The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and possibly a slathering of bureaucratic buffoonery.
As reported in the Des Moines Register, as part of Obama’s “Feed the Future” initiative, farmers in Ethiopia will soon be given bags of seed and then will be trained on how to properly plant the seeds and apply chemical fertilizers.
You know, because what is perhaps the oldest known civilization on the planet can’t possibly continue to survive without the help of an “advanced” nation, its tax dollars and its corporate puppeteers.
Reporter Philip Brasher writes …
President Barack Obama is counting on an unusual mix of taxpayer dollars and investments from profit-hunting agribusiness giants such as DuPont to feed the globe’s growing population.
And this, dear reader, is the problem.
While the goal to exterminate hunger is an honorable one, this is not the most effective way to do it. In fact, I would argue that some of today’s hungriest people live in parts of the world that have been overrun by the “good intentions” of other western nations.
Unlovely Stepchildren
The truth is, in an effort to feed a lot of hungry folks in Africa, the U.S. already sends tons of corn, wheat and rice every year. But in the process, these “free” calories saturate the market and put local merchants out of business. No one’s going to pay for local food when Americans are sending it over for free.
Libertarian farmer Joel Salatin commented on this, saying …
One of the most interesting things that ever happened to me was in Turin, Italy. I was a US delegate to Terra Madre, which was the slow food, big, international, slow food convivium.
When I wasn’t speaking, I went and, and attended as many of the African delegation speakers as I possibly could
There were, I don’t know, 400 of us American delegates, it was a 5,000-member thing. It was interesting, the animosity of the rest of the world toward we American farmers
Every single African delegation said, “We have all the resources.” And if you look at Africa, they have rainfall, there’s luxuriant growth. They said, “The reason that we’re having trouble is because of western dumping that displaces our indigenous production.
What they said was we have all of this resource ability to produce. We’ve got indigenous production, we’ve got all this. But what happens is that when the aid food comes to our shores, it suppresses the local market. It overwhelms the local market with cheapness. And what that means is that the local farmers who were selling at the market and who had their ongoing business concerns are now displaced by a subsidized, cheap, material that’s dumped onto the local market.
And we spent, trust me, we spent most of our time distancing ourselves from all American policy, saying, “We’re not Washington, DC. They don’t like us in Washington, DC. We’re different.” Well, the fact was that that was the same way it was with all of the other slow food delegations. They were distancing themselves from their governments, who were taking foreign aid and displacing them as indigenous, embedded, localized food networkers. They were being displaced by UN charity. What each of these delegates said, each session I went to, was, “You Americans butt out. We don’t need your foreign aid. We can feed ourselves.” And they would list these wonderful, perennial nut-bearing trees and things that had now been cut down because of cheap, western-dumping, foreign aid into those cultures, which depressed the price of their locally-produced food, and eliminated the value.
And as soon as it eliminated the value of their local food, it eliminated the resource base that produced that food, which means that resource base became exploited, cut down, destroyed. And now they were looking at we’ve got, we’ve got 20 years ‘til we can replace this, because our resource base has been destroyed due to the lack of value, which created a lack of respect, which created a lack of stewardship. And here we are. And here we are, poor, and we’re not feeding ourselves; not because we can’t, but because a system that was working extremely well has been displaced by this, this western dumping.
And it was that way in every single delegation. So, it was fascinating that all of us, all 5,000 of us delegates from 147 countries of the world, none of us, not a single one, developed countries, undeveloped, none of us represented had the blessing, if you will, of our official governments. We were all guerrillas. We were all mavericks. We were all unlovely stepchildren.
The truth is, many of these countries would likely be a lot better off if we just stayed out of their business. Or if we do want to offer our assistance, it can be done so in the absence of government. Certainly there are a number of non-profits and even charitable individuals that have offered everything from micro-loans to help small farmers and local businesses rebuild their local economies to small distributed energy systems that allow many of these rural folks to work well into the night, long after the sun has set.
There’s nothing wrong with being charitable. In fact, it’s righteous to share our good fortune with those who struggle. But this is a decision that must be made by the individual, and not by a centralized government taking action on your behalf – using your money. Particularly when these decisions seem to benefit the corporate masters of the U.S. government a lot more than those in need.
Sure, it makes for good PR. You know, the whole “teach a man to fish” routine. Certainly it’s better than just sending over a bunch of free food.
But who’s going to tell these farmers that in another decade or so, because of all those chemical fertilizers they’ve been using, that their soil could be completely devoid of the nutrients that help keep soil healthy?
Who’s going to test the water to make sure its not contaminated in the process?
Who’s going to tell these folks that the price of those synthetic fertilizers have increased and they’re going to have to figure out how to come up with the cash to pay for them. Because you know that gravy train won’t last forever.
This whole thing smells like a tangled web of corporate welfare, resource misallocation and bureaucratic bufoonery. And sadly, as taxpayers, we’re funding the whole thing.
As a sidenote, I find it uncomfortably laughable that while the Obama administration and its corporate funders descend upon Africa to feed the hungry, in the U.S., citizens are being jailed for doing the same thing – as we discussed in this article here.
I guess the government doesn’t like competition.
