Politics and Dharma

Despite a terrific overabundance of food in the world, not only do we still have famine and malnutrition, the price of food has actually increased dramatically. The monetization of American food aid may not have been a primary cause of the problem, but it has been a contributing factor.

The fuel price increases of the last few years have been visible on the grocery store shelves, so we need no professores to indicate the connection. The princely fuel prices have encouraged wacky notion of ‘ethanol’ to come around again, which does little now as it did in the ’70s to resolve ecological or economic problems while wasting more fuel and driving up corn and petroleum prices in the process. It does, however, offer the opportunity to profit on the idealistic concerns of others, as discovered in Europe.

The perspective of those who come up with these schemes is not universally evil — I would even venture to guess that at the core of many of these travesties is the crushed fossil of a good idea. Yet one can hardly make a movement at the national or global level that doesn’t profit one and impoverish another. The mere effort of manifesting a “good idea” at the national level inevitably results in a “reaction” in the form of others attempting to either co-opt or “game” any changes made. The result is that even acts of charity made at the national level inevitably antagonize those receiving the ostensible benefit.

Food aid schemes have been spectacularly good examples of this sort of mis-philanthropy. Originally, a series of horrific famines in Africa, widely reported in the West, inspired a massive outpouring of food aid. This glut of food shipped to the remote, far corners of Africa served to implode local food markets and distribution systems, but due to distribution snafus, only a small percentage of the early food aid provided was ever actually eaten by starving Africans. Improvements were made to the system over the years, but it’s doubtful that the underlying issues have really ever been addressed, since malnutrition and famine continue to be an issue in many places in Africa and around the globe.

However, local food markets are no longer imploded by food aid: instead, US-subsidized grain shipments are shipped to local markets in Africa at prices designed to undercut every other producer in the area, simultaneously depressing commodity prices and the economic production of the area, without the actual destruction of the local economy. Since the US buys American grain and gives it to charity groups to sell at enormous discounts, this policy is called the ‘monetization of aid’. Only recently the group CARE has announced that it would no longer participate.

The reality for most people in the West is that hunger is an easily avoided discomfort. The ideal that no person should be undernourished is certainly admirable, but difficult to manifest. In the event that one can ascertain a means to appropriately measure and distribute the correct caloric distribution in a culturally sensitive way (without making any social or quality judgments, naturally!), actually getting the food to all the mouths before the food rots is unlikely, and ensuring that those who receive the food actually eat it (and not sell it) is impossible.

We resolve “hunger” by buying prepared food at the corner store and tossing the packaging away at the curb. We imagine it must be as easy to “fix” hunger in far-away places, since we are such pros at it here. Why can’t we just send a few giant crates of cheeseburgers to Ethiopia or India? We can even pack a giant microwave on the plane and they can plug it in at the hotel when they get there. Easy.

These answers — oh, so sensible within our own reality — are nonsense to an African perspective. The “ultrareality” is that we cannot arbitrarily add wealth to a place — in the form of food or fuel, arms or cash — without significantly impacting the political and economic situation of that place. The act of bringing in grains affects the commodity market. Bringing in guns shifts the balance of power. Whatever distribution system is used to deliver this new wealth gains in political power, and will utilize this power to ensure that distribution favors some and leaves others out.

This is easily predictable, not only from our understanding of human nature, but also from the recognition that the worst areas of famine and malnutrition are the places where poor governance, or war, has prevented the maintenance of agricultural production and transportation systems. By providing new wealth to incompetent or adversarial governments in the form of ‘aid’, we repeatedly rewarded the worst excesses of failure and delayed the moment of crisis which finally required the people in those areas to either rebuild or move away.

The big picture is that food aid is just one of a dozen “progressive” issues that has been misdirected along the way such that the underlying problems remain unsolved, but new markets and new profit sources are somehow created anyway. It is sometimes difficult to tell if this is because progressive ideas are simply too irrational to be implemented, or if rather that it is too easy to emotionally manipulate progressive populist voters into economically disadvantageous positions.

No foolin’.