Food is no ordinary commodity. It’s both indispensable and a precious, scarce resource. Ultimately, we need to bring food production and distribution under public ownership and control to end this irrationality.
Achieving that end-goal won’t be simple. We can’t simply take over a system as complex as our food system in one fell swoop. Socializing supermarkets, by contrast, would be relatively simple. It’s the obvious place to start.
Most of the popular discourse around food places the burden of change on individual consumers. However lovely local farmers’ markets may be, convincing people to frequent them isn’t going to cut it, especially as wages decline and working hours crawl up. For their part, government regulations can end the worst excesses of the market, but the problems with our food system require more than just regulatory nudges.
Solving these problems will require rational economic planning. In fact, supermarkets already plan our food system. But they do it for the sake of profit maximization rather than the public good and long-term sustainability.
Food insecurity
Gah! You don't fix a food shortage with interest rates!
A third of the food price increases in the UK in 2023 was down to climate change, according to the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit think-tank.
“There’s a material impact from climate change on global food prices,” says Frederic Neumann, chief Asia economist at HSBC. “It’s easy to shrug off individual events as being isolated, but we’ve just seen such a sequence of abnormal events and disruptions that, of course, add up to climate change impact.”
Such repeated events result in “a permanent impact on the ability to supply food,” argues Neumann. Food price rises once considered temporary are becoming a source of persistent inflationary pressure.
Globally, annual food inflation rates could rise by up to 3.2 percentage points per year within the next decade or so as a result of higher temperatures, according to a recent study by the European Central Bank and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.
Capitalism relies on maintaining an artificial scarcity of essential goods and services (like housing, healthcare, transport, etc), through processes of enclosure and commodification. We know that enclosure enables monopolists to raise prices and maximize their profits (consider the rental market, the US healthcare system, or the British rail system). But it also has another effect. When essential goods are privatized and expensive, people need more income than they would otherwise require to access them. To get it they are compelled to increase their labour in capitalist markets, working to produce new things that may not be needed (with increased energy use, resource use, and ecological pressure) simply to access things that clearly are needed, and which are quite often already there.
Take housing, for example. If your rent goes up, you suddenly have to work more just to keep the same roof over your head. At an economy-wide level, this dynamic means we need more aggregate production — more growth — in order to meet basic needs. From the perspective of capital, this ensures a steady flow of labour for private firms, and maintains downward pressure on wages to facilitate capital accumulation. For the rest of us it means needless exploitation, insecurity, and ecological damage. Artificial scarcity also creates growth dependencies: because survival is mediated by prices and wages, when productivity improvements and recessions lead to unemployment people suffer loss of access to essential goods — even when the output of those goods is not affected — and growth is needed to create new jobs and resolve the social crisis.
There is a way out of this trap: by decommodifying essential goods and services, we can eliminate artificial scarcity and ensure public abundance, de-link human well-being from growth, and reduce growthist pressures.
Across Australia, 3.7m households have experienced food insecurity over the past 12 months, a jump of almost 350,000 on the previous year, Foodbank’s annual hunger report has revealed.
More than 2.3m of those households were “severely food insecure”, meaning they were actively going hungry, reducing food intake, skipping meals or going entire days without eating.