Starvation in Uganda Food mountains in EEC!

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Television news broadcasts last week brought home the full horror of starvation that now threatens the lives of at least 12 million people in Africa alone.

But the very next day they threw their weight behind the reactionary pronouncement by Shirley Williams, David Owen and William Rodgers that they would split from the Labour Party if it called for a withdrawal from the Common Market.

The EEC of course provides the most glaring testimony to the inability of capitalism to feed the world or administer production in the interests of the vast majority of the population.

Its beef mountains, butter mountains, milk and wine lakes, its silos packed with unused grain, its subsidised crops ploughed back into the ground -all at a cost in excess of £5 billion this year-stand in stark contrast to the grinding poverty, the tortures of hunger and deprivation that face whole peoples in Uganda, and elsewhere in Northern and Western Africa.

The EEC shows the wanton destruction of foodstuffs on a monumental scale by capitalist vandals in the pursuit of private profit.

But there are still more resources available to feed, clothe and house the impoverished masses: the money used for the huge arms programmes IN REVIEWING THE BUOGET, SIRE, I FIND YOU RAVE ALLOCATED BILLIONS FOR DEFINISE AND NOT ONE CENT FOR THE POOR now being embarked upon by imperialist leaders in their Cold War offensive.

Thatcher is even now finalising the decision to spend £5,000 million on the new Irident missiles for the Polaris submarine fleet: £1,000 million is already being spent on developing a new British torpedo.

Hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent by US imperialism deploying Cruise and Pershing 2 missiles throughout Europe.

And $50 billion has been allocated by Carter to building the absurd MX missile system in the USA!

Meanwhile imperialist spending on existing armed forces totals tens of billions of pounds Thatcher RIGHT each year.

All this extravagant hardware and expenditure is designed to perpetuate imperialist rule over the masses of the world: yet there is scarcely even a token gesture of concern when starvation-whether in Kampuchea or Ethiopia; whether in Uganda or West Africa-strikes at millions of men, women and children.

Meanwhile in Uganda itself the workers and peasants have suffered the multiple burdens brought about by years of savage dictatorship under Sandhurst-trained butcher Amin, and now by the presence of 10,000 Tanzanian occupying troops propping up the military regime.

And the inability of the Ugandan economy-in the clutchesof imperialism-to plan or develop systematic agriculture in one of . the most naturally fertile and abundant countries on earth spells out unmistakeably the material necessity for the overthrow of imperialist and capitalist exploitation and the establishment of a planned, socialist economy not on a national but an international basis.

Until then, despite all the occasional handwringing of liberals, and despite food parcels from charities, starvation, poverty and hunger will remain the ever-present reality of life for the majority of the world's population. Defending food mountains: Williams