In July, the United Nations issued a stark warning: 2022 will be a year of unprecedented hunger. The number of people facing acute food insecurity has soared from 135 million in 2019 to 345 million now. 50 million people in 45 countries face famine. Nearly a billion are living on the brink of catastrophe. This human suffering on an almost unimaginable scale reflects a crisis that has been accelerating over the past two years. It has prompted protests across the world against soaring food prices, toppling the prime minister and president of Sri Lanka and forcing Ecuador’s right-wing president to the negotiating table. The last major food crisis in 2008 saw riots in more than 40 countries. It is only a fear of working class anger and desperation tipping over into mass resistance that has forced the issue onto the imperialist agenda, with International Monetary Fund head Kristalina Georgieva warning ‘history has shown that hunger often triggers social unrest and violence’.
The imperialists have weaponised the food crisis as a stick with which to beat Russia. According to the Washington Post on 22 May, ‘Putin is starving millions of people around the world’. ‘President Biden and the G7 announce measures to counter Putin’s attack on food security’, the White House announced in June. This crass propaganda seeks to cover up that this is a crisis created and fuelled by imperialism.
It is the division of the world between oppressed and oppressor nations, the plunder of the labour and resources of the working class on a global scale to fill the coffers of the wealthy nations, the concentration of agriculture into a handful of monopoly commodity producers and rampant speculation on food as a commodity that are driving prices sky-high, leaving millions worldwide in a permanent state of food insecurity. This underlying reality is being exacerbated by the knock-on effects of the coronavirus pandemic, as well as the climate catastrophe and imperialist-fuelled conflicts, including the war in Ukraine.
Hunger in a world of plenty
The pandemic has had a devastating impact on the working class internationally, with the brunt of it borne by those in the oppressed nations. Inequality between rich and poor was hugely exacerbated as 150 million more people were forced into extreme poverty – bringing the figure to 750 million – while 500 new billionaires were created. David Beasley of the World Food Programme (WFP) warned then of ‘widespread famine on a biblical scale.’ Now The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2022, produced by UN agencies including the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and WFP, shows that up to 828 million people were affected by hunger last year, 46 million more than in 2020 and 150 million more than in 2019. 2.3 billion people – nearly a third of the global population – were moderately or severely food insecure, suffering from a chronic inability to access or afford food on a regular basis. The report estimates that 22% of children aged under five were stunted because of lack of access to adequate nutrition.
Yet there is more than enough food produced globally to feed the world. 2021 saw bumper wheat harvests and global food production has been rising steadily. But soaring prices put it out of the reach of the world’s poor. Hunger is caused not by scarcity of food, but by the inability of millions to pay for it.
Priced out of existence
By January 2022 – well before the Russian invasion – the UN FAO food price index had risen by a tenth since the same time last year, to its highest level since July 2014. This rise was driven by a sharp increase in grain prices, with corn up 45%, soyabeans 56%, wheat 16% and rice 27%. This drove overall food prices to their highest level since the organisation started keeping records in 1990. The conflict in Ukraine has exacerbated rather than caused the so-called grain crisis.
Russia is the world’s third largest wheat producer, largest net exporter of wheat and largest exporter of fertiliser. Ukraine is the fifth largest exporter of cereals. Between them the two countries account for nearly a third of global wheat and barley exports, and are credited with supplying 12% of the world’s entire calorie needs. Since 24 February, the combination of an unprecedented raft of sanctions on Russia and months of failure to reach an agreement over allowing exports of Ukrainian grain through heavily-mined Black Sea channels sharply reduced world access to cereals and fertiliser, raising prices and creating temporary shortages in some of the world’s poorest countries. By April, the World Bank’s Food Commodity Price Index was up 15% over the previous two months and was 80% higher than in 2020. It expects global prices to rise a further 20% this year, made worse by food trade restrictions imposed by 18 countries to date including India (grain) and Indonesia (palm oil) in order to protect domestic supplies. Even before the conflict in Ukraine, increasing prices were putting basic food items beyond the reach of the most vulnerable. Now cooking oil is up 36% in Yemen and 39% in Syria, both already in the grip of a humanitarian crisis caused by imperialist war. Wheat flour is up 47% percent in Lebanon, 15% in Libya and 14% in Occupied Palestine. The World Bank warns that for each percentage point rise in food prices, 10 million more people are thrown into poverty worldwide. The poorest sections of the working class – who spend vastly more of their income on food, proportionally, than the rich – are quite literally paying with their lives. The recent agreement between Ukraine and Russia to allow cargo ships carrying Ukrainian grain safe passage through the Black Sea, and a parallel agreement between Russia and the UN to mitigate some sanctions so that Russia can export its own food commodities, offer only temporary relief in a far more entrenched crisis.
A crisis sown by imperialism
The impact of the loss of grain exports from Russia and Ukraine is particularly acute in in north Africa and the Middle East. Many countries in the region import at least a third of their wheat from Ukraine and Russia; in Somalia, Benin and Eritrea, the figure is 100%, in Egypt 82% and in Sudan 75%. But the reason the region is so dependent on imports is that it is currently experiencing its worst drought in four decades. The FAO has warned that in an area stretching from northern Kenya to Somalia and a large part of Ethiopia, up to 20 million people will go hungry this year because of climate change causing temperatures to rise and a shorter and shorter rainy season. In its most recent report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned of the impact that floods, droughts, storms and other extreme weather events were already having in driving acute food insecurity and malnutrition in underdeveloped countries.
Dependency on food imports by many countries in Africa is increased by the policies of the world’s financial institutions and companies. Following the 2008 food crisis, there was a renewed push by agribusiness multinationals, backed by the IMF and World Bank, to transform agricultural resources into financial assets. Resources were transferred from domestic food production to export-oriented monocrops such as soy and corn to feed industrial livestock production or for biofuels – fuels derived from plant matter, seen as a green alternative to fossil fuels. This chemical and fossil fuel-based agricultural production on a mass scale further depletes and pollutes the land, magnifying the impacts of climate change. Massive land grabs in, for example, Kenya, Mozambique and Tanzania, saw millions of acres no longer available for domestic production. Small farmers have been left exposed to high price volatility and the privatisation of seed banks (which increases costs and reduces biodiversity), and increasingly forced onto less fertile land which is also more prone to both drought and flooding. So while last year in Kenya seven out of ten people reported being unable to afford enough food for their families, in the same year, $450m of Kenyan produce was exported to Britain, including vegetables, fruit, cereals and cut flowers. The profits from this lucrative business accrue not to the country’s poor, but to the vast multinational companies, a handful of which control the global food trade, and to their shareholders.
The biggest agribusiness monopolies, such as Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), Bunge, Cargill and Louis Dreyfus, collectively referred to as ‘the ABCD companies’, are among those who benefit from $630bn a year in subsidies to the food and agriculture sector: the figure is expected to reach $1.8 trillion by 2030. As the FAO/WFP report notes, ‘[this support] often distorted market prices, did not reach small-scale farmers, hurt the environment and did not promote nutritious food production.’
Much of capitalist crop production exacerbates rather than alleviates the food crisis. Only 0.5% of the earth’s surface is used for growing food crops for human consumption. Instead, about half of industrially produced cereals goes to biofuels and livestock feed. In the US last year, 36% of total corn production went into biofuels, as did 40% of soyabean oil. The Washington-based thinktank World Resources Institute estimates that a 50% reduction in the grain used for biofuels in Europe alone would compensate for all the lost exports of Ukrainian wheat, corn, barley and rye. During the 2008 food crisis, studies by the World Bank and IMF suggested the growth of biofuels contributed 20-50% to corn prices. The then UN special rapporteur on the right to food, Jean Ziegler, called biofuels ‘a crime against humanity’.
Profiting from global hunger
It is the inevitable and obscene logic of the capitalist system that the starvation of millions should bring rich pickings for the few. On 7 March, as wheat hit its then highest-ever price, JP Morgan’s wealth management team encouraged clients to invest in agricultural funds. Teucrium – the world’s largest wheat futures trader – saw net inflows of $377m in March and ran out of shares to sell. As early as October last year, it had been encouraging investors to profit from rising food prices. In the last two years investment funds and firms increased their stakes in agricultural commodities. According to a Lighthouse report, The Hunger Profiteers, by April this year, seven in 10 buyers of futures wheat contracts were speculators in the form of investment firms, investment funds, other financial institutions and commercial non-hedgers whose aim was to profit from the rise in prices. Curbs on such speculative activity in food were proposed after the major food crisis of 2008. The International Swaps and Derivatives Association (whose members include Goldman Sachs, BNP Paribas, Blackrock and Citibank) successfully lobbied the EU regulator to weaken the restrictions. The head of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems, Olivier de Schutter, concluded that ‘speculative activity by power institutional investors who are generally unconcerned with agricultural market fundamentals are indeed betting on hunger and exacerbating it’.
Having long ignored the escalating crisis in Yemen, where 19 million people will be food insecure by December as a result of the imperialist-backed war there, or the millions affected by drought and flooding in Africa, the imperialist countries are under pressure to act. Not only do they face the spectre of social unrest on a mass scale but, as the Financial Times warned in April, a food price crisis could erode support for imperialist war aims in Ukraine: ‘to counter the risks of waning popular support for Ukraine’s resistance, democratic nations need to do better at blaming Moscow for the price shock … Rich countries must not fail on the food crisis’. Following the G7 summit in June, the US announced a pitiful $2.6bn in food emergency assistance to international agencies. Contrast that with the $6.92bn pledged in military assistance to Ukraine since the Russian invasion. Imperialism’s priorities are clear. War and hunger will continue to devastate humanity unless resistance is built on a global scale.
Cat Wiener
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 289 August/September 2022
