The Food Crisis and the New Crisis of Capitalism

By F.V. Beup Jr.

We knew it had to come sooner or later: food would have to precede everything else. After humans have exhausted the world's resources to churn out goods for the market, in the end what really matters is survival.

If we pause and think for a while, the common notion of progress is that we have all the material means to make our life easier and more convenient. Capitalism has responded to this notion very successfully by providing not only the tools and talents for the manufacture of goods for utility but more so for providing the incentives necessary for these tools and talents to be maximally exploited. Progress has almost become synonymous with wealth created from the sale of goods in the market for profit. To create more wealth, you must always have something to sell. It is in this manner that capitalism is credited for having lifted millions out of poverty, making it the most successful economic system man has ever deviced. But how far can you go into manufacturing and selling before you exhaust the market? More importantly, how far can you go through this practice without exhausting your resources to produce goods?

The latter part of the 20th century (and the present) seemingly circumvented this problem by entering the age of "knowledge economy" whereby people could make profits not only by selling material goods but by selling ideas (intellectual goods, if you may) as well. For a moment it appears that there is a whole new world where money, or wealth, can be made without ever having to sell something tactile. The mouse-clicking, idea-selling salarymen or entrepreneurs sell and shop in their offices, bringing the market into their computers where everything appears infinite, inexhaustible. Many of those who belong to this "knowledge" generation have nary an idea that there is a real world out there where goods that find their way to the supermarkets and the cybermarket have their very origins from the ground, that is to say the earth. And the earth's resources are finite. This appears unimaginable particularly to those who have not been to the countryside and observed how the most basic of commodities are produced, particularly food. For these people food shortage is nothing but surreal.

How did it come to this?

It used to be that wealth could be made with the sale of the land's produce, and so owning land was something that everyone was willing to die for. Industrialization slowly pushed away the importance of land in favor of manufactured goods, and subsequent developments in technology further relegated it to the far recesses of man's memory. Manufacturing earned far better profits than farming. Besides, food could be grown in great quantities, more than enough to feed the world, thanks to agricultural research and scientific food production. In addition, food could be processed, preserved and stored more efficiently. Food could also be imported from agriculturally productive countries, thanks to market liberalization. Altogether, these have spawned a culture so utterly detached from the processes involved in growing food that almost a whole generation has grown believing that everything can be had if one has the money. Perhaps the ultimate sin of the knowledge economy is its overdependence on cash and near-complete indifference to land and its cultivation.

In the meantime industries have to keep on producing goods for consumption to pursue the ever-urgent demand for growth. But after everything else has been produced and bought, after every need and urge has been satiated (if ever it could be satiated), where do we look for further stimuli to growth? Let us pause for a while and think of the earth's resources having been completely exhausted. There is nothing more to produce as there is nothing more resource left to be used as raw material. Does this mean the end of growth and economic development?

While indeed capitalism has created unprecedented wealth for billions of people worldwide, it has also been criticized for having failed to lift the rest out of poverty. This, people point out, is the crisis of capitalism. In a sense this is true, but what else do we have for alternative? The present food crisis presents a new problem for capitalism in that it poses a grave choice between sustaining economic growth and human survival.

Perhaps the crisis of capitalism lies not so much in its failure to lift everyone out of poverty as in its failure to define what is enough for itself. Food, and the lack of it, may just spell the end of capitalism, or at least wound its bloated pride. Historically, however, capitalism's tenacity to adapt and survive challenges has always been astounding. Let's see how it hurdles this one.