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Category: Agriculture

Published July 12, 2011

Send Money During Famines, Not Food

So says Tim Worstall in a post over at Forbes:

“The reason that food is shipped, not money, is straight old politics. For the EU, it’s easier to persuade people that the near insane excess production of the coddling of European farmers be sent of to feed the starving than it is to reform said system. In the US, purchases are made from US farmers, the shipping must be US owned and operated shipping, so there’s a good constituency militating for no change in ways.

Continue readingSend Money During Famines, Not Food

Published July 11, 2011

Brookings: Spectacularly Wrong on Food Prices

As an academic, I like the Brookings Institution. As an academic in a policy school, I like that they have a long history of conducting rigorous policy analyses and believe Brookings has contributed positively to public policy scholarship throughout the years. As a development economist, the Brookings Africa Growth Forum is one of the best conferences I have ever had the chance to attend.

But everyone is wrong from time to time, sometimes spectacularly so. From a piece posted on the Brookings Institution website back a few months ago:

Continue readingBrookings: Spectacularly Wrong on Food Prices
Published July 6, 2011

More on the Political Economy of Agricultural Subsidies

From an article in the Wall Street Journal:

“The Department of Agriculture no longer serves as a lifeline to millions of struggling homestead farmers. Instead, it is a vast, self-perpetuating postmodern bureaucracy with an amorphous budget of some $130 billion — a sum far greater than the nation’s net farm income this year.

This year [the USDA] will give a record $20 billion in various crop ‘supports’ to the nation’s wealthiest farmers — with the richest 10 percent receiving over 70 percent of all the redistributive payouts. Free-market conservatives don’t dare touch the Department of Agriculture, given the senatorial clout of Midwest farm states. Don’t expect left-wing Democrats to object either. In a brilliantly conceived devil’s bargain, the Department of Agriculture gives welfare to the wealthy on the one hand, while on the other sending more than $70 billion to the lower income brackets in food stamps.”

Here is more from the same author.