Battling world hunger
And so Josette Sheeran, executive director of the U.N. World Food Program, told a London news conference Tuesday that hunger and starvation again stalk the globe -- 6 million children a year dying of "hunger-related causes" -- and that the answer is for the wealthier nations to ship her even more money, delivering free food by the shipload while "investing" more in "programs to support domestic agriculture."
Even if the United Nations statistics look suspicious (define "hunger-related"), surely even one child starving is a serious matter. So, if this is truly a crisis, perhaps the first thing we could drop is the nonsense.
Why do so many Third World countries now suffer when world commodity prices rise and fall? Could it be because their governments were encouraged, decades ago, to force their farmers to shift over to single crops that could be easily sold overseas, in bulk, for cash? Were the "kitchen gardens" that used to feed their people converted so the government could earn cash overseas to pay off the big loans they took out to build massive hydroelectric dams and other fancy "modernization" projects that in turn facilitated the growth of those same centralized kleptocracies? It would be nice to hear the United Nations call for a reversal of those damaging policies.
What role do the absurd schemes of the United States and Western Europe -- attempting to "cut our reliance on imported oil" by making motor vehicle fuel out of corn -- play in today's skyrocketing world food prices?
In fact, it requires more energy to grow and process all that corn than we save through the modest 1 percent reduction in imported oil achieved by converting food to fuel. This is all about farm subsidies, not energy efficiency. If ethanol were the answer -- it's clearly not -- it would be much cheaper to simply import cane-sugar ethanol from Brazil, now effectively banned by prohibitive tariffs and quotas.
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown did at least say this week he might "push for change in E.U. biofuels targets."
Hogwash. If starving babies concern you, drop the corn ethanol scam tomorrow; drill for oil wherever it can be found; build more refineries on a crash basis; throw out all the bogus environmental restrictions that block the construction of new coal plants. Go back to using corn for food.
How much of all this free, donated food will Ms. Sheeran and her gang ship to Zimbabwe? We have nothing against the people of Zimbabwe, but that nation -- formerly Rhodesia -- is so fertile it was once the breadbasket of Africa. Now the nation can't feed itself, because dictator Robert Mugabe stole the land away from the white farmers who knew how to make it produce, and turned it over to his clueless clansmen.
Feeding hungry residents of Zimbabwe is fine -- but shall we do so without insisting Mugabe step down and allow his nation to be returned to the sensible free-market principles and rule of law under which it used to feed not only itself, but its neighbors as well?
World hunger has precious little to do with droughts or "crop failures," and a whole lot to do with the economic systems under which people live. Neither Singapore nor Manhattan produce much food, yet people there prosper, while in such lands as Haiti, Indonesia, Bangladesh and much of central Africa people starve in the midst of some of the most agriculture-friendly soils and climates in the world.
Why is there no starvation in Iceland and Canada? Because food grows on trees, there? Or could it have something to do with the free markets and property rights long fostered there, along with the free flow of goods across those nations' borders?
Feed the starving, yes. But unless Ms. Sheeran and her crew revel in confronting an endless task, the bales of wheat and rice must be accompanied by a credible warning: Your problems are political and economic. Corruption, kleptocracy and the seizure of assets from those who invested to build up farms and processing plants will no longer be tolerated.
Sometimes, hunger is nature's way of telling us we're doing something wrong.
