Ending Famine, Simply by Ignoring the Experts

[SecularMotion]

Source: NY 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.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/02/world/africa/02malawi.html?hp

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This is a good sign. More countries need to reject the World Bank and their free-market policies.

[momster]

1. Conservatism Fails Again

From the Article: "The United States, which has shipped $147 million worth of American food to Malawi as emergency relief since 2002, but only $53 million to help Malawi grow its own food, has not provided any financial support for the subsidy program, except for helping pay for the evaluation of it. Over the years, the United States Agency for International Development has focused on promoting the role of the private sector in delivering fertilizer and seed, and saw subsidies as undermining that effort."

There are some jobs that you need a government to do well if the job is to succeed. The key words are 'government to do *well*'...not this broken ideological limping nightmare that we have now.

[whistle]

2. We know that World Bank policies promote genocide and euthanasia in the poor countries

[leftist_not_liberal]

3. recommended

It is time to stop this global trade in the most trivial of items, and yes, corn is trivial in that most places can produce it themselves. Besides the fact that IMF and World Bank policies are about raping the third world for the benefit of the (top 1% of the) first, the waste in fuel and the climate consequences dictate a return to ration, local economies.

Even the shittiest of communist central planners could have avoided the oil shocks that are frighteningly soon to come...

[OKthatsIT]

4. Get them hooked on Monsanto GMO SEED, then pull the plug

Monsanto, the UN's favorite secret weapon, promising wonder crops but has the potential to starve billions. All they have to do is pull the switch on 'fertile seed' and give them the GMO seed which will not reproduce more seed.

Talk about Crimes Against Humanity...

[Lorien]

5. They already do that in Iraq; force farmers to buy seed that carries the

"suicide gene". They also have developed seeds which will only germinate when sprayed with patented Monsanto chemicals. Check out the documentary "The future of food" to see what else the megacorps have in store for us. :scared:

[truedelphi]

9. Then it is wondered as to why "They hate us!" n/t

[JHB]

They're just following our practices, not our preaching...

Another bit from the article:

"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."


Of course, when liberals point things like this out, we're "blaming America first".

[NorthernSpy]

6. Free-market economists are murderers.

Well-fed ideologues who imposed starvation on others.


May they someday get what they deserve.

[Hydra]

7. Here's the real point:

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.

Rather sly of them- produce cash crops at bottom level prices for IMF hacks, and be dependent on IMPORTS for the thing you really need- food.

They don't like how the country is acting? No more low cost food imports.

"What's that? You don't have anything to eat? The Free Market will fix that!"

:puke:

[rodeodance]

10. sick sick

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.

[hedgehog]

8. It's the circle of Death - we subsidize incredible amounts of corn,

wheat, rice and cotton while small family farms fold up. Then we dump our excess gain on whatever famine is handy.



I like the Malawi solution. Now if they could only train their farmers in sustainable agriculture A/K/A organic farming.

[Hydra]

11. We could sell them some of our surplus manure

instead of making building materials out of it.

[trashcanistanista]

14. Good point. The true solution is one word

composting. Then they will no longer need to be dependent on fertilizers. Put Monsanto out of business.

[NickB79]

12. Unfortunately, fertilizers are made from natural gas

And natural gas supplies globally are expected to peak in a decade or two as demand outpaces supplies.

It was fun while it lasted, though.

[hedgehog]

13. This is whywe need to start intensive studies in sustainable agriculture

A/K/A organic farming.

Compared to farming methods based on herbicides & chemical fertilizers, organic farming

Produces the same or better yield from a given field over several years

Produces more nutritious vegetables

Actually increases soil depths (traditional farming methods reduce soil depths)


BTW - Obama has proposed assisting farmers to get organic certification

http://www.barackobama.com/2007/10/16/obama_outlines_policies_for_ru.php

[eppur_se_muova]

15. "Free" market works only when decisions are not FORCED.

Starving people need the best options available, not the best the market will bear.

The free market works very nicely when "disposable income" is a realistic concept. But at the extremes of wealth -- the very highest and the very lowest -- the assumption that selling price is controlled by a careful cost/benefit analysis is pure fiction. The very poor cannot afford to bid, no matter how great their desire to do so, and the very wealthy can outbid anybody, with no real sacrifice. Either way, the concept breaks down.

Short version: World Bank is evil.