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.
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This is exactly the type of situation described in The Shock Doctrine. The World Bank should be disbanded immediately, and every officer thrown out.
What has been done around the world by the World Bank, our CIA, and the corporations they serve boggles the mind.
I'm not surprised at all by the actions outlined in the article. I've become a cynic. These policy makers, these murderers, were best described by our first President George Washington who referred to them as "a corrupt squadron of paper dealers."
He warned us about them and we didn't pay attention, Ike warned us about them and we didn't pay attention and the result has been as Franklin Roosevelt described it. "The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it comes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group," Franklin D. Roosevelt
I wonder how many other "third world" countries are not developing as a result of similar advice from the World Bank (not to mention other such entities). A great deal of the "charity dollars" from this country are sent to places like Africa and other underdeveloped countries. Simple changes in policy like this could make a world (pun intended) of difference.
Thanks, Jane!
This piece could have been titled,
Who Are These People Working For?
I just read an article that said that the narcissistic sociopaths (ignore the law, no empathy for others) who cause so much trouble in our personal lives actually tend to be very successful in business.
And this article sums it up.
No matter how many terrible things we can say about the neocons, they always are so much worse than we imagined.
For example, the chemical companies imprint basic foodstuff seed (like corn, rice) with some dna variation so that "their" seed can always be tracked. They want people to buy their seed instead of saving seeds from last year's crops. And I suspect they are also busily destroying the "real" seed - the one that god made. Soon, anyone who grows anything, even a weed, will have the chemical police invading their property, testing their plants, assessing fines for using "their" seed.
Do they care if people throughout the world starve? Of course they don't. Get the Africans all growing - whatever, pineapple - for 10 years, all basic foodstuff seed on that continent will disappear - then they control all the basic foodstuff in the world, and will charge a hefty sum for anyone who wants to eat.
And their friends are busy stealing water for the same purpose.
Anyone who is happy is just not paying attention.
Ever heard of "NSSM 200"?
If not, google it.
This the World Bank at it's best. This scenario has been played out over and over again globally but now many countries have caught on and are tossing these shylocks out on there cans. Their "enforcers" the IMF are no better.
And people have the audacity to wonder why the USA is so hated.
The World Bank is an undeniably evil and corrupt instatution. This isn't the only situation where they have blood on their hands. This situation is just disgusting.
The banks around my farming community require fertilizer and pesticide applications before they will grant a loan. The reason: the insurance companies require fertilizer and pesticide applications. Does anyone hear the words "interlocking directorates" around here?
First, get people like Peace Corps or other volunteers to teach the traditional farming method of composting. Revitalize and sustain soil; it's our only hope for a future.
Second, watch the movie The Girl In The Cafe.
Third, stop the World Bank practice (and that of other banks, too) of using GMO seed that requires a specific fertilizer and is infertile, so you have to buy the seeds again next year. In fact, stop the World Bank!
I believe people spreading what we know about sustainable agriculture to farmers in countries (including the USA) can start another sea change. Current farming practices ruin community water supplies, ruin the soil, and poison workers and neighbors. Stop those destructive practices and compost--or better yet, let chickens do the composting and use their manure for fertility.
Thanks, Jane Smiley, for your courage and word-talent. I've got one of your books on my bed right now.
Paragraph 6 starts out with: "What is the goal here?" I would change the wording to say "What is the GALL here?"
"Not to subsidize fertilizer handouts to the farmers".
The thing is - although for the wrong reasons - the approach is correct "in a way". The end goal was totally wrong, however.
The price of many fertilizers is heavily dependent upon the price of oil; anything that disrupts the flow of oil or raises its price dramatically - like having PNAC running a world power or trade policies that cause the demand for oil to soar across the globe - hammers the third-world farmer.
Likewise, anything that disrupts the flow of oil or causes its price to soar consequently raises the cost of transportation and so also hammers the end consumer of those food imports that the World Bank - in their eagerness to support the middlemen, traders, and banking systems who make their living off of the international flow of commodities and money - tries to encourage.
If preventing fertilizer subsidies had been accompanied by a thrust to encourage the use of renewable fertilizers and organic farming with the end goal of making Malawi - and every nation in the world - entirely self-sufficient in the food arena, the World Bank would have had something.
And proven that they weren't in fact merely the representatives of a parasitical scourge upon the World.
This is really important. Free market theory is a joke, dependent for its success upon an almost infinite range of trading agents when in reality there are quite limited numbers. It succeeds, moreover, in nothing but matching supply with demand. Demand, however, it counts as money ready to be spent, and it imagines that somehow government money is not acceptable as demand because it's not interested in getting the best deal. Only governments can match supply with NEED. Businessmen will HAVE to walk away.
One has to ASK why 35 million Americans find it difficult to put FOOD on the table so you don't have to look to AFRICA for hungry people.
Humans have constructed magnificiant cities---and places like VEGAS and created technology advances that send stuff into outer space and YET----
We have HUNGRY people ALL OVER THE WORLD and POVERTY is a HUGE problem.
JANE,
On you tube there is a full blown 29-part expose' on the history of corruption and the "secret" side of politics and religion that really must be viewed; called "The secret rulers of the world" by Tyrannyofsoulz. It covers everything, really; about what is wrong with our little civilization, and why a) no end is near, and b) it will just escalate from here. This is the one thing I have seen that takes the time to pull all the "pieces" together. Kind of a master class of the movie "Why we fight". Luv yer stuff....
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