By MARCIO DOS SANTOS*
The debate about the tolerable values of what is lawful or unlawful within society has not developed along with science and technology.
For Adam Smith, the name behind the famous work “The Wealth of Nations”, the State should “(guarantee) the obvious and simple system of natural freedom”, according to Eduardo Giannetti (p. 121). In addition, “the uniform, constant and uninterrupted effort of each man to improve his conditions”. These would be two fundamental issues for the development of the economy.
Adam Smith writes The wealth of nations in 1776, on the threshold of capitalist accumulation that we will see shortly, with the natural course of history and the exploitation of Western nations on the Afro-Asian and Latin American continents. This effort, yes, seems to me, much more evident when we talk about the riches of these nations that today we identify with the North and their influence with the Global South.
In an excellent article published by the portal Other words On November 27, 2024, Grieve Chelwa talks about the colonial bias in the fight against corruption, showing how mega-corporations, the IMF and some NGOs used the discourse of “transparency” to capture state resources. The situation across the African continent continues to draw attention due to the exploitation of Western companies, as is the case of a Swiss company that operates in Zambia extracting ore at very low prices and exporting the same ore for sale in the European market at exorbitant prices.
The logic is ancient, the modus operandi, already known. Institutions like the IMF bled Latin America dry for much of the 20th century, granting loans to countries like Brazil in exchange for liberalizing packages such as privatizations of public assets, which became more evident during the FHC years. The IMF's exploitative relationship with Latin America is well demonstrated in Eduardo Galeano's book The open veins of Latin America. Eduardo Galeano, as a great journalist, gives many historians a lesson on how to write history, that is, a history that denounces. A history that contextualizes, that speaks directly to people and that opens spaces for discussion of the issues he raised in this work, which in certain aspects, is still very current.
In general, according to the observations of the agriq portal, the type of agriculture that predominates in Brazil is large-scale agriculture, or agribusiness, as we are used to calling it. As the portal explains, with over 20 years in the market, the company helps agronomists to issue agronomic recipes in an intelligent way.
We should look with great interest at a project by Father João (PT-MG), who is the coordinator of the parliamentary group for the taxation of pesticides in Brazil. This project values our agroecology and organic production, which opens up space for Brazil to increase its revenues with this taxation. This situation, of course, greatly bothered agribusiness with the fallacy that the taxation of pesticides would increase the price of products in the Brazilian basic food basket.
It is time for us to admit that, although we have a tradition in agricultural production, our food production is infinitely smaller when compared to what agribusiness produces, always with a view to the external market and that food security policies are extremely important in a scenario in which, in 2022, observing the numbers from the Brazilian Research Network on Food and Nutrition Sovereignty and Security (REDE PESSAN), released in June 2022, a total of 33,1 million people do not have enough to eat in Brazil.
We have not collected more recent data, but the signs of economic recovery after the pandemic lead us to believe that the situation has not changed completely. Eric Hobsbawn, when he wrote The age of extremes reports that it was only after the Second World War that the European economy managed to produce a surplus of food, for the first time in the history of that continent. The FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations), through the Akatu Institute, estimates that 1,3 billion tons of food per year in the world, which corresponds to 1/3 of what is produced annually, are wasted.
More than half of the world's hungry people live in Asia. The prevalence of moderate or severe food insecurity remained virtually unchanged in Africa, Asia, North America, and Europe between 2022 and 2023, and worsened in Oceania. It seems that the math hasn't added up. If we waste so much food, why do so many people around the world still go hungry? Authors like Melhem Adas continue, as in the XNUMXth century, to attribute hunger to population growth, which makes no sense given the productive capacity observed in the world today.
Eduardo Gianetti's book Public vices, private benefits seeks to draw an analysis relating economic, scientific and technological development to human morality, which at times, as explained in the first chapter of the work, would live in a kind of moral Neolithic. The progress and advancement we have found in science and technology over the last hundred years is evident, and it is clear that, in part, we can attribute this techno-scientific advancement to the terrible conditions of English workers in the 13,4th century, to European imperialism over Asia and Africa and to the two wars. Today, “smart” bombs are bombing the Gaza Strip and Lebanon in a war, not necessarily between Israel and Hamas, but between Israel and the Palestinian people, where it is estimated that more than 17,5 and 3,1 people have suffered serious injuries to their extremities and at least XNUMX have had limbs amputated, according to the portal The globe.
When Thomas Hobbes spoke of the “State of Nature,” he proclaimed that the fear of violent death made it necessary for a sovereign to take action, assuming the monopoly of justice and ensuring order. But how can we talk about security when children are starving and are victims of bomb attacks that injure or kill them, due to actions orchestrated by the very State that should keep them safe? In this respect, governments around the world, especially in the West, are like children playing with dangerous toys.
I am not making an anti-technology or anti-science manifesto here, but our capacity to cause harm is obvious to us. While this same technology and science allow us to produce enough food to feed everyone, we are still talking about hunger and food insecurity in the 21st century. Logic can be applied to solving various problems that we face in our daily lives, but we cannot blame people for logic, because logic is cold.
I often talk to my students about how abandoning an old, problematic car that causes us headaches and financial losses is logically acceptable, but that we can in no way apply this same logic to our parents or grandparents who, when sick, need expensive medicine for expensive treatments, because morality prevents us from acting like this with people, due to the obvious fact that people are not material objects.
What is clear is that the debate about the tolerable values of what is lawful or unlawful within society did not develop along with science and technology, and contrary to what Adam Smith believed in the 18th century, the simple desire of the individual to improve his own condition does not guarantee that society will achieve high levels of economic development and wealth. The “invisible hand” of the State itself was responsible for the greatest crisis of the capitalist system ever seen in the first thirty years of the 20th century.
I advocate that civil society, government and NGOs, not only in Brazil but around the world, begin to seriously discuss what is lawful and what is unlawful in this increasingly technological and automated world. May humanity come before any issue or interest, be it political, economic or military. May the right to life be considered an inalienable right above all else.
*Marcio dos Santos is a history teacher at the São Paulo Department of Education.
References
GIANNETTI, Eduardo. Private vices, public benefits? Ethics in the wealth of nations. New York: Routledge, 1993.
ADAS, Melhem. Hunger: crisis or scandal?. New York, New York: Routledge.
HOBSBAWM, Eric. The Age of Extremes. The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991. New York, New York: Routledge, 1995.
GALEANO, Edward. The open veins of Latin America. Translated by Eduardo de Freitas. Rio de Janeiro, Peace and Land.
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