{"id":3761,"date":"2007-10-24T03:21:10","date_gmt":"2007-10-24T10:40:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/archives\/2007\/10\/24\/starvation-in-malawi-another-glorious-victory-for-fundamentalist-market-worship\/"},"modified":"2007-10-24T03:21:10","modified_gmt":"2007-10-24T10:40:58","slug":"starvation-in-malawi-another-glorious-victory-for-fundamentalist-market-worship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=3761","title":{"rendered":"Starvation in Malawi: Another Glorious Victory For Fundamentalist Market Worship"},"content":{"rendered":"

From Brad Plumer<\/a>:<\/p>\n

For the past 20 years, the World Bank and assorted Western governments have been telling Malawi<\/a> how to conduct its affairs. Stop subsidizing crop prices. Curtail spending. Float your currency. And so on. More recently, in 2000, donors demanded that Malawi dismantle a fledgling program that subsidized fertilizer for poor farmers–who often can’t afford it on their own–on the grounds that the subsidies would make it impossible for a “solid agricultural market to develop.”<\/p>\n

Well, it’s hard to flout the donors, and Malawi did as told. What happened next? Some 1,500 Malawians starved to death in 2002, and five million more needed emergency rations in 2005. So, last year, the government finally told its “advisors” to shove off and put the subsidies back in place. Two years of record surpluses followed, and Malawi is now shipping excess maize to Zimbabwe. As Toronto’s Globe and Mail<\/i> tells it<\/a>, the subsidies have worked wonders; they’re far cheaper than importing food aid; and even the EU has reversed its stance and pledge to underwrite the fertilizer coupons.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And from The New York Times<\/em>:<\/p>\n

Bank policies in the 1980s and 1990s that pushed African governments to cut or eliminate fertilizer subsidies, decontrol prices and privatize may have improved fiscal discipline but did not accomplish much for food production, the evaluation said.<\/p>\n

It had been expected that higher prices for crops would give farmers an incentive to grow more, while competition among private traders reduced the costs of seeds and fertilizer. But those market forces often failed to work as hoped.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe whole thing was based on the idea that if you take away the government for the poorest of the poor that somehow these markets will solve the problems,\u201d Professor Sachs said. \u201cBut markets can\u2019t step in and won\u2019t step in when people have nothing. And if you take away help, you leave them to die.\u201d<\/p>\n

Professor Easterly said the bank\u2019s managers had made elementary mistakes. \u201cIt was a simplistic, Economics 101 lesson, that if you raise prices, farmers produce more, which makes sense if farmers have roads, access to credit, good access to fertilizer markets,\u201d he said. \u201cBut most of the time, farmers were lacking those.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From Brad Plumer: For the past 20 years, the World Bank and assorted Western governments have been telling Malawi how to conduct its affairs. Stop subsidizing crop prices. Curtail spending. Float your currency. And so on. More recently, in 2000, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3761","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics-and-the-like","category-international-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3761","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3761"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3761\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3761"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3761"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3761"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}