At the End of the Day

The Slog

by John Ward

All we have is a bit of a distribution problem

I start tonight’s roundup of human Earthbound folly in Greece, where the following entirely sensible measures have been enacted by the EC arse-lickers in Athens Greek Government as it attempts to put into practice the fantasies of the Generals in Berlin-am-Brussels:

Instead of relying on reported turnover from the self-employed, the Samaras government will now tax them based on estimates that fit the Troikanaut targets. This is a bit like your electricity company estimating consumption on the basis of triggering the marketing director’s bonus. Talking of heating things, for this coming winter there will be no reduction in the tax on heating oil.

But there is little or nothing to fear, because the economic recovery that was going to begin in late 2013 is now confirmed as definitely “in sight” for Greece at the end of 2014…..not too long after which unemployment will start falling. This is great news, as in Thessalonika over Easter, gdp was down 20%, and in Greece overall youth unemployment soared to a new peak at 64%.

But as this very human tragedy unfolds in South East Europe, bigger things are exercising the smaller, inhuman minds in Brussels itself. For on the stocks there is an attempt by the EU to pass a law making it illegal for individuals to plant, save, sell, or trade their own seeds for any food item. The mind boggles at what that might be about, but while it’s boggling away there, here’s a few facts about world food supply.

A daily ration of bread is now beyond the reach of roughly a billion people on planet Earth. In Greece and Spain, city dwellers are used to the sight of people from all walks of life rummaging in rubbish bins for a bite to eat. (In Athens, I saw it for myself). But elsewhere beyond Europe, things are much worse…..and rapidly getting worse still. Traditionally, commentators have suggested that overpopulation beyond any other factor should be brought to book for this; but it just isn’t true.

A handful of businesses control the global food chain in 2013, and in each country a usually even smaller number of hypermarket distributors control the prices that drive up inflation and drive farmers out of business. Esther Vivas of the Pompeu Fabra University’s Centre of Studies on Social Movements points out how the global agribusiness model is geared purely for the generation of ever-bigger profits for its shareholders. Valuing profit and buying clout above human welfare is an odd way for human beings to behave, but in the 21st Friedman-worshipping neocon Century, it is I’m afraid regarded as both sensible and normal.

So too is globalisation seen by idiots as diverse as Gordon Brown and George Osborne as the only viable future. But the truth is that the globalisation of food supply has seen the economies of Western scale crush the small farming bases of Africa, India and Asia. Go to South East Africa now, and you will see the same prices being paid in food markets as one might expect in London’s Borough market, or Eymet on the Dordogne. Given the disparities of income between those three places, this is market decisiveness gone insane.

Except of course that markets do not decide as per the half-baked ideas of  Mad Milt and his Mob of drivel-quoting disciples: markets are set by small cartels, manipulated by central bankers, or fixed by crooks of every persuasion. I marvelled at the feigned shock from the Fallons and Hunts and Johnsons when Vince Cable dared to call such people spivs. For myself, I thought his remarks spivist: the average wide-boy immortalised by the shortages of the Second World War had more human kindness in his back passage than all of Cable’s targets put together.

As the World Health Organisation asserts – quite correctly – over and over again, ‘There is enough food in the world to feed everyone adequately; the problem is distribution.’ All we in the privileged world outside Africa, Asia and ClubMed would have to do is move away from the remote shareholder model  of food production, and accept more healthy levels of food consumption: doing those two very sensible and relatively simple things would mean everyone in the world having enough to eat by 2017. Switching to a self-sufficiency model for food would mean a massive trade in surplus – and too much food for everyone even in Africa – by 2029.

But in the world we have created for our species, distribution is the eternal problem. The distribution of common sense, common humanity, and communal support is similarly challenged. There is no common sense at all in a low income/high tax system of austerity. There is no common humanity in the continued inflexibility of Berlin’s approach to that austerity. And there is not one iota of communal support in the EC’s ridiculous contention that the Greek people should be punished for the obscene greed of a 2% elite.

Too often here in Europe, we show signs of those mediaeval bigots who thought sailors looking for new lands would fall off the ends of the Earth. The EU is but a microcosm – albeit a gross caricature – of a global problem in which a grasping, materially compulsive minority insists that nothing is wrong and all will soon be right. The mining companies in Australia, the oil barons in Texas, the bankers in the City of London, the energy mafiosa in Russia and the crypto-Soviets in Brussels continue to dig, drill, derive, dispute and direct as if there was nothing abnormal going on at all – as if this might be nothing more than Mankind going about its expected daily business.

In reality, it is a study in denialist absurdity. And when the curtain comes down on this farce, the audience may well be startled; but not many will be laughing.