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The
market fails again
Within
a month of the Live8 concerts that were supposed to influence the
leaders of world capitalism to do something about poverty in Africa,
the charities had to get their begging bowls out again. This time for
a famine in Niger, an ex-French colony to the north of Nigeria with a
population of over 11.6 million.
In
October last year various international agencies including the UN’s
Food and Agriculture Organisation signalled that, due to a bad
harvest and an invasion of locusts, cereal production in Niger in
2004-5 was likely to be 7.5 percent below normal. In accordance with
the law of supply and demand the price of millet, the main cereal
grown and consumed in Niger, began to rise, with the result that the
farmers whose crop had failed were unable to afford to buy enough
food for their families. Malnutrition, especially amongst children,
grew.
The
government reacted by bringing in a scheme to sell millet at a
reduced price, but although this was below the market price it was
still two times higher than the price the farmers had received for
their 2003-4 crop.
Dr
Isabelle Defourny, of Médicins Sans Frontières, takes
up the story:
“In
early June, Niger's prime minister acknowledged that the government’s
response was ineffective when he noted that hundreds of thousands of
the 3.5 million people threatened by the food shortage were too poor
to be able to purchase cereal, even at a low price. Those most
severely affected by the food crisis have the least resources,
including farmers whose harvests were poor and cattle producers and
craftsmen. Many had already exhausted their resources, selling goods
and animals to feed themselves.” (Messages, MSF newsletter,
July-August, www.msf.fr/documents/base/2005-07-01-Messages137VA.pdf
)
MSF
urged that “free food distribution is the
only way to keep the situation from worsening and to prevent large
numbers of deaths”, a perfectly
reasonable proposal if we were living in a society geared to serving
human needs and welfare. But we’re not.
The authorities took a different view, for reasons explained by
social researcher, Jean-Hervé Jezequel, in an interview in the
same issue of Messages:
“ .
. . in early June, at a meeting of the Joint Commission for
Consultation, the decision-making body of the ‘action plan’ which
includes representatives of the state and of institutional donors,
the government of Niger declared that despite the seriousness of the
food crisis, it would not set up free distribution operations. The
only political reaction from the institutional donors came from the
ambassador of France, who was glad there was a ‘policy that will
not destabilize the markets’. The ambience was almost surreal:
ignoring the emergency food situation, economic considerations were,
without hesitation, given priority over the fate of endangered
people.”
The
French newspaper Libération reported that some cereal
merchants had held back stocks to drive up prices further and that
others had “disposed of their stocks in
neighbouring Nigeria where the population has a higher purchasing
power” (9 August).
So,
yet again, as in every “food crisis”
since the Great Starvation in Ireland in the 1840s, the workings of
capitalism have produced the obscene spectacle of the export of food
from an area where people are starving because, not having money,
they don’t constitute a market and so
don’t count.
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