press and on TV about starvation in the "third world".
- Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo.
Malthus argued that population will always tend to grow at least as Fast as the productivity of labour. Thus any increase in economic production could not raise living standards for long, but would be eaten up supporting more people. His message was simple - poverty will always.be with us.
SORRY TALE Ricardo told a slightly more sophisticated version of the same sotry tale. According to him, as population grew farmers would have to till more and more less fertile land, in order to grow the additional food required. More labour would be required to produce the same quantity of food on this less fertile land as on the hetter land, and so the average cost of producing food would go up. This would then set off a chain reaction: food prices would go up and higher wages would be necessary to enable workers to buy the necessities of life; profits would then fall and the money The UN's World Food Conference has led to a flurry of discussion in the But almost all these discussions are based on the sort of thinking that was worked out almost two centuries ago by two of the first capitalist economists available for investment in new capital would be cut back. Asa result economic stagnation would set in.
However, let's look at some facts. Since the war, the population in a country like India has risen at 2% per cent a year. On the other hand, the rate in the US has been leas than 0,6 per cent a year, Britain's 0.3 per cent, and Germany's population has actually fallen! In other words, things have been the opposite of what Malthus predicted; in the countries where labour productivity has risen most rapidly population growth has been the slowest.
Part of the explanation for this lies in the fact that in the colonial and semi-colonial countries production is carried out mainly by physical labour, without the aid of machines, and is organised through the family, Since there are few state provisions for 'social security", it is also the family which must take care of the sick, the injured and the aged. Thus people are driven to have large families in order to eke out a living and give themselves some small measure of security.
CAUSE For this reason, porerty is much more a cause of high population growth, rather than its effect.
Nor are the facts uny kinder to Ricardo's arguments, The production of busic grain (a main source of human food, both directly, and through providing feed for domestic animals) is rising at a rate of about 3 per cent cach ycar. Most of the increase is concentrated in the Coited States, and is not due to the use of more land and labour, but to the higher productity orland abd labour brought aboul by mechanisation and the use of fertilisers.
Starvation results from the distribution of the food produced. In the carly 50's both the advanced capitalist and the underdeveloped countries, looked at separately, produced roughly enough grain to meet their needs. Yet by 1973 the advanced countries were producing 50 million tons more than they needed each year, while the underdeveloped nations were short by about the same amount.
So much was being produced in the United States that the Government was paying farmers not to produce, in order to keep prices up.
have become less and leas able to pay for imports of grain. The price has quadrupled over the last two years, while agricultural aid has halved and oil prices rises have pushed up import bills. Natural half of the deliberate restriction imposed on US production! High and speculstion are a much more serious problem.
ago when he destroyed the arguments of Matthus, Ricaido and their supporters, the source of the problem lies in capitalism, and not 'natural' causes like shortage of land or too many people, Poverty exists in the third world today because Ineir stranglehold over these coun Now the advanced capitalist countries are themselves faced with big economic problems, and the competition and rivalry between the big imperialist powers is growing daily. Neither the UN nor unyone else will be able to persuade the US, the other impMeanwhile, the poor countries difficulties such as crop failures have been grossly exaggerated, The scale of the shortage is only 30-35million tons prices pushed up further by hoarding As Marx pointed out a century capitalism and imperialism maintain more 'important' things to worry about than mass starvation.
John Harrison I with the protective wings of the ruling The mad anarchy of capitalism: calves are slaughtered (left) to keep up beef prices, while (below) the only food this Indian could find was grass.