wrote in 2006, in India "without market
regulation agribusiness corporations will make profits selling costly
seeds, buying cheap farm produce, and locking farmers in debt. This has
been the process by which the small family farmer has disappeared in
USA, Argentina, Europe."

Now the law of supply and demand has dictated that the new market for
biofuels should reduce the production of corn for food by 25 percent in
the US - triggering a manmade shortage and a rise in corn prices.
Speculators have been hoarding crops on the expectation that prices will
rise further. Meanwhile, investors around the world have been fleeing
the falling dollar to buy up commodities such as rice and wheat, adding
to the speculative momentum and forcing staple prices higher for the
world's poorest people.

The neoliberal agenda long ago lost its shine for the vast majority of
the world's population, although its most earnest proponents have been
the last to recognize this stubborn reality. The most recent World
Economic Outlook, published by the IMF last fall, did note rising
inequality in the richest countries: "Among the largest advanced
countries, inequality appears to have declined only in France. The
recent experience (of increasing inequality) seems to be clear change in
the course from the general decline in inequality in the first half of
the 20th century."

Yet the IMF remained optimistic about the future of neoliberalism: "from
2002 to the present, the world economy has enjoyed its strongest period
of sustained growth since the late 1960s and early 1970s, while
inflation has remained at low levels. Not only has recent global growth
been high but expansion has also been broadly shared across countries.
The volatility of growth has fallen."

In recent weeks, neoliberal policymakers appear to have finally realized
that widespread hunger could ignite a level of protest that threatens
the ruling order worldwide. World Bank president Robert Zoellick
recently worried on the organization's website, "33 countries around the
world face potential social unrest because of the acute hike in food and
energy prices".

Perhaps these out-of-touch policy wonks should suggest that the world's
poor start eating ethanol, in keeping with their long-standing bourgeois
tradition. And US workers now teetering into the neoliberal abyss should
consider following their brothers and sisters around the world in
fighting back.
_____

Sharon Smith is the author of Women and Socialism (2005) and
Subterranean Fire: a History of Working-Class Radicalism in the United
States (2006). She can be reached at: sharon at internationalsocialist.org


http://www.counterpunch.com/sharon04112008.html


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