Global IssuesQ&A: Hunger, Food Shortages Fuel Uprisings
The rise in food prices and growing hunger, one of the causes of the popular uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and other countries in the Arab world, is due to financial speculation and not a lack of arable land, says Janaina Stronzake, a leader of Brazil's Landless Workers Movement (MST).
The shortage of staple food items and hunger are used as weapons, and they end up forcing populations to act in certain ways, said Stronzake, who also represents the international peasant movement La Vía Campesina.
The Brazilian activist sat down with IPS during a break at a Jan. 29-30 meeting organised by the Geneva Federation for Cooperation and Development (FGC) in this Swiss city, and talked about the role of small farmers in times of food crisis.
Q: What do you see as the reason for this commotion over food prices? A: The issue of food prices and scarcity, or famine, is always a complex question, with multiple causes and a series of factors that influence it.
Saying the rise in food prices is caused by the fact that people in China and India are eating better seems to me overly simplistic. It's like saying, well, if we're paying more it's the fault of the Indians and the Chinese. And that's not true.
Q: Is there a shortage of food in the world? A: This planet has the capacity to produce enough quality food for everyone, without resorting to questionable technologies, like transgenics.
In Brazil there are 120 million hectares of farm land lying idle. In other words, to produce more, we don't have to encroach on the Amazon jungle, we don't have to cause environmental imbalance or destroy the forests.
The only thing needed is a decent agrarian reform programme, to generate the conditions for peasants to continue farming.
Q: So what is the cause of all of this? A: One of the basic factors driving food prices up is financial speculation. That is because food products are considered commodities and are traded on the futures markets.
Q: Who benefits from the speculation? A: The transnational corporations, which benefit from playing and speculating with hunger.
To see this, all you have to do is compare the years when food prices are on the rise and the charts showing the profits of the big transnational corporations. For example, between 2004 and 2008 we saw a series of clashes and disturbances, of hungry mobs looting supermarkets for food at the same time that prices were going up.
During that period, the profits of Syngenta, one of the world's largest agribusiness companies, soared from six to 11 billion dollars. So, while many people go hungry, corporations pocket even greater profits.
Q: How do the policies of these companies manifest themselves? A: By the way the companies try to structure agriculture, depriving farmers of the ability to produce by controlling water, seeds and intellectual property rights over products, besides grabbing the best land.
And through control of the market as well. Today just 10 firms dominate almost the entire market for soy, corn and sugar cane.
Q: How has the peasant movement reacted to the rise in food prices? A: With a great deal of concern, because they form part of a complex system that is a whole.
Polish thinker Zygmunt Bauman talks for example about 'human waste.' He says it's as if there were 'superfluous' people in the world that something has to be done with. One way is for them to die of hunger, because there's not enough work for everyone.
With the new production technologies, there is no longer a need for so many workers. So this excess population has to disappear. Not because they can't be fed, but because within the capitalist system they neither produce nor consume. Thus, they tend to vanish. And that is one way: for them to die of hunger in a crisis of this kind.
Q: And the other ways? A: Another way is through the business of prisons, the privatisation of the penitentiary system.
At moments of acute crisis, people often resort to crime to survive. So we have all these robberies and other kinds of crimes, and then the prisons are privatised, and they become a profitable business.
The companies receive subsidies to build and run prisons, and they profit from the work of the inmates. Reminiscent of the Nazi concentration camps in Germany.
This system is spreading around the world. In Brazil, some right-wing state governments are starting to look into how prisons could be privatised.
Q: Are there other methods of extermination? A: Yes, there's also the question of wars. How can wars continue to be fuelled, like in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, without hunger that forcibly displaces people and forces them to work as mercenary soldiers?
So there you see how hunger and high food prices are employed as weapons to force people to act in certain ways. To that we have to add other kinds of crime, like arms dealing or trafficking of drugs, women or organs. All of which are interconnected in a single system, which generates profits for a handful of companies.
Q: What do you think of international trade agreements that cover food products? A: La Vía Campesina is pushing for food products to be left outside of the scope of the agreements pushed by the WTO (World Trade Organisation). Food cannot be treated as just another commodity.
All of humanity needs food, and we should guarantee a minimum for everyone, independently of their economic conditions. And that can't be done merely through welfare and aid, such as what UNICEF (the United Nations children's fund) provides.
People also need to be empowered, at a community or grassroots level, to guarantee production and supply of food. That is what food sovereignty is about.
Q: What do you hope for from the Doha Round of WTO talks, which have a chapter dedicated to the reform of the global agricultural trade? A: Those negotiations don't include us. They take us into account merely to point to the tendency of small farmers to disappear.
But the thing is that this disappearance brings with it the risk of food shortages, because agribusiness, the big corporations, the ones that are negotiating in the Doha Round, can ensure a certain quantity of food for a certain period of time, but they are only concerned about their own profits.
© Inter Press Service (2011) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service