The current sustained hike in food prices and the hunger crises that it has and will provoke are not an accident, but the very result of neoliberal policies and intentions, argues George Caffentzis, in a recommended article for Mute magazine.

1. The reasons behind the hunger crises

What can possibly be a reason for such developments?

Here are his arguments:

George Caffentzis:

“Placing today’s ‘food crisis’ against this historical background reminds us that capitalism produces scarcity rather than wealth at least for the majority of the world population. But this explanation also raises new questions. If capitalist development has for decades been structured by the need to control food supplies and use food as a means of profit making and as a weapon in the class struggle, why is it still necessary, in 2008, to resort to measures like dramatic food price hikes that are guaranteed to trigger revolts in many parts of the world? Why do the World Bankers and other capitalist planners want to run this risk? Why were the policies of structural adjustment not sufficient? And, is the food crisis part of the crisis of neoliberalism?

These questions are not easy to answer, but some hypotheses are in order. For the dramatic and murderous food price increases are intended to force a decisive shift in the constellation of class forces throughout the world in favour of capital.

First, the food crisis should be read as a reply to the widespread refusal of land commodification (which is especially strong in Africa) and the struggle that communities are making across Latin America to reverse the privatisation of land and natural resources and recreate ‘new commons’. This has taken the form of open land re-appropriation movements, like the Zapatistas, the Landless Workers’ Movement in Brazil, the Landless People’s Movement in South Africa, as well as many less formally organised efforts throughout the world.7 In many parts of Africa, rural migrants to the towns, especially women, have been cultivating plots of public land, a move which enables them to gain some independence, increase the family consumption and budget, and raise some money of their own through the small scale sale or barter of the surplus product.

Both World Bank officials and the CEOs of the major food trading corporations undoubtedly plan that the food price hikes will put an end to this resistance, as the rising food prices will produce a new ‘land rush’, leading to further land expropriation, a further commercialisation of agriculture, and renewed attacks on subsistence farming in favour of the farming of crops for export.

Second, through the hike in food and fuel prices, capital is trying to introduce a set of reforms in the social reproduction process that have long been on its neoliberal agenda, but so far have been successfully resisted by workers in Europe and the US. Despite the erosion of benefits due to increasing inflation, neither Social Security in the US nor pensions in many countries of the EU have been significantly reduced, despite repeated efforts to achieve this end. In this context, the food price hike is the equivalent of a cut in the real wage and a transfer of even more value to the agricultural corporations. It disposes of those ‘income rigidities’, to paraphrase a Keynesian concept, that so far have prevented the far-reaching ‘welfare reform’ capital has aspired to for many years. As with inflation historically, food price hikes attack working class communities at their weakest, as shoppers and consumers, rather than as members of workers’ organisations.

Third, the food price hike also serves to defeat the resistance of many governments, from Europe to Africa and Latin America, to the introduction of GM products. The rejection of GM food has surprisingly come from every social rank in these regions, to the great dismay of US agribusiness. Significantly, the argument that hiking food prices would facilitate the African governments’ acceptance of GM was already well articulated in the World Bank’s World Development Report of 2008, that was published in October 2007 (before the most recent price hikes). Indeed, the report would appear quite prophetic of the developments to come, if we did not realise that to a great extent these developments prevailed thanks to the efforts of the World Bank and its partners in the UN system, the IMF and the FAO, ‘prediction’ often being a euphemism for a planning target in World Bank discourse.”

2. Land and food as a commons

So, what is at stake in this crisis, is the very structure of the new post-meltdown world order:

“It is difficult to anticipate whether the food crisis will achieve these three objectives or will instead stimulate a worldwide uprising of movements for the re-appropriation of land and de-commodification of agriculture. For the best laid plans of both agribusiness executives and the World Bankers can go astray.

One determining factor here will be the behaviour of governments in the global South (especially the largest ones, China, India and Brazil), many of which have shown themselves ready to take a more combative stance towards the pressure exercised by the ‘international community’ on them. The failure of the World Trade Organization’s ‘Doha Round’ is a good sign in this direction. But resistance is not confined to giant nations like China, India and Brazil. An exemplary precedent is the case of Malawi, one of Africa’s smallest countries. Traditionally self-sufficient, and even an exporter of food to South Africa, in the 1980s this country was led by the World Bank to end its subsidies to farmers and later, in 2000, the IMF insisted that it put its food reserves on the market. But after years of near famine conditions, it has recently reversed these policies, despite pressure to the contrary by the IMF and World Bank. This has been a wise move, indeed, one that other countries will likely emulate, since for the first time in years Malawi can boast again of a surplus food production.

States, however, are problematic allies in the struggle against starvation-creating price hikes, since they are almost always also interested in developing their capitalist agricultural sector, but on their own terms. What will matter most in deciding the outcome of the food crisis will be the ability of movements, across the divides imposed on us, to coordinate strategies of resistance against the planners of hunger and starvation. The struggle against famine and land expropriation cannot be fought only in Africa or the mountains of Chiapas. It must be carried on in the supermarkets and streets of the US and Europe, as were the ‘clean clothes’ campaigns of the 1990s that transformed shopping into a political act and united textile sweatshop workers in the Global South with workers in the North. The demand for food for all, that will strengthen not poison the consumers and producers, forms the basis of a material politics that can upset the purposes of those who have planned the food price crisis.

But let us make no mistake on this point: the stakes in this struggle are high. If the food price hike strategy works and food production is fully commercialised, if the struggle for the re-communalisation of land is defeated, with food and land going to those who have more cash in hand, millions will die, the peasantry as a historic class will disappear, people across the planet will have access to land only by labouring as peons at the service of agricultural corporations, and we will have missed our last chance of having some control over the quality of the food we eat, which is already largely a byproduct of the petro-chemical industry. Most important, if the food price hikes achieve their purpose, the possibility of constructing a world where, paraphrasing José Bové, ‘Life is not for sale’, will be extinguished for decades.”