Positive or negative: you decide

Jacob takes me to task for being too negative. He says:

Governments play an important role (positive or negative) in making the sort of solutions you propose viable in the long term. That’s why heaping coals of fire on the heads of government leaders is a better strategy than simply writing them off.

Most of the rest of the world has been heaping coals of fire on the heads of government leaders, who last week were gathered in Rome to discuss high food prices, climate change and bioenergy. And what did the assembled government leaders do to rid themselves of the flames? More or less nothing. ((The Economist is, for once, more optimistic than I am.))

It was as if they were blissfully unaware that their heads were on fire.

Pious sentiments were “reaffirmed,” as if that will make some difference. Money was forthcoming for emergency. humanitarian aid, and that’s a good thing, although even in the realm of food aid I suspect that there are more sustainable solutions that could be tried. Everyone talked about the need for more research, but mostly of the same old kind, and without offering a single additional red cent to pay for it.

You may be aware that the head of the US delegation, Secretary of Agriculture Ed Schafer, used his statement to tell the assembly how he’d had a nice chat with Norman Borlaug about how to solve the food crisis. But he didn’t mention that the US has cut its support for research by CGIAR centres, the very centres that Borlaug’s work helped to get going, nor that Borlaug himself has asked several times for this decision to be reconsidered. The CGIAR may or may not not be the most effective route to great agricultural R&D for developing countries, but it isn’t as if the US is putting its money anywhere else that will benefit poor people in poor countries. The US is doing research, of course. And almost every intervention by the US delegate on that topic stressed the need for advanced biotechnology to provide the very poorest people with food security.

Jacob rightly points out that “governments play an important role (positive or negative) in making the sort of solutions you propose viable in the long term”. And my point is simply that I’ve seen very little evidence of a positive role, especially not lately. The reason is that the people heaping coals of fire on government heads are not the poor of poor countries, but the rich of their own countries.

What policy changes would be most effective in boosting food security in developing countries? Dismantling trade barriers of all kinds; subsidies, import tariffs, export taxes. And that’s not just my opinion, it’s the carefully considered recommendation of people who’ve spent a lot of time studying these things, for example the International Food Policy Research Institute and the Royal Institute of International Affairs in the UK, to mention just a couple.

And what were the hot-headed government leaders, including 23 heads of state, doing at the FAO meeting last week? Everything they possibly could to keep those trade barriers in place.

Indeed, governments large and small, rich and poor, could play a very important positive role in tackling hunger and poverty, but on past evidence they simply don’t know how to. The very least they could do would be to get out of the way.