The Global Crisis: Food, Water and Fuel by Michel Chossudovsky

The sugar coated bullets of the "free market" are killing our children. The act to kill is unpremeditated. It is instrumented in a detached fashion through computer program trading on the New York and Chicago mercantile exchanges, where the global prices of rice, wheat and corn are decided upon.

Poverty is not solely the result of policy failures at a national level. People in different countries are being impoverished simultaneously as a result of a global market mechanism. A small number of financial institutions and global corporations have the ability to determine, through market manipulation, the standard of living of millions of people around the World.

We are at the crossroads of the most serious economic and social crisis in modern history. The process of global impoverishment unleashed at the outset of the 1980s debt crisis has reached a major turning point, leading to the simultaneous outbreak of famines in all major regions of the developing World.

There are many complex features underlying the global economic crisis pertaining to financial markets, the decline in production, the collapse of State institutions and the rapid development of a profit-driven war economy. What is rarely mentioned in this analysis is how this global economic restructuring forcibly impinges on three fundamental necessities of life: food, water and fuel.

The provision of food, water and fuel is a precondition of civilized society: they are necessary factors for the survival of the human species. In recent years, the prices of these three variables have increased dramatically at the global level, with devastating economic and social consequences.

These three essential goods or commodities, which in a real sense determine the reproduction of economic and social life on planet earth, are under the control of a small number of global corporations and financial institutions.

Both the State as well as the gamut of international organizations --often referred to as the "international community"-- serve the unfettered interests of global capitalism. The main intergovernmental bodies including the United Nations, the Bretton Woods institutions and the World Trade Organizations (WTO) have endorsed the New World Order on behalf of their corporate sponsors. Governments in both developed and developing countries have abandoned their historical role of regulating key economic variables as well as ensuring a minimum livelihood for their people.

Protest movements directed against the hikes in the prices of food and gasoline has erupted simultaneously in different regions of the World. The conditions are particularly critical in Haiti, Nicaragua, Guatemala, India, and Bangladesh. Spiraling food and fuel prices in Somalia have precipitated the entire country into a situation of mass starvation, coupled with severe water shortages. A similar and equally serious situation prevails in Ethiopia.

Other countries affected by spiraling food prices include Indonesia, the Philippines, Liberia, Egypt, Sudan, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Kenya, and Eritrea, a long list of impoverished countries, not to mention those under foreign military occupation including Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine.

Deregulation

The provision of food, water and fuel are no longer the object of governmental or intergovernmental regulation or intervention, with a view to alleviating poverty or averting the outbreak of famines.

The fate of millions of human beings is managed behind closed doors in the corporate boardrooms as part of a profit driven agenda.

And because these powerful economic actors operate through a seemingly neutral and "invisible" market mechanism, the devastating social impacts of engineered hikes in the prices of food, fuel and water are casually dismissed as the result of supply and demand considerations.

Nature of the Global Economic and Social Crisis

Largely obfuscated by official and media reports, both the “food crisis" and the “oil crisis" are the result of the speculative manipulation of market values by powerful economic actors.

We are not dealing with distinct and separate food, fuel and water "crises" but with a global process of economic and social restructuring.

The dramatic price hikes of these three essential commodities are not haphazard. All three variables, including the prices of basic food staples, water for production and consumption and fuel are the object of a process of deliberate and simultaneous market manipulation.

At the heart of the food crisis is the rising price of food staples coupled with a dramatic increase in the price of fuel.

Concurrently, the price of water which is an essential input into agricultural and industrial production, social infrastructure, public sanitation and household consumption has increased abruptly as a result of a worldwide movement to privatize water resources.

We are dealing with a major economic and social upheaval, an unprecedented global crisis, characterized by the triangular relationship between water, food and fuel: three fundamental variables, which together affect the very means of human survival.

In very concrete terms, these price hikes impoverish and destroy people’s lives. Moreover, the worldwide collapse in living standards is occurring at a time of war. It is intimately related to the military agenda. The war in the Middle East bears a direct relationship to the control over oil and water reserves.

While water is not at present an internationally trade commodity in the same way as oil and food staples, it is also the object of market manipulation through the privatization of water.

The economic and financial actors operating behind closed doors are:

- The major Wall Street banks and financial houses, including the institutional speculators that play a direct role in commodity markets including the oil and food markets

-The Anglo-American oil giants, including British Petroleum (BP), Exxon Mobil, Chevron-Texaco, Royal Dutch Shell

-The biotech-agribusiness conglomerates, which own the intellectual property rights on seeds and farm inputs. The biotech companies are also major actors on the NY and Chicago mercantile exchanges.

-The water giants including Suez, Veolia and Bechtel-United Utilities, involved in the extensive privatization of the World's water resources.

-The Anglo-American military-industrial complex which includes the big five US defense contractors (Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grunman, Boeing and General Dynamics) in alliance with British Aerospace Systems Corporation (BAES) constitutes a powerful overlapping force, closely aligned with Wall Street, the oil giants and the agribusiness-biotech conglomerates.

........to be continued