Day: May 25, 2001

As you may have heard, Robert Redford and Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton have been trading potshots over conservation, with Redford like to think of himself as an environmentalist’s environmentalist. Which makes New York Times writer John Tierney’s op-ed on his experience at a Redford global warming retreat all the more hilarious,

The event began with a group hike up the mountain to a clearing where Mr. Redford made a toast to “healing the planet.” Then, after explaining that “Native Americans have a special understanding and relationship with the earth that we would all do well to learn,” he introduced two Indian chiefs to perform a ritual. As they recited prayers and lamented “the white people’s war on living things,” they built a fire out of wood and sprinkled tobacco in it.

It seemed a bit odd for a conference on cleansing the atmosphere to open with a ritualistic fire that wasted energy and spewed greenhouse gases mixed with the world’s deadliest carcinogen. But then, the chiefs’ profligacy was nothing compared with the audience’s. We had come from all over the world in oil-burning airplanes and driven 50 miles in rented cars that spewed exhaust into the Rocky Mountain air.

Following the declining fortunes of the French Communist Party, one of the oldest surviving Communist daily newspapers in Europe — L’Humanite — recently announced that it had reached an agreement with private investors to bail out the troubled newspaper.

Founded by French Communist leader Jean Jaure (who was assassinated in 1914), the paper once had a daily circulation in excess of 400,000. As membership in the French Communist Party has declined from a high of 800,000 to less than 200,000, however, the circulation of L’Humanite fell to less than 50,000 and became a serious drain on party finances.

To prevent the newspaper from disappearing entirely, the paper entered an agreement to forge a deal with the devil — capitalists — and sold a stake to privately owned television channel TF1. Ironically TF1 is in turn owned by communications group Bouygues, which in turn is a division of Lagarde`re, a combination holding company of defense and media companies.

Only in France would weapons makers want to invest in a struggling Communist Party daily, and only in France would the daily agree.

Marxist daily sells stakes to private investors. Jo Johnson, Financial Times, May 18, 2001.

Foreign aid doesn’t seem to work. Plans to subsidize agriculture in developing countries to give farmers and others enough to live off of won’t work. So what should the developed world due to help the poor in the developing world? There’s one cheap, easy thing that industrialized nations could do immediately which would not only help alleviate hunger and poverty, but also benefit the developed nations: end all agricultural subsidies in those nations.

The ongoing subsidies that nations such as the United States, France, Great Britain and others provide to their farms are among the most backward of public policy decisions anywhere in the world. Their main effect is to raise the cost of food within those countries while simultaneously making it difficult, if not impossible, for farmers in developing countries to compete. Such subsidies create millions of net losers to pad the profits of a very small, but politically influential, group of growers.

UN Food and Agricultural Organization director Jacques Diouf outlined the magnitude of the subsidy problem in a recent meeting at the World Agricultural Forum in the United States:

In 1999 alone, the total subsidies to agriculture by OECD countries was estimated at US $361.5 billion, or 1.4% of their total GDP. This support is in accord with the WTO agreements, but there is little doubt that it gives the industrialized countries a competitive edge which poorer countries cannot match. It is also interesting to compare this support with the total flow of official development assistance to agriculture, which reached US $7.4 billion in 1998.

Many industrialized countries talk incessantly about how developing countries need to eliminate their own subsidies and bring more transparency to their economies, but then they hypocritically turn around and offer massive subsidies which distort agricultural markets both within their own borders and internationally. Such subsidies should be eliminated as soon as possible — it’s the best solution both from a moral and economic point of view.

Source:

Widespread hunger a stain on world’s conscience; agricultural subsidies in industrialized countries disadvantage poor nations. UN Food and Agricultural Organization, Press Release, May 20, 2001.