Archive for the 'Development' Category

Thinking about Human Rights (and UNICEF)

Published on 16 February 2010 in Development, Economics, Health Care, Justice/Law, Prostitution and Welfare. Tags: , , , , . 0 Comments

Before I begin:  UNICEF has a campaign in the UK at the moment to raise awareness of children being denied their rights around the world.  You can see the homepage for the campaign here.  You can donate here.

Here are some things to keep in mind when thinking about human rights:

  • A right is a particular form of liberty.  It is the freedom to do something.
  • An obligation or mandate is the opposite of a right.  A right involves a conscious choice; thus the phrase “to exercise one’s right.”  If there is no choice available, there is no right.
  • One person having a right often implies denying another right from a second person.  Suppose that you work for me.  If I have the right to fire you, you cannot have the right to a guaranteed job with me.  If you have the right to go on strike, I cannot have the right to fire you for going on strike.
  • Sometimes having a right does not impede the rights of others.  A right to make use of a non-rival good is the classic example.
  • Exercising a right is not necessarily in a person’s best interest.  I have the right to gamble all of my money at a casino, but it probably wouldn’t be wise to do so.
  • Every decision of consequence for everybody, everywhere, is subject to a constraint of some kind.  There are only 24 hours in a day, the resources at your disposal are finite and, eventually, you will die.
  • If a person, operating under a constraint, chooses to not do something, it does not imply that their right has been denied to them.

These last two points, while logical, create problems for many advocacy groups.  Consider the woman who, subject to constraints in her finances and the wages on offer for various jobs she can perform, chooses to become a prostitute.  Consider the subsistence-farming family that, subject to constraints in it’s finances and the wages on offer for alternative work, chooses to keep it’s children away from school and working on the farm.

It is largely for this reason that many people advocate what they call “economic rights”.  Although there are various versions of this (e.g. minimum wages, the welfare state, etc.), you can think of them as a government, on behalf of the entire population, instituting a guaranteed minimum income.

Now, while there are strong moral arguments for such a guarantee (which I fully support and agree with), this is not a right.  This is a mandated transfer of income from high-income citizens to low-income citizens.  For the rich, it is an obligation (the opposite of a right) and for the poor, it does not directly increase the range of choices available to them.  Instead, it indirectly increases that range by relaxing one of their constraints.

I say again:  I fully support providing a minimum income to all people by means of a welfare state; nobody should live in poverty.  But this is not a right.  It is a moral duty.  Calling this an “economic right” is a deliberate obfuscation for marketing purposes.  People pay more attention and money when a person’s “rights” are being denied than when they simply have a moral obligation to help.

I love the work done by UNICEF. I think they are just about the best NGO on the planet. My wife and I donate money to them. They make an express point of telling you how much of the money you give will go to administration costs or to more fundraising.

I just wish they could raise those funds without confusing things by saying that Aklima’s right to education is being denied to her.  I recognise that they have to.  I just wish that they didn’t.

Note to self: holidaying in Greece will soon be cheap

Published on 3 February 2010 in Development, Economics, Europe, Finance and Politics. Tags: , , , , , . 0 Comments

Megan McArdle directs the world to this piece in the FT.  From the FT article:

The European Commission said on Tuesday it would endorse Athens’ plan to bring back under control the public sector deficit, which last year reached almost 13 per cent of gross domestic product.
…
Under a three-year plan, the Greek government seeks to cut the national budget deficit to less than 3 per cent of GDP by the end of 2012.

and:

In response to criticism that earlier plans had not included sufficient spending cuts, Mr Papandreou also announced an across-the-board freeze in public sector wages which, together with cuts in allowances, would reduce the public sector wage bill by 4 per cent. The government has also pledged to raise the retirement age.

If the Greek government can achieve this without massive, nation-wide strikes, I’ll be terrifically impressed.  Megan’s comments:

Everyone is expressing optimism. But while this sort of belt-tightening is necessary for Greece to stay in the EU, it’s going to come at a huge cost. Greece is already in recession–that’s why its budget problems loom so large–and the fiscal contraction will only make them deeper. Meanwhile, the EU will be setting its interest rates to meet the needs of larger, healthier members (and inflation-hawk bondholders). Tight fiscal and monetary policy means a long, painful period ahead for the Greeks.

This is the dilemma that faced Argentina with its monetary peg to the dollar; ultimately, it led to devaluation and default. We will see if Greece can whether [sic] it better.

I don’t think that this sort of belt-tightening is strictly necessary in the near term.  Germany will, again, fund a bail-out if it really comes down to it because, if nothing else, the loss to Germany of a member of the EU dropping the currency is greater than the loss to Germany of paying for Greece’s debt.

It’s clearly necessary in the long term that Greece get it’s fiscal house in order, but since they’re in such a severe recession, this isn’t really the time to do it (financial market pressure aside).  This is, in essence, the same debate that is gripping America, although there the pressure to address the deficit is coming from a successful political strategy of the opposition rather than, much as that same opposition might like, pressure from the markets.

Ultimately, what the EU needs is individual states to be long-term fiscally stable and to have pan-Europe automatic stabilisers so that areas with low unemployment essentially subsidise those with high unemployment.  Ideally it would avoid straight inter-government transfers and instead take the form of either encouraging businesses to locate themselves in the areas with high unemployment, or encouraging individuals to move to areas of low unemployment.  The latter is difficult in Europe with it’s multitude of languages, but not impossible.

In a perfect world where all regions of the EU currency zone were equally developed, this would simply replace the EU development grants.  But this isn’t a perfectly world …

On China

Published on 11 June 2009 in Development, Economics and Trade. Tags: , , , , , , , , . 0 Comments

Menzie Chinn emphasises that for the purposes of estimating country shares in global GDP, it is necessary to think of them in nominal terms.  On that basis, China is large, but only half the size of the Euro zone and well under half the size of America.  Therefore, he implies, an increase in demand from China won’t really contribute as much to global growth as people might be hoping.

Nevertheless, people do seem to be wondering about China as an engine of global growth in demand.  The reason is simple:  Despite a near catastrophic collapse in world trade, China’s economy is still growing while those of  other export-oriented countries like Japan or Germany are falling precipitously.

Clearly part of the reason for the continued Chinese growth, like in Australia, is the successful use of a fiscal stimulus to boost local demand (the Australian rebound was also helped by the fact that, by not manufacturing much, their decline in investment was offset by a fall in imports and (price) changes in natural resource exports occur with a significant lag).

Brad Setser has explored the Chinese stimulus a little.  He writes:

I initially underestimated the magnitude of China’s stimulus by focusing on the (fairly modest) change in the government’s fiscal balance. It is now clear that the majority of China’s stimulus has been off-budget: the huge increase in lending by state owned banks mattered far more than the change in the budget of the central government. The expected loss on these loans can be considered a form of fiscal stimulus.

Which is a fascinating way to conduct government business.

Ecuador defaults. Wait, no. Yes. Maybe?

Published on 16 January 2009 in Development, Economics and Finance. Tags: , , . 0 Comments

Felix Salmon points out the absurdity of the situation:

A couple of major developments on the Ecuador front: yesterday, finance minister Elsa Viteri came out with the rather stunning decision that the country would make the coupon payments on its 2015 global bonds — despite deciding to default on the 2012s and the 2030s. And today, the Ecuador CDS auction closed at 31.375%, meaning that anybody holding an Ecuador CDS will receive 68.625 cents on the dollar.

Viteri’s decision opens up a major legal battle: there’s no doubt that Ecuador’s legions of creditors will attempt to attach those coupon payments the minute they arrive in the US. And I, for one, can’t imagine for a second that holders of the 2012s and the 2030s will take Ecuador up on any forthcoming offer to buy their bonds back at 30 cents on the dollar when the country is happily paying the 2015s in full.

This is not the first time Ecuador has tried to pay some foreign creditors without paying others who are pari passu. Ten years ago it tried a very similar trick with its Brady bonds — with disastrous results. But I don’t think that Ecuador has any grand strategy here; instead, the most likely hypothesis is that a well-connected financier has greased enough palms to make sure that he gets paid out on both his 2015s and his credit default swaps.

What all this means in practice is that Ecuador is now behaving so erratically that there’s no point even attempting to deal or negotiate with the present administration in anything like good faith. Instead, the holders of the 2015s will thank their lucky stars and hope that they actually receive their money; the professional vultures will be spending a lot of time in federal court in lower Manhattan; and most of the rest of the holders of the 2012s and the 2030s will simply wait for the next Ecuadorean president to come along. Because this one just isn’t acting logically.

*sigh*

When can social change occur?

Published on 28 October 2008 in Development, Economics and Politics. Tags: , . 1 Comment

Somebody much smarter than I am was kind enough to read my little post on Endogenous Growth Theory.  At lunch today, they drew attention to this item that I mentioned:

I’m not aware of anything that tries to model the emergence of ground-breaking discoveries that change the way that the economy works (flight, computers) rather than simply new types of product (iPhone) or improved versions of existing products (iPhone 3G). In essence, it seems important to me that a model of growth include the concept of infrastructure.

The question was raised:

Could it be that times of significant social change have a tendency to coincide with with the introduction (i.e. either the invention or the adoption) of new forms of infrastructure? [*]  A new type of mobile phone hardly changes the world, but the wide-spread adoption of mobile telephony in a country certainly might change the social dynamic in that country.

It’s something to ponder …

[*] My intelligent friend is not an economist and would probably prefer to think of this as a groundbreaking discovery rather than just the development of a new type of infrastructure.

New Scientist is loopy

Published on 21 October 2008 in Development and Economics. Tags: , , , . 2 Comments

New Scientist has a feature this week blaming the unsustainable destruction of the environment on an obsession with economic growth and calling for a move to a growth-free world.  The answers to the questions raised by the collection of articles (all essentially repeating each other) are straightforward and widely recognised:

  • As the supply of something dwindles or the demand for it rises, the price of that thing will rise.  If we run low on some particular natural resource or our demand for it at the current price proves greater than the supply, the price will rise.  That will cause demand to fall and will spur innovation in searching for an alternative.  Trains in Britain first ran on coal-fired steam engines.  Eventually the price of coal rose too high and they switched over to diesel.  The price of oil was going up too, so after that they moved to electric engines.  The transitions aren’t perfectly smooth, I’ll grant you – there are discrete jumps that can make it a bumpy ride – but it does happen.
  • Externalities exist, both good and bad.  Actions that come with positive externalities ought to be subsidised.  Actions that come with negative externalities ought to be penalised.  We’re producing too much carbon dioxide?  Make the polluters pay.  Whether it should be through taxes or a trading system is a matter of debate, but bring it in.  We’re over-fishing in the North Atlantic?  Impose a tax directly on the fishermen for every fish they catch.  When the cost of doing a bad thing rises, people do it less and innovate to find an alternative.
  • Yes, extreme inequality is a Bad Thing ™.  It’s true that for some time we’ve had worsening inequality because of low growth among the poor and high growth among the rich, but that doesn’t mean that growth is bad per se, only that the composition of growth is around the wrong way.  It is far better to have low growth for the rich and high growth for the poor (so they catch up) than to have no growth at all and rely entirely on redistribution.  Redistribution should happen, yes, but primarily for the purposes of enabling the poor to grow faster.  Have the rich pay for the health care and education of the poor.

You don’t think this all this is possible?  Of course it’s possible.  Here is an article from Der Spiegel from April 2008 talking about solar power and the Sahara desert.  Here is a map from that same article:

The caption reads:  “The left square, labelled “world,” is around the size of Austria. If that area were covered in solar thermal power plants, it could produce enough electricity to meet world demand. The area in the center would be required to meet European demand. The one on the right corresponds to Germany’s energy demand.”

If the cost of coal- and gas-fired electricity production were high enough, this would happen so fast it would make an historian’s head spin.

Sing it from the rooftops

Published on 5 May 2008 in Development and Economics. Tags: , . 1 Comment

A bunch of serious economists have been pointing to this comment by Paul Collier. It is so good that I’m going to reproduce it in full:

The sharp increase in the world price of staple foods is an inconvenience for consumers in the rich world, but for consumers in the poorest countries, especially in Africa, it is a catastrophe. Despite the predominance of peasant agriculture, most African countries are net food importers and food accounts for over half of the budget of low-income households. This is the result of decades of agricultural stagnation combined with growing populations. Although many of the net purchasers are rural, evidently the problem is at its most intense in the urban slums. These slums are political powder kegs and so rising food prices have already triggered riots. Indeed, they sow the seeds of an ugly and destructive populist politics.

Why have food prices rocketed? Paradoxically, this squeeze on the poorest has come about as a result of the success of globalization in reducing world poverty. As China develops, helped by its massive exports to our markets, millions of Chinese households have started to eat better. Better means not just more food but more meat, the new luxury. But to produce a kilo of meat takes six kilos of grain. Livestock reared for meat to be consumed in Asia are now eating the grain that would previously have been eaten by the African poor. So what is the remedy?

The best solution to a problem is often not closely related to its cause (a proposition that that might be recognized in the climate change debate). China’s long march to prosperity is something to celebrate. The remedy to high food prices is to increase food supply, something that is entirely feasible. The most realistic way to raise global supply is to replicate the Brazilian model of large, technologically sophisticated agro-companies supplying for the world market. To give one remarkable example, the time between harvesting one crop and planting the next, in effect the downtime for land, has been reduced an astounding thirty minutes. There are still many areas of the world that have good land which could be used far more productively if it was properly managed by large companies. For example, almost 90% of Mozambique’s land, an enormous area, is idle.

Unfortunately, large-scale commercial agriculture is unromantic. We laud the production style of the peasant: environmentally sustainable and human in scale. In respect of manufacturing and services we grew out of this fantasy years ago, but in agriculture it continues to contaminate our policies. In Europe and Japan huge public resources have been devoted to propping up small farms. The best that can be said for these policies is that we can afford them. In Africa, which cannot afford them, development agencies have oriented their entire efforts on agricultural development to peasant style production. As a result, Africa has less large-scale commercial agriculture than it had fifty years ago. Unfortunately, peasant farming is generally not well-suited to innovation and investment: the result has been that African agriculture has fallen further and further behind the advancing productivity frontier of the globalized commercial model. Indeed, during the present phase of high prices the FAO is worried that African peasants are likely to reduce their production because they cannot finance the increased cost of fertilizer inputs. While there are partial solutions to this problem through subsidies and credit schemes, large scale commercial agriculture simply does not face this problem: if output prices rise by more than input prices, production will be expanded because credit lines are well-established.

Our longstanding agricultural romanticism has been compounded by our new-found environmental romanticism. In the United States fears of climate change have been manipulated by shrewd interests to produce grotesquely inefficient subsidies for bio-fuel. Around a third of American grain production has rapidly been diverted into energy production. This switch demonstrates both the superb responsiveness of the market to price signals, and the shameful power of subsidy-hunting lobby groups. Given the depth of anti-Americanism in Europe it is, of course, fashionable to criticize the American folly with bio-fuels. But Europe has its equivalent follies.

First, the European Commission is now imitating the American bio-fuels policy. At present the programme is small enough to be unimportant, but we need to pull it back before it does real damage. We have surely learnt enough about European agriculture to realize how important it is to kill this incipient scam before we are engulfed by it. But the true European equivalent of America’s folly with bio-fuels is the ban on GM. Europe’s distinctive and deep-seated fears of science have been manipulated by the agricultural lobby into yet another form of protectionism. The ban on both the production and import of genetically modified crops has obviously retarded productivity growth in European agriculture: again, the best that can be said of it is that we are rich enough to afford such folly. But Europe is a major agricultural producer, so the cumulative consequence of this reduction in the growth of productivity has most surely rebounded onto world food markets. Further, and most cruelly, as an unintended side-effect the ban has terrified African governments into themselves banning genetic modification in case by growing modified crops they would permanently be shut out of selling to European markets. Africa definitely cannot afford this self-denial. It needs all the help it can possibly get from genetic modification. Not only is Africa currently being hit by rising food prices, over the longer term it will face climatic deterioration in the context of a rapidly growing population.

While the policies needed for the long term have been befuddled by romanticism, the short term global response has been pure beggar-thy-neighbour. It is easier for urban slum dwellers to riot than for farmers: riots need streets, not fields. And so, in the internal tussles between the interests of poor consumers and poor producers, the interests of consumers have prevailed. Governments in grain-exporting countries have swung prices in favour of their consumers and against their farmers by banning exports. These responses further politicize and fragment an already confused global food market. They increase the risks of investing in commercial-scale food production and drive up prices further in the food-importing countries. Unfortunately, trade in agriculture has been the main economic activity to have resisted being subject to global rules. We need stronger and fairer globalization, not less of it.

What can I say?  Just this:  Amen.

*sigh* (Zimbabwe)

Published on 19 April 2008 in Development, Politics and Security. Tags: , , , , , , . 0 Comments

This is from The Independent. It’s a fairly short article, so I’ll include it in full (all emphasis is mine):

Chinese troops have been seen on the streets of Zimbabwe’s third largest city, Mutare, according to local witnesses. They were seen patrolling with Zimbabwean soldiers before and during Tuesday’s ill-fated general strike called by the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).

Earlier, 10 Chinese soldiers armed with pistols checked in at the city’s Holiday Inn along with 70 Zimbabwean troops.

One eyewitness, who asked not to be named, said: “We’ve never seen Chinese soldiers in full regalia on our streets before. The entire delegation took 80 rooms from the hotel, 10 for the Chinese and 70 for Zimbabwean soldiers.”

Officially, the Chinese were visiting strategic locations such as border posts, key companies and state institutions, he said. But it is unclear why they were patrolling at such a sensitive time. They were supposed to stay five days, but left after three to travel to Masvingo, in the south.

China’s support for President Mugabe’s regime has been highlighted by the arrival in South Africa of a ship carrying a large cache of weapons destined for Zimbabwe’s armed forces. Dock workers in Durban refused to unload it.

The 300,000-strong South African Transport and Allied Workers Union (Satawu) said it would be “grossly irresponsible” to touch the cargo of ammunition, grenades and mortar rounds on board the Chinese ship An Yue Jiang anchored outside the port.

A Satawu spokesman Randall Howard said: “Our members employed at Durban container terminal will not unload this cargo, neither will any of our members in the truck-driving sector move this cargo by road. South Africa cannot be seen to be facilitating the flow of weapons into Zimbabwe at a time where there is a political dispute and a volatile situation between Zanu-PF and the MDC.”

Three million rounds of AK-47 ammunition, 1,500 rocket-propelled grenades and more than 3,000 mortar rounds and mortar tubes are among the cargo on the Chinese ship, according to copies of the inventory published by a South African newspaper.

According to Beeld, the documentation for the shipment was completed on 1 April, three days after the presidential vote.

Zimbabwe and China have close military ties. Three years ago, Mr Mugabe signed extensive trade pacts with the Chinese as part of the “Look East” policy forced on him by his ostracising by Western governments over human rights abuses. The deal gave the Chinese mineral and trade concessions in exchange for economic help.

The shadow Foreign Secretary William Hague called on David Miliband to demand a cessation of arms shipments.

A South African government spokesman Themba Maseko said it would be difficult to stop the shipment.

*sigh*

Farm subsidies promote terrorism

Published on 11 April 2008 in Development, Economics and Justice/Law. Tags: , , , , , , . 3 Comments

Well, maybe not directly, but it bears thinking about. It’s not a new idea, either, but I thought I’d put it out there anyway …

US and European farm subsidies artificially suppress world crop prices by causing American and European farmers to produce more than they profitably otherwise could. By the World Bank’s estimates, the prices of course grains, rice and wheat would rise by between 4% and 7% relative to other prices if all subsidies and other impediments to trade were removed (hat tip: Dani Rodrik).

That means that farmers in places like Afghanistan turn to other crops like poppies (for heroin). Since drugs are illegal, the farmers can only sell their crops through black (well, in Afghanistan, grey) markets that are controlled, America tells us, by people who support and funnel profits to the Taliban and al-Qa’ida.

Those Afghani farmers don’t really care what they grow. They just want to make a profit, like anybody else. How do we know this? Because when the price of crops goes up for other reasons, they happily started switching to planting wheat:

In parts of Helmand Afghan farmers are this year sowing wheat instead of poppy – not because they have suddenly been converted to the argument that producing heroin is not in the national interest.

Market forces have been the deciding factor – with wheat prices doubling in the past year, and the street price of heroin falling, it is now more cost effective to grow wheat.

So there you have it. If America was serious about fighting drugs and terrorism, it would cut it’s farm subsidies.

Killing the worlds’ poor through good intentions

Published on 30 March 2008 in Development and Technology. Tags: , , , , , , , , , , . 0 Comments

This sort of stuff makes me very, very angry.

Kerry Howley, writing at Reason, does an interview with Robert Paarlberg:

In May 2002, in the midst of a severe food shortage in sub-Saharan Africa, the government of Zimbabwe turned away 10,000 tons of corn from the World Food Program (WFP). The WFP then diverted the food to other countries, including Zambia, where 2.5 million people were in need. The Zambian government locked away the corn, banned its distribution, and stopped another shipment on its way to the country. “Simply because my people are hungry,” President Levy Mwanawasa later said, “is no justification to give them poison.”

The corn came from farms in the United States, where most corn produced—and consumed—comes from seeds that have been engineered to resist some pests, and thus qualifies as genetically modified. Throughout the 90s, genetically modified foods were seen as holding promise for the farmers of Africa, so long as multinationals would invest in developing superior African crops rather than extend the technology only to the rich. When Zambia and Zimbabwe turned away food aid, simmering controversy over the crops themselves brimmed over and seeped into almost every African state. Cast as toxic to humans, destructive to the environment, and part of a corporate plot to immiserate the poor, cutting edge farming technology is most feared where it is most needed. As Robert Paarlberg notes in his new book, Starved for Science: How Biotechnology is Being Kept Out of Africa (Harvard University Press), in 2004 the Sudanese government “took time out from its genocidal suppression of a rebellion in Darfur to issue a memorandum requiring that all food aid brought into the country should be certified as free of any GM ingredients.”

Starved for Science includes forwards by both Jimmy Carter and Norman Borlaug, the architect of Asia’s Green Revolution and the man credited with saving more human lives than anyone else in history. Paarlberg, a Professor of Political Science at Wellesley and a specialist in agricultural policy, wants the West to help small African farmers obtain promising technologies just as it helped Asia discover biological breakthroughs in the 60s and 70s. Instead, he says, a coalition of European governments and African elites are promoting a Western vision of rustic, low-productivity labor.

Do read the entire thing. Megan McArdle offers her comment here:

My understanding at the time was that this was even worse than ignorance: Africans keep out relief grain because they know that farmers will hold some of it for seed. They were afraid that if GM entered the food chain, they would that never, ever be able to export any plant products to Europe because of their stringent regulations (these have, I believe, been somewhat relaxed). So even if the president of Zambia knew GM was harmless, he couldn’t risk permanently impairing his country’s economic future.

In fact, let me quote some more from Howley’s interview with Paarlsberg:

reason: Can you give us a sense of what an average African farmer in, say, Zambia, is currently working with?

Paarlberg: It would be a woman and her children primarily, and they would plant not a hybrid maize, but a traditional openly pollinated variety, and they would time the preparation of the soil and planting as best they could for when they thought the rains would come. But the rains might not come in time, or they might be too heavy and wash the seeds out of the ground. It’s a risky endeavor. They can’t afford fertilizer, and it’s too risky to use fertilizer because in a drought the maize would shrivel up and the fertilizer would be wasted. They don’t have any irrigation. As a consequence, even in a good year their yields per hectare will be only about one third as high as in Asian countries, 1/10 as high as in the United States.

reason: Just as it used to be in Asia.

Paarlberg: Everywhere!

…

reason: No African government other than South Africa’s has made it legal to plant GMOs. You call this “out of character” for the same governments.

Paarlberg: They have not yet enacted the law, set up the biosafety committee, and granted approval, which is the laborious process that [the United Nations Environmental Program] and the European governments have coached them into adopting.

It’s interesting. In no other area are governments in Africa particularly concerned about hypothetical environmental risks. They know better than to invoke the precautionary principle when it comes to unsafe food in open air markets. They know that they need to first get rid of actual food shortages and raise income; then and only then can they afford to impose the same extremely high standards of food safety on open air markets that are imposed on supermarkets in Europe. Yet curiously when it comes to GMOs they adopt the highly precautionary European standard, which makes it impossible to put these products on the market at all. I take that as evidence that this is not an authentic African response, it’s a response imported from Europe.

reason: So the romanticization of bucolic farm landscapes unmarred by scientific advance has an American and European pedigree.

Paarlberg: It’s not what we do at home—only two percent of agricultural products in the US are organically grown. And many of those that are organically grown are grown on industrial scale organic farms in California that don’t bear any resemblance to small bucolic farms. But it’s the image we promote in our new cultural narrative. It’s something that affects the way we give foreign assistance.

reason: Many of the anti-agricultural science gurus you mention in your book have a spiritual dimension. Can you talk a bit about Sylvester Graham?

Paarlberg: Sylvester Graham, the father of the modern graham cracker, was opposed to the modern flour milling industry. He didn’t like the industrialization of bread production, and he wanted women to go back to grinding flour. He was a religious man, a minister, and he had all of the narrow minded prejudices we might associate with a New England clergyman from the 19th century. He thought that women should stay in the home, he believed people should be vegetarians because that would keep their sexual appetite back. We sometimes forget what goes along with the food purist zealotry. It’s often zealotry about more than just a certain kind of food to eat.

In Zambia today there are expatriate Jesuits from the United States who have come to believe genetic engineering is against God’s teaching, though this is not a belief that is embraced by the Vatican. They believe that all living things, including plants, have a right not to have their genetic makeup modified. Of course we have been modifying the genetic makeup of plants ever since we domesticated them 10,000 years ago, but these particular fathers are focused only on genetic engineering.

…

reason: Isn’t it paternalistic to blame Europeans for the decisions of African governments? Is this something African elites are at least as complicit in?

Paarlberg: It’s a codependency. The African elites depend upon Europe for financial assistance, they depend upon European export markets, they depend on NGOs for technical assistance, it’s just easier for them to follow the European lead than to go against that lead. And to some extent the European governments depend upon having dependents in Africa that will, despite the difficult experience of colonization, continue to imitate and validate and honor European culture and taste.

reason: What exactly have European NGOs done to discourage productivity in farming? You quote Doug Parr, a chemist at Greenpeace, arguing that the de facto organic status of farms in Africa is an opportunity to lock in organic farming, since African farmers have yet to advance beyond that.

Paarlberg: Some of it is well intentioned. The organic farming movement believes this is an appropriate corrective to the chemical intensive farming that they see in Europe. In Europe, where prosperous consumers are willing to pay a premium for organic products, it sometimes makes sense to use a more costly production process. So they think, “Well it’s the wave of the future here in Europe, so it should be the future in Africa as well.”

So they tell Africans who don’t use enough fertilizer that instead of using more they should go to zero and certify themselves as organic. That’s probably the most damaging influence — discouraging Africans from using enough fertilizer to restore the nutrients they mine out of their soil. They classify African farmers as either certified organic, or de facto organic. Indeed, many are de facto organic. And their goal is not to increase the productivity of the organic farmers, but to certify them as organic.

I just find that to be lacking in moral clarity.