Perpetual hunger

Add to this injustice the hubris of using crops for car fuels and scrambling the genetic structure of many crops, and the tragedy becomes whole.

High food prices and hunger are the inevitable consequences of this imperial food system. I detected the making of this tragedy in 1975 in Colombia - and I denounced the missionaries behind it. I said then and I repeat now that hunger is intimately tied to land. Any talk about hunger must become a talk about land - who owns it, does it raise food or luxury crops, how much a family needs for food self-sufficiency: in other words, think about food in the context of agrarian or land reform.

Give land to the landless and hunger will diminish; perhaps cease. Stop exporting subsidised food and encourage food sovereignty in the tropics.

In the United States, and other “industrialised” countries, increase the number of family farmers to millions to put agribusiness in its place. Why? Because agribusiness corporations are the engines of cash cropping, tempting landlords to empty the world’s countrysides off family farmers and peasants.

These policies are fuelling ecocides and civil wars in more countries than Colombia. They result in the creation of millions of rural poor and hungry filling up the slams of cities.

Agribusiness corporations are also making a killing over high food prices, which they set. Wheat increased in price by 130 per cent in 2007. Rice, the staple of more that three billion people in Asia and Africa, doubled in price in the first three months of 2008. Potash, a company in Canada, made over $1 billion in 2007 selling fertiliser, increasing its profits by 72 per cent over 2006. Cargill Corporation of the United States made $2.3 billion in 2007 from selling grain, its profits rising by 36 per cent over those in 2006.

Failure to address these political issues will have violent implications. In the 20th century, landlordism and its creations, rural poverty and hunger, caused communism. Now the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is warning of “social unrest of an unprecedented scale”.

The violence and famine in Somalia over food is one of the last of several shots fired in that global struggle.