orb@whuxl.UUCP (SEVENER) (12/02/85)
Jan continues to ignore the obvious: > > >Jan, are you *blind* or what? The unfortunate fact is that *most* > >Third World countries have *grave* problems with food distribution. > >[examples follow] > > *Of course they do*. Poor countries have problems with just about > everything. (I firmly believe, though, that *production* is the key > to the solution). I just pointed out that in Mao's China these > distribution problems were *multiplied*. > Jan Wasilewsky OK, Jan let's talk about *production*. In Brazil less than one percent of the population owns 80% of the land. This often means that land goes fallowed and unused for large estates of the wealthy for their own pleasure when it could be used for growing food for the starving. This is not aytpical: instead this is a typical land distribution in Third World countries. This is no way to promote the type of free market in agriculture that we have in our own country either. In our country, because land ownership is currently dispersed and was historically dispersed because of the foresight of Jefferson and Lincoln with giveaways of small *limited* plots of land, there is competition and overproduction. In Third World countries like Brazil on the other hand, agriculture is much more of a monopoly controlled by landed elites which have held their vast estates for generations. This monopoly control leads to several effects: for one thing, the owners are not particularly concerned with increased production: that may only lower prices. On the other hand peasants who have to work the land for absentee landlords have no stake in it or long-term improvements. Of course they often have absolutely no security either: they could be easily replaced with more cheap labor. Therefore production is often lowered in these countries. Which is why development economists as a whole have come to emphasize land reform and land redistribution as critical to economic development and ending hunger in Third World countries. Such land reform *promotes* the market in these countries by breaking up the current landed elites monopoly on the land. However this requires *political* change in these countries and pressure against the resistance of the landed elites which control these countries in league with the military. tim sevener whuxn!orb
simon@gargoyle.UUCP (Janos Simon) (12/11/85)
Someone called my attention to the posting about Brazilian agrarian conditions. I am a Brazilian, and I must say I was surprised by it. While some of the picture may not be totally inaccurate, most of it is. Please try to get some facts before spouting "examples" out of slogans (even if the slogans are decent). Information: most of Brazil's land IS in the hands of relatively few. The consequences are quite different, and vary widely even within the country (say the Northeast vs. the South). In particular, since about the 16th century, much of the agricultural production was not food, but exports: first sugar cane, later rubber, coffee, and more recently soybeans and oranges, as well as sugar cane grown for alcohol production (to substitute gasoline). Many of the large farms in the South are quite modern operations and are just a totally different entity from the subsistence farming in the arid Northeast or from the farms encroaching on the jungle. Talking about "the farm in Brazil" makes about as much sense as talking about "the landscape in the US". JS