Food Not Orthodoxy

[prole]

IHT 12/1/07

This year, a nation that has perennially extended a begging bowl to the world is instead feeding its hungry neighbors. It is selling more corn to the World Food Program of the United Nations than any other country in southern Africa and is exporting hundreds of thousands of tons of corn to Zimbabwe.

...Over the past 20 years, the World Bank and some rich nations Malawi depends on for aid have periodically pressed this small, landlocked country to adhere to free market policies and cut back or eliminate fertilizer subsidies, even as the United States and Europe extensively subsidized their own farmers. But after the 2005 harvest, the worst in a decade, Bingu wa Mutharika, Malawi's newly elected president, decided to follow what the West practiced, not what it preached.

[fenderfour]

How will we continue to subsidize our corn growers if we allow the hungry nations to grow their own?

[JayB]

"Food not Orthodoxy" would probably be a serviceable distillation of the sentiments that prevailed in the Ukraine during the 1930s, under the Great Leap Forward, in present-day North Korea, etc.