Missed this first time around, but courtesy of the magic of interconnectivity — Thanks Sam — I am able to reflect on some reflections.
If you’re eager to improve the food (and other) security of smallholder farmers, or the nutritional status of young people you might, once, have looked to the US to lead the way, at least as far as smallholder farmers and young people in other countries, poor countries, are concerned. At home? No such luck.
As Alex Tabarrok said in his post Not from the Onion, over at Marginal Revolution, “The headline says it all”.
Tabarrok quotes extensively from the Washington Post article that furnished the fine headline above. I can do no better than to quote him.
[A]nyone who argues against making school meals healthier because it’s too expensive at the same time as they vote for keeping billions of dollars in farm subsidies is not concerned about expenses. What unites the bill is not ideology but protection of agribusiness.
Say it isn’t so!
Not a peep out of the G20 meeting, yet; although much has been said about controlling prices, the only mentions of subsidies I’ve found are in the context of biofuels which, according to the US, “are job creators, not hunger villain” (sic). (I don’t suppose they could be both?) Far keener intellects than mine have considered the influence of rich-world agricultural subsidies on poor-world food insecurity, and the overall message is that they malevolent.
It’s just a shame, I suppose, that what happens to smallholder farmers and poorly nourished young people at home more or less mirrors what happens to them in other countries, poorer countries.
