The End of The End of Poverty?

I saw this trailer four or five months ago and honestly didn't even make it through the first of its three minutes - but that had more to do with the fact that I find Martin Sheen somewhat unbearable.  However, I get the impression that Tyler Cowen doesn't think I'm missing very much by skipping either the trailer or the film, which he summarizes as a "screed of mistruths and error."  Is it just me or is that the most straight forward opinion that Cowen has ever expressed.  The film's website is here if you're interested in finding a viewing at which to form your own opinion.

Obama and Global Poverty

The Judeo-Christian tradition compels us to prioritize the needs of the poorest and most vulnerable, whether in our own country or internationally. Not only is this the right thing to do, it is the best interests of our nation that we reach out to the rest of the world at this time. President Obama's administration represents a new opportunity to restore our moral standing in the world. Recognizing and responding to the increased hardship in developing countries caused by an economic crisis not of their making will be the first test of the administration's commitment to addressing global poverty.

Ruth Messinger at the Huffington Post.

Limiting Factors

There is an interesting piece in the NYT that does a good job of explaining why I'm reluctant to endorse a call for the next agricultural revolution to once again be dependent upon chemical fertilizer usage.  To do so is to paint ourselves into the proverbial corner:

Then the widespread use of inexpensive chemical fertilizer, coupled with market reforms, helped power an agricultural explosion here that had already occurred in other parts of the world. Yields of rice and corn rose, and diets grew richer.

Now those gains are threatened in many countries by spot shortages and soaring prices for fertilizer, the most essential ingredient of modern agriculture.

Some kinds of fertilizer have nearly tripled in price in the last year, keeping farmers from buying all they need. That is one of many factors contributing to a rise in food prices that, according to the United Nations’ World Food Program, threatens to push tens of millions of poor people into malnutrition.

The article glosses over a few important details but it does a good job of explaining how modern, conventional farming is built upon the clay feet of chemical petroleum based nitrogen.  Limiting factors are inherent in agriculture and the ability to manipulate those factors by stepping outside of natural cycles and introducing synthetic options has always been a short term gain, even if it is not recognized as such.  So, we need solutions more creative than calls to redouble our dependence upon already crumbling structures.  The UN has already recognized this in their state of global agriculture report released earlier this month:

Business as usual is no longer an option,” the report stresses. The first conclusion: while agricultural science and technology has made it possible to greatly increase productivity in the last 50 years, the sharing of benefits has been far from equitable. Furthermore, progress has been achieved in many cases at a high social and environmental cost. The report’s authors therefore recommend that agricultural science place greater emphasis on safeguarding natural resources and on “agroecological” practices. These include using natural fertilizers and traditional seeds, intensifying natural processes and reducing the distance between agricultural production and the consumer

That sounds like good, progressive thinking.  Unfortunately, it looks like we need more creative thinkers on the issue than we currently have.  The NYT piece ends with this depressing quote from Norman Borlaug:

"This is a basic problem, to feed 6.6 billion people,” said Norman Borlaug, an American scientist who was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his role in spreading intensive agricultural practices to poor countries. “Without chemical fertilizer, forget it. The game is over.”

Depressing because Borlaug, the man who may have saved more lives than anyone in history, is unable now, in the face of a starkly different situation than the one he faced earlier in the century, to think beyond the old models of development.  We need some new Borlaugs.

Same story . . .

This nice little rant from the Philadelphia Enquirer sums up nicely my reluctance to endorse Sachs's call for another green revolution fueled by conventional fertilizers and high-yield GMO's, here is a bit:

The food shortages, suddenly front-page news, are not new. Hundreds of millions were starving and malnourished last year; the only change is that as the crisis has grown, it has become more difficult to "manage" the hunger that a failed food system accepts rather than feeds.

The current global food system, designed by U.S.-based agribusiness conglomerates like Cargill, Monsanto and ADM and forced into place by the U.S. government and its allies at the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization, has planted the seeds of disaster by pressuring farmers here and abroad to produce cash crops for export and alternative fuels rather than grow healthy food for local consumption and regional stability.

Read the whole thing.

Sachs on the Food Crisis

I'm not a huge fan of Sachs.  He's a good writer, a good summarizer of information, and a good front man but his policy solutions tend to be too Western-centric and thus too heavily dependent upon throwing money at problems for my tastes which run more towards sustainable solutions.  However, like I said, he's a good compiler and communicator of data and thus I was remiss in not pointing out his piece in Time - here is his summary on the causes of the global food crisis:

The crisis has its roots in four interlinked trends. The first is the chronically low productivity of farmers in the poorest countries, caused by their inability to pay for seeds, fertilizers and irrigation. The second is the misguided policy in the U.S. and Europe of subsidizing the diversion of food crops to produce biofuels like corn-based ethanol. The third is climate change; take the recent droughts in Australia and Europe, which cut the global production of grain in 2005 and '06. The fourth is the growing global demand for food and feed grains brought on by swelling populations and incomes. In short, rising demand has hit a limited supply, with the poor taking the hardest blow.

The last three trends I don't have much of a problem with, the first I'll quibble with in a moment and while the specter of rising oil prices is underlying several of them-fertilizers, biofuels, tranportation-I'm curious as to why he didn't bring it front and center. 

His solutions to countering these trends?  First, spend a lot of money on fertilizer and high-yield seeds thus, in effect, hopefully spurring another green revolution.  I worry about this solution, especially in the case of fertilizers, as dependence upon them and the methods of farming that are incumbent with their use are heavily entrenched in the corporate led global food system.  High-yield seeds, code words for GMO's, are a matter of no small debate but unfortunately the debate is often phrased in paternalistic tones when directed at developing countries who refuse to open their markets, or fields, to their use.  Second, Sachs jumps on the biofuel bashing wagon and says America and the EU should abandon all subsidies for the fuel crops.  Third, and most intriguing to me is basically a call to develop ways to "weather proof the world's crops" by developing sustainable methods of accommodating and adjusting to changes in the global climate.

These aren't bad solutions but neither are they quick solutions and in the face of our 100 million global neighbors now facing the threat of starvation its hard not to ask how we didn't see this coming.