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Three billion
people around the world are facing starvation right now!
Thirty people a minute are dying of starvation in a world where half
the world’s population lives on less than $2 a day. Thirty
countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America are undergoing massive
food rebellions. In Haiti, 80 percent of the population no
longer have the resources to eat food. Millions in Haiti are
forced to subsist on mud mixed with sugar and shortening.
But we
Americans are likely to believe that world starvation of this kind
has nothing to do with us. However, global hunger has
everything to do with us.
Every aspect of this world food crisis is made
in white America, by Americans, for America’s economic benefit.
Today’s skyrocketing rice and grain prices are not the result of
shortages!
We are seeing record rice crops globally this year!
Real factors contributing to the current rapid rise in food costs
and starvation worldwide are:
1)
Wall Street speculation. Commodities like grains are
thought to be safe investments against the falling dollar and loss
of faith in the stock market. The surge in grain and
agriculture investment has created a grains bubble. By now all
the bad subprime mortgage bonds in money market or retirement funds
have been replaced with commodities.
Baby
boomers will enjoy a “secure” retirement at the cost of the death of
many children all over the world!
2) Biofuel genocide. Wall Street investors are
creating an ethanol bubble too, driving up the prices of grain grown
for fuel rather than for food. Farmers around the world can no
longer afford to grow grain for food when the earnings for fuel are
far greater!
Fidel
Castro has said that biofuels will take the lives of three billion
people, turning their stable crops into fuel for transportation for
the rich.
“This
colossal waste of cereals for producing fuel… would serve only to
save the rich countries less than 15 percent of what is annually
consumed by their voracious automobiles.”
3) Free Trade
Agreements.
Historically governments kept restrictions on the price of food to
prevent speculation and price gouging. Now governments around
the world have agreed to the forced deregulation of world
agricultural markets. Haiti, where people are today forced to
subsist on mud, is a perfect example. Twenty-five years
ago Haitian farmers grew and exported their own rice.
In
the late 1980s the U.S.-backed International Monetary Fund forced
Haiti, as a condition for a desperately needed loan, to deregulate
their markets and open them up to competition from the outside.
The U.S. then dumped its government-subsidized rice onto Haiti (and
many other countries around the world) selling the American rice
cheaper than Haiti farmers could sell theirs for. The U.S.
rice dumping brought to an abrupt halt Haiti’s own self-sufficient
agricultural infrastructure and forced millions of people into
desperate poverty.
4) U.S. Agribusiness. Cargill, Archer Daniels
Midland, and Bunge control the majority of the global grain market
while Monsanto controls over a fifth of the global market in seeds.
While billions of human beings are starving, Cargill’s third quarter
2007 profits increased more than 86 percent and Monsanto’s were up
45 percent. In fact they are using the current crisis to
further impose their genetically modified seeds on the peoples of
the world.
The U.S. will not be immune from this crisis. Almost 22% of
African families in America experience food insecurity — not knowing
where their next meal will come from. One out of twelve
Indigenous families forced onto reservations on their own land
experience food insecurity with hunger. Throughout the U.S.
the African community has been hit hard by the collapse of the
subprime mortgage scam, which again made Wall Street bankers and
investors billions of dollars. Cities with high African
populations, such as Cleveland, Baltimore, Detroit, and Atlanta are
seeing tens of thousands of families facing foreclosure and
homelessness as a result of this. When the full weight of this
crisis hits over the next couple of years, millions of African
people in America will be plunged even more deeply into poverty.
What can we do?
The only thing
that will really end this crisis is ending the system that acts as a
parasite sucking the blood of the peoples of the world. Let’s
face it: the prosperity of the white world is directly dependent on
slavery, genocide, and theft of the resources of just about everyone
else. For us Americans to live, they can’t!
World peace and cooperation is, of course, forever impossible under
such a system. Going “green” in and of itself is no solution.
Environmentalism inside of a system sitting on a pedestal of slavery
and colonialism will do nothing but make us feel good for recycling
bottles or saving the ozone, while the majority of people continue
to suffer and die. Environmental destruction is simply a
byproduct of a system that wipes out whole peoples and civilizations
to maintain our artificial life style!
To end starvation, the
earth’s oppressed peoples need to take control over their land,
resources, lives, and destinies again. The people of Iraq,
Palestine, Venezuela, along with African, Mexican, and Indigenous
people colonized inside America are struggling for this. This
is the struggle for national liberation. The Uhuru
Solidarity Movement, led by the African People’s Socialist
Party, has built a people’s organization that defends the
democratic rights of the African community that has been massively
imprisoned, placed under martial law, and subjected to oppressive
educational systems worldwide. White people who find that
living at the expense of the suffering of the vast majority of
humanity is intolerable can join the Uhuru Solidarity Movement led
by APSC. You and I can make a difference and build a system of
justice and peace, not as mere consumers of information, but by
taking a real stand in solidarity for the future of the planet in
the hands of African and oppressed people.
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