The title of this post is an economics and public health pun in very poor taste. But the story behind it is fairly unsavoury too.

Two academics, David Stuckler at Cambridge University and Sanjay Basu at Yale recently looked into the effects of the IMF's policy impacts on public service reform in the former Soviet Union, using tuberculosis as an indicator. Their full results are here, but here's the bottom line:

After correcting for confounding variables, as well as potential detection, selection, and ecological biases, we observed that participating in an IMF program was associated with increased tuberculosis incidence, prevalence, and mortality rates by 13.9%, 13.2%, and 16.6%, respectively. ... read more »

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Posted on 18 August, 2008 - 18:31

There are a number of theories going around about the demise of the WTO talks. Mine are here but a couple of others worth noting are by Martin Khor, here and Devinder Sharma. I particularly like Devinder's take - which shifts the blame entirely toward the US reluctance to give up cotton subsidies. It's something we got to discuss a little when Devinder helped to launch Stuffed and Starved in Delhi last week (thanks Devinder!). I'm not sure I agree that the elections in India has nothing at all to do with the outcome, but we're both agreed that soon enough, the talks will be back from the dead. Indeed, if the Third World Network is to be believed, the corpse of the talks is already being revivified by Lula and Lamy.

Meanwhile, just to bust a hole in the Third World vs First World narrative that some have tried to spin around these talks, here's a press release from the US National Family Farm Coalition, applauding their demise... ... read more »

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Posted on 18 August, 2008 - 16:53

The splendid George Caffentzis has kindly allowed me to share this piece, written for Turbulence in the UK.

Starvation Politics: From Ancient Egypt to the Present

... read more »

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Posted on 31 July, 2008 - 03:19

Here's something on the WTO now up at Comment is Free.

When the World Trade Organisation talks collapsed in Seattle in 1999, there were parties in the streets, and a wailing and renting of clothes in the corridors of power. The failure of the Doha round of WTO talks in Geneva this week has drawn a more muted reaction from both its boosters and critics. In Seattle, it was possible to tell a story in which the voices of people on the streets mattered, and in which the disenfranchised had scored a victory against an unaccountable front company for international capital. This week's failure had less to do with global justice, and much more to do with the growing pains of international capitalism. ... read more »

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Posted on 30 July, 2008 - 18:41

The headline says it all, and the article gives the details.

What's curious for me, though, is the organisation that sponsored the research. On its 'about' page, the Organization for Competitive Markets advertises itself thus:

We are "pro- business" because we believe in free markets and the law of supply and demand to allocate resources properly. We are "conservative" because we view American values such as honesty and morality should be demanded of our businesses and politicians. We are "liberal" because we believe government has a regulatory role to create and enforce the rules of doing business, thereby avoiding crony capitalism. We are "populist" because we have determined our nation is made economically and culturally wealthy by preserving the ability of independent families to produce our food without fear of the economically dominant firms in agribusiness.

In other words, they think that capitalism would be great if it weren't for the capitalists. It's something that my libertarian readers might like to chew over and, if they're libertarian, agree with. Oo, and that reminds me, I know I owe Luddhunter a fuller response, and I'll try to get to that in a couple of weeks time (I'm married to a lapsed libertarian, and have a rehab system that I'm happy to share). Until then, though, I get to post my favourite libertarian joke, as told to me by the excellent Martin O'Neill:
Q: What's the difference between anarchism and libertarianism?
A: Under anarchism, poor people get to shoot back. ... read more »

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Posted on 29 July, 2008 - 06:14

When advocates of free trade policies pick a developing country poster-child, they often go for Brazil and Argentina. Which is why a new report, below, is especially useful in undermining the myths around agricultural trade liberalisation. The most important observation:

South America's soybean industries are winners from global trade liberalization, but few of the benefits go to rural communities. Based on high-input, industrialized monoculture farming, employment and wages have both declined despite dramatic increases in production.

Now read on... ... read more »

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Posted on 18 July, 2008 - 21:41

Couple of articles at odds with one another on the prognosis for free trade, given the current political climate, and the food crisis. The Washington Post has editorialised about why "an obscure Frenchman" - Pascal Lamy, current head of the World Trade Organization - "might be able to save the world. The only question is when he should do it."

Away from the free-trade leg-humping comes a more sober article from Bloomberg on the fading enthusiasm for free trade. ... read more »

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Posted on 17 June, 2008 - 05:25

The Financial Times is doing what it usually does - providing concise and honest insight into how the elite bosses think, this time around genetically modified crops. The recent op-ed by John Gapper follows a logic that I've been bumping into increasingly.

1. We need to increase food production to feed the world.
2. Yield-increasing science has worked before.
3. The nay-sayers want to reduce output through organic agriculture.
4. Monsanto, on the other hand, is investing in science.
5. Therefore we ought to embrace GM technology to fight the food crisis.

Almost everything about this argument is wrong. ... read more »

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Posted on 13 June, 2008 - 17:36

I’m a little disappointed with The Observer today. I’d been holding back on posting all my thoughts about food riots so that I could pull them out of the hat today with a comment piece in their pages. My article began with worries about globalisation and the consequences of food riots in Haiti.

The piece was bumped yesterday afternoon.

Yesterday evening it was announced that the Haitian Prime Minister, Jacques Edouard Alexis, had been fired in a special session of the Haitian Senate because of the food riots.

Then Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the International Monetary Fund, announced imminent global disaster from food price rises.

Since I’m still hoping that the piece will still appear somewhere, and since it now needs rewriting, I’ll not post it quite yet. But here’s what the stories of the price rises leave out, and why there’s reason to fear that Haiti’s fate is likely to be that of many other countries. ... read more »

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Posted on 13 April, 2008 - 19:38

The Financial Times again distinguishes itself by being the only major newspaper to take the global food price rises at all seriously. On Monday, front page above the fold, an article on the UN's call for $500m in food aid to avoid famine. Yesterday, on rice rationing in the Philippines. Today, front page again, the announcement that the price of rice, a staple for over 2.5 billion people, rose 30% in a single day. ... read more »

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Posted on 28 March, 2008 - 21:51