Say Anything Blog

By J.R. Dunn

As everyone knows by this point, we are in the midst of a food crisis. Domestic prices of basic foods have risen by 46% over the past year, putting even more pressure on already stressed consumers. Overseas, food riots have occurred in Haiti, Cameroon, Burkina Faso, Egypt, Indonesia, Yemen, and as close to our borders as Mexico. These riots were severe enough to bring down the Haitian government of Jacques Edouard Alexis. Others may follow.

Any number of explanations have been offered. Global warming has taken its accustomed bow, only to be immediately pushed to one side by other candidates including market pressure created by higher living standards in India and China and increased fuel and fertilizer costs thanks to OPEC’s price-raising spree. Overpopulation has been dragged from the closet and dusted off one more time. The dour ghost of economist Thomas Malthus, with his lethal equation that food supply increases arithmetically while population increases geometrically, has made yet another appearance.

How will we feed the world, the cry arises. The feast is over; the era of cheap food has come to an end. The West (as ever), must mend its ways, give up its McDonald’s and KFC for the common good, learn to content itself with a bowl of cabbage soup and a handful of bamboo shoots a day. Soylent Green is just around the corner.

Within a year, the prophet of the 1200-calorie international diet will begin his campaign, in much the same way as Al Gore (perhaps it will even be Al Gore, if global warming goes south quickly enough), pursuing that Nobel aglow just over the horizon. Ecoterrorists will develop new targets to add to loggers and fur-wearers. (Has anybody ever noticed that PETA and Earth First! tend to keep their distance from leather fanciers, like those who so frightened Code Pink in Berkeley last week?) Fast-food restaurants will burst into flame in the dead of night. Famous chefs will require bodyguards. Ranchers will walk in fear of ambush, their herds poisoned or scattered.

All of which completely misses the point. Because there is one reason above all for the current crunch in basic foodstuffs, and that is: politics.

Food and Politics

There’s nothing new in the confluence of politics and food. Chinese emperors punished fractious provinces by surrounding them with troops and confiscating all food supplies. Six months later the imperial troops would move in and execute the survivors for cannibalism. This has also been the pattern for much in the way of government action in the modern era. Some of the worst atrocities of the past century involved ideological famines. Hunger was a commonplace of left-wing states, either through use of food as a weapon or through sheer incompetence. The Ukrainian Holodomor ("Hunger-Death") of 1932-33 may have killed as many as 14 million. Mao outdid his imperial forbears with the Great Leap Forward of 1958-62, which killed up to 45 million (probably the greatest single atrocity of the modern era). The Ethiopian famine of 1984-85 easily killed over a million. Nor can we forget North Korea, with its grotesque “rolling” famine, which seems to recur almost annually. Democracies, on the other hand, can be defined as “political systems in which famines do not take place”. No famine has occurred in a democratic Western state since the 1790s.

But liberal governments will figure out a way to imitate tyrannies. (They’ve been doing this for quite a long time, a widely overlooked fact that I’ve made the topic of my next book but one, being completed as you read this.) Food policy is no exception.

Last year represented a perfect storm for international agriculture. Not only did oil prices shoot through the roof and expanded menus in Asia lead to a run on commodities, there was also a serious problem with American honeybees, used to fertilize many varieties of crops. Colonies were dying for no clear reason, ensuring that large agricultural districts remained unfertilized. (The cause is still uncertain, although it may simply be genetic exhaustion after years of inbreeding to enhance certain traits, generally docility and ease of handling. Beekeepers who imported new strains from overseas have reported no problems.) To top off the mix, unusually cold weather ruined crops in areas ranging from California to China. (Yes, Al, we did say “cold”. Time for a revised edition of An Inconvenient Truth.) Under the circumstances, 2008 was not fated to become a banner year for agricultural production.

But the major trigger for this year’s predicament was the Congressional decision to mandate ethanol production. Congress subsidized the production of 7.5 billion gallons. As farmers began climbing on the grain wagon, this grew to over 9 billion gallons, an incredible one-third of the American corn harvest. Immediate price inflation hit all foods utilizing corn—not only directly, but as animal feed, and in the form of corn syrup used in soft drinks and sweets. The sudden sequestration of corn immediately affected all other grains, as supplies dropped when corn was planted instead, and scarcity took hold as attempts were made to replace corn with wheat, rice, and other grains. Within months, the effects had spread worldwide.

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Above all, we must be aware that the situation represents no apocalypse. Farmers across the country are madly planting corn (despite warnings to diversify from the Department of Agriculture) which will bring prices down with a thump next year. But the Second Horseman’s swift trot across the horizon has revealed some serious failings in international agriculture. Most of these failings are products of political meddling. Cease meddling, and many problems will solve themselves. Today, much of the developed world has learned that industry cannot be effectively manipulated through policy. We sometimes forget that farming is an industry like any other. That recognition is long overdue.

And thanks, I’ll have mine well done.

Read the whole thing.  Getting govt out of business is always a good thing.