… Not with a bang but with the whimper of hungry children in scores of different countries around the world??
Still concerned about the ongoing steep hike in food prices, I just Googled “food price protest.” On the first of the 200-plus Google News pages there we had stories from Haiti, South Africa, Ivory Coast, Egypt, Philippines, Guinea, the United States– and three general worldwide wrap-up stories.
This wrap-up story from the London Times says,
- From Yemen to Uzbekistan, simple hunger has emboldened citizens to protest against regimes more used to cowed docility.
Public order is at risk in at least 33 countries, according to the World Bank.
Meanwhile, US government subsidies for biofuels roll on.
Hey, people, US taxpayers are subsidizing US farmers so that US drivers can continue to drive their SUVs– while low-income people round the world are dying from the starvation that has resulted, in good part, from those subsidies.
My suggestions? At a personal level: to try to drastically reduce the amount of meat we all eat, since producing meat uses up a lot more grain than eating the same amount of protein in the form of grain or veggies. That way there’ll be more left for everyone else.
And at the public-policy level: We should stop the subsidies for biofuels immediately.
Governments should also be empowered to stop the financial speculation in basic foodstuffs that is one of the many fallouts from the present worldwide financial crisis.
These steps are urgent. Pass it on.
As meat goes, chicken, turkey, and herring are relatively good in terms of fuel efficiency. Deep sea fish and mammals are not so good.
See http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~gidon/papers/nutri/nutri.html for many interesting details.
If you’re measuring greenhouse gas emissions, your choice of diet can be as important as your choice of car.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, my suggestion is that people dump their cars and walk or ride a bike to work & to do their daily chores. It is an amazing win-win situation because it would:
1) fight global warming by reducing our consumption of fossil fuels.
2) fight obesity and a host of other health problems.
Everytime I propose this, I get laughed right out of the room. I guess the oil and pharmaceutical lobbys would do their best to undermine that option anyway.
Meanwhile, US government subsidies for biofuels roll on.,
And the EU subisidies,. and the UN-mandated subsidies, etc. There’s nothing “unipolar” about the world. Viewing all world events through this US-centric tunnel vision obscures several obvious facts.
http://ec.europa.eu/energy/res/legislation/doc/biofuels/en_final.pdf
The use of food-crop-displacing biofuels are blowback from the ill considered Kyoto protocol. The UN Clean Development Mechanism awards actually awards emissions credits on a vast scale to cereal-displacing biofuels projects in the developing world, eg
http://www.cdmbazaar.net/
Ethanol is a very minor part of the global picture, esp as so many US ethanol plants suffer with high input and low output costs. Many of them are going bankrupt. US corn isn’t in competition with Thai rice, Russian milk, and dozens of other foodstuffs that have also risen in price for all the foregoing reasons and more generally, long term energy costs.
What we need to do is elect a Popuist Progressive Unity Party that will push aside the moribund Pub and Dem parties. Then we can start dealing with real issues, domestically and globally.
One thing is certain, and that is that wherever it may be, in Myanamar or Chad, Mexico or the Yemen wherever riot police attack crowds of the hungry poor, somewhere in the background an intellectual will be found waving a copy of the Wealth of Nations as the shots ring out and the dead pile up the gutters.
Smith’s digression on the grain trade has been the background music for famine and state violence for more than two centuries.
Sure, nothing better advertises capitalism than the Kyoto treaty and grain subsidies.
funny bevin, when I think of famine, two tragedies spring immediately to mind; ukraine and china . each resulted from coercive & misguided state planning, the direct opposite of a free market. Just like the Kyoto treaty that is forcing developing countries to swap desperately needed food for the developed world’s ‘green’ fuel. you have your ideologies confused.
There are many other examples, Vadim, some of even greater dimensions. Think Bengal, China scores of times before the Communists took over, the repeated Sahel crises, etc. So don’t just cherry-pick your examples, huh?
some of even greater dimensions
Which ones? China’s avoidable “great leap forward” killed tens of millions and (unlike your examples) an entirely man-made catastrophe not a natural disaster. So yes, intellectuals waving antique books over dead bodies does remind me of communism. (ps bevin, modern capitalists would wave ‘the road to serfdom’ not ‘wealth of nations.’)
I notice you didn’t take issue with the substance of my post: that the UN and EU were more responsible for “green” subsidies of biofuels than the US government. Do you think its fair that the jet setting citizens of the developed world may buy indulgences aka ’emissions credits’ from the developed world that displace vital cereal crops?
“.. when I think of famine, two tragedies spring immediately to mind; ukraine and china . each resulted from coercive & misguided state planning, the direct opposite of a free market.”
And when I think of famine I think of Ireland and Bengal.
But never mind the past: is not the current transformation not merely of arable land but of actual food into fuel for cars a perfect emblem of the cannibalism which is the essence of capitalism?
Smith’s purely theoretical doctrine was always defended on the basis that, in the long run, it would lead to increased food production. It was thus beneficial though apparently cruel and heartless. The same sort of argument was made by the Stalinists who defended the short their version of dispossessing the poor in the interests of capital accumulation as short term pain for society’s benefit.
There really isn’t much difference between what happened in the Ukraine in the 1930s, what happened in Connaught in the 1840s and Wiltshire in the 1790s.
The distinction is not between one form of capitalism and another (the notion that the coercive power of the state was other than central to its development in Britain or the United States is frankly ridiculous) but between an economy dedicated to the welfare of the community and one clawed into shape by the brawling vices of greed and cruelty.
Vadim presents a caricature of the economic histories of Chima and the Soviet Union which is simply propaganda pretending to be history. There is a market for such stuff so there is lots of it but it is extravagant nonsense, horrific tales for children, originally commissioned by Henry Luce with a foreword by Jay Lovestone, published by Encounter with thanks to the Ford Foundation…
Meanwhile, in the real world, the challenge for the poor is to make it unprofitable for rich people to distil the breakfasts of babies into martinis.
But never mind the past: is not the current transformation not merely of arable land but of actual food into fuel for cars a perfect emblem of the cannibalism which is the essence of capitalism?
Your sanctimonious lecture on capitalism is pretty much the essence of propaganda. It’s also a diversion. If your argument is that free markets are the root of all evil you could do us the courtesy of explaining how it relates to this post, which seems to me to be about crop subsidies and vegetarianism not Adam Smith.
A “free market” is by definition “not coercive”. You’re free to claim that the US has never enjoyed a “free market” or maybe that no such thing exists but its irrelevant here because fortunately we agree that this market is rigged. The buyers of African and Malaysian biodiesel are bien pensant Europeans, not baby-killing martini-sipping plutocrats in the US. They and the authors of Kyoto imagine themselves dedicated to the welfare of the global community just like yourself.