Economics of Starvation

The following are from an excellent article called

### Economics of Starvation by Sameh Naguib

to be found at the very interesting site http://www.seditious.com/

> "...The logic of the world food market is particularly conducive to starvation. Advanced countries in Europe and North America, as well as Japan, produce over three-quarters of the world's exports of foodstuffs. These countries maintain schemes to protect their agricultural production. In general, people in these countries pay vastly inflated prices so that high and stable prices can be guaranteed to the farm and food processing sectors. One of the first results of this system is a decline in imports, which translates as a loss to Third World countries that export foodstuffs.

> ...To keep the prices up, governments create massive stocks of foodstuffs, which are then taken off the market. World grain stocks exceed 200 million tonnes, while the shortfall of grain in the Horn of Africa will not exceed 10 million tonnes. The cost of storing food in Europe alone runs in tens of billions of dollars, but the massive cost of storing vast quantities of food leads governments to the "logical" conclusion that they must either process it into something else or simply dump it.

> ...Famines are not caused by nature, they are part of the global business cycle; the boom and slump of world capital. And like slumps, famines always serve to strengthen the rich and weaken the poor. When an African country is stricken by famine, it is not the state that starves but the poor majority. The rich actually get richer as the prices of land and labour tumble and as the powerful monopolise the flow of food aid."

> ...Famine sums up the essence of a world order based on profits and state power. Political and business leaders in both industrialised and developing nations avoid doing anything that might jeopardise profits and their networks of vested interest. Anything that might encourage the absurd notion that food surpluses ought to be eaten -- rather than sold at the market price or else destroyed -- is hushed up. There is no shortage of food, yet scarcity is forced on those who have no money to buy it."