56.
Dynamics Of World Hunger
Arecent article in The Nation, titled “Manufacturing a Food Crisis”, by Walden Bello, explains much of the dynamics of world hunger in today’s world:
The apostles of the free market and the defenders of dumpingthe policies they advocate are bringing about a globalized capitalist industrial agriculture. Developing countries are being integrated into a system where export-oriented production of meat and grain is dominated by large industrial farms. The elimination of tariff and nontariff barriers is facilitating a global agricultural supermarket of elite and middle-class consumers.
There is little room for the hundreds of millions of rural and urban poor in this integrated global market. They are confined to giant suburban slums, where they contend with high food prices or to rural reservations, where they are trapped in marginal agricultural activities and increasingly vulnerable to hunger. Indeed, within the same country, famine in the marginalized sector sometimes coexists with prosperity in the globalized sector.
This transformation is a traumatic one for hundreds of millions of people, since peasant production is not simply an economic activity. It is an ancient way of life, a culture.
Such is, and has always been, the results of imperialism – war, misery, and the repression of the many, so that a small minority may live in luxury beyond the imagination of most normal people.
The apostles of the free market and the defenders of dumpingthe policies they advocate are bringing about a globalized capitalist industrial agriculture. Developing countries are being integrated into a system where export-oriented production of meat and grain is dominated by large industrial farms. The elimination of tariff and nontariff barriers is facilitating a global agricultural supermarket of elite and middle-class consumers.
There is little room for the hundreds of millions of rural and urban poor in this integrated global market. They are confined to giant suburban slums, where they contend with high food prices or to rural reservations, where they are trapped in marginal agricultural activities and increasingly vulnerable to hunger. Indeed, within the same country, famine in the marginalized sector sometimes coexists with prosperity in the globalized sector.
This transformation is a traumatic one for hundreds of millions of people, since peasant production is not simply an economic activity. It is an ancient way of life, a culture.
Such is, and has always been, the results of imperialism – war, misery, and the repression of the many, so that a small minority may live in luxury beyond the imagination of most normal people.
