From: James Rogers (jamesr@best.com)
Date: Sun Mar 26 2000 - 13:16:07 MST
On Sun, 26 Mar 2000, Zero Powers wrote:
> I believe the real problem is with food distribution, rather than
> food production. I have not done the research, but the anecdotal stories of
> silos full of grain in the midwestern US being hoarded and going rotten,
> rather than being efficienly and equitably distributed seem to support this.
Having lived near a grain dump, I can attest to the enormous quantities of
grain that are dumped every year. I have no idea what the exact quantity
is but I am pretty sure that the U.S. dumps over a million tons of grain
each year.
How would you define "efficient and equitable" distribution of the dumped
grain? Grain is a true commodity; the reason it is being dumped and left
to rot is that the markets for selling it are saturated i.e. there are no
more buyers. Being an easily renewable resource, it makes far more sense
to dump the excess than to further depress the market by selling below
cost or giving it away. In other words, meddling in the grain market will
produce a situation that is even worse than exists now.
A far better way to solve the hunger problem is to fix the broken
economies of these starving countries (and the governments that created
them) so that they can afford to buy U.S. grain. This way the buyers
would benefit in general and the producers would benefit from an expanded
market. While one could argue that a better solution would be to improve
local agricultural production, I think that in many cases competing with
the production efficiency of the U.S. agricultural industry simply to
have local production is a futile effort and not a useful application of
resources in the long run.
-James Rogers
jamesr@best.com
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