Food chain politics
UNITED NATIONS — Secretary General Kofi Annan got it right when he implored delegates at a Rome World Food Summit that countries should increase their efforts to eliminate hunger, as “one of the worst violations of human dignity.” Conversely Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe sullied that message when he praised his regime’s efforts to seize privately owned farmland, in effect decreasing agricultural production. Yet, the Summit’s target of “halving world hunger,” remains noble, if likely out of easy reach.
The British government decried the UN meeting as a “waste of time” as Tony Blair’s Minister of Development, Claire Short, gave the Rome confab the decidedly undiplomatic short shift saying, “I’m not sending a Minister because I don’t expect it to be an effective summit.” Few Western leaders attended.
Still the worsening Southern African famine — stemming from the dual banes of natural disaster and to self-inflicted human malfeasance — begs for a solution, and soon.
Thus, ironically Mugabe addressed the Rome conference and actually had the audacity to praise his regime’s confiscation of privately owned farms! Zimbabwe’s own independent but harassed Daily News editorialized, “Mugabe Chief Architect of Current Food Shortages.”
Opposition figures described Comrade Bob’s comments in Rome as being a “world-class hypocrite” and decried his attendance as “obscene.”
Mrs. Mary Robinson, the UN Human Rights Commissioner, said scathingly that Mugabe should acknowledge that he was “primarily responsible” for much of the hunger and privations stalking Zimbabwe.
So the classic lines were drawn between genuine and gripping need on one hand, and shopworn socialist ideology on the other. In the post war era, foreign aid to needy nations became a political mantra as a way not only expunging post-colonial guilt, but as a way to win friends and influence opinion during the cold war. All aid had and still has strings attached.
On the questions of poverty and development, “conventional wisdom for thirty years after 1945 was remorselessly hostile to market solutions,” writes the Economist. The logic was that “poor counties were poor because they were the victims of a vicious cycle of poverty, doomed to remain poor.” For a long period this was seemingly written in stone; in the post- Thatcher and Regan era, these once towering assumptions have begun to crumble.
Recently a colossal, if iconoclastic, figure of developmental economics passed away; Peter Bauer, advocated economic theories that from the 1950’s to the 1970’s were heresy. Prof. Bauer (87) was due to receive the CATO Institute’s Milton Friedman Prize for “advancement of Liberty.”
In an Economist tribute published just before his death, the Hungarian- born Bauer argued, “Opportunities for private profit, not government plans, held the key to development.” Government had the limited but crucial role of protecting property rights, enforcing contracts, treating everybody equally before the law, minimizing inflation and keeping taxes low. It was a tragedy that countries neglected this role.”
Peter Bauer who taught in England and subsequently became a British Lord, argued above all, “There would be no concept of the third world if it were not for the invention of foreign aid. Aid politicized economies directing money into the hands of government rather than towards profitable business. Aid increased the patronage and power of recipient governments which often pursued policies that stifled entrepreneurship and market forces.”
Prof. Bauer once said, “Foreign aid continues to encourage the misallocation of local capital and skill, and continues to foster government policies that impoverish rather than benefit people.”
Not long ago I was heartened to hear Hernando de Soto, a rising Latin American star of development policies, address New York’s Carnegie Council. De Soto stressed, “There is entrepreneurship in the Third World but without a formal law on their side.” He conceded, “Development aid needs the rule of law…law creates what guides economics but that is not present everywhere.”
De Soto added, that the role of private property plays a key function not only in national development but stability too.
While most governments and the UN have grudgingly accepted a wider interpretation of the free market philosophy in recent years, the reality remains that the undertow of the old political isms continues to provide a dangerous undertow to genuine development. Developing countries do deserve better, but they are better served by applying the rule of law and fostering entrepreneurship rather than pounding the same old political sounding boards.
John J. Metzler is a U.N. correspondent covering diplomatic and defense
issues. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com.
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