An Easy Way to Alleviate Poverty and Hunger Easily and Cheaply
Foreign aid doesn’t seem to work. Plans to subsidize agriculture in developing countries to give farmers and others enough to live off of won’t work. So what should the developed world due to help the poor in the developing world? There’s one cheap, easy thing that industrialized nations could do immediately which would not only help alleviate hunger and poverty, but also benefit the developed nations: end all agricultural subsidies in those nations.
The ongoing subsidies that nations such as the United States, France, Great Britain and others provide to their farms are among the most backward of public policy decisions anywhere in the world. Their main effect is to raise the cost of food within those countries while simultaneously making it difficult, if not impossible, for farmers in developing countries to compete. Such subsidies create millions of net losers to pad the profits of a very small, but politically influential, group of growers.
UN Food and Agricultural Organization director Jacques Diouf outlined the magnitude of the subsidy problem in a recent meeting at the World Agricultural Forum in the United States:
In 1999 alone, the total subsidies to agriculture by OECD countries was estimated at US $361.5 billion, or 1.4% of their total GDP. This support is in accord with the WTO agreements, but there is little doubt that it gives the industrialized countries a competitive edge which poorer countries cannot match. It is also interesting to compare this support with the total flow of official development assistance to agriculture, which reached US $7.4 billion in 1998.
Many industrialized countries talk incessantly about how developing countries need to eliminate their own subsidies and bring more transparency to their economies, but then they hypocritically turn around and offer massive subsidies which distort agricultural markets both within their own borders and internationally. Such subsidies should be eliminated as soon as possible — it’s the best solution both from a moral and economic point of view.
Source:
Widespread hunger a stain on world’s conscience; agricultural subsidies in industrialized countries disadvantage poor nations. UN Food and Agricultural Organization, Press Release, May 20, 2001.
The An Easy Way to Alleviate Poverty and Hunger Easily and Cheaply by Brian Carnell, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
No related posts.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
Tags: Uncategorized