...Trinis may very well make humble pies out of mud and eat it with contentment if the day comes...
I set out to write a commentary on the high and ever increasing cost of living and food prices specifically. And I must state my ideological bent up front (unlike others), since I have been strongly influenced by what I've learnt about communist ideals. So, rather than lament paying thirty dollars for a lunch (drink excluded) that consisted of a portion of tasteless and almost peas-less pelau and a piece of over-boiled, almost cheese-less macaroni pie, I will attempt to examine the bigger picture.
I believe that most of the problems facing humanity today are as a result of population pressures and the unequal distribution of resources. At the same time, this imbalance, or inequity, is a necessary condition for the capitalist structured system to perpetuate itself. It is deliberately maintained since market forces and dynamics form the foundation of capitalism.
Once a student of geography, I learnt about such concepts as carrying capacity and the population ceiling and a theory that suggests that once the critical limit or population ceiling is exceeded in an area with resources of a given sustainable capacity, the deficit of resources will manifest itself in the form of what was called positive checks - things such as famines, species competition and extinction and even conflicts and wars as people compete to survive. However, being the "intelligent" species we are, we believe that surely we do not have to yield to natural forces and mechanisms of control that balance everything within the natural system. That is for the lesser beings since we can create the means to better the odds and indeed our very conditions.
But with all our technologies, all we are effectively doing is managing to borrow time as we advance further beyond the critical threshold, stretching the limits of the natural design. So every day we put our brains to work, discovering new ways to use the ‘resources' that are available to us in an attempt to better our condition. After all the years since the days of the ‘Green Revolution' and the genetically enhanced HYV's (Higher Yielding Varieties) of grains and food crops and advancements in agro technologies that were supposed to solve the world's food problems, how is it that so much of the world still goes hungry?
I take a simplistic approach when it comes to such matters. The issues affecting our society and our world do not need elaborate explanations, scientific deductive analysis and the use of models named after hard to pronounce intellectuals. In my opinion it is a case of plain common sense, of outing fire with water. If the problem is a shortage in food supply, you don't build smelter plants, you build farms - increase supply, drive down prices.
So finally I'm hearing about plans afoot to address the food price situation locally with proposals for tilapia farms (while we continue to wreak havoc on the seas) and rabbit rearing for meat. But I believe that being creatures of inherent greed, we will no sooner meet the current demand than we will see new needs and new levels of demand.
If we are getting no closer to solving the world's problems even with all our technologies - and in fact the problems seem to keep growing more insurmountable as the answers slip further away from us - then it must mean that our overall ideological direction is wrong. The fact that the relationship between humanity and the earth resembles parasitism as opposed to mutualism is indicative of imbalance; and this disharmony manifests itself through all the conditions and realities that characterise the current human condition. We must move away from the ideology that rationalises and justifies the uneven distribution of food and provides justification for blatant wastage even in the face of hunger. Move away from that which allows us to celebrate with meaningless wastage and then go hungry the day after.
Over this past Christmas season, my job placed me at several Christmas functions hosted by big companies at various hotels. I got to witness for the first time, an overabundance at every occasion that saw large amounts of food going to waste untouched. Loaded carts and stalls with all descriptions of food waited to be dumped, as I was told by hotel staff, while on another street in town I am sure there could have been found hungry bellies. I started to imagine that these were just a few dinners for a few companies in a small country. What about the larger international picture? Think about how many tonnes of food would have been wasted at that time of the year alone.
I saw recently in a daily newspaper a story about Haitians having to eat mud pies and a local politician saying that people in T&T will riot first before they eat mud pies. Perhaps that politician forgot that Haiti has a stronger culture of revolution than Trinidad and Tobago; that they were the very first in the western hemisphere to do so, and it is the rest of the Caribbean that are more tolerant to abuse and oppression. So Trinis may very well make humble pies out of mud and eat it with contentment if the day comes.
Ultimately the global food problem results from the fact that the main producers of food and other commodities for the world markets are doing so purely for profit - to increase the wealth of those who control the land and means of production. They perpetuate the vicious cycle of ever increasing prices as the domino effect of cost increases threatens their bottom line. To speak of piecemeal causes of and solutions to global hunger and skyrocketing food prices, without addressing the entire flawed economic and political framework, is spinning top in the very mud that may eventually have to feed us.