John Feffer: Socialist of the Week

The left are a talkative bunch and are constantly showering us with their words of wisdom. But it is rare that they give us an essay of the quality of this one at Asia Times. John Feffer, who is co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus (a think tank without walls) has bestowed upon us a leftwing brainfart of a transcendant order. A few choice quotes:

Gas prices in the United States are above US$4 a gallon; global food prices surged 39% last year; and an environmental disaster looms as carbon emissions continue to spiral upward. The global economy appears on the verge of a technical knockout, a triple whammy from energy, agriculture and climate-change trends. Right now you may be grumbling about the extra bucks you're shelling out at the pump and the grocery store; but, unless policymakers begin to address all three of these trends as one major crisis, it could get a whole lot worse.

Hmmmm..... where to begin? He doesn't give his source for the 39% increase in global food prices. I do know that in the USA they only increased by 4.9% in 2007. And given the fact that the US dollar depreciated against many foreign currencies during that year, it is unlikely that food prices increased by even 4.9% in other countries.

And of course, 'climate change' caused by carbon emissions is accepted by John as an axiomatic truth. He's not going to let the facts get in his way.

Just ask the North Koreans. In the 1990s, North Korea was the world's canary. The famine that killed as much as 10% of the North Korean population in those years was, it turns out, a harbinger of the crisis that now grips the globe - though few saw it that way at the time.

That small Northeast Asian land, one of the last putatively communist countries on the planet, faced the same three converging factors as we do now - escalating energy prices, a reduction in food supplies and impending environmental catastrophe. At the time, of course, all the knowing analysts and pundits dismissed what was happening in that country as the inevitable breakdown of an archaic economic system presided over by a crackpot dictator.

They were wrong. The collapse of North Korean agriculture in the 1990s was not the result of backwardness. In fact, North Korea boasted one of the most mechanized agricultures in Asia. Despite claims of self-sufficiency, the North Koreans were actually heavily dependent on cheap fuel imports. (Does that already ring a bell?) In their case, the heavily subsidized energy came from Russia and China, and it helped keep North Korea's battalion of tractors operating. It also meant that North Korea was able to go through fertilizer, a petroleum product, at one of the world's highest rates. When the Soviets and Chinese stopped subsidizing those energy imports in the late 1980s and international energy rates became the norm for them, too, the North Koreans had a rude awakening.

North Korea is only 'putatively communist', eh John? What would Kim Jong Il have to do to become really communist? And all that any country needs is mechanization and cheap fuel in order to have bountiful harvests? Then why have so many other communist countries had famines, including the Soviet Union in the 1930s and China in the late 1950s and early 1960s? Ever hear of the tragedy of the commons, John?

Lower food prices are generally a boon for consumers. But they are devastating for the subsistence farmers who make up the vast majority of the world's poor.

Low food prices do not affect subsistence farmers. They are, by definition, not selling any of their harvest.

However, over the past three years, according to the World Bank, food prices have increased 83%. That may be only an annoyance for wealthy shoppers, but for the poor, who often devote more than 50% of their incomes to feeding their families, such staggering rises can be the difference between life and death.

Since food prices only increased by a total of 9.7% in the USA for 2005 through 2007, it was even less of an annoyance than he thinks.

And now Sir John gets to the meat of the global warming problem:

Global warming, too, has had an impact. Drought in Australia and the eastern United States, severe flooding in China and Bangladesh, rising ocean levels and fresh water shortages throughout the world are all thought to be related to climate change, though climate scientists cannot prove that any given weather anomaly is caused by global warming.

Not only that, they can't prove that the earth is warming at all.

Climate scientists can be fuzzy this way about causality in the short term. Paradoxically, however, they often see the future more clearly. For instance, the top global food policy think-tank, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), predicts that global warming will be responsible for a 16% decrease in agricultural gross domestic product globally by 2020. The Center for Global Development argues that developing countries, in particular, will be hit hard by climate change: By 2080, India, its report argues, will see a staggering 30-40% drop in agricultural production and Senegal will plummet 50%.

You gotta love it! Climate scientists can't predict short-term happenings but they are confident they can predict what will happen 12 years from now and 72 years from now! It's too bad that the geniuses at the Center for Global Development won't be around in 2080 to accept their rewards for their clear visions of the future in India and Senegal.

And now John gets in his obligatory criticism of Bush's invation of Iraq:

Oil prices have been steadily increasing since 2004 as a result of rising demand. They have been helped along greatly by growing chaos in the Middle East, fed by the Bush administration's foolhardy invasion of Iraq.

Aren't you going to say something about his tax policy too? Didn't he steal the election from Al Gore in Florida? It's very easy to predict what the left will say. Much easier than predicting the weather.

Now a demonstration of John's mathematical prowess:

Like the North Koreans, we, too, have been trying to squeeze more food out of a limited amount of land: arable land per capita is declining at a steady rate.

It takes a genius like John to figure out that the quantity of farmable land on earth is fixed whereas the population is increasing. Thus, arable land per capita is declining. How do lefties get so brilliant!

The director general of the UN's Food and Agricultural Organization, Jacques Diouf, has called for a minimum of $30 billion a year for a global agricultural restructuring. It's not at all clear who will pony up such sums,

I don't know who is going to pony up the $30 billion either. But I am sure that many people who work at the UN are licking their chops over the prospect of getting their hands on some of it. Remember the Iraq oil-for-food scam?

Of course, free trade is also to blame:

as a result of the North American Free Trade Agreement, Mexico lost 1.3 million agricultural jobs, forcing many desperate small farmers to cross into the United States as migrant workers.

Isn't that awful, John? The Mexican consumers were forced to pay less for their food as a result of NAFTA? Just a couple of paragraphs previously, you were lamenting high food prices (and exaggerating the amount of the increases). Now you are whining about low food prices in Mexico. So what do you want: High food prices or low?

The quest for perfect markets usually conceals a global shell game in which wealth is redistributed from the many to the few. To even the playing field that markets constantly tilt in favor of the powerful, and to direct funds toward environmental sustainability, governments need to intervene in the economy.

After all, private enterprise is not going to invest in the large-scale improvement of rural infrastructure - the capital costs are high and profit margins far too low. More controversially, developing countries may need to maintain, or even reestablish, tariffs and subsidies to protect local producers. Since it is both sold and consumed, food should be considered a strategic resource, a matter of national security. It should be left out of trade negotiations in the same way that the "national security exception" allows governments to subsidize and protect their military industries as they please.

Ah yes, government control of agriculture will solve all our problems, won't it John? Just like it did in the Soviet Union, China, and North Korea. We can't let those poor people in developing countries have any freedom of enterprise, can we?