Food prices

Jacques Diouf, head of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation, spoke recently of a 'very serious crisis' brought about by the rise in food prices and the rise in the oil price. Various global economic bodies are forecasting rises of between 10 per cent and 50 per cent over the next decade.

There have already been riots about food prices in Mexico, West Bengal, Morocco, Senegal and Yemen, although not in Edinburgh. But the factors behind the price rises in Leith are exactly the same as those in Mexico, or in China - where, last Wednesday, the government introduced price controls on dairy products, meat, vegetables and cereals. And while food price inflation hit 18 per cent last year in China, there's no good reason why they should not do that here. In fact, there are a lot of reasons why they should.

There have been four chief drivers of food price inflation in the last two years. The first is the huge rise in oil prices: $100 a barrel means food that is four-times as expensive to plant, irrigate, harvest and transport as it was six years ago. Some commodities brokers are now betting on oil going to $200 a barrel within a decade.

The second factor is the climate: drought, hurricanes and floods around the world last year made for terrible harvests - from Australia to the Caribbean and the United Kingdom. The third is the massive rise in the price of the staple-food commodities: wheat, maize and soya. This has been partly driven by speculation in the markets, partly by the demand for crops to turn into fuel.

Ethanol, a diesel-type fuel made from plants, must bear a lot of the blame. Since George Bush announced a rush to corn-based ethanol it's done well for American corn farmers - 20 per cent of whose harvest, subsidised by the government, went into fuel tanks rather than flour mills this year. Bush's taste for corn-based ethanol is based partly on trying to break the US's reliance on Middle East oil suppliers, and partly on a (largely misplaced) faith in its ecological credentials. (Its increasingly voluble critics claim that growing grain and then transforming it into ethanol requires more energy from fossil fuels than ethanol generates.). . .

But the last, and perhaps the most disturbing factor in the food price rise, is the financial boom in India and China. Around the world, and through history, people have eaten more meat as they have become richer. This is called the nutrition transition and it's now happening, very quickly, in the two most populous nations on the planet.

Hundreds of millions more people are now rich enough to eat meat compared with 10 years ago, with meat consumption in China more than doubling over the past 20 years. Meat also consumes food resources in a shockingly inefficient way: it takes 8kg of grain to produce 1kg of beef, and 4kg for pork. But each kilo of grain may need a tonne of water. And fuel oil is needed throughout the process, to fertilise the grain, pump water and to transport it.

Water and oil will both be in short supply this century. None of this is a surprise to Tim Lang, professor of food policy at London's City University, and an adviser to the government through the Sustainable Development Commission. 'I've been expecting this for two years', he says. 'The food system is entering a period of very significant restructuring, the first since the years after the Second World War. We may look back at the second half of the last century as an era of cheap food. It'll be like the Hundred Years' War, as we were taught it in school: a seminal moment in human history that's gone and will not return.'. . .

But could there be positive aspects to the food price rises? Some environmentalists believe so, including Tim Smit, founder of the Eden Project, near St Austell in Cornwall. 'Food is ridiculously cheap and we need to pay more - for our environment to be healthy, to cut down on carbon emissions and give more income to our farmers,' he said. 'It's said that 30 per cent of all food produced in Britain is thrown away. We may be getting back to seeing what the real price of food is, and that is healthy for producers and for society.'

So is there a morally preferable price level for food, at which people will value it more, and waste less? Raj Patel, a political economist at Cornell University in California, and author of Stuffed and Starved - on the politics of global food supply - says that allowing the market to set prices to make people behave better is not the answer. 'There are greens who are crowing that the price of food going up is going to benefit the environment and help the small producer,' he says. 'But the benefit of the rises is going to the contractors and the commodity brokers - not to the farmers or to developing world economies. Nor are supermarkets innocent victims of price rises. Sainsbury's and Tesco have recorded double-digit growth in profits last year.' . . .

But as the situation stands today, at least a third of the world - including the populations of China, Russia and India - have government-imposed price limits on their foods.

'That's how it's going, says Lang. 'You can't wriggle out of the facts. There are water shortages, climate change, energy price rises, population demographics, waste. We can't go on eating meat the way we do: the economics of it just won't add up.'

Muslim Bishop

ومن ذاكرتي الجميلة التي كانت الحرب اللبنانية مدخلاً مرسوماً الى قطعها، اني دعيت في آذار في عام 1975 الى مهرجان في كلية الحقوق في الجامعة اللبنانية تحت عنوان: الجنوب وكبوجي - وكان معتقلاً في الارض المحتلة - وقد تعرض الجنوب في بداية العام الى عدوان يومي شرس (كفرشوبا تحديداً، حيث هدم مسجدها ومدرستها بقذائف المدفعية الاسرائيلية) وشارك في المهرجان من المتكلمين المطران غريغوار حداد والاب حليم ريشا والاخت نجاة نعيمة وشفيق الحوت وأنا، وقدم الخطباء الاستاذ بشير عميرة... ألقيت كلمتي وجلست. وبعد قليل تكلم بشير عميرة وقال: بناء على طلب الجمهور فإن كلمة "الاسقف" هاني فحص سوف تطبع وتوزع عليكم. واشتعلت القاعة بالتصفيق امام ذهول بشير عميرة الذي لم يكن يدري ماذا فعل من خطأ أجمل من الصواب. وكان في القاعة عشرات من الرهبان والراهبات. والتقطها الاستاذ شفيق الحوت وكتب حول معنى هذا الخطأ الصحيح في جريدة "المحرر" وفي زاويته اليومية تحت عنوان: إبن البلد.

Minimum wage legislation?

I have been pondering on whether the issue of campaigning for a higher minimum wage should be a priority for progressives in Lebanon. I could not find a full account on the issue in historical references, only some passages:
Marx:

. . . some trivialities which Guesde found it necessary to throw to the French workers notwithstanding my protest, such as fixing the minimum wage by law, etc. (I told him: “If the French proletariat is still so childish as to require such bait, it is not worth while drawing up any program whatever”). . .

Lenin:

It is true that this law, like all bourgeois reforms, is a miserable half-measure and in part a mere deception of the workers, because while fixing the lowest rate of pay, the employers keep their wage-slaves down all the same. Nevertheless, those who are familiar with the British labour movement say that since the miners’ strike the British proletariat is no longer the same. The workers have learned to fight. They have come to see the path that will lead them to victory. They have become aware of their strength. They have ceased to be the meek lambs they seemed to be for so long a time to the joy of all the defenders and extollers of wage-slavery.

Luxemburg:

But it is obvious that the class character of any particular demand is not established by merely incorporating it mechanically into the program of a socialist party. What this or any other party considers a "class interest" of the proletariat can only be an imputed interest, concocted by subjective reasoning. It is very easy, for instance, to state that the workers' class interest demands the establishment of a minimum-wage law. Such a law would protect the workers against the pressures of competition, which might come from a less developed locality. It would assure them of a certain minimum standard of living, etc. Such demands have been presented repeatedly by socialist circles; however, the principle has not yet been accepted by the socialist parties in general, for the valid reason that the universal regulation of wages by means of legislation is but a utopian dream under today's anarchistic conditions of private economy. This is because workers' wages, like the prices of any kind of commodity, are set up in the capitalistic system under the operation of "free competition" and the spontaneous movement of capital. Therefore, the legal regulation of wages can be achieved only in exceptional, clearly defined areas, e.g., in small communities. And since the general establishment of a minimum-wage law clashes with the current conditions of capitalism, we must admit that it is not a true proletarian interest, but rather a fabricated or imputed one, in spite of the fact that it can be supported by a completely logical argument.

What to make of that? Campaigning for a higher minimum wage (or legislation, if non-existent) can contribute to workers' struggle when the labor movement is weak, as is currently the case in Lebanon. But there are issues to be aware of, such as reversibility, the question of declining real value of the set minimum wage with rising prices, its effective enforcement when capitalists control the state, capitalist competition leading to exploiting workers not covered by the legislation (whether at home or abroad, an important issue given the great mobility of capital at this stage), and changes in job availability in different sectors.

Ultimately however, minimum wages should be set through collective bargaining, not legislation. The process would resist the problems mentioned above, with an internationalist perspective ensuring that all workers benefit. So it seems that increasing the minimum wage should be set as a priority now to mobilize workers. The wage level to be demanded must be set only according to that criterion (which level would have the largest support from the working class). So its value is mostly instrumental. As the labor movement is strengthened, the goal must then be to bargain collectively on minimum wages.