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Panic buying and food riots - the global food crisis revisited : Comments
By Joseph Dancy, published 1/10/2009How did agricultural production increase so abruptly in the past and how can we continue increase productivity in the future?
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The question in practice is always the economic one, however called, of how best to satisfy human wants involving scarce resources including time, labour, water and capital.
There is a real issue of scarcity that cannot be conjured away by appeal to government (otherwise why not put all food production under central planning?).
The fundamental question is how best to rationalise the use of scarce resources; by voluntary means through the market, or coerced means through the state. But it is not clear that Shiva is, in the final analysis, vindicating the political means.
The whole purpose of the Green Revolution was to feed people, which it did. Those who allege over-population seem to be saying: “Just enough of me, far too much of you.”
As to disrupting social relations of production, so what? So did the invention of the wheel; the car put wagon-wheel makers out of work; and so on. The desideratum is the satisfaction of human wants, not the preservation of social relations of production per se.
If the disruption of traditional technologies has the result that more people go hungry, *that* is a valid argument against such disruption. The issue remains the economic one of how best to use scarce resources, not the preservation of traditional technologies per se.
The voluntarism and group management that Shiva mentions stand on their own merits. They are not an argument in favour of political decision-making, since their success is all the argument they need. To the extent that political decision-making is required to make them work, it is because of the underlying lack of private property rights in water.
The World Bank is a political organisation, created by governments for redistributionist reasons: foreign aid handouts, by forcing taxpayers to fund junkets for vested interests. The planned chaos resulting from its interventions that Shiva notes is the characteristic of all central planning. Shiva’s vague understanding of economics miscalls this interventionism ‘privatisation’, which ideology the bank preaches, but rejects and contradicts in its very nature. It is an argument against political interventions, not in favour of them.