Land rights and ownership

Two inter-related factors which influence hunger that are often ignored are land ownership and who controls land.

The following passage summarizes it very well, asking “Is It Overpopulation or Who Controls the Land?”

The often heard comment (one I once accepted as fact) that “there are too many people in the world, and overpopulation is the cause of hunger”, can be compared to the same myth that expounded sixteenth-century England and revived continuously since.

Through repeated acts of enclosure the peasants were pushed off the land so that the gentry could make money raising wool for the new and highly productive power looms. They could not do this if the peasants were to retain their historic entitlement [emphasis is original] to a share of production from the land. Massive starvation was the inevitable result of this expropriation.

There were serious discussions in learned circles about overpopulation as the cause of this poverty. This was the accepted reason because a social and intellectual elite were doing the rationalizing. It was they who controlled the educational institutions which studied the problem. Naturally the final conclusions (at least those published) absolved the wealthy of any responsibility for the plight of the poor. The absurdity of suggesting that England was then overpopulated is clear when we realize that “the total population of England in the sixteenth century was less than in any one of several present-day English cities.”

The hunger in underdeveloped countries today is equally tragic and absurd. Their European colonizers understood well that ownership of land gave the owner control over what society produced. The most powerful simply redistributed the valuable land titles to themselves, eradicating millennia-old traditions of common use. Since custom is a form of ownership, the shared use of land could not be permitted. If ever reestablished, this ancient practice would reduce the rights of these new owners. For this reason, much of the land went unused or underused until the owners could do so profitably. This is the pattern of land use that characterizes most Third World countries today, and it is this that generates hunger in the world.

These conquered people are kept in a state of relative impoverishment. Permitting them any substantial share of the wealth would negate the historic reason for conquest — namely plunder. The ongoing role of Third World countries is to be the supplier of cheap and plentiful raw materials and agricultural products to the developed world. Nature’s wealth was, and is, being controlled to fulfill the needs of the world’s affluent people. The U.S. is one of the prime beneficiaries of this well-established system. Our great universities search diligently for “the answer” to the problem of poverty and hunger. They invariably find it in “lack of motivation, inadequate or no education,” or some other self-serving excuse. They look at everything except the cause — the powerful own the world’s social wealth. As a major beneficiary, we have much to gain by perpetuating the myths of overpopulations, cultural and racial inferiority, and so forth. The real causes must be kept from ourselves, as how else can this systematic damaging of others be squared with what we are taught about democracy, rights, freedom, and justice?

— J.W. Smith, The World’s Wasted Wealth: the political economy of waste, (New World’s Press, 1989), pp. 44, 45.

Some have pointed out over the years that even the US Founding Fathers understood this very well, to the effect that some elites were able to affect the Constitution in this manner:

Despite the egalitarian rhetoric of the American Revolution and an attempt to place a proclamation in the Constitution for a “common right of the whole nation to the whole of the land,” the powerful looked out for their own interests by changing Locke’s insightful phrase: “all men are entitled to life, liberty and land.” This powerful statement that all could understand coming from a well-read and respected philosopher was a threat to the monopolizers of land, so they restructured those words to “life, liberty and [the meaningless phrase] pursuit of happiness.” Knowledge of the substitution for phrases in America’s Constitution which would protect every person’s rights with phrases that protect only the rights of a few should alert one to check the meaning and purpose of all laws of all societies carefully.

— J.W. Smith, Regaining Rights to a Modern Commons through Eliminating the Subtle-Monopolization of Land, Chapter 24, Economic Democracy; The Political Struggle for the 21st Century, (1st Books, 2002, Second Edition) [Bracketed text is original]

Diversion of land use to non-productive use

When precious arable land use is diverted to non-productive, or even destructive use, the overall costs to society can be considerable. Examples of such land use include, but is not limited to the following:

• The tobacco industry
• Tea and Coffee plantations the world over to be sold to the wealthier countries, primarily
• Floriculture to sell flowers in the wealthier countries comes at a high cost to the growers
• Certain dam projects
• Sugar cane growing for sugar exports
• Beef and fast food industries using other people’s resources

Increasing emphasis on liberalized, export-oriented and industrial agriculture

In Less Developed Countries the problem of land use is even more acute. Whilst the majority of food produce tends to be grown on small, subsistence farms, the bulk of the best agricultural land is used for the growing of cash crops. Partly a legacy of colonial policies, partly a result of the debt problem and IMF and World Bank solutions to this problem, we find that people in the LDCs, particularly the rural poor, are going hungry whilst the bulk of these countries' agricultural output is exported to Europe and the USA.

— Ross Copeland, The Politics of Hunger, University of Kassel, September 2000

In many cases where food is grown, it is often for exports. In some cases, while local people may be going hungry, they are growing food to export for the hard cash that would be earned. The increasingly export-oriented economies are being promoted by the wealthier Northern countries and the international institutions that they have strong influence over, the IMF and World Bank, as detailed in the Structural Adjustment section on this site. The result of this is that the wealthier nations tend to benefit while poorer countries generally lose out.

[Farmers] producing [fruit and vegetables] for export markets has recently become more common. TNCs are increasingly involved in the production of crops that have traditionally not been exported. But export crops are replacing staple foods in some areas, resulting in food scarcities and rising food prices that hit hard at the poorest.

... Yet [the market success seen by this exporting policy] “has frequently come at a cost in workers' health, inequitable distribution of economic benefits, and environmental degradation in many of the exporting countries.”

... Small-scale farmers and consumers in Latin America are paying the price of this drastic shift to export agriculture. In towns and cities across the continent, beans are now frequently scarce as land which once grew beans now grows vegetables for export. Beans contribute around 30 per cent of the protein consumption by the continent’s 200 million low-income families. Most bean farmers are now trying to grow vegetables for export and devoting less of their land (often already small) to beans for their own use.

— John Madeley, Big Business Poor Peoples; The Impact of Transnational Corporations on the World’s Poor, (Zed Books, 1999) pp. 64 - 66

Sometimes, the cost of the food produced can be more than what the local people can afford and has to be exported to earn cash. Land and labor is therefore diverted away from immediate needs. Additionally, the local food growers are then subject to the fashions and preferences of external communities and market demands. If they no longer like the range of products as much, the entire local economy could be affected. The banana trade in the Caribbean is an example of this.

Free trade and other economic agreements that reduce subsidies on local farms etc, has a worse impact on developing countries with few resources. We hear of these subsidies being “barriers” for foreign investment. Yet, the nature of the foreign investment isn’t to help promote self-sufficiency etc. It is to follow on from what the SAPs opened up — that is, SAPs opened up these economies, and foreign multinational companies can now go in and help “export” base foods and commodities. As J. W. Smith has described, this results in the Third World producing for the First World (which was the pattern during imperial and colonial times):

World hunger exists because: (1) colonialism, and later subtle monopoly capitalism, dispossessed hundreds of millions of people from their land; the current owners are the new plantation managers producing for the mother countries; (2) the low-paid undeveloped countries sell to the highly paid developed countries because there is no local market [because the low-paid people do not have enough to pay] ... and (3) the current Third World land owners, producing for the First World, are appendages to the industrialized world, stripping all natural wealth from the land to produce food, lumber, and other products for wealthy nations.

This system is largely kept in place by underpaying the defeated colonial societies for the real value of their labor and resources, leaving them no choice but to continue to sell their natural wealth to the over-paid industrial societies that overwhelmed them. To eliminate hunger: (1) the dispossessed, weak, individualized people must be protected from the organized and legally protected multinational corporations; (2) there must be managed trade to protect both the Third World and the developed world, so the dispossessed can reclaim use of their land; (3) the currently defeated people can then produce the more labor-intensive, high-protein/high-calorie crops that contain all eight (or nine) essential amino acids; and (4) those societies must adapt dietary patterns so that vegetables, grains, and fruits are consumed in the proper amino acid combinations, with small amounts of meat or fish for flavor. With similar dietary adjustments among the wealthy, there would be enough food for everyone.

— J.W. Smith, The World’s Wasted Wealth 2, Institute for Economic Democracy, 1994), pp. 63, 64.

Yet, the wealthier nations realize the importance of food security and heavily subsidize their own farming infrastructures:

While subsidies are viewed as barriers by companies outside the region, they are critical incentives for the smallholder farmers especially those in southern Africa, most of whom are still using traditional methods and are only just beginning to acquire vital modern technology. Large-scale commercial farmers in Europe and the US have been modernized for decades and have benefited from similar subsidies from their own governments for many years.

Paradoxically, the European Union, one of the leading proponents of trade liberalization has one of the most protected agricultural sectors in the world through its Common Agricultural Policy. Such is the double standard of the EU that it forces developing countries, through the western-dominated World Trade Organization (WTO), to open up their economies when Europe’s agriculture sector is the most highly subsidized in the world.

— Munetsi Madakufamba, Unequal 'freetrade' threatens food security, The Mail & Guardian (a South African national newspaper), August 13, 2001

Additionally, some of the political dynamics that result in the poverty that most food growers are in, also leads to continued misery:

• Historically, the poor have often been marginalized by forcing them off their lands on to land less suitable for agriculture. This has been achieved through (sometimes violent) change and control of legal land ownership and related laws, especially during the colonial times.
• When much of the colonialized countries broke free from their imperial rulers, this pattern didn’t go away.
  • There was a continued concentration by the newer elites of poor countries (who, as discussed in some of the geopolitics sections of this site, were often placed in power by former colonial and imperial rulers).
  • In some cases the new elites were dictators and despots. In other cases, the economic relations of the society had been transformed so much, that systems like mass plantation systems continued as those in charge were in favor with former colonial masters, and now had more power.
  • Combined with the expansion in global trading today, and the promotion of export-oriented economies as a solution to poverty, this has led to local and national elites in poor countries exporting to wealthier nations where the only real “market” for their food and other products can be effectively sold.
• A continuing circle like this produces a downward spiral of deeper poverty and further marginalization.
• The less suitable land also leads to further environmental degradation of those and other areas as well such as forests.

Peter Rosset describes the above very clearly as part of a look at some of the causes of poverty and hunger in his essay “Genetic Engineering of Food Crops for the Third World: An Appropriate Response to Poverty, Hunger and Lagging Productivity?”. He goes on to show how this has led to the current downward spiral, quoted in summarized form below:

• The marginalization of the majority leads to narrow and shallow domestic markets
• So landowning elites orient their production to export markets where consumers do have purchasing power
• By doing so, elites have ever less interest in the well-being or purchasing power of the poor at home, as the poor are not a market for them, but rather a cost in terms of wages to be kept as low as possible.
• By keeping wages and living standards low, elites guarantee that healthy domestic markets will never emerge, reinforcing export orientation.
• The result is a downward spiral into deeper poverty and marginalization, even as national exports become more “competitive” in the global economy.
• One irony of our world, then, is that food and other farm products flow from areas of hunger and need to areas were money is concentrated, in Northern countries. (Bold emphasis added; italics emphasis is original)