Beware of free newspapers. They are starting to proliferate in London and other major UK cities and of course, they have their own agenda. Firstly they are not community newsletters, far from it. They are owned by corporate interests. In the case if the free London Evening Standard, it is the property of the Lebedev’s, an influential family of Russian oligarchs. Say no more. In the case of the Metro, it is owned by Associated Newspapers, part of the Daily Mail Group. Say no more. However, to keep up their populist credentials both papers have been known to take superficially radical positions on certain national and even international affairs.

That is not necessarily a bad thing as long as we readers are aware of the corporatist agendas lurking just below the surface. Their heartfelt pleas for a more rational capitalism is all about their endeavours to increase their share of the market, be it in finance, commodities, information or industrial capital. That is their bottom line maximisation of their profit margins, and any philanthropic or humanist input, is merely clever window dressing.

OK, enough of the preamble. On the 10th January, 2013 The Metro came up with a cracker of a front page feature article. Under the title; Half of All Food Goes to Waste the lead journalist, Etan Smallman, makes some devastatingly poignant points in an article that would not, at first glance, be out of place in the socialist press. The opening couple of lines set out some grim facts:

As much as half of all food produced in the world is left to rot. Inefficient farming practises, overly strict sell-by dates, buy-one-get-one-free offers and shoppers demanding perfectly shaped vegetables all contribute to as much as 2billion tonnes of food never reaching the meal tables. In Britain Families throw away 7 million tonnes of food, valued at more than 10 billion, every year.

The article continues along this vein, pulling out headline grabbing statistics from a report entitled; Global Food:Waste Not, Want Not. It’s all very seductive stuff that you can shake your head at as you travel to work in the mornings. But examine the article a little closer and you notice that it is the western consumers and the third world farmers who are getting the blame. The giant global food corporations don’t get a mention other than a vague reference to the big supermarkets. Once again it is the individual consumer and farmer rather than the global food industry that is in the firing line.

While there is no doubt that buying, cooking and eating habits in the relatively rich developed counties are extremely wasteful; the blame should primarily be directed at the food and advertising industries. It is they who are fuelling an irrational appetite for foods soaked in fats, salt and sugars. It is they who are creating the obesity epidemic by addicting the entire global population to sugar a substance that is proving more harmful to humans than tobacco, alcohol and class A drugs put together. It is the global chemical companies that are saturating our foods with cancer inducing additives, and it is these self-same corporates that are desperately trying to control the world’s food production by their control of genetically modified (GM) seeds.

The mantra of the Chicago School of economics, enthusiastically adopted by Thatcher’s Tories, New Labour and of course the present Coalition Government, is that the market is always right. I’m not even sure that Ed Milliband and Ed Balls have fully repudiated this doctrine. What the Metro’s article does highlight, albeit in an implicit, half-hearted way, is that the market is not the best tool for meeting the basic needs of the world’s population- far from it. If the capitalist market was an all seeing, benign, omniscient force, how is it that the distribution of the world’s food supply is in such a diabolical state. How is it that the global market cannot manage the distribution of food and clean drinking water in a rational manner? The fact that 14 million children die each year of malnutrition and entirely preventable diseases is proof, if proof be needed, of the complete and utter failure of the global capitalist market.

Rather than silently and efficiently organise for a rational distribution of the world’s resources, instead it always and everywhere fosters the concentration of resources and capital into fewer and fewer hands. Everywhere capitalism mutates into monopoly capitalism where soon, two hundred unaccountable global corporations will control 80% of the world’s economic activity. National governments and local democracy are rapidly becoming empty shells. To paraphrase the Occupy Movement, the one percent will lord it over the ninety nine percent, only in reality, it will be the 0.001 % who will have supreme control and the rest of us will be left to try to eke out a subsistence living from the crumbs that fall from their dining tables. What has The Metro and Mr Smallman got to say about this nightmare scenario? Absolutely nothing!