Salient

Food for Lenin

By Jackson Wood | 5 May, 2008

The current food crisis is no surprise to me. For years, people have been saying that we are producing enough food to feed the world, but that the distribution of all this food is inadequate. We have us, the Western countries which have excesses of food, where you see food thrown out wantonly; and famine in Darfur and Burkina Faso. The rise of freeganism is evidence of this. The people who are not getting the food are the people who need it.

Last week in the House the Minister of Agriculture, Hon Jim Anderton said: “the Labour-Progressive Government does not have a food security strategy because New Zealand is a nation that produces many times more the quantity of food that is required to sustain our own domestic needs.” But what are we doing with this food? What are we doing with the extra? Well, we’re not bringing down prices of food, and we’re not giving it to people who need it. We’re seeing the nasty side of the capitalist system, and low-income New Zealand families are struggling to afford bare essentials.

What’s the Government going to do about it? Removing GST has the short term effect of relieving prices. But what happens next year when food prices continue to rise? Food prices will keep going up. What New Zealand needs to do is ensure that we are using this vast quantity of food that we produce, to feed people here, and in countries where cereal prices have risen faster in two months than wages have in ten years.

Lenin predicted in 1916 in Imperialism, that something like this would happen. The global capitalist system would implode due to increasing pressure of developed nations fucking up developing nations. New Zealand sits in an interesting position, only barely on the cusp of a first world nation. We have the opportunity to help not only the poor here, but to show the stupidity of the international system, by helping those most in need elsewhere.