“We are hungry” they shouted before attempting to smash open the palace gates. In recent months, it has become common amongst Haiti’s poor to use the expression “grangou klowox” or “eating bleach”, to describe the daily hunger pains people face, because of the burning feeling in their stomachs." - BBC News, 8 April.

The global rise in food prices has acted as another intolerable burden faced by workers and poor people throughout the neo-colonial world resulting in the outbreak of riots and uprisings in Africa, Asia and Latin America. In the last three years food prices have risen by a massive 87% due to rises in the cost of food staples such as wheat, corn and rice. In the latest food report produced by the United Nations it is now estimated that there is a food crisis in 37 countries. A further 100 million face being pushed into absolute poverty.

Egypt, which is the Middle East’s most populous country, has seen the price of bread and cereals shoot up by 48.1% in the past year- this is in a country where 40% live on less than $2 a day! Many are forced to wait in queues for hours in the blistering sun in the working class suburbs such as Alexandria in order to receive subsidised bread which is becoming increasingly scarce. People are lucky if they get to eat meat once a month. Since February 11 people have died in food lines as a result of exhaustion, heart attacks and accidents.

There are several factors that have lead to the astronomical rise in food prices. These include a rise in the number of droughts as a result of climate change, the increasing use of maze for the production of bio-fuels and increased demand for wheat from India and China. This has been exacerbated by the profiteering of speculators, who are deliberately hoarding food in anticipation of further increases in the coming months.

The capitalist political establishment internationally are undoubtedly fearful of the social and political consequences that will flow from the increase in the price of food particularly given that it takes place against the backdrop of a downturn in the world economy. The recent movements in countries such as Haiti and Egypt show that their fear is justified. A number of countries have restricted their exports of food while institutions such as the World Bank have given a minor increase in aid to those countries worst affected by the crisis. These measures will do little to alleviate the suffering of ordinary people who are seeing their standard of living deteriorating.

In reality, governments internationally have no answers to the root causes of the massive hike in food prices. This capitalist system, which they represent, is not one that is planned for people’s needs but instead is blindly driven for short-term profits regardless of the consequences. This has led to the destruction of our environment and more recently the unsustainable investment in bio-fuels resulting from the energy crisis.

Working people internationally need to be consciously organised in order to defend their conditions against the disastrous situation confronting them. A movement needs to be built that will fight for socialist policies, demanding that wages be linked in with the cost of living and that the resources of the world be productively and democratically owned, controlled and planned by workers and poor people not by the parasitic capitalist elite that controls our planet.