July
16, 2004: Hungry for Profit is no bedside
reading, unless you enjoy drifting off to a historical analysis
of agribusiness or Maoist land reform. But for anyone outraged,
distressed, or merely concerned at the increasing control
of corporations over food production and supply, Hungry
for Profit may be a good book to go with your morning
coffee. The editors, Fred Magdoff, John Bellamy Foster, and
Frederick Buttel, have brought together essays from almost
two dozen authors in an effort to present a comprehensive
picture of what is wrong with today’s global food system,
how it came to be this way, and what can be done about it.
The editors are primarily interested in the relationship
between capitalism and food production, a union they find
both unsound and dangerous. The first essay argues against
the notion that capitalism originated in cities where, unfettered
by religion and custom, humans cheerfully trucked and bartered
their way into a newly-liberated Homo economicus
identity. The essay’s author, Ellen Meiskins Wood, argues
that capitalism in fact emerged from changing property relations
in the countryside and required a major upheaval of social
relations. In England, the ruling classes could not coerce
peasants into slaving away for their superiors' benefit as
easily as could the monarchs of continental Europe.
But land ownership was more concentrated in England than
in other parts of Europe—in France the peasants owned
much of the land—and so the landlords could demand greater
productivity from their tenants, in effect pitting them against
one another. Wood suggests that this new demand for productivity
had its roots in John Locke’s Second Treatise of
Government, in which Locke defines property as the “natural”
right of those "improving" the land, which is to
say putting it to productive and profitable use. Later this
would also provide a high-minded justification for expelling
the native peoples of America: to arriving Europeans, the
Indians were not obviously exploiting the land, therefore
they had no right to it.
Not all of Hungry for Profit is so heady, and it
gets easier as you move along, like stretching a cramp. Many
of the essays focus on contemporary affairs rather than history
and theory: farm workers and the unsavory role that contractors
have played in mediating their work conditions; the role of
grassroots organizations such as the National Campaign for
Sustainable Agriculture, the Northeast Organic Farming Association,
the Rural Development Center, and The Land Institute; the
flight of displaced peoples around the world from country
to city and the related growth of popular land reform movements;
the forced transition of Cuban agriculture to organic methods.
One of the more lucid and engaging essays, “Want Amid
Plenty,” by Janet Poppendieck, warns that an overemphasis
on alleviating hunger through acts of charity such as soup
kitchens and fund-drives can often unwittingly benefit those
seeking to eliminate federal and state social services. “The
people who want more inequality are getting it, and well-meaning
people are responding to the resulting deprivation by handing
out more and more pantry bags and dishing up more and more
soup. It is time to find ways to shift the discourse from
undernutrition to unfairness, from hunger to inequality”
(p. 201). The essay could well be titled “Hungry from
Profit.”
One essay looks at food and politics with respect to the
policies of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund,
the World Trade Organization, and the North American Free
Trade Agreement. It is a history in which the economic powers
force free trade—along with moral rebukes—upon
resistant developing countries, but only after having already
brought their own industries to market dominance through the
use of protectionist policies.
In case after case of 20th-century economic expansion and
change, agribusiness was the beneficiary. During the Depression
years, the U.S. barred agricultural imports, protecting U.S.
food producers from lower foreign prices, in turn leading
to a surplus which was then sent abroad under a cheap food
aid program. Protectionism benefited large grain companies
like Cargill and Continental. Later, under the Marshall Plan
and the 'Green Revolution,' the U.S. agribusiness model was
exported to Europe and to selected Third World nations. In
1997, the WTO ruled against an EU ban on importing cattle
that had been given one of Monsanto’s recombinant growth
hormones.
Several essays deal with biotechnology and the rise of ‘seed
piracy,’ ‘genome control,’ and the now infamous
‘Terminator gene,’ that creature of life-affirming
scientific inspiration that causes plants to produce sterile
seeds. Genetically engineered crops are the froth and foam
of contemporary agricultural debate. And they are very much
with us—in us, in fact. Half of the soybean produced
globally and a third of the corn is genetically engineered.
High fructose corn syrup, that ubiquitous sweetener that leads
off the ingredients list on so many plastic wrappers and aluminum
cans, is made by applying a biotech-produced enzyme to corn.
As several authors point out, biotechnology is not inherently
harmful. But if the technology is in the fists of huge corporations
that demand short-term profits and that treat environmental
destruction as ‘externalities’ best left to their
public relations departments, then biotech will assuredly
lead to bio-wreck. Ironically enough, the same companies that
promoted the virtues of the Green Revolution—industrial
agriculture on speed—as the cure to global hunger are
now promoting a new Biotech Revolution to alleviate the environmental
degradation caused by the Green Revolution. The logic is by
now morbidly familiar.
Hungry for Profit may seem formidably academic in
its analyses, and you may have to shield your eyes from occasionally
barbarous jargon (‘depeasantization,’ ‘proletarianization,’
etc.) but there’s a good bit of meat in this book. You
just have to work through some gristle to get to it.
Constantine Markides is a freelance writer and novelist
living in Portland, Maine. He can be reached at cons76@yahoo.com
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