Who Are These People?

Over the weekend, I managed to avoid reading the article in the New York Times about agriculture in Malawi for about four hours. I knew what would happen, and when I finally read the article, it happened -- I was livid. In case you haven't read it, it is entitled "Ending Famine, Simply by Ignoring the Experts". The experts happen to be the folks at the World Bank.

Judging by the article, what they are expert in is not soil science, growing food, generosity, or humanity. The gist of the article is that for years the World Bank, in its punitive way, "advised" the government of Malawi not to subsidize fertilizer handouts to the farmers, but to let the "free market" work. The result was famine, starvation, and the almost total depletion of local soils, as starving farmers planted without fertilizing the soil and depleted it more and more, thus killing themselves and wrecking the environment. This seems to have been fine with the World Bank, who were acting on principle: "In the 1980s and again in the 1990s, the World Bank pushed Malawi to eliminate fertilizer subsidies entirely. Its theory both times was that Malawi's farmers should shift to growing cash crops for export and use the foreign exchange earnings to import food."

What was that again?

Their advice was, don't feed your children or elderly relatives, or even yourselves, but grow things like, I don't know (I really don't), sugar cane or tobacco, export it using lots of high-priced fuel, and then import a few, I don't know, potatoes or ears of corn, and hope for the best.

According to the article, part of the hunger problem in Africa is a lack of fertilizer (something they have plenty of in Washington, D.C.). The World Bank opposes fertilizer subsidies in order to -- well,it boggles the mind. In order to what? Get rid of the population? Degrade the soil beyond repair? I cannot think of any other reasons.

What is the goal here? Regularized financial markets? More billionaires? Really, it makes you almost vomit to imagine how the minds of these people work. Don't they understand free market capitalism? Free market capitalism operates by lurching here and there and then correcting itself. Every correction is a correction for a reason -- people made bad choices and then had to pay for them, often with their houses, sometimes with their lives or those of their relatives.

In the US, the agricultural free market has brought us lots of booms and busts, depleted soil, contaminated groundwater, superbugs, obesity, the end of the family farm, and numerous other
disasters. But the World Bank says "More of the same". Free marketers never seem to understand what an investment is -- it is something that cannot actually be "corrected" at all easily, and so people who make them (as in ethanol factories for processing corn kernels into fuel) want to protect them. In order to protect them, they fight tooth and nail against innovation and "correction". You and I might call this stupidity. The free marketers call it "creative destruction". During "creative destruction", lives and livelihoods are lost.

Doesn't that sound fun?

Of course, if you are sitting in your luxury office high in some building somewhere, perhaps it is fun to watch people starve. Perhaps it is fun to pronounce "expertly" when you don't know beans about how things grow and how agriculture works. Perhaps it is fun to coerce people into acting on your stupidities. But really, the rest of the human race has to wonder where these World Bank experts gained their expertise -- oh, I mean their sociopathic personality disorders.

Comments

[molderic]

I read the article. Sounds like they still need more fertilizer. We do nothing except pay for a study and then gainsay the results. Why don't we send more subsidized fertilizer? The Times article points out that Malawi followed our works and not our words. Gotta smile(y)

[darker]

The Whirled Bank guys want all that sh*t for themselves.

Paul W. and the rest of them are ANAL RETENTIVE.
Do not expect them to "share" their sh*t.

Look at Bush-Cheney. Have they given you the "real sh*t" about ANYTHING AT ALL?

No, middle-Americans are fed a diet of LIES.
Americans VOTE for LIARS and protectors of the NANNY STATE FOR THE RICH & CORRUPT CORPORATE WELFARE QUEENS.

Unless Americans STOP THIS ADDICTION, they will keep eating sh*t from their so-called government.

[Bernique]

Jane --
You and Naomi Klein should get together and write a super book about WorldBank/IMF stupidities.

[radicalcentrist44]

It only took 5 comments for someone to blame the republicans. You guys are slipping up today.

[kfdan]

"The United States, which has shipped $147 million worth of American food to Malawi as emergency relief since 2002, but only $53 million to help Malawi grow its own food, has not provided any financial support for the subsidy program, except for helping pay for the evaluation of it. Over the years, the United States Agency for International Development has focused on promoting the role of the private sector in delivering fertilizer and seed, and saw subsidies as undermining that effort."
What is implies is that the US government is simply supporting it's own farmers with public subsidies while encouraging poor countries to destroy their ability to grow food! This is not the action of an enlightened government but the deliberate attempt on the World Bank's part to destabilize poor countries! The World Bank should be disbanded! Private sector interests be damned!

[CactusTom]

Jane, I agree completely with your outrage. But as a lifelong student of history I have come to the sad conclusion that life has always been, and will always be, a competitive king on the castle affair. Realistically, it is a Darwinian world were the rich and powerful win out. All the rest is just so much wishful thinking. So if you simply refuse to compete your naively nuts. If you are unable to compete, “God” help you. Sorry for these “uplifting” words. As I stated in a Time inbox piece, “The Universe is Amoral.

[CactusTom]

Jane, I agree complexly with your outrage. But as a lifelong student of history I have come to the sad conclusion that life has always been, and will always be, a competitive king on the castle affair. Realistically, it is a Darwinian world were the rich and powerful win out. All the rest is just so much wishful thinking. So if you simply refuse to compete your naively nuts. If you are unable to compete, “God” help you. Sorry for these “uplifting” words. As I stated in a Time inbox piece, “The Universe is Amoral.

[veracity]

Great commentary, Jane, thank you so much. I, too, was flabergasted at reading the NY Times article - even though I had read John Perkins "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man," Naomi Klein's "Disaster Capitalism" and have long known that the Great Irish famine was caused by Great Britain EXPORTING grain, from absentee-landlord controlled Irish estates, at the very height of the famine in 1845! In addition, during World War II, the Axis allied Vichy French colonial administrators seized Vietnamese rice stocks to supply the Japanese army, leading to a massive famine of almost one million Vietnamese in 1944-45 (and a big part of what would become the fanatical Vietnamese resistance to France and later America during the Vietnam post-WWII war(s)). We know that here in America we wiped out buffalo herds to help in the "cleansing" of native Indian tribes from the West; and author Michael Lind posits the neo-Confederates and neo-conservatives still, today, see the world in terms of "how do we eliminate any rival clans/trib­es/nations to our rule?"
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0465041213/almostadiary-20
This amazing link, from 2002, predicts that following IMF/World Bank advice WOULD LEAD to the famine...
http://ngin.tripod.com/050802a.htm
I fear that we all Americans, for being too satiated and sedate to overcome our "inside-beltway" rulers and "major media" "nothing wrong here" mainstream narrative (allowing Pelosi & co. to cooperate with neo-con/ne­o-confeder­ate Republicans) are now guilty of far more death and chaos in the world, than just the one million Iraqis who have died since the US invasion there.

[mamacat]

One of the problems with the current U.S. administration has been the forcing of ideologies on bodies that are supposed to make and implement policies. Forcing right-wing, evangelical, closed minded ideas onto the groups that are supposed to be helping people, such as the World Bank, is counter-productive.
We have all read the stories about the young Republican put into a position of power over scientists, who then tells the scientists what their conclusions should be, based on neo-con ideology. This sort of control over what can be publicly stated by scientists is what we would expect from the Soviet regime, or the Nazis, or Imperial Japan. Now we are forced to realise that it is what we can expect from a Republican controlled United States.

The other point is more general. Even when an organisation is not controlled by political idealogues, the best intentioned bureacrats, engineers, and even scientists need to be able to listen to other people, as well as pay attention to observed facts. So often, we do not listen to the people we are interacting with. By assuming that we are smarter, or better, or somehow superior to others, and that we are in a positon to dictate, we lose the ability to learn from personal interaction. Democracy as an idea that people are born equal and have rights is something that should be implemented in many of our day-to-day activities, not just once every two years, when we (or a few of us) go to the polls and vote.

[splashy]

The market is always behind, looking backward, not forward. The key is that those that espouse it want to screw others, take the money and run, and leave everyone else to deal with the horrible consequences. Then they can move in and steal the rest when everyone is weakened by the consequences.

Actually, they are saying "let us talk you into ruining yourselves, so then you will let us steal everything else you have because you are weakened." They do it all with words and money. It's evil, plain and simply evil. The people like that are parasites on the rest of us.

[cloudy]

Yup, right on the money ... in what it DOES say

Back in the 70's, the head of state of Sri Llanka memorably quipped to the alter-ego of the World Bank something to the effect of "Have ANY countries have EVER recovered from applying your policies?". Over the last three decades, there have been numerous policy reincarnations, but it has always been the same basic screw-the-­poor-and-t­he-environ­ment economics, and the same basic protestations otherwise.

It is completely erroneous to think that the World Bank is specifically Repug. Clinton, with his NAFTA-philia type approach subscribes to this general ideologica­l/economic template, as does the NY Times. There are SOME Democrats, like Kucinich, with a different perspective, but don't count on them guiding world policy any time soon.

I have some hope of at least a more genuinely PRAGMATIC approach if Obama becomes president, which I know the smart money says isn't going to happen, but here is the kind of policy that you can expect to continue under a Hillary presidency (including, of course, its periodic snakeskin-shedding 'rebirths of hope' within the same lousy larger framework of assumptions.

One does have to wonder what kind of sociopathic person would pursue this sort of thing, but, (as with the rarely mentioned in liberal circles (yet), including Huffpo and TPM Cafe, "I-word", imperialism) these things are NOT functions of individual personalities but of institutional forces.

In the book MORTGAGING THE EARTH, many of these issues are covered up through the early 90s. But they are attributed to some sort of 'mindset' (Cartesian, scientific­/scientist­ic, linear, left brain ...) but the truth is that the various different incarnations of mindsets are anchored in the world system, which is imperialist.

It's time we started talking about IMPERIALISM (some prefer to speak of neo-IMPERIALISM) in the context of issues, as we really can't fully grasp them without at least a conceptual equivalency of the word "imperialism".

[Blogmommy]

Thank you, thank you, thank you, Ms. Smiley. Not only was your posting clear and easy to understand for those of us who do not follow these matters carefully enough, but it also contained the right amount of controlled vitriol which ought to be expressed more often. I had also read that article in the TIMES and felt disquieted and disturbed by all of the implications. Good for you that you responded. Thank you for your much-needed moral outrage expressed so beautifully and succinctly.

[richardgordon]

Sounds like the World Bank is run by Republicans. For the life of me I cannot understand how Republicans can get so rich being so stupid. Its like being in an alternate universe where there is no up or down, no right or wrong, everything is governed by voo-doo beliefs.

Reading Bob Herbert's article today in the NYT I was thinking how thoroughly the Republicans have fucked up America. And in spite of their monumental mismanagement, in spite of their incompetence and arrogance. In spite of their bizarre belief structures there is a good possibility that they could win the next election. How is this possible America? In any other country after the disgraceful performance of the past 8 years Republicanism would become a totally discredited and extinct religion. It has done more to ruin the United States than anything in living memory.

[ibivi]

It is heartbreaking to see all of the horrible things that are going on in Africa. The ongoing destruction of people, land, animals, natural resources, etc, etc. It is overwhelming.

[charlesrfd2003]

Gee, we used to think the novels, "1984" and "The Brave New World" were total fiction. Talk about manipulation and denial. These people must be the heirs to Joseph Goebbels, the great propaganda minister... The only difference is that I probably will not be shot for writing this. At least not right away.