A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford
Having crushed the planet's peasants and converted food into just another commodity for global manipulation, the Lord's of Capital have unleashed upon humanity the threat - no, certainty - of mass starvation. The criminal mega-enterprise is centered in the United States, the former "breadbasket of the planet" whose massive conversion to biofuels has caused staple crop prices to skyrocket beyond the reach of hundreds of millions of the world's poor. The death of millions translates into profits in the trillions for the Lords of Capital, killers on a mass scale whose only talents lie in "the production of overlapping calamities, each more lethal than the last."
The Lords of Capital Decree Mass Death by Starvation
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford
"No amount of emergency aid is sufficient to make up for the wild price rises that have already occurred."
Fidel Castro called biofuels "genocide," and he was right. And there can be no question as to the identity of the perpetrators of this global genocide: the Lords of Capital that formulate the foreign and domestic policy of the United States. That policy calls for 20 million acres of corn from states like Iowa to be converted from food to fuel. As should have been expected, such a massive diversion almost immediately pushed up the price of all other basic foodstuffs - a global disaster made quick and easy by the fact that, over the past several decades, planetary food production has been taken over by agribusiness - the speculative human parasites that control how food is bought and sold, and to whom, and for what purpose. These Lords of Capital are killers on a mass scale.
"Hot" money has totally distorted the "marketplace" for life-sustaining goods, causing millions of the desperately poor in scores of countries to take to the streets. "In less than a year," writes the Guardian newspaper, in Britain, "the price of wheat has risen 130 per cent, soya by 87 per cent and rice by 74 per cent."
These are nothing less than crimes against humanity, and cannot help but destroy the lives of millions who are already at the very edge of the precipice.
"The Lords of Capital have imposed a triage of death by starvation on the planet."
The so-called "market" - which is actually a club of super-rich men who distort and destroy everything of value to humanity that they touch - will be the death of us all, and much quicker than through the effects of global warming, which is also greatly accelerated by the ghoulish, greedy rush to grow food for cars rather than people. In such a murderous environment -manipulated purely for the profits of the Lords of Capital - neither trees nor peasants stand a chance. The United Nations says it needs about half a billion dollars for the most critical cases of starvation, but no amount of emergency aid is sufficient to make up for the wild price rises that have already occurred - and which will put trillions in the pockets of the Lords of Capital.
Agribusiness wiped out small farmers in the U.S., and impoverished and pushed off the land untold millions of peasants, worldwide. Now the Lords of Capital have imposed a triage of death by starvation on the planet. The people who live on two dollars or less per day will have to die, and then, as prices rise, the three dollar people will follow.
The men who profit from such mass murder use terms like "structural adjustment" and "economic fundamentals" to attach a veneer of rationality to a chaotic system they have created on the fly for the sole purpose of mega-theft. In the end, the Lords of Capital have mastered only one art: the production of overlapping calamities, each more lethal than the last. Soon, if not already, the Haitian poor will have no cooking oil to mix with clay for their diet of dirt pies. The Lords of Capital will have turned them into dirt for another Haitian's consumption and demise.
For Black Agenda Radio, I'm Glen Ford.
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.
Isaac Saney is a Cuba and Black studies specialist and historian at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.
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