The Other Crisis

The World Socialist Movement has always argued the case that hunger is not die to food shortages but to the fact that many people are unable to buy food .

MADRE , an international women’s human rights organization , appears to share this analysis .

"...the food crisis is not an issue of shortage but of inequitable distribution. Even as global crop yields are projected to reach record levels, rising prices place basic necessities out of the reach of millions..."

As they also reported when parts of the world are facing food riots, Agro-Capitalism were making huge profits.

Grain-processing giant Archer-Daniels-Midland Co. said its fiscal third-quarter profits jumped 42%, including a sevenfold increase in net income in its unit that stores, transports and trades grains such as wheat and corn, as well as soybeans. Monsanto maker of seeds and herbicides, Deere & Co., which builds tractors, combines and sprayers, and fertilizer maker Mosaic Co. all reported similar windfalls in their latest quarters.

There is some truth in this statement by Devinder Sharma is a New Delhi-based food and trade policy analyst.

"The political urgency with which the US government and for that matter governments elsewhere have come to the rescue of the financial system from getting worse exposes their double standards. US $600 billion (that has been coughed out in just one week) could have wiped out hunger (FAO estimates 854 million people go to bed hungry every night) from the face of the planet. The additional US $900 billion that the US has spent in the past one year could have pulled out the world's estimated 2 billion poor from perpetual poverty and that too on a long-term sustainable basis. The US $700 billion bailout package that George Bush is promising could have wiped out the last traces of poverty, hunger, malnutrition and squalor from the face of the Earth...There would have been no need for the United Nations to provide a cover-up for their collective guilt in the form of Millennium Development Goals. Poverty would have been confined to history. Hunger could have been banished by now. "