… “Any number of reasons has been put forth for rising commodity and food prices: diminishing inventories of grains, greater consumption of animal products in Asia, a growing global population, global warming, biofuels, natural limits, financial speculation, the falling dollar, escalating crude oil prices, World Bank and IMF policies, hoarding, export restrictions, and more. In one way or another, all of these factor into inflation. But it’s not a jumble of reasons; there are a few critical causal chains and feedback loops behind the chaos. In broad terms, the nature of the globalized economy-the role of financial speculation, the dumping of subsidized foodstuffs from Western farmers in poor countries forced to “liberalize” their agricultural sectors, the declining dollar, and the overheated oil market-is why prices are shooting up. What ties all these factors together is politics. It’s a political decision to allow rampant speculation in commodities; it’s a political decision to decrease regulation of commodities trading; it’s a political decision to devalue the dollar by increasing deficits and cutting interest rates; it’s a political decision to force poor countries to dismantle supports for their farming sector; it’s a political decision to force the poor to buy food in the marketplace, instead of making access to food a basic human right.
The Return of Malthus
Much of the debate boils down to politics versus natural limits. This debate stretches back more than 200 years to Thomas Malthus’s 1798 “Essay on the Principle of Population,” in which he argued, as John Bellamy Foster put it, “There is a constant pressure of population against food supply which has always applied and will always apply.” Without retracing the debate over hundreds of years (Foster’s 1998 essay in Monthly Review, “Malthus’ Essay on Population at Age 200: A Marxian View,” is an excellent introduction), it’s critical to note that it’s still of great relevance today. Many people who speak of natural limits-such as the “peak oil” or “peak food” crowd-are neo- Malthusians. They often exhibit hostility toward the poor like Malthus, who wrote, “We cannot, in the nature of things, assist the poor, in any way, without enabling them to rear up to manhood a greater number of their children.”
Some involved in the debate today, such as Lester Brown and the World Watch Institute, tread close to the Malthusian line in warning of the “population problem” and arguing that it is a major reason why commodity prices are rising. Despite talk of increased food aid-which involves buying more subsidized Western foodstuffs and dumping them in impoverished countries, thereby further undermining their food security by bankrupting small farmers who can’t compete against free foods- there is a willingness to let the poor die en masse in adherence to the neoliberal agenda.
There are, of course, limits to everything-food, population, energy. But as Marx argued in the Grundrisse, overpopulation is “a historically determined relation, in no way determined by abstract numbers or by the absolute limit of the productivity of the necessaries of life, but by limits posited by specific conditions of production.” It is these limits imposed-such as biofuel production and speculation-that are behind the global food crisis.
On the other side, there is a strategy to blame the developing world for both the food and fuel crisis. China and India, with their booming economies, are held as culprits for the rising demand and thus shrinking supplies of food and energy supplies. India and China’s population and caloric intake is increasing, particularly that of meat and dairy products. But this is a decades-long trend. There is no way that steady growth over 20 or 30 years could cause commodity prices to double in a year or 2. For example, from 1990 to 2003, India’s caloric intake grew by 155 calories a person, barely 12 calories a year, while China’s grew by 231 calories, or 18 calories a year. (During this same period, the intake of the average American increased by 310 calories.) At the same time, despite adverse climatic events such as large crop failures in Australia, the world’s cereal output has increased. Part of the problem, notes Raj Patel, is that by one estimate, “740 million tons of grains were fed to animals last year and that would cover the food deficit at the moment 14 times over.” (more…)
