Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

They don't want other countries to limit their exports to US. That would hold 
prices down in those countries but limit our food supplies and raise OUR 
prices. They can riot and starve but our comfort level is nonnegotiable ... 
This is from the corporate Economist magazine.

paul tradingpost@lobo.net
------------------------------------------

The silent tsunami
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11050146
Apr 17th 2008
>From The Economist print edition
Food prices are causing misery and strife around the world. Radical solutions 
are needed

PICTURES of hunger usually show passive eyes and swollen bellies. The harvest 
fails because of war or strife; the onset of crisis is sudden and localised. 
Its burden falls on those already at the margin.

Today's pictures are different. “This is a silent tsunami,” says Josette 
Sheeran of the World Food Programme, a United Nations agency. A wave of 
food-price inflation is moving through the world, leaving riots and shaken 
governments in its wake. For the first time in 30 years, food protests are 
erupting in many places at once. Bangladesh is in turmoil (see article); even 
China is worried (see article). Elsewhere, the food crisis of 2008 will test 
the assertion of Amartya Sen, an Indian economist, that famines do not happen 
in democracies.

Famine traditionally means mass starvation. The measures of today's crisis 
are misery and malnutrition. The middle classes in poor countries are giving 
up health care and cutting out meat so they can eat three meals a day. The 
middling poor, those on $2 a day, are pulling children from school and 
cutting back on vegetables so they can still afford rice. Those on $1 a day 
are cutting back on meat, vegetables and one or two meals, so they can afford 
one bowl. The desperate—those on 50 cents a day—face disaster.

Roughly a billion people live on $1 a day. If, on a conservative estimate, 
the cost of their food rises 20% (and in some places, it has risen a lot 
more), 100m people could be forced back to this level, the common measure of 
absolute poverty. In some countries, that would undo all the gains in poverty 
reduction they have made during the past decade of growth. Because food 
markets are in turmoil, civil strife is growing; and because trade and 
openness itself could be undermined, the food crisis of 2008 may become a 
challenge to globalisation.
First find $700m

Rich countries need to take the food problems as seriously as they take the 
credit crunch. Already bigwigs at the World Bank and the United Nations are 
calling for a “new deal” for food. Their clamour is justified. But getting 
the right kind of help is not so easy, partly because food is not a 
one-solution-fits-all problem and partly because some of the help needed now 
risks making matters worse in the long run.

The starting-point should be that rising food prices bear more heavily on 
some places than others. Food exporters, and countries where farmers are 
self-sufficient, or net sellers, benefit. Some countries—those in West Africa 
which import their staples, or Bangladesh, with its huge numbers of landless 
labourers—risk ruin and civil strife. Because of the severity there, the 
first step must be to mend the holes in the world's safety net. That means 
financing the World Food Programme properly. The WFP is the world's largest 
distributor of food aid and its most important barrier between hungry people 
and starvation. Like a $1-a-day family in a developing country, its 
purchasing power has been slashed by the rising cost of grain. Merely to 
distribute the same amount of food as last year, the WFP needs—and should 
get—an extra $700m.

And because the problems in many places are not like those of a traditional 
famine, the WFP should be allowed to broaden what it does. At the moment, it 
mostly buys grain and doles it out in areas where there is little or no food. 
That is necessary in famine-ravaged places, but it damages local markets. In 
most places there are no absolute shortages and the task is to lower domestic 
prices without doing too much harm to farmers. That is best done by 
distributing cash, not food—by supporting (sometimes inventing) 
social-protection programmes and food-for-work schemes for the poor. The 
agency can help here, though the main burden—tens of billions of dollars' 
worth—will be borne by developing-country governments and lending 
institutions in the West.

Such actions are palliatives. But the food crisis of 2008 has revealed market 
failures at every link of the food chain (see article). Any “new deal” ought 
to try to address the long-term problems that are holding poor farmers back.
Then stop the distortions

In general, governments ought to liberalise markets, not intervene in them 
further. Food is riddled with state intervention at every turn, from 
subsidies to millers for cheap bread to bribes for farmers to leave land 
fallow. The upshot of such quotas, subsidies and controls is to dump all the 
imbalances that in another business might be smoothed out through small 
adjustments onto the one unregulated part of the food chain: the 
international market.

For decades, this produced low world prices and disincentives to poor 
farmers. Now, the opposite is happening. As a result of yet another 
government distortion—this time subsidies to biofuels in the rich 
world—prices have gone through the roof. Governments have further exaggerated 
the problem by imposing export quotas and trade restrictions, raising prices 
again. In the past, the main argument for liberalising farming was that it 
would raise food prices and boost returns to farmers. Now that prices have 
massively overshot, the argument stands for the opposite reason: 
liberalisation would reduce prices, while leaving farmers with a decent 
living.

There is an occasional exception to the rule that governments should keep out 
of agriculture. They can provide basic technology: executing 
capital-intensive irrigation projects too large for poor individual farmers 
to undertake, or paying for basic science that helps produce higher-yielding 
seeds. But be careful. Too often—as in Europe, where superstitious distrust 
of genetic modification is slowing take-up of the technology—governments 
hinder rather than help such advances. Since the way to feed the world is not 
to bring more land under cultivation, but to increase yields, science is 
crucial.

Agriculture is now in limbo. The world of cheap food has gone. With luck and 
good policy, there will be a new equilibrium. The transition from one to the 
other is proving more costly and painful than anyone had expected. But the 
change is desirable, and governments should be seeking to ease the pain of 
transition, not to stop the process itself.