Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion Climate Change Forum question about livestock

I think free trade is the answer. Agriculture is heavily subsidized and tariffed around the world. Without those distortions to the market, African farmers could have a competitive advantage selling to American consumers because of their low labor costs.

But no. Americans (and Canadians) like Bryan want to look after their own, and don't care about people in other countries because they're not in the rich boys club.

This, of course, is true, American markets would undoubtedly be very attractive, but exporting takes food out of an already under supplied area, and, because the richer nations can afford to pay more, pushes up prices on the home market as well. Following your exchange with Bryan, I am left with the impression that you both have your own firmly entrenched ideas about solving global problems. I feel it is important to avoid falling into the trap of over simplifying a horrific humanitarian problem.

OK, so exporting makes it harder for local non-farmers to feed themselves.

But the non-farmer population can be a very small minority. The farmers can export what they like at high prices, and eat the leftovers themselves.

Why are there so many non-farmers? Why did they leave their farms? It was an idyllic lifestyle with not a care in the world.





Nothing wrong with that. But when you find the simplification is too much, you dig a bit deeper. There is actually a reason that a lot of Africa is in trouble. It's easy to blame outsiders, but it's never been very successful at any time in history.

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My son showed me how to put quotes into boxes, there'll be no stopping me now!

Seriously though, I think that outsiders have to acknowledge a share of the blame, historically, but raking over old injustices is rarely of real value. You seem to be saying that much of what troubles Africa is internal, I agree, which is why I believe that addressing these problems is a complex matter, but is essential. It is easy for well intentioned people, in the heat of discussion, to be carried away by the exuberance of their own verbosity, and to lose sight of the real issues.


This has to be sarcasm!

Uh oh, lock up your daughters and run for the hills everyone! :P



I think I know why. I think it's because they saw a better life doing other work. But many people say they got a worse life. So I actually don't know.

Maybe you can explain why a subsistence farmer would prefer to be paid in money instead of food and accommodation, even tho that money can hardly buy any food?

I can't explain it, but perhaps it has something to do with the intrinsic insecurity of subsistence farming, and the hope that the grass will be greener over there.

Yea I suspect it's that too. But not just false hope or millions of people wouldn't be doing it - have been doing it during many countries' transitions from subsistence farming to industrialization.

That means the low pay job in the city, made available by international trade, is better than life without international trade.

I'd really be suprised if someone said the solution for poor countries is to cut them off and let them go back to an even poorer state. But that's exactly what Bryan seemed to be saying. And it's what many lefties I've met say.

People may no longer believe in streets paved with gold, but what you will believe when your crops have failed and your family has no food, could well be the same thing you regret having believed 12 months later when there is no way back.

So education is the answer. I don't mean school, but knowledge about the workplace, and the risks. But I do find it hard to believe that so many people consistently don't realize those risks and always make the wrong decision.

I think most people are making the right decision and really do prefer the for-money work, so they do it. Then we see them in a bad way and blame the foreign companies, but forget that they're better off than they were before.

Holiday's over, so I can finally reply...

The answer is obvious - when people leave their farms, and move to the city, they sell their farms. To go back they need to buy a new farm - a hard thing to do when you don't even have enough money to feed your family.

Bryan

You may want to re-read what I wrote. Key work is "seldom". You found one example where this wasn't the case. Your Europe example is meaningless, as the timeframe of European advancement is both far too small to have a meaningful evolutionary advantage, and far too much outbreeding has occured to restrict those gains to europeans alone.



You must not understand evolution very well to come to this conclusion. War tends to deplete gene pools. That is universally a bad thing - its taken us ~6 million years to develop the diversity we have. A war can remove a lot of that. The number of "future generations" you need to recover that is sufficient in number that they will most likely no longer be human.

Bryan

But compounded with much lower productivity (due to a lack of mechanization) and increased transport costs. And lots of 3rd world countries make billions selling cash crops to the west - hasn't helped their over all economy much. The problems in 3rd world countries are far more profound than can be solved by removing trade barriers.



Insults again?

The reality is I've devoted my entire adult life to curing diseases of the 3rd world - HIV, malaria, etc. I've spent years in those countries helping locals develop everything from local industries to local research facilities. I suspect that in the average year I do more to help out these people than you have in your entire life.

I simply don't subscribe to your pie-in-the-sky view of the world. The problems - and fixes - to the 3rd world are far more complex than anything in your apparent imagination.

Bryan

Welcome back.

So the problem isn't international trade, it's poor decision making on the part of the locals. And the solution would be more information availabilty, not economic isolation.

Humans have been fighting since forever. Surely that's all part of the fittest surviving. If you win your fight then more of the weaker individuals are killed and more of the stronger/smarter/etc ones survive.

That's exactly how animals work too. Weak babies are often killed while stronger ones aren't.

That's just bragging. We all do work that benefits people. Not always so directly - where did that medical equipment come from? Who designed it? What tools did they use? Who worked on them? How were they transported? Who provided those services? Who supported the staff working at the shipping companies? Just being on the coalface doesn't mean you're more important than everybody else in the chain.

And it doesn't change what you said about preferring to look after your closer neighbors at the expense of more distant people.

Maybe your ideas contradict your actions. I'm only talking about your statements, not what you've done.

I wouldn't say poor decision making is the problem either. More often than not, families leave the farms during periods of difficulty - drought, etc. Or they are forced out by larger land owners. Or their land is lost to desertification (a very common problem in sub-saharan africa) or urbanization.

Farmers rarely leave their land by choice.

Bryan

As I said, I suspect you knowledge of evolution is limited. You just proved that.

Selection is generally a bad thing. The vast majority of our evolution occurs through drift and mutation. Selection slows that process, and depletes the gene pool at the same time. Too much selection and you go extinct - something which historically has occurred to about 99.999% of all species, BTW.

Not only that, but war is one of the worst forms of selection imaginable - in fact, it probably wouldn't even count as selection because it is indiscriminate in terms of the genotypes it acts against. Wars are rarely won by the biologically superior group (if such a group even exists; which I doubt in most cases). Rather, they are won by those with the largest numbers and/or those with the better technology - neither being an evolutionarily-derived advantage.

Bryan

Nope, its a direct refutation of this insult you leveled directly at me:


I look after my own first. After that I expend my remaining resources looking after others. It makes both moral and evolutionary sense (not that the two are really all that separable).

You seem to claim we should look after others first - the most needy specifically. That's been tried, and it doesn't work. When you help the needy at the expense of the rest, everyone eventually becomes needy.

Bryan

You just made my point for me. Finally. You clearly said that subsistence farming without money is not a great life.



Would have happened with foreign trade or not.


You mean armed land owners right? Violence is not foreign trade, it existed long before that.


Because of unsustainable farming practices perhaps?



I don't like my neighbor's garden. I'll deploy urbanization onto it and it'll be gone {{Poof}}.

You haven't demonstrated how poor countries would be better off without free foreign trade. Maybe they just wouldn't.

No personal insults please.