The silent tsunami from Economists


The silent tsunami from Economists  on the food crisis.  Good short term and long term solutions:

  • Merely to distribute the same amount of food as last year, the WFP needs—and should get—an extra $700m.
  • In most places there are no absolute shortages and the task is to lower
    domestic prices without doing too much harm to farmers. That is best
    done by distributing cash, not food—by supporting (sometimes inventing)
    social-protection programmes and food-for-work schemes for the poor.
  • Then stop the distortions:
    In general, governments ought to liberalise markets, not intervene
    in them further. Food is riddled with state intervention at every turn,
    from subsidies to millers for cheap bread to bribes for farmers to
    leave land fallow. The upshot of such quotas, subsidies and controls is
    to dump all the imbalances that in another business might be smoothed
    out through small adjustments onto the one unregulated part of the food
    chain: the international market.