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From: orb@whuxl.UUCP (SEVENER)
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Unequal food distribution :re to Jan, Brazil
Message-ID: <853@whuxl.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 2-Dec-85 10:02:03 EST
Article-I.D.: whuxl.853
Posted: Mon Dec  2 10:02:03 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 3-Dec-85 22:45:24 EST
References: <836@whuxl.UUCP> <7800734@inmet.UUCP>
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Whippany
Lines: 41

Jan continues to ignore the obvious:
> 
> >Jan, are you *blind* or what?  The unfortunate fact is that *most*
> >Third World countries have *grave* problems with food distribution.
> >[examples follow]
> 
> *Of course they do*. Poor countries have problems with just about
> everything. (I firmly believe, though, that *production* is the key
> to the solution). I just pointed out that in Mao's China these
> distribution problems were *multiplied*. 
> 		Jan Wasilewsky

OK, Jan let's talk about *production*.  In Brazil less than one percent
of the population owns 80% of the land.  This often means that
land goes fallowed and unused for large estates of the wealthy for
their own pleasure when it could be used for growing food for
the starving.  This is not aytpical: instead this is a typical
land distribution in Third World countries.  This is no way to
promote the type of free market in agriculture that we have in our
own country either.  In our country, because land ownership is
currently dispersed and was historically dispersed because of the
foresight of Jefferson and Lincoln with giveaways of small *limited*
plots of land, there is competition and overproduction.  In Third World
countries like Brazil on the other hand, agriculture is much more of
a monopoly controlled by landed elites which have held their vast
estates for generations. This monopoly control leads to several effects:
for one thing, the owners are not particularly concerned with increased
production: that may only lower prices.  On the other hand peasants
who have to work the land for absentee landlords have no stake in it
or long-term improvements.  Of course they often have absolutely no
security either: they could be easily replaced with more cheap labor.
Therefore production is often lowered in these countries.
Which is why development economists as a whole have come to emphasize
land reform and land redistribution as critical to economic development
and ending hunger in Third World countries.  Such land reform
*promotes* the market in these countries by breaking up the current
landed elites monopoly on the land.  However this requires *political*
change in these countries and pressure against the resistance of
the landed elites which control these countries in league with
the military.
               tim sevener    whuxn!orb