.” But only the social forces to which the left is aligned are going to be able to achieve that.” Only when the windmill-tilting rant becomes mightier than the reality of the warlord’s sword.

“here are a number of obvious ethical problems with such calculations, not least those involvemd in balancing the value of an existing human being against the value of a nominal human being not yet in existence. The point does not seem to me to stack up.”

Superbly put.

The whole debate on Africa is marred by over-simplisity, generalisation and pre-existing Euro-centric political-ideological prejudice, however.

For example, it’s too sweeping to say that structural adjustment “hasn’t worked”. Uganda currently does pretty well be African standards after “liberalising” its economy – and that was after Amin devestated the place. Certainly, it’s doing better than, say, Zimbabwe with its notable lack of IMF-World Bank adjustment programmes.

South Africa’s problems can’t be laid at the door of the “Washington Consensus”, either; and that country is heading down the shitter at a rate of knots. The civil wars in Sierra Leone, Congo and Liberia, or the genocide in Rwanda, did not arise from structural adjustment. Africa is a big place. Lots of bad shit happens there. Most of it for deeply complex reasons.

The fact is, in some countries structural adjustment has increased average living standards and national wealth. The point about SAPs is that they haven’t worked nearly as well as they was hoped in the countries were they weren’t a disaster, and in the countries where they were a disaster…well that speaks for itself. But the consequence is that it doesn’t fall out into a neat picture of “SAPs bad, vague, undefined so-called leftists alternative good”.

Nonetheless, there is a strong case for arguing that simply giving aid to suffering African countries is not going to fix any problems – but that’s not to say, as Dave Osler correctly points out, that we should therefore sit on our hands when mass-droughts lead to millions dying. There’s a big difference between aid as a long-term policy default, and aid in response to an immediate crisis. But unsurprisingly, this just illustrates the complexity of the Africa question(s)

“the very worst regimes are essentially those licensed by Washington and the former colonial powers”

Oh yeah? Which ones?

Mugabe? Pol Pot? or is it just Pinochet in your fevered leftie mind?

It’s China issuing the licenses now, isn’t it?

Are we just talking Africa here – or the likes of China, and India as well?
These two countries received £297 million and £40 million respectively in aid from the UK
http://www.theyworkforyou.com/wrans/?id=2009-10-12f.292506.h

Doesn’t India have nuclear capability and its own space programme, while the USA is deeply in hock to China?

“here are a number of obvious ethical problems with such calculations, not least those involvemd in balancing the value of an existing human being against the value of a nominal human being not yet in existence” – well maybe if we take the question at a philosophical level but the intent behind such questions alludes more to the chronicity of the problem (an important point, surely?), and by implication the low level of expectation that such intense poverty can ever be resolved.

After all even here in an affluent democracy like the UK the gap between rich and poor has grown wider.

“So let the bastards die, then. The argument here is that not saving a million lives in the here and now potentially saves three million or five million lives a decade from now. There are a number of obvious ethical problems with such calculations, not least those involved in balancing the value of an existing human being against the value of a nominal human being not yet in existence. The point does not seem to me to stack up.”

If humans live they will breed. Are you arguing the numbers, or saying that the here and now is the most important?

Erm, a slightly unkind analysis of his argument. He does a lot of quoting from Oxfam there:

“According to Oxfam: “Food aid saves lives, but it crowds out other … initiatives that support communities’ strategies to prevent the next drought from becoming a disaster.” Exactly.”

““Constantly shipping food from places like the US is costly, uneconomic, and can encourage dependency,” she writes in the Oxfam report. “We are a big country and when there is famine in one part of the country, there is plenty in another. So we need better infrastructure and communications to move food around to where it is needed. Above all we need education.” ”

Oxfam has managed to understand Amartya Sen’s points about famines. They’re very much less to do with a shortage of food and very much more to do with a shortage of purchasing power (Owen Barder is good on this point as well).

I certainly agree that we have a duty to our fellow humans on the edge of starvation: but that requires that we alleviate hunger without causing further long term problems. Shipping food itself does indeed lead to dependency: worse, it depresses the price of food leading to less being planted for the next season.

What we should be doing (and I’m pretty sure Oxfam now argues this) is shipping in money to be given to those poor and starving so that they can buy food. This is obviously vastly faster than trying to ship food around the world. But it also raises the price of food in those famine afflicted areas, both encouraging higher levels of planting for the next season and also sucking in food from nearby surplus areas in the short term.

It’s not “don’t help”, but help going with the grain of markets rather than going against that grain (apologies, pun not intended).

This is such a compelling story that even the Bush Administration (yes, really) tried to get the American food aid system changed. Less surplus bought from American farmers and shipped on American ships to arrive 9 months later (about the average time) and more simply flying a plane over with money. Defeated by the Farm Lobby in Congress, of course, but yes, even Bush tried to follow this obviously correct plan.

This all rather played out during the Niger famine of a couple of years back: the famine that didn’t kill millions precisely because people had woken up to the implications of the ideas that Sen got his Nobel for.

Of course we should help starving people but we do also need to recognise the moral hazard issue.

Trillions in aid for Africa have removed the incentive to reform the political institutions and market systems. Try William Easterly on this with his long experience from working for the World Bank administering aid programmes:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-easterly/sachs-ironies-why-critics_b_207331.html

I don’t recall that Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen has been refuted when he observed: “famines do not occur in democracies. ‘No famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy,’ he wrote in ‘Democracy as Freedom’”
http://www.wehaitians.com/does%20democracy%20avert%20famine.html

The argument here is that not saving a million lives in the here and now potentially saves three million or five million lives a decade from now.

I think that Kiley’s argument is that saving a million lives now, by shipping in free food, puts three million or five million lives in need of more food aid a decade from now.

His further point is that none of Kenya, Ethiopia and Eritrea have ever had nation-wide famines, but localised ones often (as in Mengstu’s) the direct result of Government policy. If aid could be directed at infrastructure programmes (as, for example, Japanese aid often is) it would have a more long-lastign effect. As it is, food aid crowds out other forms of aid. Give a man a fish etc…

But the point that the left should make to the right is that the very worst regimes are essentially those licensed by Washington and the former colonial powers.

Which? Zimbabwe? Somalia? The DRC? The Sudan? Those four are, I would argue, the very worst regimes in Africa today. Which of these are licensed by the West? Which regimes in Africa are ‘licensed’ by the West at all these days? Which regimes do Britain ‘license’ today? This argument is, at best, 15 years out of date. Of the four named above, it is arguable that Zimbabwe has been kept afloat (barely) by Libya and China, and that the only source of support for The Sudan has been China.

Or are we talking globally? North Korea? Burma? Iran? Libya? C’mon, name some names, or it’ll look like you’re just making it up.

If we are to take Blair’s policy of “liberal interventionism” at all seriously, shouldn’t we be invading all those African countries with despotic governments and starving populations to install democracy to reduce the need for future aid?

Just a thought.

Another thought: why is it that since WW2 the so-called “tiger economies”, with rapid GDP growth, have almost all been in Asian countries where Christian churches have had little historic influence, while the churches have long histories of missionary activities in the two continents – Africa and South America – where economic development has been a succession of disaster stories?

Just asking.

Dave,

If you were Kenyan, you’d have realised this is pretty much par for the course for a certain type of disaster journalist working out of Kenya: Aidan Hartley — who’s actually Kenyan, and who’s a mate of Kiley’s — has said a bunch of equally dumb stuff in his occasional Spectator columns. It’s a wind up, best passed over in contemptuous silence.

The argument makes sense, but only given the context of also getting our own terrible and contemptible house in order as well, the CAP, our farm subsidies and our tariff controls. Western governments play a small but significant role in keeping countries poor.

@10 – good question. Malaysia is an interesting case in point…

@10

That strikes me as a rather tenuous link you are drawing there. There are lots of differences between Africa and Asia, besides religious make up. And South Korea, which I believe has been one of the fastest growing countries over the last century, has loads of Christians (though perhaps not “historically” in the sense you mean).

@13: “Malaysia is an interesting case in point…”

Malaysia is especially interesting for several reasons. It’s one of the few current examples of a tigerish economy with a majority Muslim population and despite having no oil resources of commercial significance.

Another reason for special interest was the successful war by Britain, as the colonial power, against insurgency which lasted from 1948 through 1960:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malayan_Emergency

For all that, the Federation of Malaysia emerged in 1963 as an independent sovereign state:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia

But its economic success story needs to be compared with the glowing success of Singapore, once part of the Federation until it was expelled in 1965. Lee Kwan Yew, prime minister of Singapore until 1990, famously attributed the success story to the ascendancy there of Confucian values, which he characterised as: Do not do to others what you would not like to be done unto to you, in contrast to the familiar Christian adage: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

George Bernard Shaw had anticipated Lee – although not Confucius, of course: Don’t do unto others as you would have them do unto you – their tastes may not be the same. Which seems an excellent piece of libertarian reasoning to me.

Lifting “the CAP, our farm subsidies and our tariff controls” will simply allow the US and Australia/NZ to step in to snap up market share, as has already happened in cereals. At least Europe offers African countries tariff-free arrangements, a mechanism that the US and Australia complain is not extended to them, and which they themselves have not offered to African states.

The EU is far more open to agricultural products from the developing world than other OECD areas. Two thirds of African agricultural exports go to the EU for example. Europe’s agricultural imports are four times those of the US.

I really don’t see why Europeans should accept the further extension of a world trade in agriculture shaped by US subsidies to their farmers 25% higher than those offered in the EU, and that without any steps to further the trade of the poorest exporting countries; reduction of our own food self-sufficiency; the loss of European rural lifestyles and the consequent degradation of our countryside; and all this just because an ex-Antipodean Yank newspaper proprietor tells low-farming Britain that it’s for the good of the starving poor?

“I really don’t see why Europeans should accept the further extension of a world trade in agriculture shaped by US subsidies to their farmers 25% higher than those offered in the EU,”

Erm, because dropping tariffs benefits us, the consumers, possibly? We, the peeps, want to have whatever it is that’s on offer as cheaply as possible. The 60 odd million in the UK would benefit from lower food prices for example, if the EU dropped the tariffs against imported food from the US. Sure, the 1.2 million people or so who make their living doing the farming would see their incomes suffer: and?

Aren’t we supposed to be doing these things for the benefit of the majority?
If we didn’t have EU tariffs on the import of foodstuffs then those American subsidies would be the US taxpayer being gouged for the benefit of the vast majority of the EU population. Sounds like a pretty good idea actually.

For of course, tariffs don’t benefit consumers: they benefit producers, those producers protected by them. Which is why they’re a bad thing.

“Sounds like a pretty good idea actually.”

Until they notice and we have – oh, look – nothing to fall back on.

@18 Yep.

@17

Yeah,yeah… we, the consumers, would benefit in the short term – as if ASDA wasn’t squeezing the farmers hard enough already. But food self-sufficiency is going to be an issue, as the recent panic and grain price spike showed; if we allow Europe’s farming industry to go the way of its shipbuilding, there is no easy way back. Skills disappear, the countryside becomes a theme-park, or at best an agribusiness monoplain. The quality of our urban lives declines, our diet becomes blander as rural specializations fall away, and as European production falls, so world prices will rise, enabling those nations who still have an industry to lower those subsidies and squeeze the rest of us.

Do you really think US farm subsidies are just pork-barrel policies? I don’t. I think the US has an eye to its long term interests, and that Europe should too.

@16 and @19

Ah, the old EU agricultural directorate talking points. Haven’t heard those in a while. Largely wrong. For the record:

1. No, the EU is not more open to farm imports than the US – see figure 5.9 here http://tinyurl.com/ylyf94h. Its finicky technical standards make it particularly difficult to export to.
2. The EU has a lot of imports from Africa because it is a big temperate continent next to a big tropical one.
3. Yes, the US does offer trade preferences to African countries (the “African Growth and Opportunity Act”), and because of more generous rules of origin they are often more useful than EU ones. And I’ve never heard anyone in the US seriously suggest that it should be admitted to the EU’s trade preference schemes for the LDCs and the African/Caribbean/Pacific countries.
4. “US subsidies to their farmers 25% higher than those offered in the EU”. Flat wrong, sorry. Table 1.3 in http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/33/27/35016763.pdf – it’s an old version of the report, but the latest figs haven’t changed much.

In general, US farmers are more efficient/low-cost than Europeans and get lower subsidy – they are often not the cheapest in the world (that’s usually Brazil, Thailand or Australia, depending on the product) but still pretty cheap. And yes, it is pretty much pure pork-barrel politics that keeps the subsidies flowing – one of the biggest recipients are cotton growers, and the US is hardly likely to starve to death because it can’t import cotton.

BTW, on the Times piece that started things off: all he has done is to take some fairly sensible critiques of in-kind food aid and then exaggerate enormously the impact to pretend it is some all-encompassing analysis of Africa. Simplify, then exaggerate. He’s a journalist. That’s what they do.

What Tim W and Paul S said

“But food self-sufficiency is going to be an issue,”

No it ain’t any more that shoe self-sufficiency or beer self-sufficiency are.

“Sufficiency” on its own, sure, but not the “self”. And sufficiency is best ensured by a widely dispersed production system.

“No it ain’t”

Do you have a crystal ball, as well as a bust of Adam Smith?

23 – when was the UK was last self-sufficient in food? 1820? It’s access to markets that’s important, not a drive towards autarkic juche.

Tim,

The other Armatya Sen point about famines is that they don’t happen under democracies.

So far, this has been empirically substantiated (best case = India: riven by famines regularly pre-1947, not one major famine there since independence).

So as well as talking about aid and its forms, we should be taking a lot more seriously the reform of domestic institutions so as they are genuinely democratic.

Which opens a massive can of worms, of course…

“So as well as talking about aid and its forms, we should be taking a lot more seriously the reform of domestic institutions so as they are genuinely democratic.”

Well, yes, but “domestic” rather means those jurisdictions that I am a citizen of (which in this modern world can be multiple of course).

Insisiting upon changes in those places which I am not a citizen of sounds very much like imperialism: something which your part time work for the TJN does leave you open to the accusation of.

No?

‘Insisting upon changes in those places which I am not a citizen of sounds very much like imperialism’

Well that would make Amnesty International imperialist (which it is not). The whole point about international human rights law is that countries sign up to standards and can then be held accountable to them. It is such a tragedy how badly this whole argument has gone since Iraq and Blair’s idiot-speak about ‘liberal intervention’.

Anyone got any opinions on Paul Collier’s latest book incidentally?

Paul Collier’s latest: interesting, but far too willing to make (literally) invasive prescriptions of military intervention in developing nations on the basis of cross-country regressions which are nothing like robust enough to bear that weight. A bit like the free trade and aid regression analyses of about a decade ago, a debate which has largely been abandoned (except for occasional atavistic re-runs like Dambisa Moyo’s) as it merely descended into an exercise in competitive data-mining.

Economists are better when they do economics, I think, rather than moonlighting as military analysts while using inappropriate tools.

But I could be wrong.

The leisurely pace at which African states attempted to mediate the admittedly daunting problems of Zimbabwe doesn’t create much basis for hoping the multi-tiered problems of starving populations and despotic governments in the rest of the continent will be resolved any time soon. To state what is now painfully obvious, the clear implication is that the international community will get regularly asked for more and more food aid to alleviate starvation.

@20,22

On subsidies:

It’s true that as a percentage of gross farm receipts, the OECD calculated EU Producer Support Estimate (direct support to producers, including price maintenance) is higher. Nobody is denying that US farming, with its prairies and massively mechanized agriculture is more efficient, although as in Europe, without subsidies, whole sectors would cease to exist. But agriculture accounts for 3.8% of total employment in the EU15 as against only 1.5% in the US. If you express the OECD calculated PSE per farmer equivalent, as they call it, you get a rather different picture. Europe has perhaps 5 times the number of farmers, Europeans may get a slightly higher total level of support than US farmers per tonne of crop, but it’s a hell of a lot lower per farmer.

On ease of access to the market by Least Developed Countries, I’ll just quote the standard guff:

Under the “Everything But Arms” initiative, the 50 Least Developed Countries all have complete quota and tariff-free access to the EU market for all products except weapons. This advantage is now being extended to all ACP countries – 98 percent of goods from ACP countries enter the EU duty and quota free. The EU is the largest market for LDC agricultural exports. 176 developing countries benefit from EU preferences under the “General System of Preferences”, 15 of which benefit from GSP+. The EU provides more trade development assistance than the rest of the world put together. Every year since 2001, the EU has given about €750 million in trade development assistance. The EU takes 85 percent of Africa’s agricultural exports and 45 percent of those from Latin America. It imports more agricultural products from developing countries than the US, Australia, Japan, Canada and New Zealand put together.

Note that 45% of Latin America’s exports, which rather blows away the argument about a big temperate continent next to a big tropical one.

On finicky technical standards;
That wouldn’t be a reference to GM soya and hormone soaked beef, would it?

On European food security, and Britain in particular , here’s a view from those hateful europhiles/lefties/tories/spooks at Chatham House http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/feb/01/gm-crops-food-shortages

@30

1. Yes, European farmers are inefficient, so get less per head but much more overall. That’s not news. Nor does it render the statement “US subsidies to their farmers 25% higher than those offered in the EU” any less wrong than it was the first time.

2. I know the standard guff, thanks. My point is that it is misleading. Let me repeat my point, which you have not addressed: for those African countries in AGOA, the rules of origin often make it more useful than EBA. http://www.cepr.org/pubs/new-dps/dplist.asp?dpno=7072. And see the World Bank global monitoring report I linked to last time. Basically the EU should deepen its preference schemes through better ROOs and the US should widen AGOA to include more countries, but it’s highly misleading to suggest that the EU is definitely the more open at the moment.

3. Latin American exports to EU: no, that doesn’t blow away my point. The US grows a considerable number of sub-tropical products also grown in LatAm (rice, oranges and other citrus, melons, cane sugar) which Europe doesn’t on any significant scale, as the climate in the US is different.

4. No, the finicky standards point wasn’t about GM, as barely anyone in Africa (except South Africa and I think some trials of cotton in Burkina Faso) grows GM, so that makes no difference. Nor does Africa (except a bit from Botswana and Namibia) export much beef, hormone-soaked or no. It was a reference to examples like the infamous aflatoxin standards, which hammered peanut exports from west Africa with a completely unrealistic risk assessment. Travelling in Mali once, I talked (through a translator) to some local farmers, whose one non-Bambara word was “aflatoxin” – they knew it because it had destroyed their livelihoods. Technical barriers to trade (TBT) issues aren’t trivial – for many developing countries they are much more important than tariffs.

5. If you look at that Chatham House report in detail (and I’m an associate fellow there, so I remember it in genesis) it leans heavily on “stakeholder consultations” with the UK wheat and dairy industries, which to me looks a touch like it was guided by producer interests. I’ve had several conversations about similar issues with Tim Lang, one of the authors – he’s a really nice and bright bloke, but he does come at these issues with a particular slant which I don’t think means you can automatically quote the report’s conclusions as an unimpeachable authority, any more than one by me would be.

Sorry, why, when one is talking about the survival of a European farming industry and the rural lifestyles/countryside associated with it, is the subsidy per farmer not more relevant than the subsidy per tonne?

Again, you seem to be saying that, in a regime where both European and US economically sustainable production capacity for so many agricultural products is largely determined by subsidy or tariff barriers, it is irrelevant to issues of access that the EU in fact takes in far more agricultural imports from the poorest countries, even from the US’s side of the Atlantic.

I find it hard to believe that this is simply because of sub-tropical growing conditions in the US. For instance you instanced oranges as a crop that the EU doesn’t produce much of, but EU production, mostly from Spain, Italy and Greece was about 6.5 million tons in 2007-08, only about a million tons less than the US. And right now Brazil, the world’s largest exporter of oranges is requesting a WTO dispute panel specifically concerning measures the US has taken to restrict imports of oranges from Brazil.
http://www.flex-news-food.com/pages/25511/Brazil/Orange/WTO/brazil-challenges-us-orange-juice-imports-wto.html

I’ll check up the aflatoxin thing, I seem to remember it from a while back. Interesting. Also that World Bank report; thanks for pointing me to it.

Oh, the EU also grows most of its own rice, and any imports (from Thailand, India) aren’t part of that 45% of LatinAmerica’s exports. In fact Latin/Central America mostly imports rice.

Strange stuff, rice. Usually, it’s just eaten on the spot, far more so than wheat and other crops. Which makes it weird that the US, with less than 2% of world production, is at times the world’s 3rd largest exporter. It’s the abundant water resources of California and Arkansas, I guess.

Indeed:

“All rice in the United States is grown in flooded fields. Only certain types of soils are able to hold water and hold the weight of machinery. An abundant and cheap supply of water is needed. The Mississippi delta has proven to be an ideal location for rice and most rice in the U.S. is grown in that area. Arkansas is the number one producer of rice in the U.S. today. Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas and Missouri also produce rice. The old flood basin for the Sacramento River in Northern California has also proven to be a good location for rice, and California is now the number two producer of rice in the U.S.”

It seems a little peculiar to me that we are expected to accept that subsidising farmers in the EU – or the US – is sensible policy but subsidising manufacturing industries leads inexorably to inefficiency and sloth.

@32

1. “the survival of a European farming industry and the rural lifestyles/countryside associated with it”. Wait a sec: do you want “food security” (by which you appear to mean food autarky) or do you want rural lifestyles and the countryside? Those two objectives are in direct competition. Either you direct the CAP towards production and enrich the capital-intensive barley barons of East Anglia and the wheat farmers of the Paris basin while soaking the land with fertilisers and pesticides. Or you want to preserve the landscape and keep rural populations employed, in which case you go for direct payments, set-aside and other types of subsidy that don’t encourage production, and the CAP goes to support yokels planting hedgerows and leaning picturesquely on five-bar gates in smocks chewing straw for the tourists. The US farm bill does the first. If we have to have subsidies, I would generally argue for the second in Europe and encourage farmers to diversify and to add value to what they do produce rather than subsidising them to pump out basic commodities. But then I’m just an urbanite foodie who enjoys visiting the countryside and gets dinged for taxes to pay for all of this, so maybe I’m parti pris. The CAP single farm payments have in fact been going in this direction, but the tariffs and the TBT remain prohibitive.

2. “where both European and US economically sustainable production capacity for so many agricultural products is largely determined by subsidy or tariff barriers” I am saying that the EU’s higher food imports are principally determined by its relative uncompetitiveness, not relative tariff and subsidy levels.

If you want convincingly to argue that the EU is more open than the US, you’ve got to explain why those trade restrictiveness indices are wrong. Certainly Jose Manuel Barroso sets a lot of store by them: he cited them in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in 2005, though either disingenuously or incompetently used an early version of the index which didn’t include all the technical standards restrictions. On which subject, while you’re googling aflatoxin, you could also look at the very high sanitary and phytosanitary standards (SPS) imposed on African cut flower imports, largely at the behest of Dutch horticulture. Citrus black spot on fruit; bans on fish from Lake Victoria; there’s lots of this stuff.

I would urge anyone interested in the problems facing sub-Saharan Africa to read “Dead Aid” by Dambisa Moyo.

Failing that, here’s an interview with the author from the left’s favourite organ:-

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/feb/19/dambisa-moyo-dead-aid-africa

One definition of stupidity is doing the same thing, over and over again, each time expecting a different result.

I’m not sure what the answer is, but throwing money at it hasn’t worked so far.

The Elephant in the room is population (I haven’t read the whole thread so apologies if someone has mentioned this). Ethiopia has seen a population increase of something like 40M in the early 80′s to over 80M now. Its land and climate simply cannot support that level of people.

If we send aid without imposing a strict birth control regime all we are doing is condeming a future, even larger generation of Ethiopians to more poverty and famine.

Some mentioned Uganda – its modest gains in economic development are being eaten away by rapid population growth so is, in effect, pointless.

What Africa needs is educated women with access to birth control and a generation of men who will accept that.

Don’t give aid, find on the web an Ethiopian business run by a women and buy its products. Far better then faciltating a far future famine – which is what short aid will do.

“What Africa needs is educated women with access to birth control and a generation of men who will accept that. ”

Sure: and how do we get from here to there? Which is the chicken and which the egg? I think you’ll find that it’s the rise in GDP per capita which comes first, leading to the education, the desire to use birth control (do note that it is desired fertility that has 90% of the influence upon actual fertility, access to contraception is only 10% of it) and thus the fall in population growth rates.

Thanks AB

The Elephant in the room is population (I haven’t read the whole thread so apologies if someone has mentioned this). Ethiopia has seen a population increase of something like 40M in the early 80’s to over 80M now. Its land and climate simply cannot support that level of people.

If we send aid without imposing a strict birth control regime all we are doing is condeming a future, even larger generation of Ethiopians to more poverty and famine.

Already tried, and failed, I think. Matthew Connelly’s Fatal Misconception uncovers some of the horrific things done in non-Western countries in the name of population control. It should — and we can hope it will — be read by every recipient of aid. Meantime, thanks, but no thanks.

Daniel

My approach would be to fund female education and access to birth control.
What is yours?

“My approach would be to fund female education and access to birth control.”

The problem is that those are proximate causes of declines in actual fertility. As above, you’ve got to change desired fertility first: which means wealth creation.

@Tim: http://artsci.wustl.edu/~anthro/articles/Arkansas%20Rice.htm

” Rice farmers like John Kerksieck are on the brink of draining one of Arkansas’ biggest aquifers. That alone is troublesome, in a state that gets almost 50 inches of rain a year. But even more confounding — since these Southern farmers will not be the last to find themselves in such a pickle — is the question of what to do about it.
Most of the farmers want the government to send them replacement water from the White River. The Army Corps of Engineers and the state support a plan to spend more than $200 million in federal money on the project, or about $300,000 a farmer. It is time, they say, for the government to do in other states what has long been done in the West — provide irrigation water to farmers who have no other resort.”

And in California, I think it’s a similar picture. Cheap subsidized water.

@AB

do you want “food security” (by which you appear to mean food autarky) or do you want rural lifestyles and the countryside?

As per my original post, I want both. They’re not mutually exclusive, even if they’re not achievable by the same means. And no, I don’t mean food autarky, I mean a viable agricultural hinterland, socially, culturally as well as economically. I want some continuity, I want to feel that rural life is for people, not just corporations. You might say I want a situation where the countryside is theme park interspersed with factory and vice versa, as the geography demands. What I don’t want is the US situation, where the biggest farmers benefit even more disproportionately from subsidy than they do over here.

I think it’s a bit dodgy to attribute the aflatoxin restrictions, mainly hitting peanuts, to a desire to restrict trade, given that Europe dosn’t actually grow any peanuts worth mentioning. Policy may be driven by the German purity obsession or just the fact that EU approach on food safety is based on a precautionary principle (better safe than sorry), but commercial advantage isn’t a factor, at least as far as peanuts are concerned. Incidentally, Australia’s standard is almost the same as the EU’s, and they do produce the stuff.

We can throw sanitary and phytosanitary restrictions at each other, but they’re tedious to quantify, especially since it’s difficult to judge how justified they are. Brazil’s poultry meat trade has been more heavily restricted in the US than in the EU, for instance, and its vegetables and fruit have also been hit.

“What Africa needs is educated women with access to birth control and a generation of men who will accept that”

Yep. Give the money to the women, been known in development circles for some time now, but governments don’t like it.

The debate here doesn’t really illuminate why it is that the tiger economies since WW2 – the ones with fast GDP growth – have almost all been in east Asia and why most of the disaster stories have been in Africa and South America.

@VE Bott

“I mean a viable agricultural hinterland, socially, culturally as well as economically.”
This is so vague as to be near-meaningless (who gets to decide what is “culturally viable”?) but in any case, if you want both more production for food security AND more enclaves for picturesque peasantry than at present, you are going to have to hugely increase farm subsidies and/or tariffs – except you can’t increase tariffs much because they are bound by the Uruguay round GATT agreement. I don’t think even the long-suffering European urban taxpayer is going to spring for that, and nor should she. Incidentally, when you increase farm subsidies, you often make it harder to build a genuinely sustainable diversified healthy rural economy, because the handouts get capitalised into the value of the land to which they are attached and hence increase the cost of doing anything else with that land.

“it’s a bit dodgy to attribute the aflatoxin restrictions, mainly hitting peanuts, to a desire to restrict trade”
Er, I didn’t. I said they had the effect of restricting trade. I didn’t speculate on the motive. Do you get CAP handouts for the manufacture of straw men?

“sanitary and phytosanitary restrictions…tedious to quantify”
When you get around to reading up on those World Bank trade restrictiveness indices to which I drew your attention some decades ago (and you might need to look through past Global Monitoring Reports for full accounts of the methodology) you’ll see that they do just that. And it is partly that which makes the EU about twice as restrictive of developing country exports as the US. Which is, I think, where I came in, so unless you have a devastating critique of those indices to make, this is going to be my last intervention.

Speaking of interventions, I haven’t yet mentioned fraud, but when you spray around billions of euros in taxpayers’ money – at any industry, not just farming – you tend to get stuff like this: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/27/business/global/27sugariht.html

Well, maybe it’s me, but I can’t find anything in that link that is a useful comparison of EU and US restriction of trade with LDC’s. General restrictiveness, as applied to non-LDC’s, yes – but even that’s just considering one aspect of trade distortion, the one that suits your argument.

Also, isn’t describing the survival of rural lifestyles as enclaves for picturesque peasantry a bit offensive? You need to get out there more.

The Common Humanist,

Here’s what you say you said:

My approach would be to fund female education and access to birth control. What is yours?

And here’s what you actually said:

If we send aid without imposing a strict birth control regime all we are doing is condeming a future, even larger generation of Ethiopians to more poverty and famine.

In short, you’d quite like food aid to be conditional on Ethiopia’s government coercing its people into contraception. Apart from being morally monstrous, it doesn’t work: Connelly’s good on the consequences when Lyndon Johnson tried this in India.