The White House Can Not End World Hunger
By Mary Theroux • Monday May 24, 2010 1:02 PM PDT • 5 Comments
The Obama Administration has announced that it wants to spend at least $3.5 billion—and I wonder where they’re getting that kind of money?—over the next 3 years to help as many as 60 poor nations feed themselves.
While it is very good news that this involves ending the practice of sending U.S. crops to such countries, which development economists from at least the time of Peter Bauer have shown undermines local farmers, the thinking behind the new plan is no less fallacious:
With the initiative, Feed the Future, the administration said the countries would be required to draw up their own development plans, which could include breeding better seed and giving farmers access to credit, insurance and markets.
There is not one example of a country that has developed as the result of such central planning. On the contrary, there are countless which have flipped from self-sufficiency or even net food exporting to dependency on food aid as a result of a switch to central planning, including Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, and Venezuela.
As our books, Lessons from the Poor and Making Poor Nations Rich show, if Obama truly wants to help the world’s poor feed themselves, the U.S should pledge $0 to such aid and call for the economic and political liberalization, secure property rights, and the rule of law that has resulted in transforming formerly poor nations like Botswana, Estonia, and Chile (and let’s not forget North America) into middle- and upper-income nations.
Tags: American History, Economics, Food, Free Market, Land use, Latin America, Poverty 
Reducing population growth to zero would help.
richard | May 25, 2010 | Reply
Thank you for you comment, Richard.
Unfortunately, the desirability of zero-population-growth is a Multhusian myth that has been disproved time and again, but will not die. When not restricted in our productivity—able to retain the fruits of our labor, etc.—humans are capital, just as any other resource, producing increasing, not decreasing, plenty. We are not net consumers—we are net producers.
A recent proof of this was established when Julian Simon challenged Paul Ehrlich’s “Population Bomb” thesis, resulting in the famous Simon-Ehrlich wager, which Simon won. Ehrlich predicted near-term, unstoppable, catastrophic worldwide suffering as a result of “runaway” population growth. Since rapidly escalating prices would accompany the increasingly scarce resources Ehrlich predicted would result from the “Population Bomb,” Simon offered Ehrlich his choice of any commodity to be used as the measurement as to whether his predictions held up. Ehrlich chose a basket of five metals he believed would best reflect the unsurmountable challenge that population growth would impose on the earth’s resources, and the bet was set run for 10 years: 1980 to 1990.
Predictions such as Malthus’s and Ehrlich’s fail to take into account the fact tha Man is adaptive and innovative. To the extent that government interferes with our ability to produce, adapt, and innovate, we find privation such as we see in centrally-controlled countries, notably in Africa and South America.
Today, Western Europe is experiencing negative population growth. Would you contend that it is more prosperous as a result?
With best wishes,
Mary
See also my previous post: “Should Fearmongers Be Held Liable for Damages?“
Mary Theroux | May 25, 2010 | Reply
As Mary Theroux notes, population growth is not a threat. For those still worried about this, though, the best way to deter population growth is to allow for free markets, which create prosperity.
Prosperous societies tend to lower their population growth rates, as infant mortality declines and parents can rely on savings, investments, and pensions (as well as government and private safety nets), rather than offspring, to support them in old age.
David Shellenberger | May 25, 2010 | Reply
Reconsider. Yes, the short term projections were wrong, as most people expected. But let’s take a non-zero increase of 1% per year, as an example. In about 230 years the population will be ten times larger. etc. But the now-living have nothing to fear. .
richard | May 26, 2010 | Reply
Sorry, Richard, but your Malthusian thesis doesn’t hold up over time any better than it does in the “short term” (and Ehrlich’s predictions were very “short term,” and failed).
At the time Malthus wrote his Essay on the Principle of Population, the world’s population was around 975 million. Today, it is 10 billion. Over the same period, world life expectancies and standards of living are vastly improved from 1800.
The view that Man is somehow a parasite on paradisal nature is a myth. Man is a producer, not a parasite.
The desire for population “control” can only logically be achieved by choosing who dies. Who do you suggest?
Best wishes,
Mary
Mary Theroux | May 26, 2010 | Reply