He saved more lives…than anyone else in history
May 2, 2008 by elcap
Today Norman Borlaug writes in the Wall Street Journal that Africa Does Not Have to Starve. Under current US policy adopted from the Farm Bill, the US government buys subsidized food from American farmers and ships the food to Africa on American ships. Sometimes Africans starve waiting for the food; ships have also sunk, are subject to weather delays and have even been looted by pirates. Further, the shipping costs reduce the quantity of food available for purchase. The result is that millions of Africans are unnecessarily starving.
Borlaug’s advice is simple and rather Hayekian — allow local sources to participate in the growth process:
Congress should amend the Farm Bill to allow up to 25% of the appropriation for USAID’s food-aid program to be used to purchase food locally, when the program’s administrator deems it appropriate to do so. A great many people’s lives depend on this reform.
Michael Pollan has an excellent piece on the Farm Bill over at the New York Times, showing how it’s a classic case of public choice economics, benefiting a select group at the expense of everyone else:
The farm bill essentially treats our children as a human Disposall for all the unhealthful calories that the farm bill has encouraged American farmers to overproduce. To speak of the farm bill’s influence on the American food system does not begin to describe its full impact–on the environment, on global poverty, even on immigration.
As for Norman Borlaug, if you haven’t heard of him, you’re not alone. Steven Pinker begins The Moral Instinct with this sentence:
Which of the following people would you say is the most admirable: Mother Teresa, Bill Gates or Norman Borlaug?
Further down:
. . . who the heck is Norman Borlaug?
Borlaug, father of the “Green Revolution” that used agricultural science to reduce world hunger, has been credited with saving a billion lives, more than anyone else in history.
Great post. Could it be that U.S. policy ignores starving people in favor of feeding farmers who fund politicians?
Eric, that’s an excellent way of putting it! As you know, there are some heavy hitting economists that recently came out with bestselling books on poverty.
On the social democrat side, Jeffrey Sachs wrote The End of Poverty:
http://www.earth.columbia.edu/pages/endofpoverty/index
(Sachs should not be dismissed because he’s a lefty. He’s a juggernaut, ranking #14 in economists worldwide on number of pages published in journals from 1990-2000: http://student.ulb.ac.be/~tcoupe/update/authorspages.html More importantly, he’s created the platform to which everyone else must respond.)
Bill Easterly critiques the Sachs approach in The White Man’s Burden. His Econtalk podcast is here: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2008/02/easterly_on_gro.html
The guy I find most appealing is Paul Collier, former World Bank economist, who wrote the highly praised The Bottom Billion. He also did a podcast with Russ Roberts:
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2008/01/collier_on_the.html
The bottom line seems to be that poverty — unfortunately a default state of human existence and widely common today — is a deeply rooted cultural, social and economic problem that defies a simple solution.
How can we make sure that people in places like Zimbabwe — with no rule of law, stable money or property rights — create enough wealth to sustain themselves or at least not starve?
That’s a tough one. But the answer probably lies beyond the Farm Bill.
Getting back to your question specifically, libertarians first have to answer this: Should U.S. politicians have ANY involvement whatsoever with creating policies that use U.S. labor and capital to try to help starving people in foreign lands? If the answer is yes, how can that be reconciled with a libertarian worldview?