Economic Crisis, Food Sovereignty and the Struggle for Democracy
by C. Uzondu
"The global food crisis and the global economic crisis are logical outcomes of capitalism, especially the rabidly parasitic form marketed by the United States."
People were dying from starvation before the U.S economic crisis went global. They continue to do so.
While hunger kills, some make a killing. According to a June 2008 report from the NGO, Grain, "profits for Monsanto, the world's largest seed company, were up 108 per cent, while Cargill and Archer Daniel Midlands, the world's largest food traders, registered profit increases of 86 and 42 per cent respectively. Profits for Mosaic, one of the world's largest fertilizer companies, rose 1,134 per cent." Starvation pays big dividends.
Starvation, widely understood as something that happens "over there," in the "Third World," quickly faded from the storylines of the corporate media, as the crisis in US capitalism became increasingly apparent. We heard little more talk about "the silent Tsunami" - the global food crisis. The deafening demands for government welfare from Wall Street, made near invisible an already silent Tsunami.
And, starvation continues to kill. (Incidentally, so does obesity, which is starvation of another kind).
This brings us to yet another kind of starvation. Democracy continues to be starved of content. Yet, the ultimate responsibility of a citizen, we are told, is to vote. Participation in the "political process" consummates the citizen, forget social movement activism. Those who refuse to participate in the voter scam are to be dismissed. Never mind that the scandals surrounding the last two elections would be trumpeted as undemocratic were they to happen, in say, Zimbabwe. But, we must "get out the vote." After all this is "the" most important election of a lifetime.
Yes, amnesia is rife in the land. But the reader can recall that the Democrats refused to seriously challenge stolen elections in consecutive Presidential elections. The Democrats, like the other wing of the ruling class, are committed first and foremost to continued rule of capital. This requires that the institution of the presidency, the entire U.S. system itself, be perceived as democratic. Stolen votes don't matter. It could happen again.
"The Democrats refused to seriously challenge stolen elections in consecutive Presidential elections."
Still, stolen elections are only a small part of the starvation of democracy. More critical, is the narrowing of the political debate. Note the systematic erasure of alternative political parties/campaigns. How many know of the Cynthia McKinney/Rosa Clemente truly progressive presidential campaign ticket? The starvation of democracy is also about the false separation of the economic from the political. Witness the structure of the first Wall Street bailout. Listen to George W. Bush's assurances that taxpayers' money propping up Wall Street does not mean government will have a say in banking activities. Welfare only comes with surveillance when it is for the poor (be they individuals or nation-states).
For food and democracy we starve. But, the electoral spectacle is supposed to fill our stomachs. The day draws near when McCain or Obama will be crowned king. The Empire will have a new face. The ma(n)verick or the "brother." Who really believes that imperialism will be rejected, that relations of domination will not continue? Who believes that the world's hungry will be fed?
Hopefully, not many! A revolutionary of another time said that we must have "pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will."
The financial crisis provides an opportunity, of sorts. The predatory nature of capitalism is plain for all to see. Equally visible is the non-productive and insanely speculative behavior of the financial sector of the capitalist rulers. And, many are rightly indignant at the way that the peoples' wealth was stuffed in the pockets of the bankers. Can the dismal state of affairs and the peoples' discontent be channeled into social movements that mount a serious challenge to the domination of capital? Can progressive forces (I am not referring to the Obama "progressives") help free our collective imaginations from capitalism's shackles (e.g. the wonders of free trade)?
"We will have to refuse the colonizing logic that starves democracy by reducing it to a vote."
If the commonsense, but not very sensible, belief in unregulated capitalist markets is now being somewhat questioned, multiple efforts to safeguard capitalism are already at work. Warren Buffet is putting his considerable billions on the table. France's President Sarkozy, current head of the European Union, declared the end of U.S. version of neo-liberal capitalism. It seems clear that certain sectors of the transnational global ruling class are worried. No wonder that George W. Bush plans to host the leaders of the G8 over the coming weekend. You must work on the weekend if you are going to try to quell any challenges to the U.S. right to global rule. There are already demands being made for a new international economic order.
A new international economic order is indeed necessary. But not the type imagined by the global ruling class. The global rules must be challenged and changed. But we should not look to the corporate board rooms for rule makers like the Rubins and Summers; instead we should look to the fields, to the peasants fighting for the right to food.
The right to food is a human right. But it is a right largely unrealized for billions across the planet. It is this right that La Via Campesina, an international federation of landless people, women's organizations, peasants, small farmers, and rural people, organizing across the globe are fighting for: food sovereignty. Here is one definition of food sovereignty: "the right of peoples, communities and countries to define their own policies for agriculture, fisheries, consumers, and trade of food as long as these policies are ecological sustainable, contribute to social justice and not restrict the possibilities for others to do the same."
The right to food is not a right recognized by the United States. It is a right increasingly undermined by the global food crisis, which continues to be ignored as the global financial crisis continues to develop. Peasants not US presidents are the ones fighting for this right.
Those of us who live in the imperial heartland(s) can learn from rural women, the landless, and campesinos of La Via Campesina. They have long recognized that their struggle for food sovereignty is critical to the struggle for humanity, a struggle against barbarism. (Is Monsanto's terminator technology anything other than barbarism? What else can one call the genetic engineering of seeds to not produce new life, to self-terminate?) La Via Campesina has long recognized that growing hunger and malnutrition is the result of intensifying corporate plunder. Like the economic crisis, the global food crisis has everything to do with speculation. Like the economic crisis, the global food crisis has everything to do with deregulation of corporations. The global food crisis and the global economic crisis are neither unconnected nor anomalies; they are logical outcomes of capitalism, especially the rabidly parasitic form marketed by the United States. So even if we were unable to participate in La Via Campesina's 5th international conference in Maputo, Mozambique, (16-23 October, 2008), we can develop ways to practice and live solidarity.
Critically, this means that we must open new fronts of struggle and intensify existing ones by attacking capital at its multiple sites of exploitation and domination. It will not matter who gets to sit in the White House - the bastion of white-supremacist capitalist patriarchal power. Democracy will require struggles be waged against the U.S. gulags (i.e., prison industrial complex). Democracy will require struggles be waged against the privatization of basic social and economic support institutions. Democracy will require struggles be waged to end the concentration and monopolization of resources and productive processes in the hands of a few giant corporations. Democracy will require struggles be waged against all the other manifestations of global apartheid. For this to be possible, we will have to refuse the colonizing logic that starves democracy by reducing it to a vote. Finally, democracy will require, as New Afrikan political prisoner, Mutulu Shakur always reminds, that we "dare to struggle, dare to win."
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