Famine

Almost 20 years ago there was an essay writing competition. The winner of the essay writing competition would win for my school 20 Macintoshes, and back in those days, the Macintosh was seen as a Mercedes Benz like computer. Somebody from our school won, and he was a hero. We were all grateful to him for his efforts.

This Ju-Len guy did the same for his school. Not sure if he won it for my school but good for him anyway. He was a hero. Unfortunately later in life he became a “star blogger” for the Straits Times and started writing shit articles like the one I saw one morning in mypaper:

Scarcity doesn’t cause hunger, stupidity does

I am not sure how qualified I am to comment on this, because in my entire lifetime – which includes five years of living on my own, the total number of sacks of rice I have ever bought amount to precisely zero.

I only buy rice indirectly, that is, from hawkers and restauranteurs, and so far I haven’t noticed any movement in the price of rice. I don’t even eat rice that
often. For some reason, I prefer noodles and pasta. I’ve been more pained by the
rising price of petrol, but even then I’m consoling myself that even though crude oil prices have gone up four times in the last five years or so, pump prices haven’t even doubled in that time.

And yet we grumble, which is a very human thing to do. It’s also a human reaction to panic at the rising price of rice, even though it’s gone up by just 30 per cent (so I’ve read), and that according to the NTUC, only 22 cents out of every $10 spent at their stores is expended on rice.

I’m guessing that our elders, who unlike us have actually lived through times of desperate deprivation, are the ones most compelled to hoard rice right now.

But to borrow a phrase from Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”.

Rather aptly, he spoke these words during the depths of the Great Depression.

Rice hoarders would do well to heed the lesson contained therein: panicking is only going to make things worse.

Let’s have some perspective here. We are very far from conditions which bring about famine.

Take the Great Chinese Famine of 1958.

During a three-year period of starvation caused by a convergence of factors including natural disaster, economic mismanagement and belief in flawed pseudo-scientific agricultural techniques, as many as 30 million people starved to death.

According to Wikipedia, the Chinese authorities now accept that the main culprits for the famine were human, apportioning 65 per cent of the blame on mismanagement and 35 per cent on natural causes. Indeed, more often than not,
starvation seems to stem from idiocy rather than scarcity.

The Bengal famine of 1943 saw up to three million people starve to death, but Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen holds that there was no actual shortage of rice at the time.

In fact, there was more rice around than in 1941, a year in which no famine occurred.

Instead, rumours of a rice shortage caused hoarding and rapid price inflation, and Mr Sen writes in his 1981 book, Poverty and Famines, that although Bengal had enough food to go around, millions of people suddenly found themselves too
poor to afford it.

People who hoard rice here may be acting on a simple self-preserving impulse, but they are actually making the situation worse.

Thankfully, we live in a fairly open economic system.

In the long run, I believe that the free market should correct the situation, as it tends to do for any good or service. If all else fails, we’ll always have Soylent Green.

(It’s a fictional product – a small, green wafer which is advertised as being produced from “high-energy plankton” – featured in a 1973 science fiction movie of the same name.)

First you tell people that you’re not qualified to write articles, and then you write them anyway. But of course that does not automatically disqualify you from writing more stuff.

There is nothing wrong with his main point which is that hoarding is bad, but he makes 2 severe mistakes in this article.

First, he asserts that the main cause of rising food prices is artificial and man made. This is not true. At some point we would have crossed the threshold from a situation where everybody has enough to eat, and the main problem is distribution, to a Malthusian situation. (Malthus was the guy who predicted that the world will run out of food one day.) I read it some where that the point is somewhere around 2010, and we are near that point.

It is very reassuring to ourselves that all we have to do is to solve the problem of distribution, but it may not be true for much longer. It is very politically incorrect to say this, but all the people in China / India / Vietnam / Thailand / UAE / Qatar / Brazil who are getting richer are gobbling up more food than they did 10-20 years ago and that is creating scarcity.

The other thing is that one of the main components of our food is crude oil – not for transportation, but for manufacturing fertiliser. When crude oil prices go up, the fertiliser will get more expensive and correspondingly food will be more expensive.

So fellars don’t kid yourself that doomsday is not going to come. The end is near.

This mistake is also in believing the past is the same as the present. He points to the example of China after the Great Leap Forward but he forgets that it was a different economic situation from now. Today there could not be a person who can engineer a famine like Mao did because there is nobody powerful enough to do so.

The second big mistake he makes is saying that “free market” cures everything. The free market would have prevented the Great Leap Forward famines. But it is not a cure all. He already pointed out that the hoarding is due to the greed of merchants. Fair enough, but isn’t that what the free market expects them to do? Is not the solution enforcement and regulations?

Then there are other stupid things that he wrote, like “rice has only gone up by 30 cents”. I think he doesn’t realise that Singapore has poor people. We didn’t have many poor people when we were growing up but that’s changed now. Yes, NTUC is doing its job keeping rice prices down but it’s not just an ant bite to some people.

I wonder why newspapers like to tell lies like this. They ought to be telling people: stop eating meat. Eat more vegetables. Stop using biofuel. Stop using cars. (And for goodness sake fix the bloody MRT!) But I guess nobody really wants to tell the bad news.

Addendum: it just came to my attention that Soylent Green in the movie of its name, is actually human meat. The movie depicts an apocalyptic scenario where people don’t have enough to eat, and we have factories murdering people and processing their flesh into food products. Some people wondered whether he didn’t know about Soylent green, or if he was being subversive. The former is quite unlikely – there has to be a reason why a person would purposely put in a fairly obscure movie reference, and that particular one. He gets brownie points for being subversive and wins back a little bit of respect from me.