Hi Tom,

Quote Originally Posted by Tom Odom View Post
A. Saying we have food, we just need to move it is to me much like saying we need to readjust post-colonial borders to reduce ethnic warfare. It sounds simple because it is in its heart simplistic. It completely ignores reality as in political and/or economic reality.
I'm often amazed at how many people forget that "reality", at least in the sense of operational social reality, is layered. Years ago I read a science fiction book that gave me a really great way of looking at it (David's Sling by Marc Steigler if I remember correctly) - for any given action, the first question is "is it technically feasible?" (i.e. can we do it?), followed (in order) by "is it economically feasible?" (i.e. can we afford to do it?") followed by "is it politically feasible" (i.e. do we want to do it?").

The constant focus on production is, in many ways, a hangover from old worn-out Marxist economics. Production this, production that, but no freakin' consideration of distribution (a point that Karl Polanyi made which got him excommunicated from Orthodox Marxism). A lot of Orthodox capitalist economists make the same mistake, but at the level of money as an accountancy measure (they confuse the accountancy value of a crop with the supply and demand ["needs"] value of a crop).

To make matters worse, and Zimbabwe is an excellent example of this, the hierarchy of questions is actually in a reverse order of "power"!

Quote Originally Posted by Tom Odom View Post
B. Saying we need to help the Third World develop food production is another simple statement that is simplistic. They know how to produce food in Sudan. They know how to produce food in Ethiopia. What they do not know how to do is adjust their political, economic, and social structures to the reality of the Sudan or Ethiopia. The Haitians ar another matter; the oldest black republic and the second oldest repblic in the Western Hemipshere, Haiti is very much the longest running crisis. At some stage, the Haitians either fix it or nature will. Nature is a harsh task master. Nature coupled with political/ethnic agendas is devastatingly cruel.
Charles Darwin beats Adam Smith any day of the week !

Tom, you are absolutely correct when you say that these cultures know how to produce food. A lot of the crises in food production stem from socio-cultural changes imposed on them during the past 150 years. Consider, for example, the effects of introducing late Victorian public sanitation measures in Nigeria and, at the same time, stopping clan feuds (massive increase in birth rates and decrease in death rates). Adapting to changes like that is a long and hard process, especially when your agriculture has been set towards one or more forms of mono-cropping for export.