The coronavirus pandemic is exposing the irrationality and injustice of the global capitalist food system. It produces enough to feed 14 billion people, and yet as the world economy grinds to a halt, food becomes unaffordable and is ‘over-produced’ only to be destroyed. Millions unemployed in the imperialist countries go hungry and hundreds of millions of people across the world are now threatened with famine conditions, a consequence of imperialism which keeps their countries enslaved with debt. ADAM GREY and WILL HARNEY report.
Empty shelves and rotting fields
In the capitalist food industry, absurd contradictions arise amid crisis. Britain’s fragile food supply system has been thrown into disarray by the pandemic. The commercial kitchen sector including fast food, restaurants and cafés shut down almost completely, collapsing demand and causing chaos among producers and suppliers. Although demand for groceries increased in the first three weeks of lockdown, this disguised inequality as 1.5 million of the poorest workers, many now unemployed, skipped meals for a whole day (The Guardian, 11 April).
Gaps in the shelves have become a familiar sight. Rationing remains in place at supermarkets to prevent hoarding, and online delivery queues can be weeks long. Supply chains based on ‘just-in-time’ manufacture, import and distribution have been severely disrupted: logistics companies and warehouses closed with workers self-isolating from Covid-19; and migrant workers, on whose highly exploited labour the farming and food processing sectors rely, are not travelling. Meat packing plants are especially vulnerable to Covid-19 outbreaks, due to their closed, cold and crowded nature. In the US, over 10,000 workers have been infected at 170 plants, and 45 workers have died. Just one plant in South Dakota, shut after 238 workers contracted the virus, accounts for 4-5% of US pork production.
In the US, farmers are destroying edible crops which cannot be picked cheaply and sold at a profit; most cannot afford to switch their whole business to the low-priced grocery sector. The closure of slaughterhouses and meat packing plants has been followed by the culling of 2 million farm animals. 10 million pigs may be culled by September. Chicken producer Allen Harim sent a letter to contract farmers on 10 April stating that the company would begin ‘depopulating the flocks’; the methods used include filling sheds with foam to suffocate the animals. This senseless inhumanity is the logical result of a system which breeds millions of animals only to be killed and discarded if they can’t make a profit, even as queues for foodbanks have grown miles long in some areas of the US. The director of a food bank charity in Pennsylvania commented, ‘Not even when the steel mills closed down did we see increased demand like this.’
The same chaos can be seen in Britain where 2.1 million have applied for Universal Credit. Food banks reported a 122% increase in demand for food aid for children during lockdown and warn they will not be able to continue if the recession drags on. Meanwhile, as demand for milk from the commercial kitchen sector fell by 70% by early April, the dairy manufacturer Müller ordered suppliers to cut production on more than 250 Scottish farms, as an estimated 1 million litres of ‘unwanted’ (unsellable) milk was being produced per day only to be poured down the drain. Perfectly good food and farm capacity is deliberately wasted while unemployed workers go hungry.
Britain’s food security crisis
In a news conference on 26 April, the Environment Secretary George Eustice claimed victory in the arena of food security as supermarket chains reconfigured their logistics and increased their workforces to cope with the shift in demand. The ‘panic buying’ period translated to a spike in sales, with sales growth peaking at 48% in the week to 21 March. In describing the period, the CEO of Sainsbury’s said, ‘We sold more, for five days running, than we would normally sell in our busiest day at Christmas. That’s why you saw the gaps on the shelf.’
Addressing the possibility of future food shortages and price hikes, Eustice denied that food trade has been significantly disrupted by the virus. Yet he admitted that, with the salad and soft fruit harvest only a month away, only 1/3rd of the usual 60,000 migrant labourers were present in the country. Britain’s agricultural sector relies heavily on workers from Eastern Europe.
Warnings about Britain’s dependency on food imports were sounded long before the present crisis. Tim Lang, head of the Centre for Food Policy at City University London, has argued that Britain is stuck in an imperial mindset, expecting to be fed by other countries, resulting in a trade deficit in food products of £24bn by 2017 (Feeding Britain, Pelican, 2020). Britain has 6m hectares of cultivatable land, but only 168,000 hectares are used for fruit and vegetables. Britain produces less than half of the food it consumes, compared to 78% in the first half of the 1980s. More than two thirds of the agricultural land that produces food consumed here is in other countries.
Parasitism is not only a mindset but an economic necessity for the British ruling class. Farms in Britain require annual subsidies amounting to £3.5bn to remain afloat (currently from the EU); on average farmers in Britain make more from subsidies than they do from agriculture. With farmland prices per hectare increasing steeply between 1960-2013 (see figure 1)[1] and high labour costs, they cannot afford to produce cheaply enough for the grocery sector which is increasingly reliant on imports. In the first half of 2018 alone, Britain imported £23bn worth of consumable food products – 20,948,398 tonnes of food. Around 30% of Britain’s food comes from the EU and 20% is from the rest of the world. On 19 May, trade secretary Liz Truss announced that Britain’s post-Brexit tariff regime would place 10% duties on food imports including beef, butter and poultry. If preferential trade deals with EU or non-EU countries are not reached by December, the price of food imports will rise sharply.
Famines of imperialism
After a decades-long decline in the prevalence of undernourishment worldwide, in recent years hunger has been on the rise, with the FAO State of Food Security report for 2019 reporting that 820 million people suffer from hunger. These are concentrated in Africa and Asia where the prevalence of undernourishment is 19.9% and 11.3% respectively.
Food insecurity has also risen, with the World Food Programme (WFP) predicting food crises in Haiti, Myanmar, and much of the Middle East and Central and Sub-Saharan Africa. This was before locust swarms which decimated crops in East Africa and Pakistan earlier this year.
Underdeveloped countries, whose labour-intensive harvests could be greatly affected by quarantine, self-isolation and social distancing, are now exposed to extreme danger. David Beasley, executive director of the WFP, foresees ‘widespread famine of biblical proportions’ (The Guardian, 21 April). The WFP has warned that 30 countries could experience widespread famine, with the number of people at risk doubling to 265 million.
A statement issued by the World Trade Organisation emphasises the need to maintain agricultural labour power and continue global food trade during the pandemic. To this end it advises against ‘hampering the movement of food industry workers’ and for the loosening of ‘food trade restrictions linked to unjustified concerns on food safety’ (31 March 2020). Beasley has called for £1.6bn of pledged food aid under the WFP to be brought forward, plus another £285m for logistics. Yet his programme urges only a charitable response from Western nations, who force other countries into a structural dependence on aid in the first place.
The creation of famine conditions in oppressed nations goes hand-in-hand with imperialism, as evidenced by the role of the British Empire in Ireland’s Great Famine of 1845-9 and the Bengal famine of 1943. These were exacerbated by the refusal of the colonial state to release food marked for export.
This predatory relationship remains. In the ‘post-colonial’ era, the IMF, World Bank and other financial institutions, in return for ‘development’ loans, have forced underdeveloped countries to replace their domestic agricultural sectors with export-focused economies to build trade surpluses and service their debts, in many cases making them reliant on ‘charitable’ food aid where previously they had been virtually self-sufficient.
The Agricultural Market Information System, an arm of the G20, fears a repeat of the food price crisis of 2007-8, where large cereal producers cut exports, leading to volatility and price rises on the global food market. This harmed the poorest countries most, chronically dependent on imports, and where most of a person’s income is spent on food. It was followed by popular uprisings throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Initially reacting to the pandemic, 17 of the biggest food exporting countries such as Russia, India and Vietnam introduced protectionist export bans. Half of these countries have lifted the measures but if they are reintroduced, rising world food prices combined with mass unemployment could lead to widespread unrest.
Hungering for change
We can look to historical examples of how states have protected their citizens from the worst impacts of disruption to food trade and production, for example, the response of socialist Cuba to the withdrawal of Soviet Union assistance, and the eventual collapse of the socialist bloc, from 1989. Faced with severe food scarcity, the priority of the state was always to keep its citizens fed and healthy.
Cuba diversified food production away from sugar, with the export economy shifting to tourism, tobacco and biotechnology. The reduced imports of industrial farming commodities such as pesticides, fertilisers and diesel for tractors necessitated a shift to less mechanised but more sustainable techniques. This included the innovative organopónico urban farms, which today in Havana provide for 70% of the city’s fruit and vegetable needs.
For other countries to develop these solutions they would first have to free themselves from imperialism. Even before the coronavirus crisis, the underdeveloped countries were struggling to service debts, with more than 40% of the world’s poorest countries in, or at high risk of, debt distress according to the IMF. The overall debt burden of those countries reached a record £3.2 trillion in 2019, 114% of their GDP. The pandemic has compounded this as commodities have fallen in price, output has fallen, investment is withdrawn, and currencies have become weaker against the dollar. In the weeks leading to April 2020, 85 countries approached the IMF for emergency funds; the IMF’s managing director made a ‘very conservative’ estimate that the financial need of ‘emerging economies’ was $2.5 trillion – they would still need $700bn even if they burned through all their foreign currency reserves. Virtually all the countries threatened with famine are in colossal debt. The extraction of current debt from starving countries would be barbaric.
But imperialism cannot afford to let them off. The G20 club of richest nations has agreed only to suspend debt payments for 73 of the poorest countries until the end of 2020. When countries of Latin America and the so-called Third World faced a crisis of unpayable debt in the 1980s, Fidel Castro argued that cancellation of debt would at best provide a temporary reprieve.[2] Castro advocated a debt strike to force the imperialists to the negotiating table. This is not on the cards today. Prime Minister of Ethiopia Abiy Ahmed and President of Senegal Macky Sall have called for further deferment or cancellation of debt. Other African governments are resisting calls for debt relief, fearing the effect it will have on their credit ratings and future borrowing from the imperialists. If food prices start to climb, these governments will have to answer to another force – the masses who hunger for change.
[1] Source: ‘Two centuries of Farmland Prices in England?’ A. Jaevicious et al, Saïd Business School Research Papers 2015
[2] ‘Castro calls for a general strike of all debtors’, David Yaffe, Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No 51, August 1985
