Leaflet in PDF format for mass distribution

Instead of Wars of Starvation, Let Us Double Food Production

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

Schiller Institute schillerinstitute.org
703-771-8390 (United States)

May 3, 2008 (LPAC)--The fiery letters of an unprecedented human catastrophe already stand flickering on the wall, and it will be fatal for the world as a whole, if we do not succeed immediately, in the coming days and weeks, to declare globalization a failure, and to set everything into motion to double agricultural production capacity in the shortest possible time!

This is of the utmost urgency: Since October 2007, there have been food riots in over 40 nations. According to Rajat Nag, managing director general of the Asian Development Bank, 1 billion Asians (!) are already at serious risk from the hunger crisis, and in Africa, Ibero-America, and among the poor on the other continents, an additional 1 billion face the same fate. But according to Jacques Diouf, head of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), since December his organization has been unable to raise 10.9 million euros (!) in order to purchase seed for poor farmers in developing countries. The rich states are simply not willing to support the developing countries with money, seed, and investment in infrastructure, Diouf told an FAO conference on Latin America in Brasilia in mid-April.

Jean Ziegler, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, pointed to an additional aspect of the crisis; namely, that the use of food for biofuels is a ``crime against humanity.'' In order that we might fill our gas tanks with ethanol with clear ecological conscience, people in the Third World must starve (and also die). Speaking of the resulting food riots, Ziegler said, ``These are riots of utter despair by people who fear for their lives, and who, nagged by deathly fear, take to the streets.''

And that's only the beginning. Because, as long as the current policy of the ``rich'' nations--i.e., the free-trade doctrine of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the European Union Commission, and so one--continues, the food cartels and speculators will take advantage of the conditions created by the escalating systemic crisis of the world financial system, to maximize their profits and to feed price inflation, without the farmers reaping any benefit therefrom. And if the world's central banks continue their practice of using tax revenues in an attempt to make up for the speculative losses of private banks, then we are going to see hyperinflation like Weimar Germany spread around the globe.

Under these circumstances, the entire planet will be swept by the storm winds of food riots, until humanity descends into a new dark age of chaos, gang warfare, and climbing death rates--or, until justice and life with human dignity is established for all human beings on this planet.

- The Oligarchy's Malthusian Axioms -

For the year 2050, the UN forecasts a population growth of 33%, that is, from the current 6.7 billion to approximately 9 billion human beings. The demand for food will rise correspondingly, and if we add the approximately 2 billion who are currently undernourished, then a doubling of food production is a good rough measure on which we can orient our planning efforts.

One would be hard put to find another issue which more effectively unmasks the oligarchical axiomatic state of mind, as this one. The U.S.-Eurocentric outlook regards the prospective population growth as a threat, bringing with it the challenge of mass immigration of poor people into the developed countries, and the struggle to secure raw materials (most of which are located in the poor countries). This viewpoint was most recently expressed by Michael V. Hayden, U.S. Director of Central Intelligence, at a speech at the University of Kansas. He asserted that this growth will occur chiefly in the nations of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, places where this population growth cannot be sustained economically, thus leading to a heightened danger of violence, rebellion, and extremism. This same oligarchical axiomatic outlook underlies the unspeakable strategy paper issued by five retired generals, who count as the first among the six primary challenges to the world community, population growth and the unequal distribution of the demographic curve in the various continents. This poses the greatest threat to prosperity, responsible government, and energy security, these generals say. The model for this neo-Malthusian, imperial world-view is the infamous National Strategic Study Memorandum 200 (NSSM 200), drafted by Henry Kissinger in 1974, which declares all raw materials around the world to be a U.S. strategic security interest.

The truth is, that the oligarchical model which Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and George Shultz set into motion on Aug. 15, 1971, with the end of Roosevelt's Bretton Woods system and of fixed currency exchange rates, thereby systematically guiding the economy into the direction of unregulated free trade, has now completely failed. This 1971 paradigm-shift away from production and into speculation--unregulated credit generation in the so-called offshore markets such as the Cayman Islands, where 80% of all hedge funds are headquartered--ushered in the emergence of today's casino economy.

Since that time, step by step, each new precedent has gone in the direction of the neo-liberal model: the creation of the eurodollar market; the 1974 oil price swindle; the 1975 hardening of ``IMF conditionalities''; the assaults by the Carter Administration, beginning in 1976, against ``mercantilist tendencies in the developing countries''; Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker's 1979 high interest rate policy; the policies of ``Reaganomics'' and ``Thatcher economics'' in the 1980s, including the mergers and hostile takeovers typifying a process of ever greater cartellization; Alan Greenspan's invention of miraculous ``creative credit instruments'' following the Crash of 1987; and the unfettered globalization following the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the transfer of industrial production into ``cheap production countries''--all these were further mileposts in the same direction.