Of peasants & piss poor economics
I am typing this in the business class cabin of a 747 en route from London to San Francisco. I am making this journey not because I need to rack up the airmiles or indeed, that I particular enjoy British Airways’ coffee, the quality of which should at the very least be considered a crime against humanity. However in the absence of hearings in The Hague, I am making this trip to make money: not just small amount of money but great big pots, overflowing with the filthiest of lucre. I am currently at 36,000 ft over Greenland with the expressed intention of over the next few months, delivering a lot of shareholder value. & that should cheer you up if your pension fund holds shares in our company, which I can guarantee you it almost certainly does.
In my luggage I have a spare laptop, a brace of BlackBerrys & 3G card with global coverage & enough financial modelling software to ‘arb’ just about any market you care to mention. Next week I will be in Hong Kong & the week after in China. I am globalisation. My carbon footprint can crush entire tribes of illiterate indigenous peoples who are still several hundred years away from discovering the benefits of soap let alone dental floss. I am become big business … or at least its willing accomplice.
Now on the subject of progress, last week saw the launch of the 4th incarnation of the computer game, Grand Theft Auto or GTA4 to use the vernacular. Its release was heralded by a luddite-like reaction from the usual sandal shod suspects. Apparently this computer game is going to bring about the destruction of the entire Western canon in a hail of violent plasma screen graphics. More than one commentator seems to be calling for the digital ducking stool to be broken out. Turn back the clock, up go the arms of anguished protest in the meejar section of The Guardian … burn the Playstation … smash the xBox … all hail the hop scotch sqaures, all hail the yo-yo.
In a saner world & happier times, this posturing brouhaha could be treated with distain, a barrage of personal abuse directed at the liberal left mainstream media outlets or a fusillade of No.6 shot depending upon your own viewpoint, disposition & level of medication. Yet in the face of reality, the sack cloth & ashes routine goes on. All the column inches are proof, as if it were needed, of the lengths that some people will go to deny reality. You can’t turn the clock back. Pandora’s box is well & truly open. You can’t uninvent the persistent nerve agents, long haul travel, the internal combustion engine or even computer games. The genie won’t go back in the bottle, mainly because he’s just boosted some wheels & was last seen in da’hood doing a drive by. Fo’shure.
Sadly exactly the same mentality is applied to agri-economics. Yes, an acre used to be the amount of land that a team of horses could plough in a day: currently an acre is roughly 1/60th of the area that man & machine can cover in the equivalent time. It is progress, efficiency, not starving or being beholding to those that control the land & the means of food production. A few hundred years ago we completely revolutionised the agricultural economy that culmination of which gives us the ability to feed the world’s population of 6 billion.
Now before anyone starts trying to canter around the moral high ground on a What About The Starving of Africa hobby horse, please allow me to most humbly point out that there is indeed more than enough food to go around; shortages are caused by bad politics & the gratuitous application of equally bad economic theory. This incidentally is why you tend not to get famine in democracies.
Peasant farming produces enough food for peasants. Maybe. Some of the time. It doesn’t provide the amounts of surpluses that are required to allow advanced economies to develop & be maintained. That requires the industrialisation of the means of production.
The most realistic way to raise global supply is to replicate the Brazilian model of large, technologically sophisticated agro-companies supplying for the world market. Many areas of the world have good land that could be used more productively if it were managed by large companies. For example, almost 90% of Mozambique’s land, an enormous area, is idle.
Unfortunately, large scale commercial agriculture is unromantic. We laud the production style of the peasant: environmentally sustainable and human in scale.
Please note dear readers I said industrialisation, not collectivization as China’s Great Leap Forward so disastrously proved. However I can’t help thinking that judging by how tight my suits currently feel, I could do with a few weeks on the Ukrainian Collective Farm Diet.
Sadly, the whinging classes demand that emerging markets are not allowed to benefit from the same advances in agriculture that we so enjoy. Whilst they demand that we plough (forgive the pun) more of our money into these countries so that people can be fed, equally they deny them the very technologies that who allow these populations to feed themselves. Much better that the clock is turned back to the sort of medieval rural idyll that Pol Pot would have been proud than to give the hungry both the means & the ability to feed themselves. Nothing like a bit of dependency culture, eh?
Maybe this is because the last thing that the liberal left want is for people with black or yellow skins to actually be able to provide for themselves. If that every happened, how would all those F-list celeb-braties fill their diaries. No more televised fund raisers at which to re-launch their careers. Goodness me, before you know it aging Irish minstrels would be reduced to selling copies of the Big Issue on the streets.
So, if you won’t tackle this problem in a sensible manner & with the best tools & technologies that we have to hand … let’em starve. It won’t for one moment reduce the choice of ports to accompany my cheese course on the flight home.
Comments
I love the west,capitalism and all that entails...plus I feel no guilt over colonialsim etc....ain't life grand!
Posted by: Thud | May 6, 2008 8:09 PM
Excellent post.
The double standards that socialists maintain - even in the face of irony, is unbelievable!
I hope to wake up one day, and all the idiots will have died from excessive righteousness -
leaving enough room for the rest of us to get on with free trade and finally the world will be closer to removing politically created poverty!
Posted by: f0ul | May 7, 2008 4:43 PM
In the same week:
() Iron Man made $100 million domestic(US) and $100 million foriegn for a total of $200 million.
() GTA IV sold $500 million.
No wonder Hollywood is in trouble.
Posted by: anonymous | May 8, 2008 8:59 PM