Subject: Re: Markets and food shortage Newsgroups: sci.econ princesskleigh asked: > I have an economics assignment that I'm drawing a blank on. Anyones > thoughts would be great right about now. The question is > Critically comment on the following statement: > > "One of the largest problems in the world is that people do not have > enough food. Luckily, markets are being developed to eliminate these > shortages." > Date: Sun, 17 Oct 1999 22:46:04 -0400 From: "David Lloyd-Jones" If you think that agriculture is something really ancient ("first the agricultural revolution, then the industrial revolution, now the information revolution...") then it is naural to think that it is something really crude, hence unlikely to work, hence the bottleneck in feeding ourselves. If you replace this metaphysics with a factual view of history (first tools, then division of labor, then language and trade and the information revolution, all of this before and during the neolithic; then villages, middens, herding, and crude farming; then travel, technology, and the industrial revolution; finally, the stage we are at now, genetic engineering, and the emergence of agriculture; Agriculture is younger than railroads, and modern agriculture starts about the same time as the Haber process.) then you see that agriculture is the highest technology we have, and hence agricultrual surpluses are as natural as a surplus of chewing gum under the seat in your classroom. Agriculture is knowledge, technology, and capital based. And wherever you give peasants the single thing they need, access to markets, they will go and find the knowledge, technology and capital necessary -- because they know damn well that the market is the only place they are going to get a TV set, a bike, and cash for when the Avon lady comes knocking at their hut. In this perspective it becomes clear that the only reason people should starve is not that there is a shortage of food -- and obesity is a much more common illness than malnutrition almost everywhere in the world -- the only reason for starvation is a local shortage. A failure to get the food surplus to where people actually are. In the decades from WWI to about 1947 this may have been a problem of market development, but this is less likely to be the case today. Today the problem is almost always either war or embargo. Given only peace, Southern Sudan would be Heaven on Earth: that's why people are fighting over it -- and causing the starvation. Economic study of the Bengal famine of 1947 showed that it was market failure, not food shortage, that caused the starvation, and since that time this has rarely recurred. It's quite possible that there is too much here for your teacher to take aboard. The old dogmas are pretty deeply set, particularly among teachers, for many of whom the almost wholly erroneous "The Third Wave" is avant garde thinking. Here are a few facts that might help with the correct view of history: * Trading villages are found under agricultural villages. Hunters and gatherers settled down to live together and trade with each other long before seeds or tame animals were identified. The trading village of Jericho is underneath and older than any agriculture in its neighborhood. * The hanging gardens of Babylon were inside the city -- just as Tokyo and Manila today are one third farmed land inside their city limits. (Tokyo produces among other things the eucalyptus to feed the koalas in the Ueno Zoo.) * Manhattan Island today, 1999, is a hive of agricultural activity: commercial orchid and cactus farms, basements producing crops of bean sprouts every two or three days for huge annual turnovers, marijuana farms everywhere. Columbia University has been producing corn genome on campus since the 1920's, and it's only the gross inefficient plants that get grown up the river someplace. I.e., it is only low value agriculture that gets "farmed out" to the hinterland. High value agriculture -- vegetables in ancient Babylon, the kind of thing you grow in a Petri dish today -- is now as it always has been an advanced urban occupation. * Manufacturing has been going on for far longer than even midden gardening. Flint chipping pits several hundred thousand years old have been found in Africa, while 60,000 year old necklaces -- typical trade goods -- have been found in the excavations of Aurignace in France. Since chipping flint is detail work, and hitting a large animal with a stone ax takes athleticism and daring, it is likely that trade, tools for meat, has been going on since those pits were first dug and operated as mass production factories. Good luck with your project. -dlj. > > David Lloyd-Jones wrote: > > >.....Agriculture is younger than > > > railroads, and modern agriculture starts about the same time as the Haber > > process.) then you see that agriculture is the highest technology we have, > > and hence agricultrual surpluses are as natural as a surplus of chewing gum > > under the seat in your classroom....... Jim Blair: > > Hi, > > Very interesting. Maybe I can work it into my web page ;-) > Jim, I'd be happy if you would, and it would be a very good thing for you to get some bright students working on. Start them out reading Jane Jacobs (and maybe my notes) and ask them to run with it. I think this is the sort of project that could really make a difference in things. The world's cities are never going to get to their best potential as long as people think that cities are parasites upon the countryside, and getting people to see that intellect is now -- as it has been for a million years -- the basic resource is *really* important. One of the most important things educators can do. > But I would say that "agriculture" has had a series of "revolutions": it >is both very old and very new. Quite true. I'm working toward a vocuabulary for it, but don't have it yet. The best I've got so far is 1.) midden -- the cleared clearing of ancient times, the basic Amerind format, common in Africa up until maybe forty years ago, and still found some places in Asia; 2.) the garden in the village -- Babylon, Jericho II about 6,000 BCE; Tokyo, Manila and Manhattan today; 3.) the garden outside the keep -- later Babylon, Egypt, medieval Europe, etc.; Kansas today, see below. 3A.) herding, a subcontract industry of the trading and gardening village; 4.) early modern agriculture -- the railroad, ice to get product to market, the feed lot (and salted stock, animals made thirsty before they got weighed, from which the securities market version emerged later); and 5.) modern agriculture, dated roughly from Thomas Hunt Morgan forward. The litmus is "When did most of America's corn start being grown in Manhattan?" (It's a cheat question, intended to draw attention to the difference between the high value part, creating the genome, and the pedestrian bit, soaking up the sunshine, which goes on in anti-Darwinian Kansas.) One of my favourite modern agriculture stories is this: when the guy who invented fruit salad died, (he was a professor at UC Davis, one of the five or six best ag schools in the world) his obit in the San Francisco Examiner was a full column on the front page and one and a half columns on page two. The newspaper is telling us a.) that this is the importance of the university to agriculture, and b.) this is the importance to the world, and to the world's most advanced industrial economy, California, of inventing agricultural product. >.... When people first cleared land of what grew on it > naturally and replaced that with what they wanted to grow, this was the "first" agricultural revolution (several thousand years BC). Jim, this is not good enough. The first land clearing was probably largely accidental, a side effect of the use of fire for driving animals. The first agricultural revolution you imagine above cannot happen until people have some idea of "what they wanted to grow." For this they need to be clear in their minds about seeds, or more likely the sprouting of tubers, since digging tubers with sticks and horns probably supplied heavy duty calories long before selected grasses became a useful source of carbohydrate. The identification of useful tubers for collection -- in the manner of the South African Bushmen up until about 1965 or so -- was not "several thousand years BC." The jury is still out on it, but it is at least hundreds of thousands of years ago, and may go back to pre-human times. I don't know of any good work identifying the earliest cultivation of tubers, but the fact that the Amerinds did it suggests that it was pretty old. But you don't need to clear land to do it. You can plant tuber eyes in a pile of shit, probably a pretty good idea if you know about washing (and we know that washing tubers is something Nippon macaques have invented, probably many times in many macaque settlements), or in a river bank. Incidentally note that Americans did not clear land for agriculture very much: most colonial land clearing was to burn wood for potash for export. It was fertilizer for English agriculture. American agriculture was a small time sideline which used only a fraction of the land that was cleared. So I hope you see that your paragraph has space for some work, and I have only pointed to, not supplied, the content it needs. >.... Later domesticated animals, the yoke, steel plow, Haber process, >green revolution, genetic engineering, etc. Well, uh that jumbles about six thousand years and several levels of civilization into the same list! We'll probably have some really good numbers on the time line for domesticating animals within the next five or ten years, once the various genome projects really start swinging. The first half dozen organisms' genomes have now been completely sequenced, c. cereviciae, one of the oldest and most useful domesticated ones, just a couple of weeks ago. The human genome is about 17% done, and is a real horse race between the commercial folks and the university and government folks. Once that is done, another couple of years, the technology will probably be so good that we'll start knocking off pigs, cattle, oxen, ducks at the rate of one or two a year -- and then pretty much everything inside a generation, is my guess. For the moment domestic pigs 6,000 BCE is a reasonable guess. Oxen and cattle are much more recent, I think. Cheers, -dlj.