Matt Yglesias

14 Responses to “Giving and Taking on Developing World Agriculture”

1. Craig Says:
   July 11th, 2009 at 8:57 am

   A lot of people talk about how bad developed countries agriculture policies are, but not many people seem to have a clear idea how to fix it. I know America has a lot of institutional problems that seem to favor stupid agriculture policies or at least make it hard to change them. But what about Europe? What is the cause of their algriculture stupidity?

2. serial catowner Says:
   July 11th, 2009 at 9:17 am

   Matt, you’re not always helping farmers in poor countries when you buy produce from those countries.

   In fact, the most usual effect is to spur the development of latifundia owned by a small number of landholders, who move the poor farmers off their land, causing the explosive growth of third-world cities.

   *Tap tap- is this thing on?* Is any of this getting through? It constantly amazes me to see this total ignorance of the largest demographic shift in all history.

   It’s even more amazing when you consider how many mega-slums with populations over ten million are being created by these policies, not to mention the rain forests being lost and the aquifers being drained to grow monocrops for international trade.

   Well, enjoy your future, young people. I’m guessing it’s going to get very interesting indeed at some point.

3. Reality Man Says:
   July 11th, 2009 at 9:46 am

   But what about Europe? What is the cause of their algriculture stupidity?

   Not much different. Farmers are a good constituency bloc to have as a politician. Developing world farmers don’t vote in French or German elections, but French or German farmers do. There is also a bit of a nationalistic streak to buying domestic agricultural goods. A lot of European nationalism, even if they don’t like admitting it, is still tied to ideas of the countryside. A lot of what I just wrote could also apply to Japan as well.

4. shooter242 Says:
   July 11th, 2009 at 11:50 am

   Oh for the love of …. People, the single biggest reason countries are poor is their government. Zimbabwe used to export food, and now is starving all because of Mugabe and his kleptocracy.
   Obama had it right when pointing out the difference between successful countries and others are transparent institutions protecting people’s rights. Any time you support a dictatorship, current and future (like Honduras), you support the eventual impoverishment of that country.

5. Hector Says:
   July 11th, 2009 at 12:01 pm

   Serial Catowner is dead-on right. Unless export markets for developing-country agriculture are combined with extensive land reform and public services for rural communities, the effect will simply be to increase the concentration of wealth and force peasants off their land. Of course, as you point out, I doubt that too many Yglesian hipsters are aware of that. I do think that we should buy more Venezuelan agricultural products, as that is one country that has actually made land reform and strengthening rural communities a major priority in the last few years.

   As for Shooter 242, he evidently has never heard of malnutrition in the world’s largest democracy. A few years ago, India had a greater population of the population malnourished than Africa. (Not _starving_, relatively few people were _starving_ in India, but severely malnourished).

6. Max424 Says:
   July 11th, 2009 at 12:08 pm

   @ serial catowner: “not to mention the rain forests being lost and the aquifers being drained to grow monocrops for international trade.”

   When I think about the future of agriculture in Africa, I see one giant coffee plantation.

   Great for me. I love my Ethiopian Sidamo and my Kenya AA. Bad for Africans. They can’t eat coffee.

7. Hector Says:
   July 11th, 2009 at 12:21 pm

   Max424,

   Actually, if you must cut down the rainforest and use it for agriculture, coffee farms are better than most other kinds of economically viable farming. Certain kinds of coffee cultivation are compatible with retaining at least some of the native tree cover and can (arguably) serve as decent wildlife habitat. Palm oil (for biofuel purposes), now there is a serious threat to the rain forests.

   Not that I endorse replacing the Central African or South American rain forest with coffee plantations, of course.

8. Max424 Says:
   July 11th, 2009 at 1:32 pm

   Hector

   True. Coffee is not the worst. Still, it seems a bit incongruous for a continent that always faces potential mass starvation to become the world’s leading exporter of a non-edible crop.

9. Max Says:
   July 11th, 2009 at 2:48 pm

   Hector – India’s impoverished malnourished population is a result of the government. They are a democracy but transparency is not there. India’s success is held back by the government. India is a net food exporter.

10. Hector Says:
    July 11th, 2009 at 3:28 pm

    Max,

    Which simply shows that democracy and good government are not the same thing, and are not necessarily even closely related. Thanks for that admission- most American social liberals are unwilling to make it.

    In the interests of accuracy I think most of the problem in India lies with utterly dysfunctional _state_ governments in some of the northern states. The federal government certainly has its problems, but the state governments are something else.

11. dsquared Says:
    July 11th, 2009 at 3:40 pm

    No. No. No. European and American farm subsidies help the third world, they don’t harm it. Tariffs hurt the third world, but there are surprisingly few of those.

12. Reality Man Says:
    July 11th, 2009 at 5:03 pm

    dsquared that has to be one of the stupidest articles I’ve ever read. Just because it’s in the Guardian doesn’t mean it’s not corporatist garbage. So because Africa has bad roads, they can’t export crops and we should subsidize a fat lobby and dump goods on the international market? The truth of the matter is that exporting foodstuffs, combined with good economic policies, has been an important step in development for many countries. Is it bad for Vietnam that it became the world’s biggest rice exporter? Was it bad for American farmers in the days when we were relatively poor to send foodstuffs to Europe?

13. serial catowner Says:
    July 11th, 2009 at 5:28 pm

    As a matter of fact, it was bad for American farmers for decades when American exports were strong. More than half the farmers were tenant farmers or sharecroppers living lives of such incredible poverty that I literally had to read about it twice to believe it. Famine was frequent, one might almost say pandemic, in a life with 16-hour days and seven-day weeks for the animal husbandry.

    Thee were good reasons for the fact that most American farmers were millenarians between 1880 and 1920. The growth of manufacturing in the cities helped rural people to leave the farms, but it was only the federal government that was able to bring electricity, phones, roads, and schools to most rural areas in the 30s. The much-vaunted “free enterprise” system not only failed the farmer completely but left them poorer than they were before food exports began to drive the agrarian economy.

    There was nothing picturesque about starving, not having shoes, and having nothing to do but work (for about a penny an hour) on a farm with no electric lights, radio, telephone, or television. It was, in fact, so horrible that a veil is discretely drawn over scenes of depravity too coarse to be described for modern ears.

    Not the good life as depicted by Currier and Ives.

14. Reality Man Says:
    July 12th, 2009 at 11:19 am

    serial catowner, how much of that was actually connected to the ability to export crops? Did having an export market actually make any of those things worse? A lot of the problems were caused by American racism and slavery, which not only robbed centuries of African-Americans of wealth and opportunity, but made it impossible for poor white farmers to compete with near-zero labor costs in their own domestic market.