During the holiday season, working people in this country are bombarded not only with endless advertising, but also with the message to give to charity, and to remember the needy.
In doing so, the corporations and multi-billion dollar non-profit network tap into the vast generosity of the working class,
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The state of hunger and food banks
The problem of hunger is very real. Hunger and malnutrition are killing nearly 6 million children each year. In 2004, a U.N. commission estimated that 852 million people worldwide were chronically undernourished. In addition, at least 2 billion suffer from vitamin and mineral deficiencies. There are 6.6 billion people on the planet, so nearly one in three people worldwide are facing hunger.
On television, we are led to believe that the hungry only live in other parts of the world. Indeed, 95 percent of the undernourished or hungry come from underdeveloped countries. But in the United States this year, 35 million people will take their place in line again at soup kitchens, food banks and food stamp offices nationwide. About 11 percent of the population, one in nine, is what the U.S. government calls “food insecure,” a friendlier term for hungry.
Of the 35 million hungry in this country, only 10 percent are homeless. The other 90 percent are people with clothes on their backs and roofs over their heads. But with the rising costs of food, housing, utilities, health care and gasoline, more have been forced to turn to food pantries. At the same time, food manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers are finding they have less to donate.
“We have food banks in virtually every city in the country, and what we are hearing is that they are all facing severe shortages with demand so high,” Ross Fraser, a spokesman for America’s Second Harvest, the nation’s largest hunger relief group, recently said. In Florida, one food bank reported a 35 percent increase in demand. In southwest Georgia, demand is up 10 to 20 percent across 20 counties.
Some food banks are facing record shortages. Gleaners Community Food Bank, located in southeastern Michigan, recently announced it was facing a “Katrina-like state of emergency.” The food bank needed two million pounds of food to ensure the agencies have enough on hand to feed 250,000 people on the Thanksgiving holiday. In Kansas, they are down 385,000 meals. In Los Angeles alone, banks are down more than 3 million meals since 2006.
At the Food Bank for New York City, the nation’s largest food bank, the supply this month is half what it was last year. “In the 20 years I have been at the food bank, this is the worst I have seen,” said Lucy Cabrera, the food bank’s CEO.
It is quite accurate to call this emergency “Katrina-like” not only because of the scale of human suffering, but also because of the willful neglect of the U.S. government. President Bush’s fiscal year 2008 budget would eliminate funding for the Commodity Supplemental Food Program, terminating food assistance to 440,000 low-income seniors in an average month. Food banks nationwide are facing huge cutbacks. In New York City alone, food banks will give out 4 million fewer meals this year due to cutbacks at a time of rising need.
The problem with charities
Of course, food banks can provide a meal in a time of need, but they do not end hunger. The Washington Post recently ran an article “When Handouts Keep Coming, the Food Line Never Ends,” which was written by Mark Winne, the former executive director of a major food bank in Connecticut. Winne wrote: “I often wondered what would happen if the collective energy that went into soliciting and distributing food were put into ending hunger and poverty instead. Surely it would have a sizable impact if 3,000 Hartford-area volunteers, led by some of Connecticut’s most privileged and respected citizens, showed up one day at the state legislature, demanding enough resources to end hunger and poverty. Multiply those volunteers by three or four—the number of volunteers in the state’s other food banks and hundreds of emergency food sites—and you would have enough people to dismantle the Connecticut state capitol brick by brick.”
Winne continued, “There is something in the food-banking culture and its relationship with donors that dampens the desire to empower the poor and take a more muscular, public stand against hunger.”
Charities are an essential feature of capitalist functioning precisely because they provide an alternative to this type of political movement. They give society a safe way to let off steam, telling workers that the only way to address hunger is through individual handouts and not social movements, and a way for the capitalists to repair their image and alleviate class hatred.
Abundance of food wasted by contradictions of capitalism
The problem of hunger is not a problem of resources. Since the mid-1970s the world has produced enough food to provide everyone with a minimally adequate diet. Hunger, although it certainly has been around throughout the development of our species, is no longer inevitable. Over three decades ago we reached a threshold where we can feed everyone.
If the problem is not in production, then it must be in distribution. It must be a problem of how the resources are organized. It is therefore a political problem, because it means that the people who have their hands on the levers of the economy have neither the will nor the plan to provide for everyone.
It is similar to the housing crisis gripping the country. There have been 2 million repossessions of homes in just the last year. In 2004, before this big wave of foreclosures, there were already 3.5 million people who experienced homelessness. But instead of putting the homeless people in abandoned or unsold homes, more people are now getting tossed out into the street.
There is the same absurdity with food. People are not undernourished because there is less interest in consuming food on the part of our species. Nor can we attribute the hunger to natural disaster. In earlier social systems, in feudalism, ancient slavery, and communal societies, they had economic crises based on scarcity. A flood or drought would come and wipe out the crops. Whole cities and countries were destroyed by natural calamity.
But in this case we are talking about people going hungry not because of the lack of food, but because food is a commodity which the capitalists must sell for a profit. Food could be much cheaper, but under capitalism there is no incentive to distribute any commodity without a profit.
Instead of taking advantage of the great productive capacity, they keep prices artificially high. They get rid of the abundance. The U.S. government is literally paying farmers to not produce food. They give billions in subsidies to these giant farms to not grow, because if they were to produce at full capacity, the price of food would shoot downward.
For corn-growers, they have a separate scam: bio-fuel. In the commercials, all these corporations and the Bush administration get to act like they have “gone green” because they are producing biofuels. But biofuels are nothing other than a get-rich-quick scheme.
Political leaders of both parties recently supported a $14 billion appropriation to subsidize major agribusiness corporations to destroy food by burning corn into fuel. Although they call the process “bio-fuel” production, it actually takes more fuel to produce it than the bio-fuel itself puts out. So the process really amounts to the systematic destruction of food supplies. Agribusiness corn growers are subsidized to burn up the country’s surplus food so they can sell the scarcer remaining food at a higher price.
Corn is the most abundant readily storable and amazingly cheap basic foodstuff, and it is being wasted in an age when millions of grain eaters face starvation for lack of vegetable calories. Agribusiness already claims to have the capacity to produce about 13.5 billion gallons of ethanol by destroying over 5 billion bushels of corn. Its capacity is skyrocketing and is expected to increase next year because the more corn they destroy, the more subsidies they earn.
This is the fundamental contradiction of capitalism. There are several ways to help alleviate hunger under capitalism. As Mark Winne stated, the army of food bank volunteers in this country could become a mighty political force if properly organized. If you include even a fraction of 35 million people who are going to food pantries, you have an unstoppable movement. A campaign to cap food prices, for a living wage, to end the subsidies to agribusiness and so forth—these are struggles that can yield definite results.
But the problem is that once you improve wages, prices go up. If you set prices, wages go down. At the end of the day, as long as the profit motive runs the economy, we will be getting robbed in our paychecks and at the cash register. The only way to end the problem of overproduction and the “boom-bust” cycle, which are particular absurdities known only to the capitalist system, is to eliminate the profit motive from production.
Humanity has tremendous potential due to technological advances that allow us to produce in great abundance. But we are held back by a contradiction: A small minority, the most minute of minorities, controls the economy.
To solve hunger, what we need is an economy that consciously plans to satisfy human needs, a system where food banks and charity are no longer needed to guarantee the essentials of life. What we need is socialism.
