One of the fundamental assumptions behind most eco-fascist rhetoric is that the amount of resources on Earth is insufficient for the current number of people or some arbitrary number of future people, and therefore that those resources could either be shared equally (and everybody will eventually starve) or a subset of humanity should get more of the resources and let the rest starve. I cannot stress enough that this is unequivocally false. The amount of resources and food that Earth is capable of supplying humanity far exceeds current and projected future populations.
It’s a problem of distribution as the West takes far, far more resources than the rest of the planet’s population. It’s also a problem of exploitation, because developing economies are pressured into growing crops for making money - like opium poppies - rather than for food agriculture. Human development and technological advances in fertilizers and seeds and so on created the ability for humanity to not need to starve. Capitalism created the network in which those resources are funneled to a global minority via markets.
Recommended reading on this is Late Victorian Holocausts, in which the authors describe how famines which killed tens of millions of people in impoverished countries in the late 19th century - so, firmly in the capitalist era - were not caused by a lack of food in total (in most cases), but rather by imperialist countries like Britain taking away their grain for domestic consumption and merchants in markets in countries like India marking up prices so severely that the poor could not possibly afford it. The same railroads that were lauded for their ability to distribute grain from areas of bountiful harvest to areas with bad harvest ended up taking that grain from developing countries to Europe while the rest starved. Amartya Sen: “Famine is the characteristic of some people not having enough to eat. It is not the characteristic of there not being enough food to eat.”
As @[email protected] said in the replies, the feudal mode of production was unable to change the climate to the same degree that the capitalist mode of production is able to, and was too inefficient compared to capitalism for the problem to necessarily be one of distribution and not total food production. Humans were generally victims of climate and environmental conditions, whereas now we can, to a significant degree, bend it to our will. The crime is that we do not use those powers to end starvation when it is now entirely within our means to do so, when that wasn’t (as) true before capitalism.
One of the fundamental assumptions behind most eco-fascist rhetoric is that the amount of resources on Earth is insufficient for the current number of people or some arbitrary number of future people, and therefore that those resources could either be shared equally (and everybody will eventually starve) or a subset of humanity should get more of the resources and let the rest starve. I cannot stress enough that this is unequivocally false. The amount of resources and food that Earth is capable of supplying humanity far exceeds current and projected future populations.
It’s a problem of distribution as the West takes far, far more resources than the rest of the planet’s population. It’s also a problem of exploitation, because developing economies are pressured into growing crops for making money - like opium poppies - rather than for food agriculture. Human development and technological advances in fertilizers and seeds and so on created the ability for humanity to not need to starve. Capitalism created the network in which those resources are funneled to a global minority via markets.
Recommended reading on this is Late Victorian Holocausts, in which the authors describe how famines which killed tens of millions of people in impoverished countries in the late 19th century - so, firmly in the capitalist era - were not caused by a lack of food in total (in most cases), but rather by imperialist countries like Britain taking away their grain for domestic consumption and merchants in markets in countries like India marking up prices so severely that the poor could not possibly afford it. The same railroads that were lauded for their ability to distribute grain from areas of bountiful harvest to areas with bad harvest ended up taking that grain from developing countries to Europe while the rest starved. Amartya Sen: “Famine is the characteristic of some people not having enough to eat. It is not the characteristic of there not being enough food to eat.”
As @[email protected] said in the replies, the feudal mode of production was unable to change the climate to the same degree that the capitalist mode of production is able to, and was too inefficient compared to capitalism for the problem to necessarily be one of distribution and not total food production. Humans were generally victims of climate and environmental conditions, whereas now we can, to a significant degree, bend it to our will. The crime is that we do not use those powers to end starvation when it is now entirely within our means to do so, when that wasn’t (as) true before capitalism.