Orchestrating Famine: A Must-Read Food Crisis Backgrounder

The food crisis is not soundbite friendly, therefore it's not easy to gain a larger understanding of the issue without exploring multiple sources. Craig Mackintosh at Celsias, (which is the site that is homecourt for "The Celsias Show" which I host), did the legwork and in the process has written what I consider to be one of the most comprehensive discussions of this rapidly expanding calamity that I've encountered...

...The era of cheap food is over -- this means disaster for millions, and mega-profits for a few. How did we get into this mess?

Most objective observers of the current food crisis are understandably concerned. Around 45% of the world's population live on two dollars per day or less. Skyrocketing food prices are now bringing stress to two billion people, and despair to millions -- around one hundred million, actually. The situation is only expected to further deteriorate as: the price of oil continues to soar; climate change-related disasters increase in frequency and intensity, and as policy decisions such as mandated biofuel quotas in our fuel supply further strengthens the already strong price connection between fuel and food. It is a humanitarian disaster that's well underway, and one which seriously threatens to destabilize international security. As I'm sure you can appreciate, a hungry man is an angry man.

Making a killing

And yet, this situation is playing into the arms of large corporations who are making windfall profits out of desperate demand for the most basic of needs, and who see even greater opportunities for a lot more of the same in the coming months and years.

Much of the news coverage of the world food crisis has focussed on riots in low-income countries, where workers and others cannot cope with skyrocketing costs of staple foods. But there is another side to the story: the big profits that are being made by huge food corporations and investors. Cargill, the world's biggest grain trader, achieved an 86% increase in profits from commodity trading in the first quarter of this year. Bunge, another huge food trader, had a 77% increase in profits during the last quarter of last year. ADM, the second largest grain trader in the world, registered a 67% per cent increase in profits in 2007.

Nor are retail giants taking the strain: profits at Tesco, the UK supermarket giant, rose by a record 11.8% last year. Other major retailers, such as France's Carrefour and Wal-Mart of the US, say that food sales are the main sector sustaining their profit increases. Investment funds, running away from sliding stock markets and the credit crunch, are having a heyday on the commodity markets, driving prices out of reach for food importers like Bangladesh and the Philippines.

These profits are no freak windfalls. Over the last 30 years, the IMF and the World Bank have pushed so-called developing countries to dismantle all forms of protection for their local farmers and to open up their markets to global agribusiness, speculators and subsidised food from rich countries. This has transformed most developing countries from being exporters of food into importers. Today about 70 per cent of developing countries are net importers of food. On top of this, finance liberalisation has made it easier for investors to take control of markets for their own private benefit.

Orchestrating famine

The ability of developing nations to feed themselves has been progressively undermined by trade policies and Structural Adjustment Programs (see also) forced upon them by the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. This 'unholy trinity', as these partner institutions are often described, has brought our current food crisis upon us through their neoliberal 'free' trade agenda, tailoring markets in developing countries to suit Northern corporations. Recipients of IMF and World Bank loans must open their borders to the influx of highly subsidised agricultural produce from countries like the U.S. of A., who sell their food at below the cost of production (a practice called 'dumping'), undercutting local producers and putting them out of business -- causing mass urbanisation as millions leave their fields to work or beg in cities, as well as swelling numbers of illegal immigrants into the North.

Whilst called 'free trade', the reality is that these Structural Adjustment Programs are inherently unfair. Wealthy states like the U.S. and the E.U. continue to subsidise their production, and refuse to consider any kind of program to ensure their farmers do not over-produce, whilst developing nations are forced to remove subsidies for their production. This imbalance makes it impossible for small scale farmers to compete with Big Agribusiness -- so they simply stop growing food. As it happens, the same thing occurs within rich countries too -- small scale American farmers are giving up at a rate of about 330 per week -- but, while some of these farmers commit suicide ("Suicide is now the leading cause of death among US farmers, occurring at a rate three times higher than in the general population." -- CounterCurrents), most manage to find a way to continue getting food onto the table. It is not so in the developing world...

MUCH MORE:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/5/9/175616/2680/483/512079

.. neoliberal?

I find it very offensive and a very poor
choice of words to describe what those
people and corporations are.

A better choice would be: arch corporofascist.

but don't let one word stop you from appreciating the entirety of what was written. Alot of effort was put into this excellect explanation of the world food crisis.l

from: The Neoliberal Triad of Anti-Health Reforms:
Government Budget Cutting, Deregulation,
and Privatization

by MILTON TERRIS

http://members.aol.com/jphpterris/neolibral.htm

<snip>
THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF THE NEOLIBERAL PHILOSOPHY

What is the historical basis of the economic and political philosophy of neoliberalism? Why has it become so powerful in recent years?

For a long time I could not understand why my Latin American colleagues used the term “neoliberal” to describe the policies of cutting governmental health budgets and privatizing health services. To me, the term “neoconservative” seemed to provide a more accurate description. This is because in the U.S. we have used the term “liberal” to denote people who favor government action to improve the health and welfare of the people. I did not understand that the liberalism referred to is that of the 18th and 19th centuries, the liberalism of the rapidly-growing new class of merchants and industrialists who espoused the doctrine of “laissez faire,” opposing government regulation or other interference with their freedom to operate according to their own dictates. Today’s “neoliberals” are the descendants of that class, transformed to become the owners of large national and transnational corporations that wield tremendous political influence and power.

During the past century, governments accepted major responsibilities for the expansion and improvement of preventive and therapeutic health services, as well as education, housing, nutrition, and other living and working conditions. These reforms were enacted in response to the growth of labor, socialist and communist parties and the fear of socialist revolution. That fear was greatly reinforced by the emergence and growth of the socialist economic system to include 14 nations-9 in Europe, 4 in Asia, and Cuba in the Americas-comprising 33 per cent of the world’s population.

The victory of the capitalist nations in the so-called “Cold War” a vast military, political and economic struggle that lasted for 70 years - removed the greatest single obstacle to world domination by the national and international corporations. The fear of socialist revolution disappeared, and it became possible to press for a return to the laissez-faire liberalism of the earlier centuries, by again reducing state interference to a minimum - such interference as occupational health and safety regulations, workers’ compensation, minimum-wage laws, building codes, anti-pollution requirements, anti-discrimination laws, and food and drug regulations - that raise the costs and reduce the profits of industry. The corporations are determined to cut back on government services by reducing the budgets, not only of the above-mentioned programs, but of public schools and universities, public housing, public hospitals and clinics, government health insurance programs, and government contributions to social security funds, in order to reduce corporate taxes and thereby increase profits. Further, government-operated industries such as transportation and communication services are being sold off to private corporations at bargain prices. The key word today is privatization; the market is king, and profit is the overriding goal.

The health reforms of the earlier decades were truly reforms in the sense of expansion and improvement of health services for the people. The so-called “health reforms” of the post-Cold War period are not health reforms at all, but the very opposite; these are reactionary programs designed to limit access to, and impair the quality of, the health services available to the majority of the population. The specific characteristics of these anti-health reforms vary, depending on the different types of health services in each country, and the outcome of the anti-health campaign in each country will depend on the strength and strategies of the contending forces.
<snip>

You need to do some reading about conservative liberalism. Conservative liberalism is the right wing branch of liberalism. It must never be confused with social liberalism. Today's paradigm is a neo-liberal version of the same old crap. Frederick Von Hayek and the Austrian school were adored by Margaret Thatcher and the Reagan lunatics.
Hayek's Road to Serfdom is one of the more influential pieces of right wing crap ever written and Hayek is regarded as a key figure in the 20th century revival of liberalism.

The neo-liberals
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=376

Former neo-liberals like Jeffrey Sachs have destroyed Hayek's thesis. Of course a study of the state of infrastructure, schools, health care, etc since the neo-liberal paradigm has been imposed on developing country governments (and even in the US where the state has cut spending for the social good) also destroys Hayek's thesis.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-social-welfare-state

Liberal doesn't mean the same thing in the rest of the world that it does in the U.S. That's why I cringe a little each time I hear left-leaning types use that word to describe themselves, especially when I catch myself using it that way.

edited to add: Read The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein!

"Neoliberal" refers to the "shock therapy economics" and other elements of the "greed is good" pro-corporate philosophy, advanced by Milton Friedman and his ilk; Naomi Klein frequently uses the term in this sense. This use of "neoliberal" is totally unrelated to "liberal" in the sense of "progressive". See for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism

Note also that there is a huge difference between the US and European usage of "liberal". In European political discourse "liberal" generally means "pro free market". It's a source of endless confusion, but you can see how "neoliberal" makes more sense in this context.

:)

they don't care about anyone or anything other than themselves and their own profits . . . not other people, not the environment, not other species, not anything . . . yet they make all the rules and "govern" the rest of us as they see fit . . .

time for a worldwide populist revolution, imo . . .

He sent the World Bank and IMF packing, refuses to sell his country's natural resources to international corporations and so those corps use their massive media presence to paint him as the bad guy.

Greg Palast has written a lot on this topic. The more who do the better. It's high time the people of this country learned the role their government is playing in this situation.

Julie