Wheat farmers struggle, people go hungry amid plenty of grain

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, an ecological calamity known as the Dust Bowl ravaged the agricultural breadbasket of the United States, creating vast waves of farmers-turned-refugees that intensified the economic tensions of the time. Hunger became acute as millions of arable acres disappeared in massive clouds.

Wheat farmers have produced more grain than they can sell for a profit.

In the current economic crisis, hundreds of millions of people around the world live at a constant risk of starvation. Food riots have led to uprisings in some countries. The average observer might conclude that the world, perhaps due to climate change, or other factors depressing production, has reached a peak in food production that fails to meet the needs of the world’s 6.6 billion people.

But as the effects of the crisis on U.S. farmers can attest, the present predicament is one of overproduction.

As the New York Times reported Nov. 20, farmers in Oklahoma raced to produce as much wheat as possible when prices for their crops skyrocketed. But when world demand backed by the ability to pay slowed to a crawl in the last year, the price of harvested grain fell so far that “it cost about $6 a bushel in fuel, seed and fertilizer to put the crop in,” Jimmy Wayne Kinder told the Times. “That is $1 more than [the farmers] could sell it for today, and never mind other expenses like renting land.

“I waited all my life for wheat to go from $4 to $5. Then it hit $10, and we were all asking, ‘What are we going to do?’”

Like many others, Kinder tried to hold out for even more money to maximize his profits. And like many others, for whom simply breaking even is now a mere dream, he faces staggering losses on the year’s crop.

The notion that millions could starve while harvested crops go to waste is an absurdity born of the illogical capitalist system. Kinder, who produces crops for exchange in the market, let the rush and yearning for profit turn his harvest into worthless chaff, as did many farmers. Unable to turn a profit from his crops, Kinder will let his grain go to waste. People will go hungry amid a surfeit of wheat.

Karl Marx called this farce a “crisis of overproduction”—literally, a capitalist crisis in which abundance benefits no one because the price obtainable for overproduced goods cannot meet the cost of producing them, much less produce a profit. No other economic system is capable of turning plenty into misery.

According to Bread for the World, a Christian philanthropic organization, 923 million people globally qualify as hungry, with 16,000 children dying every day due to hunger and hunger-related causes. In the United States, 36.2 million people and counting are considered food insecure, according to the Food Research and Action Center.

The truth, however, is that the world produces more than enough food to meet people’s needs. As the World Hunger Education Service notes, “World agriculture produces 17 percent more calories per person today than it did 30 years ago, despite a 70 percent population increase.”

Only under capitalism can such abundance lead to hunger. Producers will let their crops go to waste and allow a child to die every five seconds in the absence of a profit. Nothing short of the revolutionary overthrow of the profit system can liberate workers from the privations and misery wrought by the capitalist system.