http://liberationraj.org Life, liberty and pursuits Sat, 08 Oct 2011 14:48:23 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.5 http://liberationraj.org/2008/04/the-silent-tsunami-from-economists/ http://liberationraj.org/2008/04/the-silent-tsunami-from-economists/#comments Thu, 24 Apr 2008 11:20:00 +0000 india http://liberationraj.org/?p=20
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.

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