Indeed, within the framework of existing company law, units of capital must continually attempt to expand by maximizing profits, no matter what the social or environmental costs. The absurdity of our capitalist economic system emerges clearly when our understanding is not blinded by the ideology of market fundamentalism. The two basic institutions of our capitalist system are corporations and markets, and without radical reform neither has the capability of rationally responding to the mounting crises that we face now (and will increasingly face in the future) as the ecological and energy crises compound the economic crisis. Immense corporations whose decisions affect everyone in the world are fundamentally only accountable to a small number of wealthy shareholders, and even to them only in accord with the narrow criteria of profit maximisation. Markets, that in theory are supposed to satisfy social needs, treat enormous and ever-mounting social costs as ‘externalities’ that corporations can ignore and simply pass on to taxpayers, or to future generations.
In India, Coca-Cola’s bottling companies are running down aquifers that farmers desperately need to irrigate crops. Banana corporations have knowingly exposed third world workers to highly toxic pesticides, because the companies figured that they would not have to pick up any medical bills and because poor people desperate for jobs abound, so that sick or dying workers can always be replaced. Meatpacking companies prey upon the vulnerability of undocumented workers, paying them low wages and speeding up the line to the point where injuries become routine. Sugar companies oppose a norm which would lower the 30 per cent sugar now allowed in baby foods to 10 per cent. 63 Giant feedlots (Confi ned Animal Feeding Operations or CAFOs) pollute the surrounding earth, air, and water with foul odours and toxic substances. Highly subsidised and therefore profi table ethanol producers buy up much of America’s corn crop (as much as 50 per cent in the near future, on current predictions), and, as a result, raise the cost of food while the world’s poor starve. Cocoa farmers in Ivory Coast receive so little for their crop that some have had to turn to child slavery in order to survive.
All of the above examples are taken from our actually existing capitalist system of food provision, and what needs to be emphasized is that they are all perfectly rational from the point of view of profi t-maximising capitalism. But this only confi rms the extreme irrationality of capitalist ‘rationality’, and the urgent need to bring about radical changes via democratic long-term planning from the local level to the global. It is precisely because today’s global capitalist food system promotes both hunger and obesity while at the same time undermining the earth’s capacity to support us, that we need to fight to replace it at every link of the food chain with a system that is democratically planned to meet the human need for nutritious food and ensure that everyone has access to it, while at the same time leaving the environment— in so far as this is possible, given the damage already done—in an improved state for future generations.
FAO and Mobilization for Better Management of Limited Food Supplies
