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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
July 5, 2009
Feed the world
Amid all the doom gloom algal bloom and media zoom spread by professional environmental alarmists — nearly 50 years now of continuous taxpayer-funded eco-socialist hysteria — it is delightful to spot a little heresy. My attention was drawn to one the other day by an item in the New Scientist, a British magazine whose fastidious political correctness and earnestly addled scientism makes me think of it as Darwin’s Weekly Beagle.The title was “Africa alone could feed the world.” The article linked to a couple of reports by international development agencies, just published. The reports made many of the same points, about the under-employment of land, technology, political sanity and human intelligence in African agriculture. This must have been a coincidence, for one would have to be paranoid to believe that one hand of an international development bureaucracy knows what another hand is doing. The world’s supply of potential farmland could be more than doubled, according to the OECD/FAO report “Agricultural Outlook 2009-2018,” and most of this unused land is in Africa — or South America. That is very good news on the face of it, since no one sensible is any longer predicting a doubling of the world’s human population. This in turn provides context for the second, FAO/World Bank report, “Awakening Africa’s Sleeping Giant,” which argues that food production in the Guinea Savannah zone (a vast stretch from Senegal to South Africa) could be increased many times over. All that would be required is the political will to apply the lessons learned in developing northeastern Thailand, or the Cerrado region of Brazil, which offered similar challenges (poor soils, unreliable rainfall and, in the Thai case, high population density). In fact, it is simpler than that, for we can forget Brazil, which introduced destructive diseconomies of scale by way of the megaprojects with which big governments team up with big people: the extremely rich and powerful. The Thai found the answer, and it consisted largely of leaving the smallholders to do their thing, on land they were allowed to own. Instead of nationalizing and expropriating, the Thai government focused on extending infrastructure and providing political stability — including, most important, a predictable legal environment. The very confidence with which such points were made did somewhat undermine my faith in them. For I was once mixed up in the development game myself — as an economic journalist in East Asia — where I became more than familiar with the foggy statistical abstractions through which development “experts” glimpse reality. Problems that could be fixed by altering a few spreadsheet numbers prove less tractable on the ground, and I often thought a bit of quite conventional, old-fashioned, modestly inquiring journalism would help to explain to them how “things are as they are.” As well, the “experts” themselves could benefit by not only speaking to some farmers, but actually listening to them. Ignore my pessimism, here. I have some knowledge of northeastern Thailand. The huge Khorat plateau was a recurring dustbowl within living memory (my own), and from what I can see its agricultural productivity today does resemble a miracle. Moreover, as I found from working in Thailand, there was a reason for it. An odd one. Thailand was one of very few countries, in what Mao Tse-Tung called the Third World, never to succumb to European Imperialism. Successive kings of a brilliant dynasty managed to play the European powers off against each other. What this meant, in practice, was that the country did not fall prey to London- and Paris-educated “cool” socialist politicians upon becoming independent two generations ago. Almost everywhere else, economic promise was demolished under the ham fists of the “five-year planners.” (Latin America is a different yet similar story: of socialist hallucinogens operating upon homegrown military despots, begetting even more socialist revolutionary oppositions.) Democracy has almost nothing to do with this: Thailand had a history of freedom. So did the U.S. and Canada, for that matter, when our people opened the vast granaries of our west. And it is just this history of freedom that is lacking in other, benighted lands. There were fewer mental obstacles in Thailand to letting the people solve their own problems. That and, to my mind, that alone, made it a shining example for agricultural and every other form of economic development — even while the country provided a rather poor example of democratic constitutional development, with one pathetic coup after another since the fall of the old Siamese absolute monarchy in 1932. Indeed, here is the most heretical thought. It may be precisely because the politicians rendered themselves so ineffectual in Thailand that the country has prospered. On paper and in principle — in common sense — the problems of food supply can be solved. Foreign aid gets in the way, both by removing incentives to expand local production and by lining the pockets of dictators who persist with heavily statist schemes. The “global warming” environmental movement meanwhile assures an ever-heavier hand for this statism in the future, which is why it is so evil. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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