Vote Obama, But With No Illusions

This post is a replication of a response to one of my friends - Sagar - on his blog. I wouldn't normally bother with posting at length on such a thing, but I am starting to think that with all this pro-Obama rhetoric, people have forgotten that he is still a member of the ruling class in America, and his policies will be shaped accordingly. We need to pay attention the deficiencies in Obama's views and policies, because, as John Pilger has warned, "an Obama victory will bring intense pressure on the US anti-war and social justice movements to accept a Democratic administration for all its faults. If that happens, domestic resistance to rapacious America will fall silent." This would be a high price to pay indeed, so I intend to be one of the ones who will sound a cautious note about the Great Black Hope.

Let’s look at Obama's domestic policy first off. He is quite far to the right of the majority of American citizens on a host of important issues (polls routinely show this). On the economy, he supports the bail-out, thinks that unregulated, laissez-faire capitalism is great, generally supports free trade agreements (his scruples over CAFTA are for the standard conservative reason that it doesn’t protect “American labour”, which is code for domestic capitalists), and has even described himself as a “free market guy”. He will also continue collaboration between government and corporate power. On health care, he will probably invest more than the Republicans, but the essentials of the system will stay the same: i.e. it will remain privatised. On education, it will be a similar story: a bit more investment, but remaining massively underfunded and massively inegalitarian. He essentially just wants a little better version of Bush’s NCLB. On tax, sure, he won’t continue the system of tax cuts for the ultra-rich like McCain would, but he isn’t going to increase them either: that’s obvious just given the insane level of funding he has received from the business sector. On womens’ rights, he will be a lot better than McCain, but it is hard not to be given what a sicko sexist McCain is. He still won’t fundamentally reverse one of the most significant problems, however; the sexist pay gap. On racial relations, I’m obviously going to need to do some work.

I will start with the obvious observation. The fact that he is black does not mean that he will do much for race relations, just as the fact that Margaret Thatcher was a woman (the first woman prime minister) didn’t stop her from being incredibly regressive about womens’ rights. Yes, it will slightly increase the politicisation of black people, but they won’t be able to do much with that interest given that they are systematically excluded from political society unless they hold the "right" (read: establishment) views, and unless they are massively wealthy (that is, unless they’re like Obama). As we know that this isn’t the case for most black people, this is not much to shout about.

So what about his actual views on black/ white relations? Well, we can look at his More Perfect Union speech.

In it he says

we’ve heard my former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, use incendiary language
to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide,
but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation; that
rightly offend white and black alike.

This is partially true (Wright says some nutty and offensive things), but then again, most of what Wright says is correct: blacks are systematically oppressed by whites in America, being held back economically, politically, educationally, in terms of their health, and so on.

So what is it that Obama doesn’t like about Wright’s comments? Well,

they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country - a view that sees
white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all
that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle
East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead
of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam

Leaving aside the implications for foreign policy (I’ll come to that), he suggests that the idea that white racism is endemic is “profoundly distorted”. So we can guess he won’t be doing much about that then (the Knights errant would have hardly run around looking for dragons to slay if they didn’t think there were any).

He goes on to explain the history of oppression, and suggests that is why blacks might be angry (no shit). But he doesn’t talk of the continuing oppression, and moreover softens the blow by comparing it to white anger about racist “discrimination” against them! (”…when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban [byword for largely black] neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.”)

That is ridiculous! The oppression of black people is ongoing, and their anger is - unlike white anger - justified. So it seems that Obama is a bit of a dud on race as well, even though he will clearly be far better than more Republican rule.

The moral seems to be that he will be a bit better than McCain on most important issues, and a lot better - but still not doing enough by any realistic understanding - on some.

What about foreign policy and all the other “little men” (better term: unpeople) around the world? Well, he may be a little less hawkish than McCain. But the liberal peace-loving poster boy image is ridiculous.

Firstly, he harbors exactly the same manichaean delusions as Bush, saying “We lead the world in battling immediate evils and promoting the ultimate good… We must lead by building a 21st century military…” He plans to expand the military with 65,000 new soldiers and 27,000 new marines, which already has a bloated $711 billion per year budget (as much as the next 45 well-funded militaries in the world). He has no scruples about the American global imperialist project, and indeed with someone as hawkish as Biden as his running mate, we can bet that he will be quite aggressive in expanding American military domination.

Secondly, he objects to Iraq only on the grounds of “strategic error”, and thinks that the moral case is good. He makes nothing of the fact that it is an illegal international act of aggression, and would be considered a war crime of the highest magnitude by the standards of the Nuremberg trials. He even spoke of the Surge tactic as having “succeeded beyond our wildest imagination”, rather than being a hi-tech gangsterist blood-bath. Moreover, his stance on Iraq is not complete withdrawal and an end to the occupation, but withdrawal of combat troops, which only constitute one third of US forces in the country. He strongly endorses the Bush plan of military policing - utilising 60,000 plus troops who will remain - and economic domination of Iraq.

Thirdly, the troops he does withdraw he wants to redeploy in Afghanistan, where the US military are still destroying social and economic structures, infrastructures, communities, and thousands of lives. He calls this a “good war”, and states Bush “responded properly”. Moreover he has earlier this year signed an order permitting illegal incursions into Pakistani territory from Afghanistan, which will heighten tensions with and within that country.

Fourthly, he has maintained the aggressive posturing towards Iran, saying earlier this year “there is no greater threat to Israel - or the peace and stability of the region - than Iran”. He has said that he will not take military action off of the table. These threats to Iran’s sovereignty are actually illegal, for they are in violation of the UN Charter, which prohibits the threat of force to a country that does not pose a direct military threat to the welfare of your own country.

Fifthly, he is aggressively Zionistic in his views on Israel, even suggesting that Israel ought to have as its capital a complete and unified Jerusalem. Not even Bush has gone this far in showing his contempt for the Palestinians. He supports Israeli militarism and expansionism in the region, which is one of the key sources of instability. This can only be horrific for the Palestinians, the Israelis (who don’t like being repeatedly bombed), and for the security and stability in the Middle East in general.

Sixthly, he is pro the embargo on Cuba, which has severely impacted the Cuban population, causing long lasting starvation. This shows utter contempt for the population of Cuba on the basis of essentially Cold War ideological divisions.

Thus, just as he cares little for the unpeople in America, he cares little for the unpeople all over the world. The fact that because of slight improvements over McCain people withhold their criticism shows that they have given up on the idea that real political change can be achieved. Of course an Obama presidency will be better than a McCain one, but there is enough Obamania and elevated, and quite ridiculous, Messianic rhetoric about the man floating around on the net. What is needed is vigorous criticism and warning. Like Noam Chomsky recently said, people should vote Obama, but vote for him without any illusions.

Starbucks's [Green] Washing Policy

So, Starbucks - one of the biggest brands to sign onto the Fair Trade label (which I've commented on in a previous post) - turns out not to be so eco-friendly after all. For some strange reason, they have a cranky washing policy, whereby each branch must keep a tap running all day long, even if it goes completely unused. In doing so they waste approximately 23.4 million litres per day! That is apparently enough to provide enough daily water for the population of Namibia, which has been struck by severe droughts this year.

The moral, I feel, is loud and clear...

World Food Day

Yesterday was World Food Day, so a belated Happy WFD! To encourage reflection on the importance and joys of food, but especially what can happen when people are deprived of decent meals for reasons much beyond their control, I reproduce here an excellent article which was in the Guardian g2 magazine a couple of weeks ago, on the interrelationship between food and class in modern British society. Bon appétit!

Britain on a plate

Jamie's Ministry of Food, the celebrity chef's new TV series, is a powerful portrait of the socially excluded. It also reveals an enduring truth, says Felicity Lawrence: our diet today is as much about class as it always has been - and it will take more than a one-man mission to change that.

Felicity Lawrence
The Guardian,
Wednesday October 1 2008

There was a moment in the first episode of the new Jamie Oliver TV series last night when the Essex-lad-made-millionaire had an outburst worthy of a revolutionary. Emerging from a mealtime visit to Natasha, a single mother on benefits in Rotherham, he raged in his own inimitable language of protest: "Fucking hell ... it's fucking Great Britain. It's 2008. I've been to Soweto and I've seen Aids orphans eating better than that."

Natasha feeds her two children takeaways most nights. Aged five and two, they have never eaten a meal that has been properly cooked at home. Instead, they sit on the floor - no table, no cutlery - and eat shavings of doner kebabs or chips with processed cheese from polystyrene boxes with their fingers. Even instant noodles have to be negotiated without forks. The bottom drawers of Natasha's fridge are stuffed full of sweets and chocolate bars. "This is where all my money goes," she admitted. About £70 out of a weekly benefits cheque of just £80 on fast food and junk. Five-year-old Kiya has already had to go to the dentist twice to have rotten teeth removed. Natasha can see the life of obesity and illness ahead of them; it's not that she doesn't share the middle-class fantasy of sitting down to a cosy communal table each night, but despite her eight-hob gas cooker and the countless cookery shows on her flatscreen TV, she doesn't seem to know what to do.

Whenever Oliver leaves her, in this and subsequent episodes of his TV mission to teach the nation to cook, he is stirred to the same outrage, shouted from the barricade of his celebrity jeep. Natasha turns out not only to have a big cooker and TV but debts large enough to make her a pawn-shop regular, and depression deep enough to make her give up trying. When Oliver finds this out he confides to the camera in his car, "I don't blame her ... but I'm fucking angry. I'm fucking angry and I don't know who with or what with." He has just met poverty in all its 21st-century complexity - and it has a profound effect.

Miss this Ministry of Food series and you'll be missing some of the most powerful political documentary in years. In it, whether by intention or accident, the naked chef has entered the domestic life of a British town and captured a snapshot of the country's social health. The result is an indictment of the current political system as disturbing as any ideological tract. Food, and real people's experience of it, is still all about class.

The subtext is everything. Geoff, the 84-year-old Rotherham man who has never cooked in his life, seems keen and quick enough. Why he should suddenly be facing a crisis is never fully explained. But it turns out that his wife and lifelong helpmeet now has Alzheimer's disease and so everything is falling to him. He asked Citizens Advice where he could learn to cook. They had no answer. Does he have children to help? Yes, several, it turns out, but presumably distance and some of the longest working hours in Europe make it hard for them to give the support he needs. Clare, who is overweight and lives on 10 packs of crisps and a large bar of Galaxy chocolate a day, seems to struggle to read when given a recipe by Oliver. Is she one of those who fell through the net at school so that not only does she not know that liquids bubble when they boil but she stumbles when literacy and numeracy are required? This is a delicate but painful portrait of the socially excluded.

Middle-class people in the series eat junk, too. Time, or lack of it, is their problem. Women getting home from work can't find even half an hour to cook from scratch for the family, which Oliver can't understand. There are cultural barriers to eating well too. But what makes Oliver and the viewer angry, what shocks, is the deprivation.

Food has always been about class in Britain. "The nature of our diets has been entirely shaped by the class system of the 19th century and the white working-class experience of industrialisation," says Tim Lang, professor of food policy at City University in London. "From the first- when cheap white bread was sold to the poor as progress, because previously only the rich could afford it - what class you are from, and how much you have to spend has made a dramatic difference to what you eat, how you eat it and what you aspire to eat. Class imbues everything in food."

Which socio-economic class you are born into is still one of the most significant determinants of how healthy you will be. Natasha is simply conforming to the pattern. Her mother was a single parent on benefits too - she didn't pass on cooking skills to Natasha, and Natasha has none to give to her own children. The cycle of deprivation looks set to continue. Sharp inequalities can be clearly mapped, even short distances apart, according to Dr Tim Lobstein, director of the childhood research programme at the International Association for the Study of Obesity. Travel the eight stops on the Jubilee line tube from Central London's Westminster to Canning Town and you find a decrease in life expectancy of nearly one year for each station going east.
A child born in one deprived Glasgow suburb can expect a life 28 years shorter than another living only 13km away in a more affluent area, a three-year investigation for the World Health Organisation found in August. Commenting on one of the key factors, the report concluded: "Obesity is caused not by moral failure of individuals but by the excess availability of high-fat, high-sugar foods." The marketplace can generate wealth but it can "also generate negative conditions for health", which will only be resolved by tackling "the inequitable distribution of power, money and resources", it went on. In Rotherham, where areas around the town centre have deprivation levels that put them in the worst 6% of the country, one in 10 reception-age schoolchildren are obese. By year 6, 18% of them are obese, while 60% of adults are either overweight or obese.

Right across the country, those on low-incomes suffer higher incidence of a whole range of illnesses relating to poor diet. Lobstein catalogues them: higher rates of anaemia caused by lack of iron, especially in pregnancy. Mothers from low-income groups are also more likely to have children of low birthweight, who, in turn, are likely to suffer poor health and educational prospects as a result. Working-class families have more dental disease and more childhood eczema and asthma. They are more likely to suffer from obesity, both as children and as adults. They have higher rates of raised blood pressure, thanks to excess salt in their processed diets. They are more likely to suffer diabetes, heart disease, vascular disease and strokes. They suffer more cancers of the lung, stomach and oesophagus. They have more cataracts caused by poor nutrition than those in other classes. And the protective role of good diet is missing. A survey of men and women living on benefits found that a third ate no fruit at all during the week their diets were recorded.

It's not just diet, of course - alcohol and tobacco consumption are implicated, too, as poverty ties a Gordian knot of health problems. Over half of younger children in low-income groups are inactive almost all day as well, with two- to 10-year-olds getting less than 30 minutes of physical activity daily.

Elizabeth Dowler, professor of food and social policy at Warwick University who was recently involved in the government's Low Income Diet and Nutrition survey, says the class differences are stark but complicated. "If you live for more than six months on the minimum wage or on benefits there is growing evidence you cannot afford to buy the food you need for health. It is still to do with class but it's complex to unpick. Food is the flexible area that you cut back on when you are on a low income. Unlike council tax or utility bills, no one fines you if you don't spend on food and no one takes your children away, so that's what you cut, and you have a fag because that takes the hunger away."

When you are on a low income you buy the kind of food that fills you up most cheaply. What may seem ignorant choices to others are in fact quite rational. Lobstein has calculated the cost of 100 calories of food energy from different types of food. The cheapest way to get your 100 calories is to buy fats, processed starches and sugars. A hundred calories of broccoli costs 51p, but 100 calories of frozen chips only cost 2p. Good-quality sausages that are high in meat but low in fat cost 22p per 100 calories, but "value" fatty ones are only 4p per 100 calories. Poor quality-fish fingers are 12p per 100 calories compared with 29p for ones made with fish fillet that are higher in nutrients. Fresh orange juice costs 38p per 100 calories, while the same dose of energy from sugary orange squash costs 5p.

The FSA pointed out when it published its survey on the effect of low income on diet that middle-class people were eating increasingly high levels of junk, too. However, the same survey found that nearly a quarter of poor households skipped meals because they didn't have enough money. Nearly 40% worried that they would run out of food before more money came in. And yes, the working class smoke more and drink, as Oliver, falling over beer cans and fag ends outside a Rotherham house, notes.

It has been unfashionable recently to talk in class terms, but there's nothing here that hasn't been raised for decades, centuries even, as both Lang and Lobstein point out. When George Orwell wrote The Road to Wigan Pier in the middle of the 1930s depression, he set out to record the lives of the English working class in the industrial north. He was appalled by the quality of their diets. "A man dies and is buried and all his actions forgotten but the food he has eaten lives after him in the sound or rotten bones of his children." Orwell wrote down detailed accounts of how unemployed working-class people on welfare spent their money. He doubted it was even theoretically possible to live on their allowance. "The basis of their diet is white bread and margarine, corned beef, sugared tea and potatoes. Would it not be better if they spent more money of wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread?" Yes it would he answered, but "no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots ... A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita, an unemployed man doesn't ... When you are underfed, harassed, bored and miserable, you don't want to eat dull, wholesome food. You want something a little bit tasty. Let's have three pennorth of chips! Put the kettle on and we'll all have a nice cup of tea!"

To sit down to table to eat a family meal at leisure was always a luxury, according to food historian and consultant to the National Trust Sara Paston Williams. "In the slums of industrial towns in the 19th century everyone including the children was out working, and if you were poor you didn't have an oven to cook, so you didn't get together for a family meal." The royal family were in part responsible for the creation of the myth of the ordinary family meal, with father Prince Albert, mother Queen Victoria and children sitting down together, although aristocratic children were, in fact, largely fed in the nursery. Mrs Beeton spread the idealised habit to the burgeoning middle classes, who were keen to copy the rich and differentiate themselves in their new wealth from the poor. The pre-industrial and rural experience of food was different. Food might be short in bad years but generally you had better access to a wider variety of foods, including some milk and vegetables in the country. Families working on the land broke off together to eat in the fields. But the Victorian urban poor lived on takeaways, hot pies from the pie man often full of horrible stuff, and adulterated white bread and adulterated marrow jam.

To be hungry was deemed a natural state, and a necessary one since it goaded people who might otherwise be idle into working. James Vernon has traced changing attitudes to food and lack of it in Hunger: A Modern History. "Two hundred years ago hunger was considered a spur to effort. Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus debated whether the emerging market economy would eradicate hunger or depended on it, but both agreed that the market should be left to produce plenty or want without intervention from the state.

"It was only in the second half of the 19th century that this view was first challenged, when hunger was discovered as a humanitarian issue, that reflected the failure of the state to protect its citizens from economic downtowns over which they had no control."

The seminal work that changed attitudes was Friedrich Engels' The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1845. Drawing frequently on contemporary reports he read in the Manchester Guardian, he catalogued the misery of the poor quality, adulterated and inadequate diets of the poor. "The habitual food of the individual working man varies according to his wages ... descending gradually ... until on the lowest round of the ladder potatoes form the sole food. As an accompaniment weak tea with perhaps a little sugar, milk or spirits is universally drunk ... such a way of living unavoidably engenders a multitude of diseases."

Yet today the language of class has been almost removed from the political discourse. In Thatcherite and Blairite Britain, it has been framed instead in terms of "choice". There is talk of the need to give people opportunities, but after that, it's down to individual responsibility. It is no accident that the government's white paper on health and obesity was called "Choosing health" rather than the "social determinants of health".

Roger Stone, Labour leader of Rotherham metropolitan borough council, is reluctant to put food and poverty in its class context, too. "Jamie's programmes are not about us, it's not about the middle class, he's targeting people who are struggling," he told me. You mean the working class then? "No, goodness, in this day and age, it's not class."

You sense that Oliver used to think the same. Give people a chance, then it's up to them, and if, like some of the catering students in his previous programmes, they don't choose to take it, he's got no time for them.

But here he's on a journey. The series is set in Rotherham because it was there that a group of mothers helped their children rebel against the new school menus imposed during Oliver's last series. Julie Critchlow took orders for chips and crisps and shoved them through the school railings at lunchtime, earning herself a place in tabloid mythology. "Fat old scrubber" was what Oliver called Critchlow back then. He may speak estuary but he is firmly positioned with the middle classes who almost exclusively buy his books and watch his cooking shows. But Critchlow has her revenge. As phlegmatic as a tricoteuse at the guillotine, she tells him firmly in this series that he "lives in a bubble", he has no idea what it's like for ordinary people on benefits. And she and her elderly mother, who did teach her to cook, want to get a pair of choppers on his head. Oliver symbolically submits: he puts his designer hair mess into the hands of Critchlow's hairdresser daughter. A little while later he is found complaining to his producer: "Fuck. What's happened to my barnet?"

But it has done the trick, because now he talks differently. He's learned that you can't parachute in with change and waltz out again; tackling class inequality is a long, hard slog. This time he wants to get the whole town on board, to shift the tribe. He's not interested in training those who won't pass it on, who only want to cook for themselves as individuals. "This is about the home, it's about family, it's about neighbours." With impeccable timing, as the global markets go into meltdown, Oliver discovers social capital and declares: "They've got to own it. It's about ownership".

But We Hungry

The Slow Food movement, as I detailed in my last post, was set up to fight for the right of all to be sensuous: to enjoy their food, and make it a part of, rather than something they have to fit around, their productive life. This is, of course, important. But a precondition of having the right to eat well is having the right to eat, period. And unfortunately, under the aegis of modern industrial capitalist production, there are many - at least 850 million people worldwide according to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation - who do not enjoy that right. Starvation is an endemic feature of the global food system, and it is unnecessary: there is enough food in the world to solve the problem of hunger.

It is worth pausing to unravel the implications of this last point. It implies that the problem is not one of production, but of distribution: producing more food would not alleviate starvation, if that food continues to be withheld from the starving by the distributive mechanisms at work. And if you think about it, that is really quite an intuitive idea. There are many homeless and hungry people living in Oxford (the city I happen to be in as I write this paragraph), some of them are selling Big Issues on the street corner right next to the local Sainburys just over the road. Does anyone think that the way to solve this problem would be to build another Sainburys, nearly doubling the amount of food in the region, right next door? Of course not: if the homeless cannot afford food in the first store, they will not be able to afford it in the second. And this obvious thought contains the key to how to think about the problem of global starvation: it is one of what people can afford.

The primary system for the distribution of food in the world is the market system. This system requires that people pay for their food, and if they cannot afford to, then they will go without. Hence the root cause of starvation in the world is poverty. More precisely, it is the disparity between people's wages, and the cost of living, including the price of food. This disparity can only be cured in two ways: (1) increasing people's wages, or (2) lowering the price of food. But as long as the price of food is set by the market, it will not necessarily be low enough that everyone can afford food. It is quite possible that profits can be maximised whilst setting the price of food at a level that is not within the reach of many, just as long as the extra profit made from setting the price higher is more than that lost from making it cheaper but affordable to more. And as long as this is a possibility, we can't rely on markets to feed the hungry.

Indeed, the empirical evidence seems to suggest that markets are a very poor way of solving the problem of starvation, and, rather, seem to perpetuate it. As you may well remember, there were food riots all over the place earlier on in the year, and this was linked to a massive global increase in the price of food. Now, this particular event was the product of a confluence of factors, including: the fact that there were, simply and unfortunately, quite bad harvests last year and the early part of this one; the drive of many governments, particularly the US administration, towards utilising biofuels, which are based on corn and sugar-cane, so increase the costs of these basic items; an increase in meat eating in many developing countries, which diverts grain from people to livestock and drives up costs of that; and importantly, the rising price of fossil fuels (which affects the price of food in many ways, such as the costs of the oil-based pesticides or natural gas-based fertilisers used by modern agribusiness, to simple things like transport costs). But to assume that this crisis and the ensuing riots were an isolated phenomenon, sparked entirely by the dramatic increase in food prices, is too narrow, and doesn't do justice to the decades of poverty and starvation faced by many of the world's poorest countries. The increase in world food prices was simply, to modify a hoary old expression, the straw that broke the farmers' backs.

It is not a coincidence that many of the countries in which people were seeing food riots earlier this year have been undergoing radical changes in the structure of their economies for quite a while now. These changes come in the form of so-called free trade reforms - forced on developing countries by the Structural Adjustment Policies of the IMF and the World Bank - which consist in a number of different, but interlinked economic policies. Part of the deal is a simple form of trade liberalisation, and the accompanying deregulation of industry (which in itself can reduce corporate accountability and social responsibility). More significant than that, however, is the slow erosion of welfare systems and supports for poor farmers and land-workers, including government supports, grain reserves, credit services, and so forth. The reduction of tariffs to trading in developing countries has allowed Western countries, especially the US and the EU, to flood the markets of said countries with heavily subsidised agribusiness exports, undermining local farmers who simply cannot compete. This has lead to massive, worldwide hunger, as the food prices set by the global market outstrip what many in the world can afford.

There are all sorts of facts and figures that can be used to flesh out this picture, but I will let the current situation speak for itself. What I do want to explore are the aims and objectives of the largest peasant and rural land-workers movement in the world - La Via Campesina - to contrast the policies they advocate with those pushed on developing countries by international trade organisations. To that effect I will reproduce the aims as listed on their website below:

What is our main objective?

The principal objective of La Via Campesina is to develop solidarity and unity among small farmer organizations in order to promote gender parity and social justice in fair economic relations; the preservation of land, water, seeds and other natural resources; food sovereignty; sustainable agricultural production based on small and medium-sized producers.What do we defend?

Peasant, family farm-based production
La Via Campesina promotes a model of peasant or family-farm agriculture based on sustainable production with local resources and in harmony with local culture and traditions. Peasants and farmers rely on a long experience with their locally available resources. We are capable of producing the optimal quantity and quality of food with few external inputs. Our production is mainly for family consumption and domestic markets.

People's food sovereignty
Food sovereignty is the RIGHT of peoples, countries, and state unions to define their agricultural and food policy without the “dumping” of agricultural commodities into foreign countries. Food sovereignty organizes food production and consumption according to the needs of local communities, giving priority to production for local consumption. Food sovereignty includes the right to protect and regulate the national agricultural and livestock production and to shield the domestic market from the dumping of agricultural surpluses and low-price imports from other countries. Landless people, peasants, and small farmers must get access to land, water, and seed as well as productive resources and adequate public services. Food sovereignty and sustainability are a higher priority than trade policies.

Decentralized food production and supply chains

The current industrialized agribusiness model has been deliberately planned for the complete vertical integration and to dominate all agriculture activities. This model exploits workers and concentrates economic and political power. La Via Campesina advocates a decentralized model where production, processing, distribution and consumption are controlled by the people the communities themselves and not by transnational corporations.

From the above you can immediately read off the sharp difference between elite opinion on the matter of how to deal with the problem of world hunger and distribution of food, and the opinion of a body representing nearly 150 million workers worldwide. They want workers' cooperatives operating predominantly over local and domestic markets, instead of independent small-scale farmers operating on a global competitive market; they want agroecological methods of production (go here for a simple run down, or here for a more academic take) instead of the methods of industrial agribusiness; they want land-reform, something the U.S. has consistently opposed around the globe, as well as control over water-supply and the provenance and pedigree of the seeds they use; they want decentralisation, so that their fates and fortunes are not controlled by the winds of the global market, and the decisions of executives of transnational corporations who live in a different world altogether. This is nothing short of a demand for a revolutionary re-structuring of the modern world food system.

I want to end on a sombre note. The price of ignoring the demands of the working hungry around the world has been, and will continue to be, catastrophic. We have seen the food riots on television, but what we need to remember, to take away, are the causes. I'm not now talking about the long-term economic and social causes that have landed poor workers around the world in this situation; I'm talking about the immediate, desperate, and often burning and painful hunger in the bellies of millions. People in Haiti, one of the poorest countries in the Americas, have been forced to turn towards mudcakes as a food staple. These do not taste pleasant, and obviously have effectively zero nutritional value (bar tiny quantities of salt and fat); but they serve to fix the painful, acidic churning of a hungry stomach. In India, the extent to which the poor rely on rats as a source of food has become so established that the welfare minister of the country, in a perverse and insulting move calculated to stop people worrying about the situation of India's poor, has attempted to portray them as an upmarket delicacy. He neglects to mention, of course, that the reason the poor have to eat rats is because of the vast and unfathomable levels of poverty, lack of mechanisms for storing grain and ensuring access to basic foods in hard times (rather than any conscious dietary choice, such as it would be for the rich); and, most importantly, that this suggestion is effectively an admission that the Indian government does not feel the need to cure these long-standing socio-economic evils.

If we care about the fact that millions of people around the world must turn to mud and rats as a central source of nutrition, that they get so hungry and desperate that they will turn to violence and social upheaval, then we ought to oppose neoliberalism. After all, the two countries mentioned above have some of the strongest and most well-established neoliberal institutions and policies around. We need to listen, not to the World Bank, nor to any of the international financial organisations who created the current, floundering system. We should listen to the workers, the peasants and the landless who have been crying in vain for radical reform for decades. We should remember their plight, and we should be angry.

Them Belly Full

I happened to be in London over the weekend, and noticed, as I was pottering down South Bank, that the Slow Food movement were putting on a festival, involving a bunch of market stalls, some family activities, and a tent for speakers to variously cook something for the audience, or wax lyrical on some food-related social issue or other. Now I'd heard about Slow Food a few times before this, and decided to check Slow Food London out for myself, but here is a little bit of an introduction for those of you who haven't heard about them. The Slow Food movement started in 1989 in Italy, initiated by a group to the left of the Italian Communist Party, who reasonably asked: why is it only the privilege of the rich to enjoy their food? Stressing the link between taking pleasure in food and workers' rights - after all, you need time and money for good ingredients to prepare good quality food - they asserted that it was everyone's right not just to be able to eat, but to be able to savour eating. And savouring food meant taking your time over it, especially in its preparation. Thus they rejected the social phenomenon of "fast food" - instant, but low-quality calories - and adopted the snail as their logo (see above).

Fast (or slow) forward to today, and the Slow Food movement is an international movement with over 80,000 members, built on a few basic principles: food should taste good; be regional; be environmentally sustainable; and food producers should receive fair compensation for their work. There are clear problems with the movement: for example, many of the 'convivia' (essentially branches) of the movement have become quite bourgeois, and are basically forums for middle-class food aficionados. Also, the food can be quite expensive, which betrays the socialist background of the movement. There is, in general, far too much of an air of elitist hedonism.

However, one thing the Slow Food movement can be good with, it seems, is their relationship towards producers. An important focus for the movement is that consumers be directly confronted by their producers, and this is encouraged by the setting up of local and regional markets (rather than the sprawling impersonal and indifferent international markets of modern capitalism), and the creation of 'presidia', about which more below. What is the advantage of being put in direct contact with your producer? The central virtue, as I see it, is that it cuts against a feature of modern capitalism which Marx called 'commodity fetishism', which is the disguising of a social relation between individual producers and consumers as a natural relation between commodities. Being confronted with your producer is not solely about physically meeting them in the market-place, for - although it is better than not meeting them at all - you are still, in this situation, blind to the labour that has gone into the production. Being confronted with your producer extends to being aware of how the product came about, what labours went into it; in short, the productive life of the person you are exchanging with. This, then, exposes the exchange relationship for what it is; a social relation involving quantities of labour crystallised in the product.

Lofty ideas, but how are they put into practice? Above I mentioned the Slow Food presidia, which are essentially organisations of groups of producers of small-scale and specialised regional products, the production of which would not be viable under modern industrial production methods. But these presidia do more than just preserve artisanal foodstuffs; they also make consumers aware of how these foods were produced, the difficulties in marketing them, etc. And I do not mean through simply stamping a couple of lines on the packaging about being made by the hard-working farmers of wherever, as per the general supermarket superficial tactic of making consumers feel better about their purchase. Take, for example, a recent Slow Food gig in San Fransisco, where locals got to experience "coffee cupping" (like wine tasting, but with coffee). The coffee they tried came from the regions of Sierra Cafetalera in the Dominican Republic and Huehuetenango in Guatemala, and present were farmers from both of these regions, telling their stories of production. This puts the consumers in direct contact with not only the faces, but the lives of the people who made the product they're consuming. Incidentally, according to the blogger I've linked to, "the coffee these farmers produce is spectacular; the difference between this coffee and the brown water you purchase at your corner Starbucks is like night and day". And this is what quite naturally flows from not taking the short-cuts and mass-production methods used by modern industrial agribusiness: producers have the time and resources to concentrate on producing a quality coffee bean, that will produce a much better tasting cup of coffee.

But as far as the response offered by the Slow Food movement goes - and it is a lot more radical than, e.g., just making sure you buy Fair Trade, about which more below - it is still very limited. It is imperative for us to drastically re-think our relationship with what we eat, and the social relations that we place ourselves in when we buy our food. I've been convinced of this by reading Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power, and the Hidden Battle for the World Food System, by Raj Patel (apparently friend of Chris Brooke, who tutored me at Balliol College, Oxford). In future posts I will make several arguments about the world food system, why it is morally bankrupt, and what we can do about it. For now, I suggest picking up a copy of Patel's excellent book. But I do want to broach one more topic before I click 'post', and that is the topic of where we buy our food.

Some people might be tempted into complacency by the thought that they buy mildly more ethical produce than the majority such as, say, organic, or Fair Trade. This mind-set seems especially to afflict the Waitrose-shopping middle-classes, but it can just as easily characterise the behaviour of many who think of themselves as radically socially progressive. But the idea is an illusion, and an insidious one at that. I will start by qualifying myself: when I shop in a supermarket, I will buy Fair Trade. They do, after all, pay their workers fractionally more than the global norm, and the workers must be organised into co-operatives, ensuring a more equitable distribution of wages between the workforce. But you have to be deluded to think that, if only everyone bought Fair Trade we would eliminate world hunger and starvation. Fair Trade is still organised along traditional lines, and the structure of relations of producer to consumer embodied by the company is still the same as the rest of the modern food system. The wages are higher, but only fractionally (for example, Peruvian Fair Trade coffee farmers can expect about £1.60 for a ten and a half hour work day, as opposed to a non-Fair Trade wage of about £1.30), and this is a low cost for multi-billion dollar companies to greenwash their image (e.g., baby-killers Nestlé have signed their coffee products onto the Fair Trade label).

The problem really begins with where we buy our food. Fair Trade are sold by major supermarket chains and food retail outlets, and this is the primary weapon that the free market system wields against the unassuming consumer to make him or her surrender their autonomy, and to stop them thinking freely about the ethics of food. Every last aspect of a supermarket stinks of control: to take an example Patel is fond of, the reason milk is placed at the back of supermarket (check this out next time you are in one) is because it is the item we are in there most often to buy. Thus, by forcing us to march up and down the supermarket when we really only wanted one item - the milk - we are lured into buying all sorts of other products that we never consciously set out to purchase. We have become so accustomed to supermarkets (and, not to mention, they have done such a good job destroying local markets and independent stores) that we stop realising that we possess real choice about where we get what we eat.

A far better alternative is, where possible, to buy food that is locally produced, and to take the time to get to know your local producers. A critique (via) offered of Slow Food, and one I concur with, is that locally produced does not necessarily mean ethically produced. Thus it is important that in buying local food, you know the conditions under which it was created, and that the workers enjoy a decent wage. Indeed, one of the best things you can do for your local economy is to check whether there is a Living Wage Campaign in your area! (I have been involved for just over a year with the LWC in Oxford, and there is a thriving London Campaign that I have links to, if anyone is interested). But in general, producers of locally sourced food are likely to have higher wages than those who produced the food sitting on supermarket shelves; after all, in Britain at least, and in many Western countries, there is a minimum wage which is substantially higher than the rates of pay in developing countries. Moreover, food that is locally produced more often than not is fresher and tastes far better than the rubbish you get from supermarkets, as well as being cheaper. So there really is no excuse! A useful resource for finding local markets in your area (if you're in the UK) can be found here.

As I have said, this is the first of many posts on the politics and ethics of food, and I have not discussed much the worst aspects of the system; namely, the effects of decades of trade liberalisation on the developing world. But hopefully I have spurred you on: this is not an issue we should be complacent over.

Here is the anlage of the thing you fear

Hello all, and welcome to my new blog, The Zygote. This is intended as a slightly more politically enthused affair than my previous blog, and will be (hopefully) updated more regularly (weekly or bi-weekly is the aim, at any rate). It will contain musings on and information about social and political movements and issues that I find myself getting involved in, or enthusiastic about. Moreover, it aims to get you - and me - angry! Anger does not generally get a good press, but this powerful and consuming emotion can, properly channelled, achieve wonderful things. So there will be constant immersions and re-immersions in the unjust, the disgraceful, and the downright absurd aspects of modern political systems and structures, with the aim of shaking off some of the apathy that can quite easily set in unless one takes conscious steps to prevent it.

Not all of what you will find here, however, will be quite so serious. I warn you that I am strongly disposed towards philosophical meanderings, so there will likely be bouts of that. But I also want the blog to be a record of more than just my thoughts; I want to relate my experiences. To some extent, then, I cannot prefigure what will be appearing on here. I hope you enjoy, and I ought to be posting something more substantial soon.