The authors label colonialism as the central source of worldwide starvation. Frances Moore Lappe and Joseph Collins use fact after fact in an attempt to express how extreme the situation was and is. They propose that the origin of starvation in such areas as Africa and Viet Nam are due to the colonization process, which forced the natives to stop cultivating food plants and focus solely on cash crops. The piece vilified the colonizing countries by painting a picture of exploiting the native people and forcing them to rely on imported foodstuffs with intentions of driving up prices on imports while suppressing the costs of exports. Which in turn creates the famine. The first step by the Europeans was to force the native peoples off their land so that the land itself may be used for cash crop production.
John Stuart Mill suggested that colonies shouldn’t be thought of as civilizations or countries at all, but rather “agriculture establishments.” In most instances, these colonial powers strong-armed the natives off their land for the sole purpose of producing goods that were made available in the European Market. Colonialism seemed to be a major part of why people can’t feed themselves, because most of their natural resources were either stolen or lost due to other countries taking over different lands.
Colonial powers not only used physical but also an economical force to push these natives off their land, while at the same time making them dependent on the sole source of income in their country, cash cropping. Cash cropping was the second factor in why people can’t feed themselves. A cash crop is a product meant to be sold into the market, rather than consumed by the producer. The specific cash crops that were grown in place of staple crops in Africa were peanut, cocoa, palm oil, and cotton. When the British agreed for trading cocoa, its benefits never went to the Africans. Many Africans were moved into small, crowded, cheap areas. The government would deny any simple access to Africans such as water, road, healthcare.
127 our experts are availableright now
During the great depression, the colonial markets crashed this resulted in the peasants unable to pay their taxes so they had to move and worked in low-income cocoa plantations. This also resulted in indigenous groups to compete with each other for raw materials, some concluded violence to each other. “Although raw force was used, taxation was the preferred colonial technique to force Africans to grow cash crops. The colonial administrations simply levied taxes on cattle, land, houses, and even the people themselves. Since the tax had to be paid in the coin of the realm, the peasants had either to grow crops to sell or to work on the plantations or in the mines of the Europeans”.
This intriguing quote explains why hunger was so prevalent in those times and why famine broke out at regular intervals without any sort of intervention from above. A case in point would be the Bengal famine in India in the late 1870s where millions of people died due to a combination of factors largely caused by drought and this created a situation where hunger became a terribly and edifying cause of death.Lappe and Collins also make reference to the infamous marketing boards which were set up in countries like the Gold Coast and Sierra Leone in the 1930s where the agricultural crop was bought from African farmers at a very low price which was actually below the market price and then resold in other countries for up to seven times the purchase price.
The authors provide a hugely convincing argument in this respect as they demonstrate that famine is indeed a man-made phenomenon that has caused the deaths of untold millions across the centuries with colonialism a force for evil in this respect. Before colonialism started in some “underdeveloped” countries, people that lived in those countries already had a system in place to take care of each social class Instead of finding a way to improve in these “underdeveloped” countries, once colonialism emerged, it was not going to be a benefit for the majority (the citizens), it will only help the elite by gaining money. Collins and Lappe frequently refer to these nations as underdeveloped? rather than calling them undeveloped. They use this word in order to illustrate that these people are not primitive beings; there are certain areas in their society that need to be developed as opposed to their society as a whole.
These underdevelopment were engineered by the colonizers and could be undone in time if capitalism wasn’t the dominant religion of the world. People have become more and more greed-driven throughout history, and this article demonstrates just one of the many greed-driven inhumane activities of modern western culture.
