So says the Center for Global Development’s (CGD) Kimberly Ann Elliott in a recent post:
As a start, CGD colleague Connie Veillette and John Norris from the Center for American Progress identified five ways to “make aid more effective and save more than $2 billion.” Three of their five recommendations involve cuts in subsidies for farmers, shippers, and NGOs that would make US food aid policies more flexible, responsive, and development-friendly… and save a half billion dollars. In addition, Connie and John recommended cutting at least $1.5 billion from farm subsidies, which go disproportionately to larger, richer producers.
Increasingly in the congressional debate, the $5 billion in “direct payments” that go to farmers every year — regardless of crop prices or yields, and on top of any other subsidies they receive — have moved squarely into the budget-cutting bulls eye. Eliminating those payments, which were created almost two decades ago as part of a failed effort to reform farm subsidies, is certainly justified, but those payments are delinked from production and cutting them would do little to reduce the global distortions imposed on developing-country producers. There is also another $10-12 billion in trade-distorting subsidies that undermine incentives to invest in agriculture in developing countries – those should not escape the budget ax.
I have addressed this topic many times on this blog in order to make the exact same point Connie Veillette and John Norris make. In chronological order:
Seven Billion People on Earth: Enough with the Fear Mongering
The seven billionth person on Earth will be born today according to the United Nations. To mark occasion, the BBC has developed an application that allows calculating your own number. I learned that, of all the people now alive, I was born 4,133,669,462nd.
As is inevitably the case when talking about the world’s population, the birth of the seven billionth person has caused a rash of newspaper articles, newscasts, and blog posts about how this really is a sign that at least two of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse — famine and death — will soon be here.
For a perfect example of that type of fear mongering, see this presentation, by Australian journalist Julian Cribb.
The Reverend’s New(est) Clothes
But really, Cribb is merely serving us the reheated leftovers of Reverend Thomas Malthus‘ Essay on the Principle of Population. In this book, first published in 1798, Malthus asserted that disease and famine would naturally arise to limit the size of any population.
Thus, because population growth would outpace agricultural growth (after all, there is only a limited amount of arable land in the world), disease and famine would take care of keeping the size of the population in check. Malthus actually estimated that the upper bound was equal to about one billion.