Matt Yglesias

17 Responses to “Endgame”

1. El Cid Says:
   June 16th, 2009 at 6:38 pm

   Kudos for mentioning the Malawi case; I’d been bringing it up for years, and the NYT had quite a serious article on it too back in 2007:

   Ending Famine, Simply by Ignoring the Experts

   The secret of Malawi’s success: heavy subsidies for fertilizer, farmers say. The World Bank had pressed for their elimination.

   By CELIA W. DUGGER | Published: December 2, 2007 | New York Times

   LILONGWE, Malawi — Malawi hovered for years at the brink of famine. After a disastrous corn harvest in 2005, almost five million of its 13 million people needed emergency food aid.

   But this year, a nation that has perennially extended a begging bowl to the world is instead feeding its hungry neighbors. It is selling more corn to the World Food Program of the United Nations than any other country in southern Africa and is exporting hundreds of thousands of tons of corn to Zimbabwe.

   In Malawi itself, the prevalence of acute child hunger has fallen sharply. In October, the United Nations Children’s Fund sent three tons of powdered milk, stockpiled here to treat severely malnourished children, to Uganda instead. “We will not be able to use it!” Juan Ortiz-Iruri, Unicef’s deputy representative in Malawi, said jubilantly.

   Farmers explain Malawi’s extraordinary turnaround — one with broad implications for hunger-fighting methods across Africa — with one word: fertilizer.

   Over the past 20 years, the World Bank and some rich nations Malawi depends on for aid have periodically pressed this small, landlocked country to adhere to free market policies and cut back or eliminate fertilizer subsidies, even as the United States and Europe extensively subsidized their own farmers. But after the 2005 harvest, the worst in a decade, Bingu wa Mutharika, Malawi’s newly elected president, decided to follow what the West practiced, not what it preached.

   Stung by the humiliation of pleading for charity, he led the way to reinstating and deepening fertilizer subsidies despite a skeptical reception from the United States and Britain. Malawi’s soil, like that across sub-Saharan Africa, is gravely depleted, and many, if not most, of its farmers are too poor to afford fertilizer at market prices.

   “As long as I’m president, I don’t want to be going to other capitals begging for food,” Mr. Mutharika declared. Patrick Kabambe, the senior civil servant in the Agriculture Ministry, said the president told his advisers, “Our people are poor because they lack the resources to use the soil and the water we have.”

   The country’s successful use of subsidies is contributing to a broader reappraisal of the crucial role of agriculture in alleviating poverty in Africa and the pivotal importance of public investments in the basics of a farm economy: fertilizer, improved seed, farmer education, credit and agricultural research.

   Malawi, an overwhelmingly rural nation about the size of Pennsylvania, is an extreme example of what happens when those things are missing. As its population has grown and inherited landholdings have shrunk, impoverished farmers have planted every inch of ground. Desperate to feed their families, they could not afford to let their land lie fallow or to fertilize it. Over time, their depleted plots yielded less food and the farmers fell deeper into poverty.

   Malawi’s leaders have long favored fertilizer subsidies, but they reluctantly acceded to donor prescriptions, often shaped by foreign-aid fashions in Washington, that featured a faith in private markets and an antipathy to government intervention.

   In the 1980s and again in the 1990s, the World Bank pushed Malawi to eliminate fertilizer subsidies entirely. Its theory both times was that Malawi’s farmers should shift to growing cash crops for export and use the foreign exchange earnings to import food, according to Jane Harrigan, an economist at the University of London.

   In a withering evaluation of the World Bank’s record on African agriculture, the bank’s own internal watchdog concluded in October not only that the removal of subsidies had led to exorbitant fertilizer prices in African countries, but that the bank itself had often failed to recognize that improving Africa’s declining soil quality was essential to lifting food production.

   “The donors took away the role of the government and the disasters mounted,” said Jeffrey Sachs, a Columbia University economist who lobbied Britain and the World Bank on behalf of Malawi’s fertilizer program and who has championed the idea that wealthy countries should invest in fertilizer and seed for Africa’s farmers.

   Here in Malawi, deep fertilizer subsidies and lesser ones for seed, abetted by good rains, helped farmers produce record-breaking corn harvests in 2006 and 2007, according to government crop estimates. Corn production leapt to 2.7 million metric tons in 2006 and 3.4 million in 2007 from 1.2 million in 2005, the government reported.

   “The rest of the world is fed because of the use of good seed and inorganic fertilizer, full stop,” said Stephen Carr, who has lived in Malawi since 1989, when he retired as the World Bank’s principal agriculturalist in sub-Saharan Africa. “This technology has not been used in most of Africa. The only way you can help farmers gain access to it is to give it away free or subsidize it heavily.”

   “The government has taken the bull by the horns and done what farmers wanted,” he said. Some economists have questioned whether Malawi’s 2007 bumper harvest should be credited to good rains or subsidies, but an independent evaluation, financed by the United States and Britain, found that the subsidy program accounted for a large share of this year’s increase in corn production.

   The harvest also helped the poor by lowering food prices and increasing wages for farm workers. Researchers at Imperial College London and Michigan State University concluded in their preliminary report that a well-run subsidy program in a sensibly managed economy “has the potential to drive growth forward out of the poverty trap in which many Malawians and the Malawian economy are currently caught.”

   Farmers interviewed recently in Malawi’s southern and central regions said fertilizer had greatly improved their ability to fill their bellies with nsima, the thick, cornmeal porridge that is Malawi’s staff of life.

2. AssForAHeadDotCom Says:
   June 16th, 2009 at 6:40 pm

   Only a hack like MattY, part of the Soros-Podesta-Sotomayor network of Terkeldom, would ignore this smear on well-meaning patriots who just happened to shoot a child as part of their activities.

   I could sit here for the next hour laying out all the ways MattY and his readers are hacks and cretins. All the miserable failures here have neither the brainpower to understand my argument nor the guts to answer me. Hard questions. YouTube. Hacks.

3. 24AheadDotCom Says:
   June 16th, 2009 at 8:40 pm

   - Rumor is that all CAP workers are required to watch youtube.com/watch?v=YMf4NivM6TA twice per day. MattY often exceeds his quota.

   - But seriously, a couple days ago, MattY said this was “the right thing” to do. Yet, MattY has never once been intellectually honest enough to provide a logical counter-argument to the issues discussed at that page, preferring instead to construct strawmen or engage in other CAP-level behavior. Can you trust what MattY tells you?

   - Only a hack – in this case, one that supports massive illegal activity – would try to hold other people and movements responsible for the activities of a small group of troubled people, yet that’s the level of debate one finds around here. Perhaps MattY could care to let us know which comments are coming from the University of Tennessee.

4. ... Says:
   June 16th, 2009 at 8:46 pm

   24Ahead:

   Only a hack – in this case, one that supports massive illegal activity – would try to hold other people and movements responsible for the activities of a small group of troubled people

   24Ahead:

   P.S. I’m still waiting to hear from MattY about the group she joined that gave an award to someone who’d proposed genocide.

5. Not Glenn Reynolds Says:
   June 16th, 2009 at 8:49 pm

   ShutTheFckUpLonewacko

6. El Cid Says:
   June 16th, 2009 at 8:58 pm

   Hey, LoneCracko, if you don’t like Matt Yglesias, his blog, or his commenters, why don’t you fucking leave instead of coming here all the time just so you can try desperately to be more successful than the loser you are and lure the successful and gainfully employed Matt Yglesias and his readers to your shitty blog?

   Nobody asked you to come here and blogwhore for no relevant reason every chance you get. So if you don’t like it, and feel so benighted to see its contents, why don’t you just go away?

   Trust us — nobody would mind, and no one would miss you. Don’t hang around on our account, unless you’re just here ’cause you think you can make another 62 cents off your shitty blog.

7. Econobuzz Says:
   June 16th, 2009 at 10:43 pm

   Is it too late for meaningful financial regulation to pass Congress?

   Yes.

8. Richard Steven Hack Says:
   June 16th, 2009 at 11:37 pm

   Who is this nut?

9. DTM Says:
   June 16th, 2009 at 11:42 pm

   Is it too late for meaningful financial regulation to pass Congress?

   Ezra’s vague concerns seem as yet unwarranted to me, and the Bloomberg article he cites mostly just contains speculation from a lot of interested outside parties.

   In fact, the Obama Administration just detailed its plan and released its white paper:

   Obama Blueprint Deepens Federal Role in Markets

   Of course people might disagree with the substance of the Obama Administration’s approach. Personally, I think it addresses most of the most important issues, and I don’t think the fact that it only eliminates one regulator is a big deal in light of the amount of authority it is is consolidating in the Fed.

   But in any event, that has nothing in particular to do with the timing issues that are apparently concerning Ezra. And holding aside all the vague speculation by outside parties, what is coming out of Congress itself still seems to suggest that the planned schedule is to have the House do something before the August recess, then the Senate pass its version sometime before the end of the calendar year.

10. Anonymous Says:
    June 17th, 2009 at 12:52 am

    Undoubtedly 24 is one of the Great Thinkers of Our Generation. He is Truly Genius, and The reason people Attack and Harass him is that They can’t Handle his Intelligent, well-Articulated, and Polite Arguments.

11. Richard Steven Hack Says:
    June 17th, 2009 at 2:03 am

    No, I thought that was me.

    So who is this 24 nut?

12. Njorl Says:
    June 17th, 2009 at 9:00 am

    24 seems to see himself as a future, successful, right-wing blogger. I think he needs new glasses.

    At least part of his business plan is to attract liberal commenters to his site. A blog that is pure echo-chamber, like freerepublic, would have to compete with freerepublic. That is not a profitable strategy. So he comes here offering his disingenuous teaser arguments thinking he’ll lure people to his site. Sometimes it works, but no one stays long. He, like most right wingers, doesn’t understand the importance of the dialectic method of argument. We can put up with the frequent, obvious, disingenuousness of Al, because he is just a commenter here, but most of us just can’t tolerate prolonged argument with people who don’t believe words have meanings, who have no regard for truth, and who believe that logic has an off switch.

13. joe from Lowell Says:
    June 17th, 2009 at 9:16 am

    Only a hack – in this case, one that supports massive illegal activity – would try to hold other people and movements responsible for the activities of a small group of troubled people

    Yes, only a hack like yourself, with your long-standing policy of glorifying the illegal activity of the murderous Minutemen, would try to hold the entire body of Paperwork-Deprived America-Joiners responsible for the activities of the vanishingly small number of them who are criminals.

    And yet, you do it every single day. Because you’re a hack.

14. Midland Says:
    June 17th, 2009 at 11:09 am

    Yep, that’s two more guys traveling all the way to this little blog just to badmouth Matt.

    My original theory stands. There can’t be any rational reason why they waste so much effort to piss on him. He’s gotta be nailing their girlfriends at conferences and stealing the liquor from their mini-bars.

15. 24AheadDotCom Says:
    June 17th, 2009 at 1:46 pm

    “joe from Lowell” should watch it with the libelous claims. I haven’t been as big a fan of the “Minutemen” (there are actually several groups using that as part of their name, and it’s important to note which one is referring to) as I’ve been a critic of their opponents. And, it’s libelous to claim that I’ve “glorified” any illegal activity that individual members have engaged in. If you don’t think I won’t sue over statements like that, just wait.

16. ... Says:
    June 17th, 2009 at 3:18 pm

    libel is something that damages ones reputation in a given community. LoneWacko’s reputation is ALREADY ridiculously low

    It doesn’t come as much of a surprise that Lonewacko is as ignorant of libel law as he is of every other topic he comments on.

    Common Internet Tough Guy threats include:

    * Libel lawsuits (that would immediately be thrown out of court).
    * Lawsuits in general, even if the two parties live in different countries.
    * Bonus points if they threaten slander lawsuits instead.

17. Ones for the Road « The Way Things Break Says:
    June 17th, 2009 at 5:21 pm

    [...] periodically posting a “what I’m reading” list and see how that works. It does seem to be all the rage these [...]