Food Trade and Ethics

What do you do with a complicated mess?

Kevin sends in an article on trade in food in Africa:

In the jargon of the industry, Africa has been an “origination” business since colonial times, providing raw materials for overseas consumers: gold from South Africa, coffee from Ethiopia, crude oil from Nigeria, cocoa from Ivory Coast and copper from Zambia. This business model is still crucial to the big trading houses and exporting Africa’s commodities has funnelled millions of dollars into the hands of foreign tycoons.

While Africa has heretofore been a source, now it is a market.  An amazing thing, Africa importing food.

The complicated mess is the series of competing laws that so distort the markets in Africa.  Terrible things happen after such laws are enacted:

In the first year of the Famine, deaths from starvation were kept down due to the imports of Indian corn and survival of about half the original potato crop. Poor Irish survived the first year by selling off their livestock and pawning their meager possessions whenever necessary to buy food. Some borrowed money at high interest from petty money-lenders, known as gombeen men. They also fell behind on their rents.

Corns laws made Irish land valuable: English overlords could make good money having Irish work the land as tenants (since Catholics could not own land) and sell the produce in England at artificially high prices.  The Irish lived off of potatoes, and when that crop failed, well the rest is history.

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/sadlier/irish/starvati.htm

And as these things go, more died of the disease that followed when immune systems were compromised than from starvation.

We have recently seen images of such starvation in Africa.  A critical part of trade is making sure we are not creating problems with our policies.  Because the pattern is always the same, we already know how we get from corn laws to starving family in a country with plenty of food.  Our job is to not do that.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Starving-woman-africa-biafra-nigeria-conflict-famine.jpg

Feel free to forward this by email to three of your friends.

Bookmark this post --- Email this post