One billion go hungry… socialism is better than capitalism

28 June 2009
LLCO.org

The global financial meltdown has had devastating effects for the world’s poor according to the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization. War, drought, political instability, high food prices are compounded by the financial meltdown. Today, according to the UN’s FAO, over one billion people go hungry. Hunger now affects one in six people.

Since last year, 100 million more people have slipped into hunger. The number of hungry people has risen 11 percent. The number of hungry people is estimated to have reached 1.02 billion according to a recent UN report. In addition, the hunger rate is rising. The number of hungry people is growing more quickly than the global population.

Asia and the Pacific have the largest number of hungry people at 642 million. Sub-Saharan Africa has 265 million hungry people. The entire “developed world” has, by comparison, 15 million hungry people. The vast majority of all the world’s hungry people exist in the Third World. These statistics once again point to the very concrete way that imperialism affects the lives of those in the Third World, driving them into extreme poverty and despair. And, it shows how imperialism affects the lives of those in the First World largely insulating them from catastrophic hunger as experienced by the Third World.

Hunger, as defined by the UN’s FAO, is consuming less than 1,800 calories a day. This threshold is, on average, the number of calories that a person needs to maintain their body weight.

UN officials are worried that crossing this 1 billion milestone does not bode well for imperial stability. Josette Sheeran of the World Food Program, a UN agency based in Rome, pointed out that hungry people rioted in at least 30 countries last year. In one case, high food prices led to riots in Haiti that overthrew the prime minister. According to the FAO, on average, food prices were 24 percent higher in real terms at the end of 2008 compared to 2006. “A hungry world is a dangerous world,” Sheeran said. “Without food, people have only three options: They riot, they emigrate or they die. None of these are acceptable options.” Of course, there is another option: socialist revolution.

Those who think that capitalism has a better track record than socialism should take a closer look. Capitalism has never come close to solving the problem of hunger. Instead global capitalism has generated a situation where hunger is mostly eliminated for a minority of very wealthy countries, and massive hunger exists for the vast majority of poor countries. One billion people go hungry every day under global capitalism, almost all live in the Third World. Although socialist societies experienced problems as society was reorganized to try to eliminate oppression, eventually socialist societies were able to solve the food problem for the most part. When Mao came to power in China, a quarter of the world’s population lived under the threat of hunger and famine. And, sadly, China once again faces the problems of capitalism. However, by the end of the Mao era, this threat no longer existed. Socialism solved the food question for a quarter of humanity. And, unlike the imperialist countries of the First World, socialist China solved its food issue without exploiting other countries. Contrary to capitalism, socialism solves its food problems peacefully.

Sources

1. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090619/ap_on_re_eu/eu_un_world_hunger