Hunger: Where Is The Scorn? (full text)
- From: PL <pl.nospam@xxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 30 Mar 2007 20:40:03 GMT
Hunger: Where Is The Scorn?
INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Posted 3/29/2007
Food Security: There's never a shortage of dictators to hurl abuse at the U.S. for its food policies. But they have no right to do it. Marxism, not freedom, is the world's foremost creator of hunger.
The blame-America-first crowd often zeroes in on U.S. plenty, calling our lack of want 'excess' and our great food productivity an ecological evil.
There's been a malevolent new wave of this lately as more news of failed Marxist regimes and the hunger they create comes out.
Cuba's communist dictator Fidel Castro on Thursday denounced the U.S.' production of grain ethanol as 'sinister' and a coming cause of ecological catastrophe and global starvation. Not only would it affect Cuba, which has rationed food since 1962, but 3 billion other people, he said.
Not to be outdone, the United Nations denounced the West for North Korea's new famine, laughably claiming the nuclear-armed state was a victim of bad harvests and a lack of food aid from the stingy West.
Meanwhile, in Zimbabwe, the West is regularly denounced as the culprit for conspiring to keep food off the African nation's shelves even as its offers of genetically modified food aid have been rejected.
Dictator Robert Mugabe's enemy isn't hunger itself, but improved food production from the green revolution, developed in an atmosphere of freedom and capitalism.
By the way, all three Marxist states claim food is a right for all. But the hunger their people suffer is in fact just another monstrous instance of state failure. In all three, private property is outlawed and expropriated.
The people who don't escape have no means of bettering themselves under state control. They live as serfs, as land goes fallow. While wielding absolute power, all three states fail to provide even the most basic needs of their citizens. They are the causes of hunger in the world.
But which of them are held up to world scorn for their awful behavior? Which are held responsible for creating terror and starvation in their own lands, even as they demand bailouts from the free countries they curse?
Where is the U.N. report denouncing North Korea, Zimbabwe or Cuba for policies that create mass starvation, all because they refuse to permit any free-market activity even if it means saving their citizens' lives?
Castro, whose ruined nation shipped $780 million worth of vegetables, sugar and agricultural exports to the U.S. in the 1950s, has turned his nation into a lunar wasteland over his 48-year dictatorship, its famous sugar industry now gone. Does Castro take responsibility? No. He blames global warming, not his disastrous decisions.
But Cuba's land lies in ruin not because of bad weather but because its massive propaganda-driven 'great sugar harvests' of the 1960s ruined the land in the name of making Castro's arbitrary quota — and because no citizen can own or trade land for its most efficient use. Now, Cuba grows so little food it must import it from the very nation its leader denounces and undermines and blames.
In fact, it's Castro's dirty secret: The U.S. is Cuba's food lifeline. The U.S. sells $340 million in food a year to Cuba just so its ration books can be worth the paper they're printed on.
The U.S. is Cuba's top trade partner, but Cuba ranks only 32nd on the U.S. list. America grows enough food to feed dozens of countries and, through ethanol, its own cars.
'Prior to 1959, when Castro took power, Cuba had the fourth-highest protein consumption in the Western Hemisphere,' says Humberto Fontova, author of 'Fidel: Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant.' 'Today, it's near the bottom.'
According to a Spanish study, Fontova said, in 1842 Cuba's plantation slaves got royally decreed daily rations of 8 ounces of meat, 4 ounces of rice, 16 ounces of starch and 4 ounces of beans. By contrast, when Castro started rationing food in 1962, Cubans got 2 ounces of meat, 3 ounces of rice, 6.5 ounces of starch and 1 ounce of beans.
'Yet (Newsweek's) Eleanor Clift will tell us that to be poor in Cuba is better than to be poor in the U.S.,' Fontova said — a claim Clift made, he says, on TV's 'The McLaughlin Group' during the Elian Gonzalez debacle.
Meanwhile, the U.N. blames the West for not feeding North Korea — missing the problem of Marxist state control that would make food impossible to produce no matter how good the weather.
The world is 'losing the fight against hunger' in North Korea, a U.N. official said, without even a wayward glance at the dictatorship that caused all this misery.
Somehow Singapore and Hong Kong, two Asian states which grow no food either, manage to avoid famine.
The difference is they produce value from their free minds and their industry under capitalist incentives, with governments that don't seek to control all economic activity. There's plenty of food, and virtually no hunger, in both city-states.
This all boils down to state control. What we want to know from the U.N. is what dictatorship can claim a right to rule a country, making all decisions for its citizens, with no responsibility to feed them?
http://www.investors.com/editorial/editorialcontent.asp?secid=1501&status=article&id=260062630759326
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