World Hunger

29,000 children die everyday of starvation.

The expansion of industrial agri-foods crippled food production in the Third World and emptied the countryside of valuable human resources. But as long as cheap, subsidized grain from the industrial north kept flowing, the agri-foods complex grew, consolidating control of the world’s food systems in the hands of fewer and fewer grain, seed, chemical and petroleum companies. Today three companies, Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, and Bunge control the world’s grain trade. Chemical giant Monsanto controls three-fifths of seed production. Unsurprisingly, even as the world food crisis was breaking, Archer Daniels Midland’s profits jumped 20%, Monsanto 45%, and Cargill 60%. Recent speculation with food commodities has created another dangerous “boom.” After buying up grains and grain futures, traders are hoarding, withholding stocks and further inflating prices.

To understand why people go hungry you must stop thinking about food as something farmers grow for others to eat, and begin thinking about it as something companies produce for other people to buy.

    * Food is a commodity...
    * Much of the best agricultural land in the world is used to grow commodities such as cotton, sisal, tea, tobacco, sugar cane, and cocoa, items which are non-food products or are marginally nutritious, but for which there is a large market.
    * Millions of acres of potentially productive farmland is used to pasture cattle, an extremely inefficient use of land, water and energy, but one for which there is a market in wealthy countries.
    * More than half the grain grown in the United States (requiring half the water used in the U.S.) is fed to livestock, grain that would feed far more people than would the livestock to which it is fed...

The problem, of course, is that people who don’t have enough money to buy food (and more than one billion people earn less than $1.00 a day), simply don’t count in the food equation.

    * In other words, if you don’t have the money to buy food, no one is going to grow it for you.
    * Put yet another way, you would not expect The Gap to manufacture clothes, Adidas to manufacture sneakers, or IBM to provide computers for those people earning $1.00 a day or less; likewise, you would not expect ADM (“Supermarket to the World”) to produce food for them.

The Corporate Capitalist System is the root cause of world hunger. The System drives poor farmers off their land and establishes agri-business thus gaining control of the food supply. From there the big corporations can manipulate the price of food and maximize their profits.

What this means is that ending hunger requires the elimination of the Corporate Capitalist System, or, at the very least, ensuring that people are put ahead of profits.

Do the math: 29,000 children x 365 days = 10,585,000 (10.5 MILLION CHILDREN) who are starved to death every year by the Corporate Capitalist System in its insane scramble to make more and more profits.

In other words: Those who operate, and profit by, the Corporate Capitalist System are nothing more than criminals and murderers of children.

And, that's the Truth.