What's your homepage?

Eh, just a bit. Typing notes out all day for this thing I'm working on.

And now typing up a long response seems, well, I'm just gonna take it chill for a lil while.

 

psh, no chilling allowed, i demand a response immediately! :tongue:

 

noclue.

 

google


i know, im boring.

 

Okay, why would I be against giving away free food? It's a matter of economics. I'm going to give you my very simplistic understanding of this complex issue.

And I know you're probably thinking the emotional response of, how can markets be a consideration when people are hungry. People are hungry, give them food.

But that very understandable emotional response, will prevent us from looking at the actual root causes of poverty.

Before I get started, i would like to make it clear that there are times when food aid is very very important. In Myanmar there are people who have no access to food right now because of the devastating Storm. They need food now. In Darfur they need food now.

Let me outline the four major causes of hunger in the world. The first major cause of poverty is hunger. This is where there is enough food but not enough money to purchase it.

The Second is infrastructure. By which I mean roads to transport food, the equipment to harvest it quickly, refrigeration for food, and adequate markets to distribute it.

The third major cause of hunger is warfare. Armies will strip all the food and shut down markets, and farmers will be drafted.

The fourth major cause is drought. Drought will rip through and the crops will die. They won't have markets to import the food from further away, or it will be prohibitively expensive.

Now, sites like TheHungerSite engage in something that's called food dumping.

First I would like to point out that all Sub Saharan African nations are primarily agrarian nations. Their economies are very largely built on growing and selling food to each other and neighbor countries.

Unfortunately, large agriculture businesses in the US, Canada, Europe, Russia, Japan and elsewhere have a policy called export subsidies. This means that they sell for instance, a pound of corn that took them $6 to produce for $2. The price is artificially pushed down so they can control the market.

This isn't a textbook example. This is happening. It's happening widely. And it's the number one reason Agrarian nations cannot lift themselves out of poverty.

Their farmers are not able to sell their crops. This means that a family that grows corn in Gabon will not be able to sell their Corn crop, because what takes them $12 to produce (already more expensive than the foreign crop) is artifically deflated on the market.

So you have literally hundreds of millions of farmers in Africa who can't sell their crops. Hundreds of millions.

What is food dumping? Food dumping is the irresponsible flooding of agrarian markets with food. That means it artificially pushes down the prices of crops so low that they cannot be sold by the farmers.

This means that through giving irresponsible food aid (which thehungersite is) you are flooding a market and preventing farmers from being able to work.

This means that farmers turn to cash crops such as Tobacco, Opium, Khat, an Cotton.

Now, not only is there a major problem with this, because cash cropping causes large scale environmental problems.

You have millions of families farms who can't sell their corn. Their corn rots in the field. They have no income. This practice is literally destroying economies.

They cannot trade their corn for other types of food. They are forced to only eat rotten corn. When the next time to buy seeds comes around, they cannot buy nearly as many seeds because they didn't have the income of the last harvest.

They can't purchase other types of food. Malnutrition is much more common then hunger.

At some points, like when fuel prices rise, all the aid drys up completely. This means you have created a market dependent on aid and overly cheap food, put their farmers out of business, and now can no longer continue to give them aid.

So we have starved a nation by pushing the prices down to an extreme by flooding markets.

This is a very common phenomenon, and as much as you want to give food to starving people, if aid isn't given responcibly, it will do more harm then good.

http://www.globalissues.org/TradeRelated/Poverty/FoodDumping.asp

http://www.wto.org/english/forums_e/ngo_e/posp47_dumping_food_aid_e.pdf

 

google.ca

but i thought about making it barbie.com because i have a google search toolbar anyway

 

Wow, I sure type a lot.

Spencer (I have big important things to say) Pettijohn.

 

Nobody read any of that. I hope it was good for you at least.

 

i read it. i swear.

 

The summarize it in less than 5 sentences for us

 

don't dump subsidized cheap food on agrarian nations, it leaves them unable to sell their own crops, thus destroying their economy and leading to worsening hunger and poverty.

 

www.google.com/ig

 

or, food spamming is bad


but if i click on the other sites it shoudl be fine, right lode? teh breast cancer n rainforest n literacy type ones

 

What is that crap doing on a liberal hippie website?

 

www.barebackexchange.com

 

Is it just me or does that URL sound NWS?

 

i read it

its a very complex problem.

in some cases, this food dumping is actually helpful to some villages, in that it allows them use their money to purchase products that will end up helping them to sustain their future produce. however, that is far from the norm...but it does happen.

theres a lot of political conflict going on - between US, EU, and the countries in Africa. this includes the scientific debates on using GMO foods. some nations will only take milled grains. exports from the African countries may be effected from the introduction of GM foods. So this debate rolls on between countries, as biotechnologyy continues to advance, which also brings need for reform all on its own to the current rules and practices of food aid. The US only giving in-kind donations (food dumping) vs many other countires giving cash is a heated debate for reform.

in-country political conflict - which keeps them an agrarian nation, when other markets have large opportunites to open up and expand which will take pressure off and lead to a more stabalized economy. they need a stable economy, not an economy that can be ruined by droughts and floods. the health of the populace is of concern - the labor pool is drastically effected by AIDS/HIV, people injured from war, people who are malnutritioned, etc...when labor pool is low, its hard to advance the society.

this just scratches the surface on how complex this is, and I only presented a limited set of problems, when many more exist but which not needed to see just how complex this is.

 

..

 

.. indeed, my friend, .. indeed.