The Food "Crisis" is Less About Food Than It Is About Capitalism

[Orwellian_Ghost]

When tens of thousands of people staged demonstrations in Mexico last year to protest a 60 percent increase in the price of tortillas, many analysts pointed to biofuel as the culprit. Because of US government subsidies, American farmers were devoting more and more acreage to corn for ethanol than for food, which sparked a steep rise in corn prices. The diversion of corn from tortillas to biofuel was certainly one cause of skyrocketing prices, though speculation on biofuel demand by transnational middlemen may have played a bigger role. However, an intriguing question escaped many observers: how on earth did Mexicans, who live in the land where corn was domesticated, become dependent on US imports in the first place?

The Mexican food crisis cannot be fully understood without taking into account the fact that in the years preceding the tortilla crisis, the homeland of corn had been converted to a corn-importing economy by "free market" policies promoted by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and Washington. The process began with the early 1980s debt crisis. One of the two largest developing-country debtors, Mexico was forced to beg for money from the Bank and IMF to service its debt to international commercial banks. The quid pro quo for a multibillion-dollar bailout was what a member of the World Bank executive board described as "unprecedented thoroughgoing interventionism" designed to eliminate high tariffs, state regulations and government support institutions, which neoliberal doctrine identified as barriers to economic efficiency.

Interest payments rose from 19 percent of total government expenditures in 1982 to 57 percent in 1988, while capital expenditures dropped from an already low 19.3 percent to 4.4 percent. The contraction of government spending translated into the dismantling of state credit, government-subsidized agricultural inputs, price supports, state marketing boards and extension services. Unilateral liberalization of agricultural trade pushed by the IMF and World Bank also contributed to the destabilization of peasant producers.

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Once regarded as relics of the pre-industrial era, peasants are now leading the opposition to a capitalist industrial agriculture that would consign them to the dustbin of history. They have become what Karl Marx described as a politically conscious "class for itself," contradicting his predictions about their demise. With the global food crisis, they are moving to center stage--and they have allies and supporters. For as peasants refuse to go gently into that good night and fight de-peasantization, developments in the twenty-first century are revealing the panacea of globalized capitalist industrial agriculture to be a nightmare. With environmental crises multiplying, the social dysfunctions of urban-industrial life piling up and industrialized agriculture creating greater food insecurity, the farmers' movement increasingly has relevance not only to peasants but to everyone threatened by the catastrophic consequences of global capital's vision for organizing production, community and life itself.

http://www.stwr.net/content/view/2903/1/

[L. Coyote]

1. This is an unintended consequence of Bush's illegal war. The falling dollar forces

those with excess capital, the rich who got tax cuts, etc., to move investments
from money accounts to commodities, so valuation is not lost. First, real estate
was the best hedge, but they drove those prices too high and broke the balloon.

The 9 trillion Bush debt is the culprit, the War on Iraq in combination with the tax cuts.
Paying interest on 9 trillion is going to further exacerbate the crisis.

[Orwellian_Ghost]

2. Goes way beyond G Bush

It is at hyperspeed the same neo-liberal economics that B Clinton was in full support of. You might say it's bi-partisan just as you might say it that economics trumps politics.

I know of no president that wasn't betrothed to the ruling class.

[Jackpine Radical]

3. Wrong. It is an INTENDED consequence of the war.

Pity the poor rich, who have such trouble turning an indecent profit. They have to create wars and depressions in order to maintain their drain on the world's wealth. During the 30's, when people were losing their farms & houses, remember that someone was GETTING houses & farms for pennies on the dollar. And consider all the interest on our current debt. Who do you think is collecting that?

[cutlassmama]

4. the rich

[L. Coyote]

5. Those who got the tax cuts will be earning interest for the next 20 years

on the money the Rs gave them.