(no subject)

[ineffabelle]

"a system that guarantees a right to food, but isn't too successful at supplying actual food, is surely less desirable than a system that reliably supplies food but recognizes no right to food"

- Roderick Long

Comments

[lassiter.livejournal.com]

Reminds me of the "one laptop per child" program for poor African kids, where US executives were lauded for funding cheap laptops for illiterate, starving children (in places where there is no net connectivity to speak of), but those same executives didn't offer a way to provide actual nutrition to those same kids, since that would have meant going up against a system designed to prevent sufficient food allocation to the "subclasses."

[wolodymyr.livejournal.com]

I was going to try to make some crack about how, No! Starvation is a food production problem and we need fertilizer-heavy GM crops to SAVE us, but dammit, it's just not in me.

[lassiter.livejournal.com]

One of the standard IMF/World Bank "conditionalities" for debt relief is that poor countries may only grow crops for export (with the profit going to pay back the IMF, of course), but they may not grow basic food crops for internal consumption, since that undermines the trading prices for those basic commodities. In other words, growing your own food is against international trade agreements.