From A World to Win News Service.;
Along with land grabs, water resources are being diverted to meet
foreign capital's needs, squeezing other farmers dry.
The Alwero river in Ethiopia's Gambela region is key for the
indigenous people. A new plantation in that region, owned by the Saudi Arabian
billionaire Mohammed al-Amoudi, is irrigated with water diverted from the
Alwero. The company's plans for industrial irrigation would undermine local
people's access to this life-giving stream. While Saudi Arabia was receiving
its first shipment of rice from Ethiopian in 2009, over five million Ethiopians
were hungry and relying on international charity food programmes to feed them.
Neil Crowder from the UK based Chayton Capital, an investment firm
that has been acquiring farmlands in Zambia, says, "the value is not the
land, the real value is in water. Grabbing of water resources for irrigating
large-scale farming could rob millions of people of their access to water and
risk the depletion of continent's most precious fresh water resources. But
still the message repeated at farmland investor conferences around the globe is
that water is abundant in Africa. It is said that Africa's water resources are
vastly underutilized and ready to be harnessed for export-oriented agriculture
projects." (chaytoncapital.com)
Even freshwater rivers carry salt. The Indus carries 22 million
tonnes of salt each year, only half of which is discharged into the Arabian
sea. The rest, almost a tonne of salt per year per every irrigated hectare of
land, stays on the farmers' fields. This kills crops. So far, a tenth of the
fields in Pakistan have become usable for agriculture. A fifth are badly
waterlogged, and a quarter produce only meagre crops. The water withdrawal from
the Indus River is so intense that in most years it no longer flows all the way
to the sea. Capitalist investment does not take this kind of damage into
account because it is external to the cost of production. Societies and the
planet suffer under these conditions, but capital thrives.
In India, pumped water from deep boreholes irrigates 30 crops that
replaced the indigenous farming system, including new plant varieties that
require more water than traditional crops. A quarter of India's crops are grown
using underground water that is not replenished by rainfall, and the water
table is dropping dangerously.
Although the issue of sustainable agriculture is more acute in the
dominated countries, it is a global problem. Water tables have fallen
substantially in areas in large-scale farming areas in the American Midwest.
Fruit plantations in California uses 15 percent more water than rain can
replenish. This kind of agriculture cannot last.
The Aral Sea, once the fourth largest lake in the world,
between the borders of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan in Central Asia, has been
completely destroyed, with unimaginable ecological and human consequences. The
infant mortality rate in this area is now the highest in the world. The two
main rivers feeding the lake were diverted to supply water for cotton farming
in the 1960s, a decade after socialist planning principles were replaced by the
criterion of profit under the rule of a new capitalist ruling class that had
arisen within the Soviet Communist Party,
According to the mega-NGO Oxfam, the land foreign investors have
leased and bought from poor farmers in the poorer regions of the world is so
vast that if it were farmed properly, it could feed a billion people. (Observer,
13 October 2012) But 60 percent of the crops grown on these lands are for
biofuel (plants used as energy sources).
Capitalism cannot put sustainable development first, which, among
other things, would mean drastically reducing the production of carbon dioxide
and other greenhouse gases that is propelling global warming. Instead, the
profitability of biofuels has triggered a "gold rush" mentality among
investors seeking higher returns on their investment. Further, biofuel projects
are often speculative and may turn out to be disastrous for a country, even in
capitalist terms. In northern Mozambique, farmers lost their land to
international companies that wanted to grow the jutropha plant for biofuel.
This experiment failed, but the damage was already done.
Food prices have gone down on the world market since their
historical peak in 2008, but not by much. According to the UN Food and
Agriculture Organization (FAO), they are now approximately twice as high as a
decade ago. (Almost one and a half times as high if adjusted for inflation.)
Burgeoning financial speculation on agricultural products and the large-scale
land grabs interact to drive up food prices.
Those who live in the imperialist countries spend only a small
part of their income for food (nine percent in the U.S. on average), but in the
countries dominated by imperialism overcoming hunger is a serious challenge. No
matter how much they work, many people are forced to spend 50-70 percent of
their income (and sometimes more) just to buy food, often of low quality,
so that even if their stomachs are full they may be malnourished. This gap
between the extreme ends on the scale of rich and poor is getting bigger.
Drought and floods due to climate change have dramatically increased the
problem.
When rich countries import food it is like also importing water
from the countries they dominate, because the water needed to grow these crops
is used to create exported agricultural commodities and not to feed the local
people. The imperialist countries and their associates import vast amounts of
what has been called "virtual water" from the countries under the
domination of their capital. They have situated themselves in such a way that they
can even benefit from climate change and drought by increasing their control
over real and "virtual" water and food sources in general.
The world needs 200 billion litres of water a second to grow its
food, the equivalent of all the water in the Amazon River every day. About 62
percent of the water used to grow crops consumed in the UK is
"imported" in this sense, amounting to some 58 bath-tubs full per
person per day. (Guardian, 20
August 2008) These sets of activities – capital's indirect import of water as
well as direct access to water and the diversion of its natural flow for
irrigated industrial farming, along with the heavy use of fertilizers and
pesticides, is a recipe for disaster for the countries where small farmers are
being evicted and for the world as a whole.
In the past few years, many grain suppliers have bought each other
out, creating an ever-growing monopoly in which a shrinking number of firms
control the global food markets. Six huge companies (ADM, Bunge, Cargill, Louis
Dreyfus, Glencore and Marubeni) control more than 75 percent of the food
market, and this process of monopolization is continuing. This trend favours
further increases in prices all along the food chain.
This consolidation is also a threat to producers, because farmers
are faced with fewer buyers and may have to accept lower prices for their
crops. At the same time, farmers are basically dependent on grain trading
companies and chemical monopolies for their seeds and fertilisers, and have to
pay more to be able to produce. The entire food chain from top to bottom is
increasingly under the direct control of monopoly capital. These monopolies are
in the position of deciding who will farm and who will not, who will eat and
who will not, and also who farms what!
Then there is the problem of wasted food that is created by the
way the capitalist distribution system works, driven by the same need for the
biggest and quickest profits as capitalist food production. According to Tim
Fox, Head of Energy and Environment at the Institute of Mechanical Engineers in
the UK, wrong storage methods, improper expiry dates, the constant
encouragement of customers to buy more than needed (buy one get one free offers)
and too much attention to the appearance of products are some of the major
causes of this waste. Thirty percent of the vegetables grown in the UK are not
even picked because they don't "look good". Half of the food
purchased in Europe and the U.S. ends up in the rubbish bin. In the third
world, the waste takes place in the start of the food chain due to the lack of
adequate agricultural technology, storage facilities and transport. Roughly
half of the 400 billion tonnes of food produced on this planet every year are
wasted.
However the most criminal waste is the waste of human beings.
Millions of people are dying from hunger and other causes related to poverty
(such as lack of medical care). At the same time, the productive power and
intellectual abilities of many millions are wasted because they cannot find
work or are kept on the margin of society.
Are we doomed to live like this forever?
It is not true that our planet cannot feed its current population.
Despite capitalism and other exploitative relations, the Earth now produces more than humanity needs, and it
has the capacity to produce much more. The problem is that the capitalist mode
of production and its distribution system cannot put the needs of the people
and the planet first.
Capitalism proclaims that it represents the final point in human
development. But it maintains tremendous impoverishment and is an obstacle to
the kind of development the world really needs. This is the reason why getting
enough to eat, let alone being able to eat healthy food, is so hard for so much
of the world's population. Capitalism cannot give people the most basic right:
the right to eat. At the same time, it is not illegal to lay people off, it is
not illegal to violently evict millions of people, grab their livelihood and
force them into hunger, because all this is crucial for the dynamics of
capitalist accumulation. That is the reality of "fair trade".
This system, capitalism and the domination of the world by a
handful of monopoly capitalist countries, is not humanity's final destination
but a barrier to its advancement to a better world. In order to get rid of
hunger and injustice, we must do away with this system and nothing less.
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