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The International Monetary Fund and the World Trade
Organization promised that more trade would help eradicate poverty and
hunger. Food crops? Self-sufficiency in food? They had a better idea. Local
farms would be closed down or encouraged to concentrate on exports. This
would make the most not of natural conditions that might be good for
growing tomatoes in Mexico or pineapples in the Philippines but of the fact
that production costs are lower in Mexico and the Philippines than they are
in Florida or California. Farmers in Mali would rely on more highly mechanized,
more productive producers in U.S. and Europe for grain supplies. The
farmers would pack up, move into town, and get jobs in some Western firm
that had relocated to take advantage of cheaper labor than it could find at
home.
The countries on the East African seaboard would
lighten their load of foreign debt by selling their fishing rights to the
factory ships of wealthier countries. The Guineans would import tinned fish
from Denmark or Portugal.
Never mind the additional pollution generated by
transporting all these goods. A life of bliss was guaranteed, and so were
the profits of the middlemen — wholesalers, shippers, insurers, and
advertisers.
The World Bank, prime promoter of this
“development” model, now tells us that there may be food riots
in 33 countries. And the WTO fears a resurgence of protectionism: Some
food-exporting countries — India, Vietnam, Egypt, Kazakhstan —
have decided to reduce exports so that they may feed their own people. What
nerve! The North is easily upset by other people’s selfishness. The
Chinese eat too much meat; that’s why the Egyptians are short of
wheat. Some states have followed World Bank and IMF advice
and turned over their food crops. They can no longer keep their produce for
themselves. Well, of course they will pay for it — it’s the law
of the market. According to U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation figures,
their bill for grain imports has already risen by a massive 56 percent in
just one year.
Correspondingly, the World Food Programme, which
feeds 73 million people in 78 countries every year, has had to ask for
a further $500 million. Someone must have decided that this was excessive,
because it got only half that amount, even though the sum it sought was
only what the war in Iraq costs every couple of hours, and it only cost a
tiny fraction of what the subprime-mortgage crisis continues to cost the
banking sector, which has been bailed out by the state.
To look at it another way, the WFP asked — on
behalf of millions of starving people — for 13.5 percent of the
income earned last year by John Paulson, the astute New York hedge-fund
manager, who realized that thousands of Americans are in negative equity
and face ruin.
No one knows, yet, how much the incipient famine will
yield, or who will reap the profits, but nothing is ever lost in this
modern economy. History repeats itself, one speculation after
another. The Federal Reserve’s monetary policy encourages debt
— first the Internet bubble, now the real-estate bubble. And just as
in 2006, the IMF was still saying there was “every indication the
mechanisms for granting loans on the U.S. property market were still
relatively effective.”
Market effective. Perhaps the two words should be
welded together once and for all. The real-estate bubble has burst, so the
speculators are resurrecting an old goldmine: the grain markets, purchasing
contracts to deliver wheat or rice at a future date and counting on selling
them at a higher price. And what ensures that prices will keep on rising?
Famine. So what does the IMF do? The IMF — which has
“the best economists in the world,” according to its managing
director — explains that “one way to solve the problem of
famine is to increase international trade.”
The poet Léo Ferré once said that
“all you need to sell despair is the right formula.” It looks
as though they’ve found it.
Serge Halimi is editor-in-chief of
Le Monde diplomatique and
the author of The Great Leap Backward.
This article appears in May 8-14, 2008.
