http://climateandcapitalism.com/?p=661

Arbeiter Ring Publishing is pleased to announce the release of Let Them Eat Junk: How Capitalism Creates Hunger and Obesity by Robert Albritton

Why are half the people in the world malnourished, while so many in the West are over-fed? Capitalism may promise cheap, nutritious food for all, but it has failed to deliver on that promise. This is the first book to explore the economics of our food system, and to explain why a quarter of the world’s population go hungry despite the fact that enough food is produced worldwide to feed us all.

Political economist Robert Albritton gives a refreshingly detailed explanation of the worldwide food crisis. He analyses the economic conditions that create a simultaneous oversupply and undersupply of food, and the massive implications they have for human health worldwide.

“[This book] pulls no punches in its analysis. … To understand how starvation and obesity can coexist in the same populations, follow the flow of capital. Everyone who cares about food equity and the preservation of democracy should read this book.”–Marion Nestle, Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health, New York University

“Marx understood the dynamics of the current food crisis over a century ago. Robert Albritton has written a fine primer, bridging the best thinking of the nineteenth century to the urgent needs of the twenty-first.”–Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved

I’ll just post here my comment I left on Climate and Capitalism:

In what country where there is a supposed oversupply of food is there capitalism? In the USA there are tariffs, subsidies, unbalanced taxation and regulation, etc.
That’s socialistic, fascistic, corporatist. That’s not capitalism.

And what is the solution? Communism? Socialism of one kind or another? More corporatism and fascism? USSR starved millions. Cuba isn’t doing all that well. Nor is North Korea. What socialistic country has been able to produce more food than the people living there need to such an extent as the USA?

The problem isn’t production of food. It’s the distortion of incentives (ethanol subsidies, sugar taxes, corn subsidies) and the tyrannical remote governments which impoverish their people. The cost of food would be reduced if they weren’t kept artificially high due to protectionist trade policy and those who most efficiently produced a product was allowed to do so. And those who have a tough time affording the artificially high foods would have more wealth if their governments would stop with the horrible protectionist, anti-property and anti-business policy.

Even if you had all that fixed it wouldn’t get rid of all the problems right away. It takes time for wealth to increase. Capital must be built up. The size of the pie will increase as will each persons slice of it but it requires people to be free to make their own decisions and for labor to flow into those locations where it is most efficient.

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Ethanol advocates claim that the biofuel is a cheap, renewable energy source that reduces pollution and our dependence on foreign oil. It sounds too good to be true—and it is.

Ethanol, especially the corn-based variety, is bad for taxpayers, bad for consumers, bad for the environment, and horrible for the world’s poor. In fact, even environmentalists are critical of ethanol subsidies these days. The ethanol craze has distorted markets and increased the price of food worldwide. The only people who still support ethanol subsidies are the ethanol producers—and politicians from both sides of the aisle. Together, they make sure the subsidies keep coming.

In a recent interview about the current food crisis, Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) said, “If part of our problem is that the Chinese are going to eat meat and you’ve got to have corn and soybeans to feed the Chinese their meat, then why isn’t it just as legitimate for the Chinese to go back and eat rice as it is for us to change our policy on corn to ethanol?”

Let them eat rice? So that American taxpayers can continue to pay people to turn corn into fuel?

Silly senator, corn is for food.

This seven-and-a-half-minute video explores the case against ethanol subsidies. Hosted by reason’s Nick Gillespie and featuring Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey, it was produced by Paul Feine and PF Bentley.

For an audio podcast version, go here.