Katie Simpson, Northampton Socialist Party
UK supermarkets are limiting purchases of tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and other staple fruits and vegetables. Further restrictions can be expected thanks to climate change, soaring energy prices, big business profiteering, and how capitalism runs its supply chains.
Much of the agricultural land that grows our produce relies on a delicate balance of weather conditions. With melting ice caps and hotter summers, many crops are failing or having reduced harvest.
Climate change
COP27, the global climate summit, exposed again that capitalism – driven by profit and organised on the basis of competing nation states – has no solution to the environmental crisis.
The National Farmers’ Union (NFU) has called on the government to support farmers with soaring energy costs. Across Europe, farmers have planted fewer crops and delayed heating and lighting greenhouses during the cold winter, because of unaffordable energy bills.
The bureaucratic wrangling of various competing capitalist markets around the world also causes delays in food distribution. And betting on the stock market, so vulture capitalists can make a profit, also drives prices up for working-class people.
The need for socialist economic planning, democratically controlled by the working class, to meet the needs of people in every country has never been clearer.
Prior to Brexit, massive agribusinesses made massive profits using cheap migrant labour. Now, it’s harder to get those workers.
We are in the insane situation of importing food from around the world, at huge environmental and economic cost, while UK farmers are shutting up shop. Farms should be subsidised – on the basis of on proven need – to save jobs, lower import costs and help the planet.
There’s enough land, labour and technology to stave off shortages and supply enough food to feed the world twice over, without detrimental environmental damage. But it requires a socialist alternative – reorganising to take the wealth and resources in society out of the hands of the capitalist class – to end free market and capitalist competition.
