My responses:

1. I’m not familiar with the case you mention in Orissa, but the combination of “Public Distribution System” and “India” suggest to me that the situation is very far from a free market to begin with. I’m going to go out on a limb on this one and suggest bad government, not capitalism, is the problem.

2. The consolidation of agriculture has been going for centuries, Brian, and is a necessary consequence of massive productivity gains. I suppose we could opt to keep peasants working on farms, but we’d have to pay more for food and they might prefer city jobs anyway. If companies are better placed to produce food than small farms, so be it.

4. The infrastructure problem has been addressed many times before by co-ops, and I question the sustainability of an industry where there isn’t a buck to be made by a third party in providing infrastructure.

5. I’m frankly surprised that you can call farmers small business people and not acknowledge that this makes them entrepreneurs. I suggest this is because you attach negative “Big Business” connotations to the word “entrepreneur”, whereas my previously stated definition is applicable: if you own the business and run it for profit, you are an entrepreneur, and in the business of taking risk. Many farmers may be in denial about this, but that’s the reality.

6. Inflammatory propaganda crap. For one thing a corporation is nothing more than a legal entity representing many people. It cannot have a mind or personality of its own, so the whole notion of clinical diagnosis is ludicrous, and insulting both to people associated with companies and psychology. It is pop-psychology at a vulgar, polemical extreme, fed to the credulous who share your “anti-corporate reflex” without having a fecking clue what actually goes on in corporations.

1. Hunger and markets. One scene that is burnt in my memory is that of Vandana Shiva observing two minutes silence after the terrorist attacks of S11. She is out there in Orissa comforting the relatives of ‘tribals’ who died of hunger after the Public Distribution System (of food) was dismantled as a loan condition from the World Bank. The money, and more, was spent on storage facilities for grain, I gather to set up an internal market. It resulted in 60,000 tonnes (more than twice the Australian harvest) rotting in the ‘godowns’ while the poor had no money to pay.

Not mass starvation, but bad enough. You’d never know how many died, as I am frankly sceptical of any statistics coming out of India.

I’d concede that war and bad government are the more prevalent causes, but the drive towards establishing markets accessible to the corporates is very disruptive.

2. Consolidation of agriculture. There are some serious arguments in favour of small farms and the drive to consolidation and corporate agriculture has some very undesirable features. But the process seems unstoppable, although some of the 4 million landless peasants in Brazil have had some success at reoccupying and squatting on the large estates. They’ll probably lose in the end, as will the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico.

3. We agree on export subsidies.

4. Pea growers in Tasmania. I agree about the vagaries of the market, but in many cases the growing of certain produce requires infrastructure - crushing mills for sugar, butter factories for dairying etc. When you have a small goods factory in the district, you expect it to use crops from the area and I think you have every right to feel dudded if they start shipping them in from around the world. The only way to stop it, though, would be through government intervention to slap on quotas. Here our govt has long given the game away, which is unusual around the world apart from New Zealand.

5. Farmers are entrepreneurs. It may be a matter of definitions, but I still think most of them aren’t. They are ‘boss people’ rather than workers and could be classified as small businesses. But most are not movers and shakers and are not higly innovative. Most, I think, try to minimise risk. They just want a modest income and not too much hassle. Joh Bjelke was an entrepreneur, borrowing to buy a tractor and plough in the depression and then going contract ploughing. Then he pioneered contract peanut threshing, then land clearing with dozers and chains. The rest of the pack followed.

6. Corporations as psychopaths. Lakan, linked to above, quotes Peter Drucker as saying “If you find an executive who wants to take on social responsibilities, fire him. Fast.”

Lakan reports on an interview he had with Milton Friedman, who says the new moralism in business is in fact immoral. Philanthropy is only justifiable if it contributes to the bottom line.

I probably ought to take a longer run at this one, but the notion of the psychopath is, I understand, considered a multi-factorial normal personality type, though some classify it as a personality disorder. Only about 3% of men and 1% of women are classified as psychopaths and only a small percentage of these end up being murderers or serial killers. Their leading characteristic is that they lack of empathy when others are suffering. They can make good soldiers.

Some-one has lined up the official WHO characteristics for a psychopath and found they line up pretty well with the characteristics of a corporation. Whether it is pop psychology or not, the claim is that the label fits and that it is more than a metaphor. The situation is exacerbated in the US by corporations being considered persons under the law (as distinct from and in some ways more privileged than natural persons.)

I tend to think that all large organistions, whether private or public, tend to be hierarchically organised and tend to have decisionmakers who are remote from the effects of their decisions.

Private stock holding corporations answer to shareholders. This almost always means a growth imperative. In this situation cooperation and triple bottom line planning usually perform best IMHO, but there is also exploitation, top-down management and bullying, not to mention the odd bit of fraud and deliberate deception, cooking the books etc. The means can be instrumental rather than necessarilly ethical. Most are somewhere in between or a mix. But we have every right to think that for most the bottom line is the bottom line.

So sorry if the term upset you, Fyodor, but I’ve heard it more than once. For a bloke who is a direct share investor I have a bit of an anti-corporate reflex. But I agree that the banks are much misunderstood.

7. I think we actually agree. The only difference with farmers is their ability to leverage political power.

Brian, thanks for your comments, and let me state I have no wish to offend you either. Consider our hands shaken on this point. On the issue at hand I’ll reply in point form to save space:

1. The problem of hunger in the world is complex, and not attributable to a single factor. However, where markets work, people tend to get fed. Where they don’t work, due to civil war, government corruption, etc. people come off second best. I can’t think of an instance of mass starvation in my lifetime that was caused by market failure rather than war and/or bad government.

2. Small farmers are losing out in developed countries, to more efficient, often corporatised agribusinesses that simply produce food more cheaply. We could do what the Europeans do and subsidise small farmers, but that’s not good for consumers (who pay more for food), taxpayers (who pay more tax) or other farmers (e.g. in poor countries) who don’t get subsidised. The consolidation of agriculture is hard for the small guys, but that’s business.

3. Export subsidies are indeed evil.

4. Regarding the pea-growers in Tasmania, I’ll repeat my earlier comments and add that the farmers do not have to grow peas, and nobody guaranteed them an income. I know many farmers, and they are very much aware of the vagaries of the market. Those who aren’t don’t last long.

5. Farmers ARE entrepreneurs, Brian. If you own your business, and you’re in it for profit, you are an entrepreneur. This means assuming and managing risk. Farmers who don’t want to manage these risks can sell up, just like any other industry.

6. I really object to the application of pop-psychology to corporations. A corporation is nothing more than a legal entity created to represent the interests of its shareholders. Operating for profit is not a psychopathic activity, and most companies are run well by competent, well-adjusted people. It’s easy to take a swipe at the banks because they are large, high-profile companies that make a lot of money, but most bank-bashers know SFA about the economics of the industry. It is competitive and banks do not earn ridiculous rates of return.

7. I understand where you’re coming from on the pain suffered by farmers as their businesses go under, but I see the same pain in lots of different industries. What angers me - and I think you’ve interpreted my anger as general callousness - is that we are supposed to treat one group of entrepreneurs differently from others because they have some greater moral or emotional claim on public support. I know these are not the arguments that you have used, but I believe this is your underlying motivation. I categorically refute that assertion, and resent the excessive political power of farmers, particularly under the current Federal government. It’s not good for the rest of us, and it’s not good for the country.

So sorry if I offended you. I mean that totally, as it is the very last thing I’d want to do.

On the matter at hand, let me say that I know zip about pea farmers in Tasmania, except that I’m pretty confident it is not marginal land.

Also, I don’t know the answers to the problems of world agriculture. There are many, particularly in the developing world, who think it should be special case and should be taken out of the world trading system as presided over by the WTO. This should not be dismissed out of hand, IMHO. Actually, it is a special case in that it was continually put in the too hard basket, and attempts to address it in recent years have been spectacularly unsatisfactory.

In the broad it seems that about 830 million people are deemed hungry, and something like 2 billion don’t have a satisfactory diet. Yet there seems to be excess food produced on the planet. You could argue a case of spectacular market failure. But similarly you could argue that trade within and between countries is not marketised enough.

Small-holder farmers seem to be in trouble all over the world. I understand they don’t do well in the US and the EU inspite of the subsidies. In Canada much farming is done in the spare time left after farmers earn their keep in off-farm jobs. The family farmer who doesn’t expand increasingly finds him/herself surrounded by monopolistic corporate commercial players, farm suppliers as well as those to whom they sell, who seem to squeeze them without compunction.

Subsidies inflate the cost of land and, yes, keep inefficient farmers in business. But the most offensive part of the subsidy game is the subsidy of exports, especially on the part of the US and the EU. At the same time they protect their own markets with tariffs and quotas. They thoroughly corrupt world markets with their practices and don’t seem to mind who they hurt.

Many developing countries produce their own food needs and grow cash crops for export. But with the IMF imposing ‘loan conditionalities’ which require them to open their markets from about 1990, some have found their cash producing economies devastated by subsidised produce from the rich countries.

Many of these issues came to a head at the WTO Ministerial at Seattle, were superficially resolved at Doha and then fell apart again at Cancun. Since then Brazil and India, with support from China, South Africa and the rest of the so-called G20, have taken the big guys on. Brazil and India were supposed to be representing the little guys, but it seems they did deals to suit themselves. The result was a deal at the WTO General Council last July wherein the US and the EU apparently got back on the track from which they had been derailed at Cancun.

The ‘global south’ see the July 2004 meeting as an institutional heist and are plotting to derail the Hong Kong Ministerial. FWIW I think they’ll fail.

Back to Tasmania. The alternative narrative is that the pea farmers did not grow up in a de-natured urban environment and then one day decide that they would go off and grow peas for a duopoly. I’m not saying you said they did, Fyodor, but you do imply more freedom of choice (as with the sailors on the merchant shipping) than IMHO they actually had. Rather, I suspect they are aging representatives of generations of family farmers, whose co-operative factory was at some stage corporatised. The end-game is that the factory is owned by a multinational (which Simplot is, not sure about McCain) with the decision sometimes being made in a different hemisphere.

Meanwhile on the farms over the decades there has been gradual mechanisation and industrialisation, which usually means debt. These guys are not owned by the land, as indigenous peoples often see it, but they are shaped by the land, the land has been their lifeworld, they are part of the land and the land is part of them.

I feel sorry for the poor bastards when they wake up in fright as the rug is pulled out or the squeeze finally reaches a critical point. They probably saw it coming, but many of these guys are not entrepreneurs. Nobody told them when they were young that they had to be such in order to survive on the land. It could have been me, but 50 years ago this year I decided to do a runner to the city.

So I’m not saying that we owe these guys a living. I do say, however, that if the French want to maintain their farmers on the land, then so be it, as long as they don’t destroy other lives with their subsidised exports.

But if it is prime land that is put to plantation forests (as it happens I have shares in such a company) then that is a waste and a shame.

I do think that we need a better way of handling readjustments for the losers. The dairy scheme was pretty brutal around the edges.

I do worry about the tendency to monopolistic corporations, and when I talk about psychopaths I am speaking of the behaviour of corporations rather than the actors within. I know not all corporations are like that, but the banks, for example, milk us pretty mercilessly, and large corporates dealing with commodities seem particularly prone to exploitation and externalising costs.

I’ll leave aside balance of payments and food security, for now at least, and just say that the pollution effects of ships hairing around the globe didn’t bother me until I read a study by Michael Cebon on the environmental implications of the US FTA. I don’t know the quality of his work and I can’t find it right now, but as I recall he quotes evidence that one particular environmental nasty is emitted by ships in the same quantity as all the motorised transport in the US. Given the problems of regulation and the likely increase I fell to thinking that open slather for shipping stuff around the planet might not be smart in the long term. At the very least it needs further study, as they say.

I’ve been over this a couple of times. It could be more fluent, but I hope not offensive. Apologies in advance if it is.

I invite all commentators who feel overly a-jibed to request an apology or explanation, and I will provide either, at my discretion. If YOU would like a particular instance addressed, please state it.

Are you suggesting that I won’t think or feel without your prompting? Did you consider that to be an insulting suggestion before you wrote it, or do you assume that as an example of homo sapiens oeconomicus I am incapable of emotional depth?

If I call you grandpa and recommend you get off your high horse, do you consider that perhaps I find your tone moralising and condescending? Or is it perhaps that you believe children should defer to their elders?

If you’re offended by anything I have said, I apologise unreservedly. As Nabsy might say, pub rules apply and I assume anyone who condescends to me is exposing themselves to return fire. If this is not the case with you, I apologise.

“I‚Äôve given you three reasons why it is a questionable idea to ship food halfway around the world and you haven‚Äôt answered any of them.”

As you’ve repeated your question, it’s only fair that I respond. You gave three reasons:

1. “Balance of payments” - buying imports isn’t good for the BoP, but we do it. A negative balance of payments is not in itself a problem. If it is cheaper to buy peas from offshore, it is more efficient to do so, and focus on producing goods and services where we have a comparative advantage.

2. “Food security” - as Jason pointed out, we produce more food than we consume. As I pointed out to EP, the issue of “strategic” food resources and “food security” is a convenient smokescreen for spending government money on marginal producers, not a good econonomic reason. I don’t buy it as an argument, and wouldn’t buy it if we had a food deficit. A lot of countries have food deficits, and manage via trade.

3. Transport pollution and shipboard crews - arguably the pollution caused by cargo ships is more than exceeded by the environmental degradation inflicted by farmers upon marginal land. Crew conditions may appear awful to you, but desperate people volunteer for these jobs. Propping up our farmers in order to put these people out of jobs is not a good argument.

The bottom-line is that if farmers in another country can produce peas more cheaply than we can, we need damn good reasons to spend taxpayers’ money propping up pea farmers. You haven’t provided one as yet, but I await your response.

I’m not only asking you to think, I’m asking you to feel. I’ve given you three reasons why it is a questionable idea to ship food halfway around the world and you haven’t answered any of them.

When I get back in tonight I’ll tell you why your narrative about “entrepreneurs” being unhappily screwed by duopolists is insufficient, wrongheaded and inappropriate.

You said:

“Nobody gives a stuff about the owners of textile factories or car parts factories.”

Happens I do, and the workers in them.

Jason, your point about export is a good one, and farmers make too much of it. I understand this particular issue is primarily about the home market with brands like Edgell’s, McCain’s and home brands.

Unproven assertion, EP. Miaow.

As a human, I have different priorities.

“Jason, we are desperate for surplus food in order to be able to export it, and still maintain a strategic surplus in times of need.”

If we produce more than we consume, there’s no need for a “strategic surplus”. “Strategic surplus” is also bullshit code for “I know better than the market what Australia needs”.

“The other main reason to subsidise farmers is to maintain our rural population. We already have too few people per square kilometre outside the cities ‚Äî we don‚Äôt need to see more migration to our already overcrowded urban centres.”

1. We don’t “need” to maintain our rural population. The country did fine before humans, and will do fine without them.

2. Our urban centres are only “overcrowded” [your word, not mine], because people want to live there. Why do you know better than they do?

“People like Fyodor are unable to see beyond simple-minded economic rationalist arguments to deeper considerations. It‚Äôs a shallow way to exist and I can only be glad I don‚Äôt suffer from it.”

I defer to your authority on intellectual depth.

* sniggers smugly *

Care to try again?

The other main reason to subsidise farmers is to maintain our rural population. We already have too few people per square kilometre outside the cities — we don’t need to see more migration to our already overcrowded urban centres.

People like Fyodor are unable to see beyond simple-minded economic rationalist arguments to deeper considerations. It’s a shallow way to exist and I can only be glad I don’t suffer from it.

Your argument runs something like this [or, rather, it would if you could construct a logical argument rather than cobbling together hackneyed prejudice and declamations]:

1. People need food.

2. Farmers produce food.

3. Farmers deserve subsidies.

It’s the jump from #2 to #3 that you’ve failed to defend, EP. Why do farmers deserve subsidies?

I’ll give you extra points, and maybe a chewtoy, if you can stay on-topic for once.

It’s a moot point in any case, as we’re not arguing about the abolition of agriculture in Australia you catnip-crazy commie. Letting marginal farmers go out of business is the rational approach to resource management, and will not result in the collapse of agriculture. If anything, it’s likely to make the surviving farmers more efficient and competitive.

What you’re saying is that a number of small entrepreneurs set up businesses to supply duopolists with a single product. The entrepreneurs knew there were only two buyers for their product, they knew they were taking on financial risk by leveraging themselves and they knew circumstance could change. Turns out the duopolists are screwing them over. That’s tough, but it happens all the time in all sorts of industries. Nobody gives a stuff about the owners of textile factories or car parts factories. Why are farmers more deserving of a handout?

Take off the rose-coloured glasses and get off your high horse.