The original story:
“Wall Street slow to see zeitgeist”
Chrystia Freeland
Financial Times
3 April 2009

Summary of the story:
Chrystia Freeland’s piece discusses the public anger about failures in Wall Street and The City. Here is a key passage:

The technorati and the punditocracy have tended to characterise public anger provoked by the crisis with the lazy shorthand of “populist rage”.

This week’s robust mass manifestation of that discontent in London will have strengthened that perception. But the truth is that the people’s disgruntlement is far more focused than that dismissive tag would suggest. Even those London crowds – and remember, these were people animated by the passions of a public demonstration, not participants in an Oxford Union debate – targeted the windows of Royal Bank of Scotland, one of the big public welfare recipients, rather than the hedge funds of nearby Mayfair.

livingissues comment:

Chrystia Freeland seems irritated that Wall Street people dismiss as “populism” the anger about the hiatus in capitalism. Fair do’s: one imagines that there are elite, educated, thoughtful people who are angry with the generation of capitalists who have so failed their customers, employees and firms. Certainly, it’s not just mob folly to dislike what’s been going on.

But Ms Freeland’s analysis seems to emphasise the wrong things. Here are a few:

(1) The street protest against the G-20 was mostly old-style anti-capitalism of the sort we’ve heard for a decade or more. This anger is always directed at whatever capitalist target looks the most unpopular at the time.

(2) This wasn’t “popular protest” by “The People”. Not many taxpayers (all of them) with money in RBS would think it clever to add to the bank’s problems by breaking the firm’s windows.

(3) The really interesting thing about the mass media response to the financial chaos we are living through is how little of it is anti-capitalist. There seems to be a quite a lot of tacit understanding that capitalism hasn’t failed us, we have failed capitalism.

(4) It is very interesting how much interesting discussion there is now about what sort of controls are needed on capitalism as we rebuild the system. The good thing is that there is a lot of sensible discussion about how too much new regulation would be as dangerous as too little.

(5) The important thing is that Chrystia Freeland seems quite wrong to say that the G20 leaders have much to learn from the protestors. They are already being quite thoughtful and have plenty of more interesting voices to take account of.

The original story:
“Legal move to crack down on climate protesters”
Afua Hirsch and John Vidal
The Guardian
18 December 2008

Summary of the stories:
The Guardian has got wind of moves by the UK government’s Attorney General to challenge the legal loophole” (“lawful excuse”) whereby people charged with criminal damage can assert that their admitted acts were damaging but not criminal because they were designed to avoid a greater damage. Thus, you can kick down the door of a neighbour’s house if it is on fire. Likewise, lawyers are arguing with great success, that protesters are invading military airfields, trashing trials of genetically modified crops and damaging power station chimneys so as to head off the greater damage of war or environmental damage. Judges and juries have mostly accepted the argument.

livingissues comment:
There is great merit in protest but there need to be limits especially when the protest is against activity which has been thoroughly debated and democratically agreed. There is no obvious parity between the modern use of the “lawful excuse” argument and the circumstances which originally spawned it.

The difficulty looks like being this: there is a superficial attractiveness in the “lawful excuse” argument and confronting it will perhaps require a deliberate change in the law. The A-G may lose his appeal to a higher court. That would only leave a Parliamentary decision – an overt display of will by the government which might be unpopular.

The original story:
“Africa needs missionaries”
Matthew Parris
The Times
27 December 2008

Summary of the stories:
Matthew Parris has been re-visiting the Africa of his youth. To his surprise and even consternation (he being an atheist) he finds himself believing that Africans do better if they believe in a Christian god. Nothing else, he thinks, so readily overcomes superstition. What’s more, Christianity matters because it respects individuals rather than groups or tribes.

livingissues comment:
This is an interesting line of argument for several reasons.

(1) It overcomes a basic judgement (a prejudice if you like) that nothing good that was European or Western or white ever went to Africa.

(2) It reinforces a judgement (a prejudice if you like) that Africa needs a transformation of culture even more than it needs hardware. What’s more the change that’s needed is in personal attitiudes.

(3) It reminds modern people that Christianity is a religion of personal liberation and as such was the surprising underpinning of the renaissance and even the Enlightenment.

(4) Parris doesn’t stress, but it’s worth adding, that Africa has been slow to develop a middle class. One could argue that the bossy, assertive people who built modern Western civilisation were mostly not very powerful and not always rich either. They built societies rather than became “Big Men”. Africa needs their sort and their kind of thinking. Christianity may well be the African route to creating such people.

The original story:
McDonald’s adds 4,000 new UK jobs
BBC Online news
6 August 2008

The basics of the story:
Fast-food chain McDonald’s has launched a recruitment drive to add 4,000 jobs in its UK restaurants to meet increasing demand for its meals. While some service sector firms are cutting jobs, McDonald’s said it needed to increase its workforce to cater for two million more customers a month.

livingissues comment:
For most people, budget and lifestyle both come into their dining decisions. Thankfully, most of us exist in more than one social reality. Plenty of us grab a cheap fast-food bite one day, and linger over a pricey slow-food pasta the next. And yet some people seem to define McDonalds as the end of civilisation.   

There are obvious differences between fast food and haute cuisine. Craft, price and skill come into it. But carbohydrate, fat, protein and vitamins bring pretty much the same benefits (and risks) regardless of the form they’re served up in.

Top chefs are rare.  That’s why they become celebrities and command top wages. Meanwhile, nobody knows the name of the relatively low-paid cooks at the local McDonald’s. Its customers, however, know exactly how their meal will taste before they eat there.  Repeat visits to McDonald’s are not about experimentation, as they might be with celebrity chefs.

So, McDonald’s is hiring 4,000 staff at a time of economic gloom, and we can celebrate. It suggests that McDonald’s is also right to hope the Oxford English Dictionary may revise its definition of “McJob”. Certainly, the current definition insults millions of customers who eat there, while degrading the tens of thousands of staff who serve them.

The original stories:
The Sunday Times reviews books on the world food crisis
The Economist reviews one of them

Summary of the stories:
Two important and widely-reviewed books describe the modern global food crisis (bad food, too little of it, too much of it wasted) and identify villains (high-tech agri-business and supermarkets). That’s all normal: there are a lot of such books. What’s interesting is that these books should receive favourable reviews from right-of-centre mainstream journals, one of which is perhaps the UK’s most important source of economically-literate commentary.

livingissues comment:
At first sight it is odd that journals committed to the free-market should have anti-corporate, luddite books reviewed by people who cheerfully promote an anti-corporate, luddite view. But we need to remember that books page editors are in the arts section of their journals, and are employed to bring something a little gentler to the mix. What’s more, most writers of whatever economic persuasion are half in love with the Green agenda, even if their heads would tell them it’s probably nonsense. Besides, they are from a “me” generation which holds its own body to be a temple, and is hyper-sensitive to insults to it. That means they are prone to imagine they are under assault.

So we must expect lots of nonsense about food.

It is of course true that a combination of technology, subsidy, state interference, widespread affluence, a good deal of poverty, and the free market (some of them in all places, all of them in a few) have made food a fascinating issue. Roughly speaking, some people eat way too much whilst others eat way too little. (And yes, there are conservation issues too.)

But what’s missing from the current debate is the understanding that the planet is now feeding vastly more people than it ever did before. And doing so quite well.

The question is, what will be the next evolutions of what has been for millennia a fast-changing agricultural scene?  Do we really believe that big firms won’t be at the heart of the next chapter in the story? Is it really clever to demonise them? 

The original story:
Alternative views on how to encourage African agriculture 
Martin Wolf
Financial Times  
 
Summary of the story:
The FT has been running an important series of articles and blogs on:

Malawi cultivates cash gains for its impoverished farmers
(by Alan Beattie)
Subsidising inputs for small-scale farmers in Africa was out of fashion for a while. Jeffrey Sachs (a world famous development economist) is working on a revival of the practice in Malawi. It is part of policy which has doubled Malawi’s crop.  

Alternative views on how to encourage African agriculture 
(Martin Wolf’s forum)
Alternative views on sustaining world economic growth (and making it more equitable)

Seeds of change
(by Alan Beattie)
Alternative views on how to help African small scale farmers.  

livingissues comment:
We see here some of the clear schools of thought on what policies work. Roughly speaking:
(1) Paul Collier thinks that high food prices will encourage farmers – includng those in Africa – to grow more food and that in the end, large-scale farmers will flourish and be the major producers. This view tends to be unpopular with campaigners.
(2) Jeffrey Sachs believes that one can direct aid towards small scale farmers and that the risk of distorting markets is worth risking. This view tends to be popular with campaigners.
(3) Jon Maguire offers us a fascinating insight into the important debate between those who believe in large-scale farming and those who believe in small scale farming. He is investing in both.

This may be the most important lesson of all: Africa needs almost every sort of solution. It needs infrastructure, help for peasants, encouragement for agri-business, GM, new seeds, to listen to locals, to help locals change old habits. It needs romantic NGOs and cool headed capitalists.

There are further divisions as to whether genetically modified seeds are valuable or dangerous. We have looked at that already.
 

The original story:
GM food: Monster or saviour?  
Jeremy Cooke
BBC News
29 May, 2008  
 
Summary of the story:
The UK Soil Association’s leader, Peter Melchett told BBC TV news (30 May, 2008) that promoters of GM technology were lying when they describe their work as as a way of producing drought resistant crops for Africa.

livingissues comment:
GM crops are freely chosen by farmers all over the world for their economic benefit. Now Monsanto, one of the leading researchers and producers of GM food, is at work on the final stages of developing a drought-resistant maize which may help the continent overcome its chronic problem of low yields.

If you visit the Monsanto website, you’ll find that the firm is not yet claiming success – it is expressing great optimism, which isn’t the same thing. You’ll also see the width of the co-operative work the firm is involved in as it develops these new seeds.

If Monsanto’s work in Africa is any sort of success, that is a hugely important matter. However strongly Peter Melchett opposes GM on ecological, economic or spiritual grounds, it seems way too early for him to say that Monsanto are lying to Africans.

The original story:
Food shortages: think big
Subtitle: ‘If we’re to solve this global problem, we need more globalisation and less sentimentality’
Paul Collier
The Times
15 April, 2008

An extract from the story:

In Africa … the World Bank and the Department for International Development have orientated their entire efforts on agricultural development to peasant-style production. Africa has less large-scale commercial agriculture than it had 60 years ago. Unfortunately, peasant farming is not well suited to innovation and investment. The result has been that African agriculture has fallen farther and farther behind.

The argument in brief:
Paul Collier believes that the world needs to grow more food and that small-scale production won’t do it.

livingissues comment:
The world is a little short of food at the moment, and the situation may worsen. The shortages seem to be in part because the rich in the world can afford to feed food to animals, so the poor face higher prices.

There has been lot of discussion of whether we should be going more organic, or more chemical. But Paul Collier stress another – less common – theme. This that small-scale, peasant agriculture just won’t cut it.  Paul Collier’s views matter: his book The Bottom Billion was an important account of how the world might help the 1 billion people who have so far seen no benefit from the economic growth that has lifted so many out of poverty. (I reviewed the book for the Social Affairs Unit.)

But bear in mind that Africa may not need the highest-tech agriculture: it has people desperate for work, and that may make their farming future look different than the West’s. What’s more, when one celebrates modern agriculture, and scientific agriculture, that may well involve techniques learned from organic farmers.

Here’s another useful story:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/apr/16/biofuels.alternativeenergy

The original story:
Governments can no longer ignore the cries of the hungry
Alan Beattie
The Financial Times
5 April, 2008

The story in brief:
Here are three quotes from the article

Concern is shifting from the farmers whose interests often predominate at times of plenty to the angry and desperate urbanites, particularly those living within rioting distance of the presidential palace, who cannot afford food at times of shortage.

Now, the way in which many of these governments – Egypt, India, Argentina – are going about this task is not a clever one. Rather than softening the blow by giving cash transfers to poor households, they are trying to rig the agricultural market by banning food exports.

Governments across the world need to plan to deliver cheap food – not to please truculent farmers – and to let free markets deliver it as far as is prudent. The world’s poor need to be freed from the hunger that threatens once more to entrap them.

livingissues comment:
Mr Beattie argues that governments in “poor” countries too often pander to farmers rather than to poor urbanites. He suggests, however, that when the attention turns to the poor urbanites, policy isn’t always well designed.

I don’t think this article tells us enough about the options the world’s politicians now have. But it is a good beginning towards helping people understand that there is quite a lot of food around – the problem is how to ensure the poor have access to it. Making them less poor (by giving them money) may be better than interfering to make food cheaper.

The original story:
Jamie may have spelled end of school meals
The Daily Telegraph
By Liz Lightfoot, Education Editor
12/07/2007

The essence of this story:
In 2005 Jamie Oliver, a restaurateur and TV chef, presented a TV campaign against “school dinners” on the grounds that they were cheap and nasty. There was a panic, as parents, schools and politicians woke up to the way many school canteens had been allowed to provide the kind of food children like (fatty, sweet and salty fast food) whilst many students were actually leaving schools at lunchtime and buying fast food and snacking on that.

The government, promised a small sum of money (£212m over 3 years) to put things right.

Very famously, Oliver made a villain of a lunch ingredient called a Turkey Twizzler, from Bernard Matthews. The firm pointed out that their product was wholesome and unexceptional.

The fallout from the Oliver series was (1) that take-up of school dinners immediately fell (that’s to say, people turned away from the food he excoriated) and (2) as healthier, more expensive food has come onto school menus, take-up of that type of food has stayed low.

There was some informed comment (especially from Prue Leith of the School Food Trust) which suggested that school kids are in the midst of a big cultural change but that we should be patient because in the long-term, acceptance of healthier food would improve.

livingissues comment:
The media like to whip up campaigns which make them, the broadcasters, seem edgy and effective – and they enjoy the power which comes to those who can see petitions and confrontations in Downing Street, and politicians (“Them”) brought to heel by “The People” (“Us”). This is part of the old war between journalism and The State. But it is also part of a new febrile process in which institutional authority is dismissed as stuffiness.

Several things are worth remembering. (1) Oliver wasn’t altogether wrong and in the long-run his sort of ideas will probably prevail. (2) Healthier and nicer food may become acceptable and available to British school children quicker because of Oliver. (3) This sort of campaign plainly works, at least some of the time. But, and here’s the sting: (4) conventional politics matter and every time one of these TV populism campaigns gets going and even succeeds, we can worry over the way conventional, institutional politics has been damaged.