Month: November 2003

I have not been able to figure out if Students for War is a subtle pardoy or if the people behind it really are sincerely insane. A WHOIS search turns up an essentially anonymous registration (registered to “Concerned Citizen.”)

If it’s really mean to be serious, a) again, they’re insane, and b) I’m not sure why I should listen to people who can’t even be bothered to correctly spell “Holocaust” on one of their nifty downloadable fliers. Normally correcting people’s spelling isn’t my thing, but the spelling in this case seems to be as sloppy as the thinking.

Ronald Bailey reported for Reason magazine from the World Trade Organization meeting in Cancun, Mexico, including an excellent article on the idiocy of developed world farm subsidies and the surprising reaction to the subsidies from those who claim to represent the interests of the poor.

Bailey highlights the insidious inequity of farm subsidies in the United States, Europe and Japan — the elimination of which would do far more than any international aid program to help the developing world. Bailey wrote,

However, access to world markets is blocked by the protectionist policies of the world’s richest countries, the European Union, the United States and Japan. These countries shovel out over $300 billion per year in subsidies to their farmers. Such largesse means that the average European cow receives an infamous subsidy averaging $2.50 per day. Consequently, farmers in developing countries and least-developed countries suffer a double whammy—rich country subsidies keep world prices artificially low so poor farmers can’t compete in world markets; rich countries then turn around and dump their subsidized agricultural surpluses in the poor farmers’ local markets. The New York Times recently and correctly editorialized that this situation is not only unfair, it is also “immoral”.

It is indeed immoral. Lack of free trade and developed country agricultural subsidies are literally killing people, according to a recent report by the Brussels-based Center for a New Europe (CNE). The CNE finds, “6,600 people die every day in the world because of the trading rules of the European Union (EU). That is 275 people every hour.” Think of it like crashing a Boeing 747 filled with people every hour, 24 hours per day.

Given that state of affairs, you might thing that those speaking on behalf of the poor in developing countries would want to see an end to such subsidies. Some may, but some prominent activists prefer a third way — a return to subsistence agriculture.

Bailey wrote,

Indian political environmentalist Vandana Shiva insightfully told the IFG activists, “Domestic agriculture in India has been destroyed by developed country farm subsidies and dumping.” Then she quickly veered from this reasonable observation to unthinking environmentalist dogma. Her solution is not to eliminate the subsidies and open up food trade. Instead she wants Indian farmers to reject the Green Revolution which boosted Indian grain production four-fold over the past four decades and move back toward small-scale agricultural production. This is a recipe for famine.

Will Allen, an American organic farmer, noted at the IFG meeting that in the United States, only 9 percent of the farmers receive nearly 80 percent of the subsidies, so the subsidies aren’t really helping small farmers in the U.S. either. But instead of calling for the end of subsidies, Allen declared, “We advocate there be subsidies all over the world to convert agriculture into sustainable agriculture.” Sustainable agriculture for Allen is organic agriculture, which is less productive than conventional or biotech farming. Lower productivity means more food insecurity and more natural lands like forests chopped down to create farm fields. . . .

Apparently, many environmental activists prefer that poor farmers and their families remain doing the backbreaking, mind-numbing labor of subsistence farming. U.S. organic farmer Allen recounted with evident nostalgia the fact that in 1848, when chemists had finally learned how to use fertilizers to boost crop production, 90 percent of Americans lived on farms. According to Allen, a century later, 37 percent of Americans still worked on farms. Today, only 1 percent of Americans are farmers. Did Americans become poorer because they fled the farm? Hardly. They moved up from farming to become the richest, most technologically sophisticated economy in history. It is past time that the richest countries remove the barriers that block the poorest countries from following this same trajectory to prosperity. The Cancun WTO conference is the place to begin.

Great, just what the world needed — a nascent “Back to the Farm” movement. The goal should be to remove these stupid subsidies so that agriculture in the developing world can compete with the developed world and advance to the point where it is as efficient as the developed world.

Source:

Cancun Delusions: Subsidizing the poor to death. Ronald Bailey, Reason, September 10, 2003.