Food for All: Creating a Socially Sustainable Food System
Arun Gupta
Open your refrigerator and you’ve opened a door to the world: coffee from Ethiopia, shrimp from Thailand, blueberries from Chile, apples from New Zealand, spices from the Middle East, and ground beef that may have bits of meat from cattle raised in several different countries. For those who can afford it, the global cornucopia is one of the wonders of capitalism. Those who can’t suffer starvation and hunger, displacement from the land, and the disappearance of their unique cultures. And all of humanity must bear the costs of industrialized agriculture, including global warming, depleted soils, species extinction, leveled forests, collapsing ocean life, and the diseases of obesity and malnutrition.
The immediate cause of our broken food system is overproduction. Capitalism demands endless expansion. More production and more trade mean capitalists can generate more profits by capturing a bigger share of the market and driving down costs. Inevitably, this floods the market with goods. The excess supply drives down prices and profits, which the capitalist addresses by shuttering factories, squeezing wages, and firing workers. For farmers, a glut of wheat or pork means they earn less. They desperately try to stay afloat by slashing prices and producing more, which further depresses prices.
A socialist agricultural system could eliminate such crises, but it would still have to produce a surplus of food and agricultural goods. Food is different from other necessities. While people can weather a housing shortage by doubling up in households, and limited medical care can be addressed by delaying noncritical procedures and using other therapies, a food shortage spells hunger or death for many.
With store shelves bursting with beans, bread, and fruit—and a hot pizza just a phone call away—we take our food system for granted. In fact, it is fragile. If farmers lack seeds, tractors, fuel, or fertilizer, not enough crops will be planted. Diseases, pests, and unpredictable weather affect harvests. There are losses all along the supply chain, from rotting grain in silos to crushed boxes of crackers in warehouses, from sour milk in supermarkets to mushy vegetables in your fridge. To top it off, global warming is bringing with it its own disasters, like the drought that ravaged much of the American breadbasket in 2012.
Under capitalism, the system favors large agribusinesses that can mobilize economies of scale and public subsidies to their advantage. Although farm subsidies are supposed to help “family farmers,” corporations vacuum up most of them. In 2008, a US Department of Agriculture study found that the largest 12 percent of farms raked in 62 percent of the subsidies.
Public subsidies squeeze farmers’ incomes by forcing the price of many commodities below the cost of production. Also, giant food corporations such as Cargill, Tyson, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), and Kraft create choke points by controlling key parts of the system, such as soybean crushing, dairy processing, and beef packing. These two forces—below-cost prices for foodstuffs and monopoly control of processing and trading—spell doom for small farmers. Processors and traders pay farmers such low wholesale prices that only the heavily subsidized big farms can consistently turn a profit. Small farmers have few other options, because a handful of corporations have sway over the markets for each specific agricultural product.
As a result, millions of small farmers go bankrupt and are pushed off the land, and large enterprises expand their control of the market. When the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect in 1994, Mexicans were told that it would reduce the price of corn tortillas, the most important food in their diet. By 2006, as heavily subsidized American corn flooded Mexico, corn prices had plunged by 59 percent. Despite all this cheap corn, tortilla prices leaped by more than 42 percent in 2007.
What happened? A few corporations, including Cargill, ADM, and Walmart, gained control of key nodes in the corn industry including wet milling, producing corn flour, tortilla making, and retailing. Traders profit by buying corn when it’s priced low, hoarding it, and then selling it when prices rise. Walmart captured 30 percent of all supermarket grocery sales in Mexico. That enabled it to raise prices to increase its profits or lower them to force out small retailers.
Some governments subsidize the entire agricultural sector rather than just large for-profit farms. But most people still lose out. Some subsidies push up the price of food. Sometimes the government dumps surplus food purchased from large producers into the market, imperiling small farmers and peddlers. Big food companies gobble up low-cost inputs to create unhealthy processed foods. Familiar foods and ways of eating are sacrificed on the altar of profit—chips and soda eaten on the run replace beans and rice eaten as part of a communal meal. Small-scale retailers, producers, and distributors are swallowed up or forced out of the industrial-scale system.
The motor of capitalism is to turn the stuff of life—bread, water, housing, medicine, education—into market commodities. Its intent is not to fill people’s bellies, which is why an estimated 925 million people worldwide suffer from hunger despite the sea of abundance.
The use of food crops as a raw material for industry also diverts food from people’s mouths. Corn, America’s number-one crop by yield, is used in scores of other products, including plastics, paint, insecticides, pharmaceuticals, solvents, rayon, antifreeze, soap, biofuel, and animal feed. In Mexico, the use of corn for biofuel is a significant factor in rising tortilla prices, and thus in declining consumption. About one-eighth of Mexican children under the age of five are chronically malnourished.
Under a socialist system, food would be a right, not a commodity. But if socialism is defined as state ownership, then the state will be tempted to commodify agricultural goods as an easy means to secure hard currency or pay for critical supplies if desperate. In Cuba in the late 1980s, sugar accounted for 70 percent of the country’s export earnings, as it would trade the Soviet Union one ton of sugar for 4.5 tons of crude oil.
Two other aspects of commodification need to be addressed under socialism: land and labor. Mexico’s ejido system of common lands did not break up the plantations or prevent the spread of landless agricultural workers because large landholders, especially cattle ranchers, used their economic power to increase their holdings. And even in a socialist state, commodifying food leads to the industrial-scale farming that’s prevalent under capitalism. This turns many farmers into rural wage laborers and undermines food security for producers, individuals, communities, and nations. It certainly abandons the socialist ideal that workers control the means of production.
In a genuine socialist system, in which agricultural workers, farmers, and communities control the land, farming, processing, and distribution, the imperative for commodification would be reduced because much of the food would be consumed locally. But as very few regions, especially those with large populations, can meet the nutritional needs of all inhabitants, trading is a necessity. This requires systems of exchange.
What would a socialist food system look like? Land would be collectively owned, not just by farmers but by everyone in the community. It would not be privately owned under any circumstances. (The use of land could change, but that would be democratically decided.) Those who work the land would receive an equal share of the proceeds, while those in the community who depend on that land for sustenance but do not perform agricultural work would also have a right to foodstuffs. They would have a say in decisions about land use, what is produced, and how surpluses are distributed.
In cities and towns, vacant lots could be used as community farms. In the United States during World War II, it’s estimated that “victory gardens” grew as much produce as commercial agriculture, with nearly ten million tons of fruit and vegetables harvested annually from rooftops, window planters, and empty lots.
Americans saved this food by canning it, which allows food to be stored in glass jars at room temperature for up to a year. This requires canning equipment, knowledge, labor, time, and facilities. In northern regions, where outdoor growing seasons last six months or less, the average family would have to grow, process, can, and store a few hundred jars in order to have fruits and vegetables year-round. Multiply that by a few thousand households in a small town, and the scale of production quickly becomes industrial.
To create a local, collective food system, we would have to rethink daily life, from housing and community to work and leisure, so people would have the time and space to farm. Common gardens are more efficient than individual plots because the community can combine labor and resources. At harvest time, communal kitchens would be vital to prepping, cooking, and canning the hundreds of tons of raw food. Individual households would not have to mobilize extra labor or own canning equipment that they’d use only a few times a year. Communal kitchens could also feed households, workplaces, and schools year-round.
As socialism is about social relations, any new food system would have to place a high priority on its communal aspects. The food- and nutrition-related diseases that afflict affluent countries like the United States start with alienation. Many farmers say children today are often unable to distinguish an apple from a tomato or a horse from a cow. Without such basic knowledge, children are more apt to believe chicken nuggets, chips, and candy bars are real food.
In addition to communal gardens and kitchens, there would be cooperatives for distribution. One example is Brooklyn’s Park Slope Food Coop, the largest US-based food cooperative where all members work. Community-supported agriculture, in which a group of people receive food directly from a farm, cutting out wasteful middlemen, is another successful form of collective distribution.
Some people would be happy to grow and process as much of their own food as possible. This would require dramatically scaling back the workweek. For those unable or not inclined to farm, agricultural work would become part of the commons. Workers in food production would receive other means of subsistence—such as housing, clothing, health care, transportation, and education—in exchange for the fruits of their labor. Workers in non-agricultural sectors could also help plant and harvest crops or work in the distribution or production process, trading labor instead of money for food.
Schools would produce food to feed students and to educate children about healthy eating habits, humanity’s connection with nature, and the social roles of food. The “farm-to-school” model could connect individual farms with schools, so children could learn about cultivation hands-on. Communal kitchens would teach children and adults how to prepare and cook food, and could also teach about different peoples’ food cultures and traditions.
With most households of just one or two people, most of us in the workforce are pressed for time to prepare food. The quick fix is to stuff our faces with processed foods, which are engineered to light up our pleasure centers like a video game. Corporations profit at the expense of our individual and social health. In societies where communal meals are still the norm, such as in France, rates of obesity-related diseases are much lower because people snack less and eat less junk and industrial foods (though that is changing for younger generations in France).
Space is one of the most important issues in any economy. Local agriculture can provide some protein and fat in the form of aquaculture and egg-laying chickens and ducks, but the cultivation of many foods—grains, nuts, legumes, vegetable oils, beef, pork, fish, spices, tea, chocolate, coffee, salt, and sugar—requires specialized equipment, labor, climates, and land. This makes it impractical or impossible to grow them in urban areas.
Questions of land and labor are more challenging when a few regions, such as central China’s rice paddies, southern Ukraine’s wheat fields, or the American Great Plains, account for a large share of global food production. Control of the land should be in the public domain, but how will that work if tens or even hundreds of millions of people depend on a specific “breadbasket” for sustenance?
To some degree, production can be dispersed and traditional crops substituted. For example, for many urban dwellers in Nigeria, bread has displaced traditional starches like sorghum, millet, and yams. Nigeria is now the world’s leading importer of US wheat—3.3 million tons in 2010. It would not be technically difficult for Nigeria to switch back, but the biggest obstacle might be changing bread-eating habits.
Nonetheless, trade is desirable. Many would find it a cruel world to live in without coffee, wine, spices, and chocolate. The question is how to do it. Flying flowers from Colombia or fish from Japan to New York City is ecologically destructive, displaces traditional crops, and relies on exploited labor—from the workers picking crops in toxic conditions to the ones retailing them in poverty-wage jobs. Non-perishable goods can be moved by ship and rail, which are far more energy-efficient than jet planes. Many types of produce, such as bananas, citrus fruit, apples, and tubers, can also be transported over long distances by these slower and more sustainable methods.
Every political system must grapple with how to allocate finite agricultural inputs such as energy, water, seeds, fertilizer, machinery, chemicals, and knowledge. (Under capitalism, food has itself become an input, whether as grain to bulk up cattle or sugarcane that is refined into ethanol.) After World War II, when countries that proclaimed socialism promoted state-led development, the farmers who received the most inputs were men producing for export markets, rather than women who were growing food for household and internal consumption. Sociologist Philip McMichael writes of this era, “Only monetized transactions were counted as productive, devaluing subsistence, cooperative labor, indigenous culture, seed saving, and managing the commons as unproductive, marginalized, and undeveloped activity.”
If hard-cash exports are a priority, agriculture will evolve into a capitalist system regardless of the governing ideology. If community were the priority, then dependence on the market would decrease. But what is community? If a poor rice harvest in the Philippines means rice has to be imported from Thailand, or if Russia needs wheat and only the United States has enough reserves, the shortages increase the likelihood of war or civil unrest. Indeed, the 2011 democratic uprising in Egypt was stoked by high food prices.
In India, for more than a millennium prior to British colonialism, famines occurred less than once a century because villages had abundant food reserves—to which everyone in the village had a right—to get them through a poor harvest. Fifty years ago, many governments practiced similar forms of collective support by providing marketing boards, price supports, grain reserves, roads, subsidized seeds and fertilizers, rural credit, tariffs, export barriers, and other types of aid that made episodes of mass starvation rare. The main goal was food security: each country should be secure in its food supply.
In the 1980s, a new ideology replaced that one: the market will provide for all. “The idea that developing countries should feed themselves is an anachronism from a bygone era,” a Reagan administration official declared. “They could better ensure their food security by relying on US agricultural products, which are available in most cases at lower cost.” This official neglected to mention that low-cost US products were available for sale to those developing countries thanks to US government subsidies to US farmers.
This double standard has not stopped Washington, its allies, and the World Trade Organization and International Monetary Fund from leveraging aid and loans to force countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America to stop supporting their own local agriculture. The West demands that less-developed countries turn to export goods to generate foreign currency, and many countries comply because they are drowning in debt that can only be paid back with dollars or euros. This has led to a situation, now common, even in the United States, for many areas to have abundant food while nearby communities struggle with widespread hunger and malnutrition.
The notion of “food security,” whether in the US or developing countries, was problematic, as it relied on a state-centered system intended to maximize food production. This favored an industrial model, such as the “Green Revolution” of the 1960s, an agricultural technique introduced to developing countries by the US that pushed many subsistence farmers off the land. The Green Revolution also relied on toxic pesticides and artificial fertilizers that made countries and farmers more dependent on the large Western corporations that produced them. It was only a few steps from there to growing genetically modified crops. And it is highly questionable whether using these artificial inputs increases food production.
A new grassroots democratic model is known as “food sovereignty.” It is based “on a farmer-driven agriculture that is the key to food-secure relations of environmental and social sustainability.” The concept was developed by Via Campesina, which describes itself as an international peasant movement. Via Campesina states:
In order to guarantee the independence and food sovereignty of all of the world’s peoples, it is essential that food be produced through diversified, farmer-based production systems. Food sovereignty is the right of peoples to define their own agriculture and food policies, to protect and regulate domestic agricultural production and trade in order to achieve sustainable development objectives, to determine the extent to which they want to be self-reliant, and to restrict the dumping of products in their markets. Food sovereignty does not negate trade, but rather, it promotes the formulation of trade policies and practices that serve the rights of peoples to safe, healthy, and ecologically sustainable production.
Such a vision incorporates trade, but it makes it secondary to security and democratic control for and by the people, not for state, corporate, or other elite interests. It recognizes there is no one-size-fits-all solution, which was one of the fatal flaws of the state-led socialist model of industrialized agriculture. As famed French farmer-activist Jose Bove puts it, “We have to provide answers at different levels—not just the international level, but local and national levels, too.”
Creating a socially and ecologically sustainable food system means confronting the power and complexity of capitalism. Growing tomatoes in a city plot or raising a few chickens in your backyard is not a solution. Neither is shopping at Whole Foods or a farmers market, no matter how much personal satisfaction you get by doing so. We can’t repair our food system by trying to shop our way to a greener planet.
A socialist food system would mimic both the complexity and simplicity of nature. It would create many different forms to meet the needs and conditions in different communities and regions. It would act according to the fundamental principles of democratic control over the economy and people’s right to have nutritious and sufficient food.
These questions will become ever more urgent as global warming wreaks havoc on the biosphere. Humanity will have to figure out how to band together to ensure a just life for all or risk descending further into barbarism. This is a struggle that we can win—one that we must win.