World food crisis?

I don't think so.

The truth is that over the past 60 years the world’s farmers have trebled the yield of the big three cereals (rice, wheat and maize), which provide 60 per cent of human calories, without ploughing a single net extra acre. (Incidentally, yields are probably 10 per cent higher simply because of increased carbon dioxide in the air.) In some places, food prices have been so low that land has come out of agriculture and back into forest. Malnutrition and hunger persist, yes, but mass famine now happens chiefly in countries with too much government, such as North Korea and Zimbabwe.

 In 1968 the celebrity ecologist Paul Ehrlich promised that “hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programmes embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.” (The world death rate fell in the 1970s.) The environmentalist Lester Brown has made a career out of calling the top of the food-supply market every time there is a price spike: in 1974, he said “farmers can no longer keep up with rising demand”; in 1981, “global food insecurity is increasing”; in 1989, “population growth is exceeding farmers’ ability to keep up”; in 1994, “seldom has the world faced an unfolding emergency whose dimensions are as clear as the growing imbalance between food and people”.

 And on Oxfam and its fear mongering...

And finally finally, there’s a moral error at the heart of their reasoning.

They consider, then explicitly reject, the large farm method for Africa. They plump instead for “smallholders”. They talk about efficiency, of course, but miss the most important part of that. Yes, productivity of land is important, so too is productivity of inputs. But the most important part of productivity, the one that actually determines life as it is lived, is productivity of labour. And they go for that “smallholder”, meaning “peasant” form of farming. The one where while, in places and at times, the productivity of land and inputs can indeed be high, the productivity of labour is by definition low.

For that’s exactly what this type of farming does, substitutes labour for those other inputs, land, fertiliser, tractors and so on. And what does low productivity of labour mean? Yup, that’s right, low wages for those providing the labour.

And that’s appalling. Morally detestable. For the real problem with peasant farming is that it means that the farmers have to live as peasants. With the income of peasants.

None of us pinkish people in Europe are willing to go back to being peasants so quite why Oxfam thinks 500 million black Africans will be happy to remain peasants I’m not sure. Other than vague accusations of racism, that the grinning picanninies are happy to sing while scraping the fields with a stick: something we happily gave up centuries ago, I can’t actually think of a coherent explanation.

But in the end, that is the real problem I have with this report. Oxfam are trying to design a system whereby 500 million Africans get to be peasants for evermore.

Tell me, how did they ever get described as “progressive”

In the Middle East where the food shortages and the short term price hike is having the greatest effect, it is the people who are paying for years of government inactivity over agricultural yields. Most of these authoritarian countries kept up the small holdings and stopped any industrialised agriculture, as they were afraid of an influx of people from the countryside to the town, which could Cause greater social unrest than their security mechanisms could deal with.  So by keeping people poor and subsiding on their land, they could keep the status -Quo, where they rule and the people follow blindly (as long as they have a full stomach). Countries like Egypt, Sudan and Syria are quite capable of feeding themselves if there had been a free and open system in place allowing markets to dictate, but they forced smallholdings on their people leading to this unrest we face at the moment. It is too late now for these regimes as there is no way they can afford to feed their populations. Once your population starts to starve then you will find they are not quite so amiable to your beck and call.

Palestinians go for science fiction and spurn history.

 Palestinian protesters have added a colorful twist to demonstrations against Israel's separation barrier, painting themselves blue and posing as characters from the hit film Avatar. The demonstrators also donned long hair and loincloths Friday for the weekly protest against the barrier near the village of Bilin. The demonstrators compared their struggle with the Na'vi race portrayed in Avatar, who find themselves having to defend their people and homeland against foreign invaders.

Well it seems that reality is further than ever away for some. The whole Palestinian discourse is not based on a reality, this needs to be accepted and the salvation history that they have literally invented for themselves needs to be spurned for their reality, they need to look critically at their past and understand where they are and what they are capable of, if they wait too long their time will pass, so until then there will be no peace.