And the Prize Goes to … Genetically Modified Foods

Timothy A. Wise

This year’s World Food Prize went to three biotech engineers, all of whom have been instrumental in bringing genetically modified foods to your table.

Inside the Marriott Hotel in downtown Des Moines, Iowa, where the prize’s four-day program took place October 15-18, the message was clear: Technology is the answer to the world’s looming food shortages, and anyone who gets in the way isn’t putting farmers and the hungry first.

And you have to admire the laureates for their candor.

In their prepared press statements, they couldn’t have been clearer about what the prize means to them.

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The Man Who Won a Nobel Prize for Helping Create a Global Financial Crisis

James R. Crotty, Guest Blogger

Eugene Fama just received a Nobel Prize for his contributions to the theory of “efficient financial markets,” the dominant theory in financial economics that asserts that markets work ideally if not constrained by government regulation. The fact that economic “science” teaches that unregulated financial markets work effectively helped financial institutions and the rich accomplish their goal of radical financial market deregulation in the 1980s and 1990s. Deregulation, in turn, not only contributed to the rising inequality of the era, it helped cause the global financial market crisis that began in 2007 and the deep recession and austerity fiscal policies that accompanied it.

The theory of efficient financial markets requires the union of two ideas: the “efficient market hypothesis” (or EMH) and optimal (security) pricing theory (OPT). Both the EMH and OPT are built on crudely unrealistic assumptions that would lead anyone not indoctrinated in a mainstream PhD program to conclude that efficient financial market theory is a fairly-tale rather than serious social science.

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As We Now Enter the Sixth Year of the Global Recession

Erinç Yeldan

The global capitalist economy has now entered its sixth year of recession, as it continues to suffer from its worst crisis since the Great Depression. Initially dismissed as routine financial turbulence in the summer months of 2007, the crisis conditions accelerated slowly, yet continually, to reach an officially declared full-fledged recession in the late 2000s.

What is more revealing, the current crisis began not in the so-called emerging markets of the global periphery, but erupted directly in the hegemonic centers of the capitalist world. At the root of the crisis are not, as commonly accused, the “corrupt” governments of crony capitalism, and their over-interference with market rationality, but the upfront irrational exuberance of “free markets,” with their unfettered workings guided by the private profit motive. Read the rest of this entry »

Fiddling in Rome While Our Food Burns

Timothy A. Wise and Marie Brill

Rumor has it that the Roman emperor Nero played a fiddle and sang while Rome burned for five days in the Great Fire of 64. Nearly 2000 years later, at the very site where this devastating fire started so long ago, history is repeating itself, only the leaders doing the fiddling are delegates to the 40th meeting of the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS). And what’s burning is the world’s food, in the engines of our cars.

Unfortunately this time, the fire didn’t end in five days. Food-based biofuels have been burning for over a decade, the fires are growing in scale and intensity, and there is no end in sight.

It’s not as if we haven’t seen the warning signs. There have been three food price spikes in the last six years, with a wide range of studies implicating biofuels as a key driver of price volatility. How could it be otherwise? In the United States, 40% of our corn—fully 15% of the global corn supply—is now diverted to make ethanol, up from just 5% in 2000.

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Winds of Change Blow in Asia

Martin Khor

More on the TPPA negotiations from Triple Crisis contributor Martin Khor. Cross posted from Third World Network.

The winds of change are blowing, bringing shifts in perceived wisdom and the old order, especially in the Asian region. The recent APEC summit and associated meetings in Bali were marked not so much by results but by perceptions. In fact, the lack of results, rather than results, was the main story.

This lack was not so much in the APEC itself, but in the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA).

The leaders of TPPA countries met in a separate venue away from the APEC summit. The Indonesians were the host of APEC and not the TPPA, which they are not involved in, and were unhappy that the TPPA threatened to take away the limelight from the main event.

But that was the secondary story. The main news was that U.S. President Barack Obama had to give a miss, not only to his scheduled visits to Malaysia and Indonesia, but to the APEC Summit itself.

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Contentions Issues in the TPPA Negotiations

Martin Khor

Cross-posted from the South Centre’s October 2013 South Bulletin.

The negotiations for the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) have been proceeding at full speed in recent months, giving rise to a lot of interest worldwide.

The stated goal is to conclude the negotiations by the end of 2013. However these is only a slim prospect for this, as there are still many contentions issues to resolve. (The countries participating in the TPPA negotiations are Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States, and Vietnam.)

Not much is known about the TPPA drafts.  But with some of its chapters leaked and available on the internet, and since much of the TPPA is likely to be similar to bilateral FTAs that the United States has already signed, we can have a good idea of its main points.

As can be expected, there are many contentious issues to consider, especially for developing countries.
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Hunger, Metrics, and SOFI 13

Jennifer Clapp

Last week, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) published the 2013 version of its annual State of Food Insecurity Report (SOFI 13). The SOFI reports provide important insight into trends regarding the extent and distribution of hunger around the world, and their findings are widely reported in the media, typically with a headline announcing how many people on the planet are hungry (this year it is 842 million, down slightly from last year, meaning roughly one in eight people is chronically undernourished).

This year’s SOFI report is in many ways an improvement over SOFI 12. Last year’s report received criticism because, in introducing its revamped methods for counting hunger, the FAO made crystal clear just how narrow its key measure for hunger, the Prevalence of Undernourishment (PoU), actually is, raising questions about its usefulness in policymaking. A group of scholars and activists coordinated by Frances Moore Lappé (in which I took part) published an academic article and a longer framing paper outlining our concerns about continuing to rely on such a narrow measure and using it to track global progress on the fight against hunger.

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Crooks, Liars, Idiots, and Plutocrats

Matías Vernengo

Economic historian Carlo Cipolla famously noted that human beings fall into four basic categories: the martyr who takes an action and suffers a loss while producing a gain to others; the genius or prodigy who takes an action by which he/she makes a gain while yielding a gain also to society; the crook (and liar too) who takes an action by which he/she makes a gain causing others a loss; and the stupid person who causes losses to others while deriving no personal gain and even possibly incurring losses. At first glance, the shutdown of the government and the looming debt-ceiling crisis seem to indicate that we are dealing with idiots, the likes of Michele Bachmann, Ted Cruz, Louie Gohmert, Steve King, and other Tea Party Republicans.

After all, there is no rational reason to shut down the government to preclude what is essentially a Republican-designed health law (created by the Heritage Foundation), that would create the conditions for finally attaining universal health coverage in the United States, a goal that all the other advanced nations have achieved decades ago. In particular, the alternative to “Obamacare” proposed by the GOP is nonexistent, and basically means leaving millions of Americans without proper medical care. On top of that, the shutdown, together with the previous sequestration, and the overall contractionary fiscal stance, will most likely make the very slow recovery even slower, maintaining an unnecessarily large portion of the labor force unemployed.

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Trade Deals Must Allow for Regulating Finance

From the editors: This piece by Triple Crisis blogger Kevin Gallagher appeared previously on the Institute for New Economic Thinking blog.

Kevin Gallagher

World leaders who are gathering for the APEC summit next week had hoped to be signing the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP). The pact would bring together key Pacific-rim countries into a trading bloc that the United States hopes could counter China’s growing influence in the region.

But talks remain stalled. Among other sticking points, the U.S. is insisting that its TPP trading partners dismantle regulations for cross-border finance. Many TPP nations will have none of it, and for good reason. The U.S. stands on the wrong side of experience, economic theory, and guidelines issued by the International Monetary Fund.

Indeed, it’s the U.S. that could learn a few lessons from the TPP countries when it comes to overseeing cross-border finance.

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Changing Course to Feed the World in 2050

Editor’s Note: Timothy A. Wise and Marie Brill of ActionAid USA have co-authored a new ActionAid report “Rising to the Challenge: Changing Course to Feed the World in 2050,” based on a GDAE Working paper. The following op-ed published by Triple Crisis and the Huffington Post summarizes the findings of the their report.

Timothy A. Wise and Marie Brill, Guest Blogger

Was Thomas Malthus right after all? In 1798, Malthus postulated that exponential population growth would outstrip our ability to feed ourselves, dooming civilization. This early attempt at global economic modeling has since been widely discredited. But if you’ve been listening to policy-makers and pundits since food prices spiked in 2008, you’ve likely heard the eerie echoes of Malthusian thinking.

“With almost 80 million more people to feed each year, agriculture can’t keep up with the escalating food demand,” warned Frank Rijsberman, head of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). “FAO estimates that we have to double food production by 2050 to feed the expected 9 billion people, knowing that one billion people are already going to bed hungry every day.”

Well, not so fast. Yes, resource constraints, exacerbated by uncertainties over climate change and the unsustainable consumption of non-renewable resources have introduced new threats to our ability to feed a growing population. The issues are indeed serious, but the specter of looming food shortages is a bit overblown.
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