David Harvey quote

When famines do occur (as, sadly, they too often do), it is invariably due to social and political causes. The last great famine in China, which may have killed some 20 million people at the time of the ‘great leap forward’, occurred precisely because China was then by political choice isolated from the world market. Such an event could not now happen in China. This should be a salutary lesson for all those who place their anti-capitalist faith on the prospects for local food sovereignty, local self-sufficiency and decoupling from the global economy. Freeing ourselves from the chains of an international division of labour organised for the benefit of capital and the imperialist powers is one thing, but decoupling from the world market in the name of anti-globalisation is a potentially suicidal alternative. The central contradiction in capital’s use of the division of labour. Under the rule of capital, agriculture tends to be monocultural, extractive and, of course, perpetually expanding under the pressures of exponential growth. David Harvey, Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism, Verso, 2014, p. 124-5.