The annual UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) State of Food Insecurity 2004 report noted that despite steady increases in agricultural productivity the number of people going hungry worldwide has increased by 18 million since 2000 to a total today of 852 million.

“The world in aggregate is getting wealthier and producing more than enough food,” Hartwig de Haen, one of the authors of the FAO report, told the New York Times. “The problem is the access of people to jobs, to resources, to land and to money to buy food.”

Global stocks of grain have reached a record high, the UN agency noted, “a significant surplus is expected, for the first time since 1999/2000.” But under capitalism, grain production has no direct relationship to the amount of hunger in the world. In the language of finance capital “surplus” means the quantity of food above what can be sold at an acceptable profit.

In fact, massive dumping of U.S. and European agricultural goods on the world market has led to an increase in hunger. Washington and other imperialist governments give huge subsidies to agricultural monopolies that allow them to sell their produce at artificially low prices on the world market, wiping out farmers in semicolonial countries and enriching agribusiness in the imperialist centers. This is a contributing factor to the increase in long-term malnutrition. Those living in rural areas account for about 80 percent of the world’s 852 million chronically hungry. Half of these are subsistence farmers, according to the FAO report.

At the same time, imperialist bankers siphon off $100 million dollars per day from the wealth produced by workers and farmers in the semicolonial world in the form of interest payments on foreign debt, Oxfam reported in a study released December 6.

Millions around the world are being drawn into the ranks of the working class. The worldwide proletariat has grown from around 2.4 billion to 2.8 billion in the past decade, according to a recent report from the UN’s International Labour Organization (ILO). Over the same period, the number of workers living on less than $2 a day has reached an all-time high of 1.4 billion worldwide, half of all wage workers. About 550 million of these toilers live on less than $1 a day.

The ILO reports that over the same period there has been close to an 11 percent increase in labor productivity worldwide. In the decade between 1993 and 2003, labor productivity in the imperialist countries increased by nearly 15 percent.

In the United States and elsewhere, the drive to increase productivity has been fueled by increasing competition. The employers have turned to life- and limb-threatening increases in the speed of production; extension of the working day, week, month, and year; mechanization; and cutting wages, benefits, and social entitlements in order to shore up their declining profits.

In East Asia, with the economic boom in China as the main motor force, labor productivity has increased by 75 percent. In South Asia and Southeast Asia, the increase is 38 percent and 22 percent, respectively. The study shows a less than 2 percent increase in Latin America and the Middle East, while workers in sub-Saharan Africa have seen their labor productivity drop by a similar amount over the same period. Labor productivity in Eastern European countries has increased by one-fourth.  
 
 
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