Your first paragraph makes a thesis that is not easily falsified by anecdote (both capitalist British Raj India and communist Stalinist Russia had large famines).
However I agree that US food production is already highly centralized, at least where big ag is concerned, with the characteristic that profits fill private pockets while losses are subsidized by the people at large.
You seem to be talking about long term underproduction.
In the Irish case, the subsistence farmers would have been devastated by a US overproduction even before a famine, similar to subsistence farmers in Africa and India today.
Holodomor includes perpetual mismanagement and a political decision not to accept food help or really do anything. No amount of overproduction before Stalin would have prevented food being seized and then rotting in transit.
Certainly it's the case that you need at least enough overproduction to drive prices down marginally and to restock a reserve if it is actually used, and make speculation not a sure bet.. I think current subsidies go beyond that and arguably don't work because all that overproduction drove innovations in making food fungible to energy (i.e. as ethenol) and energy is now a more retainable wealth as the major input to proof of work.
Stalinists were trying to create economies of scale by centralizing agriculture to large conglomerates but weren't smart enough to avoid supply disruption that together with dry years, optimistic communication/lies and foreign export led to massive famines throughout the whole USSR.
One can see the same pattern in large corps where the front falls suddenly off.
If it was, then how was this because of Central planning? Man-made, engineered famines have happened under capitalism too, it's not hard to twist and jerk the market into a famine given material circumstances like those that made it possible for the Holodomor.
As for food being always produced in market economies, see the Bengal famine. Food wasn't destroyed in the Holodonor, it was simply redistributed. Similar famines happened under capitalism, all it takes is for a crop to come up first or for cash crops combined with the anarchy of production to lead to a crop that is beneath the requirements.
So no, similar famines did happen under capitalism, and your thesis is simply incorrect.
Markets can have latencies measuring in years or more, see the bullwhip effect. It's incorrect to say that they will be lo always have more processing power and less latency. They would if they were theoretically perfect, but markets are already at their limit and are not far away from the most primitive of planning.
The Soviet Union collectivized the farms, and famine ensued. Then they allowed farmers to be capitalists again, and famine ended. Then they collectivized again, starvation followed.
Finally, the Soviets allowed farmers to farm small plots of land, and sell the result. This became the backbone of food production, not the collective farms.
In the 1980s Kansas became the "breadbasket of the Soviet Union" as Reagan sent huge quantities of Kansas wheat to the USSR.
As for the US, the never-ending specter of famine ended around 1805 or so. Since then the height of Americans shot up. It was not do to any humanist thinking or modern logistics or government programs. It was due to the free market.
We are discussing economic systems. What is the point of listing selective list of famines at certain times of Russian history to the discussion about communism vs capitalism. Much worse famines occurred when the Russia was capitalistic. Famines occurred in any type of economic system. Are you implying that communist Russia was more susceptible to food shocks?
I would point out that under capitalism there have been famines even when there has been plenty of surplus food. A lack of famine either acute nor chronic is surely not a defining characteristic of capitalism.
Then you should read the list of famines rather than just looking at the page, because after the invention of fertilizer which brought an end to mass starvation (and was another product of capitalism), the biggest famines in the history of the world have been from communist nations, whereas the main problem in capitalist nations is obesity. Even the homeless here suffer more from obesity than from hunger.
I agree that famine would be a serious risk, but when I look at major famines they seem to largely be imposed by government action. Irish, China, Russia, North Korea etc.
The Irish potato famine occurred in part because of the potato blight, but it was a multi year issue that at it’s core related to growing exports (cotton, grain) in favor of local food. Russia’s industrialization created famine because so many farm workers where sent to factories. China had similar root causes, the 18year old worker in that story went home to see their family and many fields where fallow. Steal all the food or workers from a village and people starve.
That’s not to say drought etc didn’t play a role, but the American dust bowl isn’t remembered as a famine because there was feedback between the amount of food crops planted and the need for food.
> Planned economies consistently lead to famine and tens of millions of people starving to death.
They do not. Cuba has yet to experience a famine despite being under a severe embargo for several decades.
Famines also happen under capitalism. There are multitude of famines in east Africa to choose from, death count is well over tens of millions. Outside of Africa, the Bengal famine happened under British rule, death count 1-4 million people. While socialism was gaining traction inside British isles at the time, their colonies kept being ruled by harsh free market advocates.
However blaming capitalism for the Bengal famine is unfair, where imperialism, colonialism, and racism is a much better explanation, similarly, blaming communism for the Great Chinese Famine in Mao’s China is unfair, when fascism is a much better explanation.
Famines aren’t the only man-made disaster out there. It is hard to blame anything but global capitalism for disaster such as the Bhopal disaster, where one of the largest cities in India was poisoned in a effort to maximize profits for shareholders. Thousands died.
Together the disaster of capitalism cause several orders more deadly than the disaster commonly attributed to communism.
I think most people would agree that government can enable, and can definitely disable, capitalism. Presumably by definition anarcho-capitalists don't (and to some extent they might be right, but not in many cases), but I don't understand why you're saying that here.
> For every socialist government failure (like Holodomor or Great Chinese Famine) there is a capitalist government failure (Irish Potato Famine or Bengal Famines).
The main cause of the potato famine was biological. The contributing factor I think you're referring to was liberty: farmers could sell potatoes overseas instead of to their starving kin.
The British government could've removed liberty, and seized the potatoes and ordered them to remain in Ireland, or, I would say, the British government could've worked within the liberty/capitalist system and have simply bought the potatoes at market rate and kept them in Ireland. They did neither.
The difference with the Great Chinese Famine was that - of course - the central bureaurocracy was actively involved in making farming terrible. It wasn't a failure to do something to help; it was a failure of doing the wrong thing. The blight wasn't biological; it was ideological.
We can move food around. Famines historically tended to be regional; bad climate, or natural or man-made disaster, devastating food production in an area. Before the 19th century moving enough food from another region, or even from another continent to address that local shortfall, was much more challenging.
If the 1930s American dustbowl had happened to a densely populated non-industrial society, it would probably have been one of the worst famines in history. Agricultural yields fell by like 50% for several years in the affected region. But they just brought in food from California and Saskatchewan. It was still a disaster, of course.
The Russian famine of 1921 was one of the first times industrial societies really mobilized in that way. At the peak grain grown in the USA and donated to the USSR was feeding about 1 in 10 Russians during the famine. One of the largest logistics operations in history up to that point. It's why Herbert Hoover was nominated for the Nobel peace prize five times.
It’s one thing to have a bad crop. It’s another to have your government enforce some heartless economic system at the expense of people’s lives, and utterly fail at helping them by accepting foreign aid from other countries.
Just as the Holodomor[1] and Great Chinese Famine[2] were the result of misguided or malicious “socialist” collectivization efforts by Stalin and Mao, the Irish Potato Famine[3] and the much later famines in the Bengal regions[4] were the result of misguided or malicious “capitalist” efforts by the British state and empire to enforce who gets to eat.
Irish Potato Famine was exacerbated a lot by the system of landlords and private property protections.
Bengal Famine was largely exacerbated by Churchill’s policies that heavily favored the British at the expense of people on the Indian subcontinent. And of course the entire British Raj came about through state capitalism (the British East India Company getting the empire’s support and appointing governors).
However I agree that US food production is already highly centralized, at least where big ag is concerned, with the characteristic that profits fill private pockets while losses are subsidized by the people at large.
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