Commodification of Food
Pope Leo claims that “it is important to resist the commodification of basic human needs” like “food” because “access to adequate food is a fundamental human right.”
IN FACT, the commodification of food has greatly increased access to it, while treating it as a human right has led to scarcity. Here are the specifics:
- Per Cambridge University Press, “Throughout most of human history, chronic malnutrition has been the norm.”
- Likewise, the World Bank explains that “until the mid-18th century, improvements in living standards worldwide were barely perceptible,” and “most societies were resigned to poverty as an inescapable fact of life.”
- As defined by dictionaries, “commodification” is treating something as a “product that can be bought and sold” or the “process by which goods and services are increasingly produced for the market.”
- In the mid-18th to early-19th centuries, the Industrial Revolution and modern capitalism marked by free markets and private property emerged, and the countries that adopted capitalism experienced vast increases in wealth, while the rest of the world continued its prior pattern of economic stagnation.
- Per a 1999 paper in the Oxford Review of Economic Policy, “Despite the clear association of modern capitalism with the richest countries in the world, most of the poorer countries rejected capitalist models until they had tried a number of alternatives. Many of those detours — especially socialism and national socialism — imposed horrific costs on these societies and on others that got in their way.”
- For example, the foremost opponent of capitalism, the Soviet Union, declared in its Constitution that all large-scale “agricultural enterprises” are “state property” that “belong to the whole people.”
- Likewise, the Law of the Soviet State called for “destroying the old mechanisms of the capitalist world,” including the “demolition of the old apparatus of food supply.”
- Upon implementing that agenda, Vladimir Lenin, the primary founder and first leader of the Soviet Union, called their new socialist system of food supply the “most superb mechanism for attaining food.”
- In reality, the Soviet Union was wracked by degrees of famine, starvation, bread lines, and food scarcity throughout its 69-year history.
- Per the academic serial work Quality of Life in the Soviet Union, the “living standard” there “was roughly one third that of the United States.”
- Documenting the downsides of treating goods as “rights,” the prolific economist William A. McEachern wrote that the “only place you find free cheese is in a mousetrap,” and it is a “mistake” to only consider the immediate effects of public policies and “ignore the secondary effects” because these “often turn out to be more important than the primary effects.”
- One manifestation of those secondary effects is draining resources from investments that increase productivity, which is the primary driver of living standards and one of the main reasons why middle- and low-income Americans are richer than their counterparts in every other nation of the world.
- Other manifestations include, but are not limited to, reducing incentives to work, increasing enticements to loaf, and creating wasteful layers of regulations and bureaucracy.
- After the bulk of the world adopted capitalism in the 1980s and 1990s, the portion of the world’s population that was undernourished halved from 19% in 1990 to 9% in 2019, and the portion of the world’s population living below the extreme poverty line plunged from 44% in 1999 to 9% in 2019.
- Contrary to Pope Leo, who echoes Karl Marx by blaming poverty on an inequitable “distribution of wealth,” Harvard economics professor Jeffrey D. Sachs explains that “Marx’s most deadly legacy” was the false belief that “gaps in income between rich and poor are caused by exploitation rather than differences in productivity.”
- Instead of acknowledging the facts of this matter, influential people and publications like Pope Leo and New York Times malign principles that rescued the bulk of the world’s population from hunger while embracing ideologies that have starved them.
