A workers’ answer to the food crisis
Last week thousands of garment workers in Bangladesh went on strike in protest at rising food prices. Factory workers earn as little as a $1 a day and have seen the price of rice increase by a third since last year. Some 30 million people in Bangladesh – nearly a quarter of the population — may be going without a daily meal.
Food riots have taken place this year in Egypt, Haiti and Burkina Faso. The United Nations predicts that 33 countries in Asia and Africa face “political instability” as a result of food price rises. It says the global food bill has rise by 57% in the last year, with basic staples such as rice and wheat doubling in price.
The food crisis is not the result of too little food produced across the globe. Last year the global grain harvest was 2.1 billion tonnes, up 5% on the previous year – easily more than enough to feed the entire population of the world. Although harvests in some places (such as the US) were down a bit, the main problem is that only about half of this grain going directly to feed people. The rest is being used for other purposes.
According to the Independent (16 April), around 100 million tonnes of grain last year went on producing biofuels – more than quadruple the figure at the turn of the century. This was the result of a push by the big capitalist powers, both the US and the European Union – as well as by other regional powers such as Brazil with existing ethanol industries – to increase production in a vain and unplanned attempt to combat climate change.
Last week the British government introduced the requirement for transport fuels to be 2.5% biofuel from crops. The EU has plans for a similar measure. Yet the facts about biofuels have been well known for years. Apart from the deforestation that takes place to “clear” for biofuel crops, it takes 232kg of corn to fill a 50-litre car tank with ethanol – enough to feed a child for a year.
If nothing else, socialists should support Biofuelswatch and the Campaign against Climate Change, who want a moratorium on biofuels until they can be shown to be socially and ecologically sustainable.
However nearly a third of the global grain harvest – some 760 million tonnes last year, went on feeding animals. There is a growing demand for meat across the globe and this requires a big input of grain. Apparently it takes 8kg of grain to produce 1kg of beef, and 2kg of feed to produce a kilo of chicken – what is known as “conversion efficiency”. As well as consuming grain, cows also produce large quantities of greenhouse gases. One cow produces more methane per day than a 4x4 driving 33 miles.
In response to the food crisis, some greens have called for a vegetarian diet. George Monbiot has suggested a switch to tilapia, a freshwater fish that consumes 1.6kg of feed per kilo of food – the best conversion efficiency of any farmed animal.
I think socialists should generally avoid focusing on individual lifestyle solutions to problems caused by the anarchy of global capitalism, and resist attempts to coerce people into changing their eating habits. As William Morris put it in 1886, “But a man [sic] can hardly be a sound Socialist who puts forward vegetarianism as a solution of the difficulties between labour and capital… there are people who are vegetarians on ascetic grounds, and who would be just as tyrannical as other ascetics if they had a chance of being so.” However we should not dismiss lightly the human health benefits as well as the ecological gains from a better diet, brought about voluntarily.
For socialists, the food crisis is another symptom of capitalist crisis – the chaotic system of profiteering which drives down workers’ living standards. The food crisis, coming on the back of big increases in the price of fuels – for heating and powering homes, for transport (both public and private) — adds up to the most concentrated squeeze on working class incomes since the 1970s.
In Britain, food prices have risen fast. Bread prices have doubled in the last three years and are up by a third on last year. Rice prices are also up by a third; eggs by 40%; chicken by 70%; and pasta by 80% (the Guardian 16 April) And all this while the fat cat bosses still reap a fortune and while the government imposes pay cuts across the public sector.
The answer, both in Britain and across the globe, is for workers to take action. We need an authoritative estimate of the cost of living and a sliding scale of wages to keep up with the real cost of meeting basic needs. We need industrial action to smash the imposed pay ceiling for workers.
We also need political demands – particularly as the rising cost of living will hit many of the poorest, least organised and vulnerable workers. The government should levy a windfall tax on supermarkets, the banks, petrol companies and energy suppliers who continue to rake in huge profits. We should demand benefits and pensions be increased to guarantee a minimum standard of living. We should fight for these reforms now, and as part of our struggle for socialism – which will guarantee everyone’s basic needs are met.
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A Few Points
1. Grain production was up by 5% last year, but is likely to increase more this year, because large amounts of set aside land is being brought into cultivation as farmers seek to benefit from high prices. There is in fact an interesting economic theory relating to such situations called the Cobweb Theory, which demonstrates how the market in such situations ratrher than clearing produces increasing volatility with large swing in prices, and supply. One reason intervention in agricultural production was introduced.
2. Your own figures show why bio-fuels is a red herring here. The 100 million tonnes is less than 5% of the total 2.1 billion tonnes produced. Moreover, production of bio-fuels is not something that has only just begun so it is only the icnrease in bio-fuel production that could be taken as having any impact i.e. far, far less than 5% of production. So this is unlikely to explain increased prices.
3. Increased food prices, like the icnrease in other commodity prices such as metals is typical of this Spring Phase of the Kondratiev Long Wave upswing. It reflects vigorous economic grwoth placing a rapid icnrease in demand on supply, which cannot expand quickly enough to meet it. It takes about 7 years to open a new Copper mine, it takes usually a year for newly sown agricultural products to be sown, and where new or set aside land is used, it can take longer because of the need for investment to take place on the land. Where entirely new areas of food production are to be developed the investemnt required not just in preparing the land, but providing other infrastructural needs such as roads, storage etc. takes even longer. But huge potential for such production exists - Russia, which used to act as a bread basket for much of Europe for a start, Africa and South America for a much larger second, and third. The increase in food prices actually reflects the fact that during the Kondratiev Long Wave downswing that lasted between the mid 70's and late 90's food, like oil and other commodities was actually very cheap as supply that had been brought on line lacked sufficient demand - hence the wine lakes and food mountains. The extent of that cheapness was demonstrated by the recent Newsnight which disclosed that in Britain the average family throws away a third of all the food it buys!!!
4. The main increase in demand arises from the fact that huge numbers of people around the world have been dragged out of poverty and the idiocy of rural life, and become part of th world working class in Asia, whilst others in Eastern Europe have seen their living standards rise as Capital has taken advanatge of large pools of cheap labour, driven into unemployment when their formerly secure employment under Stalinism came to an end.
5. Although high food prices represnt an imminent problem for large numbers of people who have neither employment nor the possibility of producing their own food, at the same time those high prices represent the possibility for these same people in the more medium term to secure employment as new sources of agricultural supply are opened up.
6. For the same reason that the total amount of grain going to animal biofuels cannot be pointed to as the source of higher prices, neither can the total going to animal feed - only the increase can be so taken into account. That increase is largely due to the improvement in diet of those newly created workers, and I think to suggest that they should cut back on their diet is as wrong as the demand by developed economies that developing economies should restrict their economic development for environemntal purposes. It is environmental imperialism.
7. Its true that cows are more responsible for greenhouse gases than cars, but it is also true that insects produce even more methane than cows. I doubt environmentalists would, however, favour a mass culling of insects.
In short the best answer is of course socialism, but short of that workers have to take matters into their own hands and use their own collective strength to both defend their living standrads, and to provide solutions to the problems created. Capitalism as it has in the past will provide a solution through the amrket, but necessarily one that involves all kinds of crises and convulsions, and will if we let it, throw the burden on to the backs of workers. Developing a true cost of living index by committees of workers is a start that can be made where workers are organised and have sufficient strength, and fighting for increases in wages thereon is something workers can do themselves without relying on the state. In Britain the Co-op is the biggest farmer in the country,a nd in fact the current situation offers an opportunity for its expansion taking more production out of the hands of private Capital, and placing it directly in the hands of workers that have the opportunity to plan and control this production democratically - if only the labour Movement would get off its arse and take the opportunity it has to do so.
As far demanding the Government impose a windfall tax and so on. This is both pissing in the wind and reactioanry lassalleanism. The only reason a bouregois government is going to do that is if it is in the interests of Capital as a whole. Why fool workers into beleiving they can place any faith in the capitalist state undertaking such action, when the Marxist position is to mobilise the workers themselves to undertake independent class action, and impose their own solutions. What happened to your "Third Camp" as being such independent workers action? Instead it reveals itself again as nothing more than petit-bouregois, top down, statist, Lassallean socialism. The best solution to the profist of these companies is not the reactionary call to Government to do something about it, but for workers to reduce those profits through their own collective action, higher wages, better pension provision, and better still the use of such liberated funds to create a pension system directly under democratic workers ownership, and control.
But such solutions are not available for many in the poorest countries where such organised labour Movements are weak or non-existent. Again solutions based on asking the bouregois state and imperialism to provide aid are reactionary. The best we can do is to establish some form of international workers aid, but the reality is as Engels pointed out in his letter to Kautsky even were the workers to overthrow capitalism in its heartlands they would have to leave the colonies largely to develop on their own for some considerable time, because as he put it the workers would have enough to do developing socialism in their own countries without trying to resolve the problems of the rest of the world.
Arthur Bough