Look at Vietnam: During the war, farmers whop were poor and desperate to feed their families joined the Viet Cong out of desperation. Once farmers received secured land rights, it cut Viet Cong recruitment by 80% and increased rice production by 30%. Today, Vietnam is the second largest rice producer in the world.

Investing in secure land rights lays the foundation for other targeted initiatives in poverty alleviation to work more successfully. (clean water, microcredit, etc.)

See organizations like the Rural Development Institute (www.rdiland.org) and Agros International (www.agros.org) for more on this. RDI has just been highlighted by the Clinton Global Initiative for their work on land rights and its contributions to global security and poverty alleviation.

the rich land owner and the Gap stores
can get away with paying him pennies
because of the threat of starvation.

better to eat a little than to complain and get fired.

of course if the land was given to the people,
they could grow food instead of cotton
(and dont forget, cotton destroys the soil).

but then people wouldnt be so exploited.
and the Gap stock price may fall!

Just a question. Where markets (that is, free choice) have been reigned in, has this approach ever helped people get food? And, on the flip side, where markets have been free to work, how many people have gone hungry? They’re selling us cotton so they can buy food. Stop despising work. Productive effort is what makes food, not government edict. These things do not simply exist. It takes people’s work to make them.

Let people deal with each other in terms of reason, instead of under the threat of force (the central problem in Nigeria, Ethiopia, Somalia, Zimbabwe, and so on), and watch how hunger problems take care of themselves. Me, I’m dirt poor by American standards, living in a 200 square foot apartment, but freedom to keep what I produce and trade it means I don’t go hungry. Indeed, I even have internet access and bedsheets! That’s without accepting or applying for welfare (I reject the notion on principle). You should understand the real causes of hunger, and that has everything to do with governments and rebels and other power-seeking men in those countries, and little to do with markets.

let africa feed its own before they sell us
coffee and cotton picked by hungry kids.

http://www.foodnotbombs.net/nigeria.html

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1725975,00.html

I hope you read these comments. Special interest groups, particularly those concerning environmentalism and global warming, have pushed very hard to get ethanol subsidies and ethanol requirements. These efforts have succeeded in Congress and with the executive branch (primarily because of the unbalanced influence of Iowa in Presidential primaries). As a result, farmers are replacing regular crops with ethanol corn. That’s what’s making them money, so we ALL are paying for it. Anybody with a solid understanding of economics saw this coming, yet Congress ignored this.

Yours is also a special interest group, pushing for government solutions to problems created by government solutions. There are two things that the world needs now. The first is for governments to GET OUT of markets, to stop tariffs and subsidies and meddling like they have. We are already reaping the revenge of unintended consequences, but they are natural consequences of creating artificial and forced demand for a product of dubious value (indeed, ethanol is worse for greenhouse gases, taken in totality, than leaving it alone). The second is not to push for government aid to impoverished nations, but to push for impoverished nations to respect and protect individual rights of their citizens, especially property rights. Europe was once as poor as Africa, anciently. The change in Europe came with “letting the nerds keep their lunch money.” Eastern Europe has been thriving and skyrocketing since their governments began establishing laws that protected individuals rights to their property, since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Common Terry is right to ask “why.” Here’s your answer. Here is also your solution.

we eat food and drink tea grown in nations with starvation.

the USA sells weapons to the leaders of nations with starvation.

ONE is not pointing out the whys of hunger. why not?