[News] Let Them Eat Ethanol!

[Anti-Imperialist News]

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

Apri1 11, 2008


Growing Hunger


Let Them Eat Ethanol!

By SHARON SMITH

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 80 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 50 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 80 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 U.S.' 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 
U.S.-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 10 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 30-day salary bonus and will address their demands on 
healthcare and wages.

* * *

Hunger is also rising in the U.S. 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 U.S. media outlets, which still largely take their cue 
from Wall St. 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 U.S. has reached a level not seen in decades, 
with food staples like milk rising 17 percent over the last year, 
rice, pasta and bread rising over 12 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, 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 U.S. 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 U.S.A, 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 U.S.--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 U.S. 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 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1931859116/counterpunchmaga>Women 
and Socialism and 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/193185923X/counterpunchmaga>Subterranean 
Fire: a History of Working-Class Radicalism in the United States. She 
can be reached at: 
<mailto:sharon at internationalsocialist.org>sharon at internationalsocialist.org




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