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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the June 27, 2002
issue of Workers World newspaper
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WHAT'S BEHIND WORLDWIDE HUNGER CRISIS?
By Monica Moorehead
In mid-June the United Nations hosted a food summit in Rome
that focused attention on the rise of hunger worldwide. The
conference brought together over 6,600 participants
representing 181 countries and 1,000 organizations. Seventy-
five government leaders were also present.
High-level representatives of many of the major imperialist
countries--including the United States, Britain, Germany,
Canada, France and others--boycotted the conference.
The notable absence of these leaders infuriated many
conference participants, most of whom represent the poorest
developing countries that are dealing with hunger and
malnutrition on a massive scale. Many of these countries are
located on the continents of Africa, Asia and Latin America
and in the formerly socialist region of Eastern Europe.
In southern Africa alone, an estimated 13 million people go
to bed hungry each night. The African continent is bracing
itself for another major drought. On top of this, Africa is
losing a whole generation of young people, numbering in the
millions, to the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
The four-day food summit was called to develop a program of
action to try to alleviate hunger, which affects 800 million
of the 1.2 billion people who are officially impoverished by
UN standards. This means that they subsist on $1 a day or
less.
An estimated 24,000 people die needlessly from hunger every
day.
The vast majority of those living in poverty are women and
children trying to survive in semi-feudal conditions.
One goal the conference agreed on was to develop projects to
cut the number of hungry people in half by 2015. This was
the same goal set at the 1996 summit on world hunger.
Last September, former Pakistani Agriculture Minister Sartaj
Aziz spoke on a panel on hunger in Bonn. He put forth some
startling statistics: within the 48 least developed
countries (LDCs), the number of malnourished people doubled
between 1980 and 1998, to 40 percent of their total
population or 240 million people.
Aziz said the dependence of the developing countries on
importing food rather producing food for their own
consumption has increased dramatically over the past 26
years.
The opposite is true for the industrialized countries that
are able to export food because of a surplus. This surplus
does not negate the reality that millions of people in the
industrialized countries suffer from hunger and are
malnourished.
The LDCs are enslaved to the International Monetary Fund and
World Bank, institutions controlled by U.S. and European
banking conglomerates, with unrealistic debt payments. This
neocolonial relationship has played an integral role in
exacerbating the poverty and hunger crisis for the poorest
countries.
THERE'S ENOUGH TO FEED THE WORLD
But these statistics alone don't tell the whole story.
According to Saskatchewan Interactive, worldwide food
production is greater than the needs of the total global
population. There is enough food to supply 2,700 calories a
day per person to everyone in the world.
Only 20 percent of the world's food production actually
reaches people. Some of this food goes to livestock, while
much is destroyed because it cannot be sold at a profit.
The root cause of all the hunger, poverty and disease is the
worldwide system of capitalism and imperialism--a cold-
hearted economic system that treats every developing country
as a potential market on which to dump its cheap goods,
while at the same time destroying any semblance of
independent social development for the well-being of the
people.
Imperialism destroys the livelihoods of farmers throughout
the developing world. Local farmers' products can't compete
after the industrialized countries flood the world market
with cheaper goods.
And who understands this social phenomenon better than the
imperialists themselves? This is one of the reasons they did
not take the Rome conference on hunger seriously and
boycotted it. They knew that many delegates would rightly
point the finger of blame for so much poverty and suffering
at them.
ZIMBABWE'S PLIGHT
During the 1970s and 1980s, the southern African nation of
Zimbabwe produced enough food to feed its population. Today
Zimbabwe is forced to import food, which has led to a
growing hunger crisis.
This is not the fault of Zimbabwean President Robert
Mugabe's economic policies, which is what the low-level U.S.
and European representatives put forth at the Rome
conference.
Mugabe defied an illegal visa ban imposed on him by the
European Union in order to attend the conference. The
imperialists have labeled Mugabe a "tyrant" because of his
policy of supporting the mass seizures by dispossessed Black
farmers of rich, arable lands controlled by white farmers
for over a century.
The imperialist powers have economically blockaded Zimbabwe
and white farmers have withheld their farm products from the
domestic market to punish the government and the Black
population.
Mugabe said, "Zimbabwe's land must rightly belong to
Zimbabweans, that being the true test of our national
sovereignty. Where previously only a handful of colonial
settler farmers were undertaking commercial farming, the
country now has over 260,000 farming families."
There is more than enough food to feed the people of the
world and the technology exists to keep them fed. The
problem is that the capitalist class controls the means of
producing and distributing food. Their priority is making
profits, not meeting peopleneeds.
- END -
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