On Sun, 28 Jul 2002, Ulhas Joglekar wrote:
> > I don't see at all how an alternate development of the countryside > > contradicts advanced industrial production. This seems like a false > > dichotomy. > > Michael, I am not sure this is true of industrial crops such as cotton, > oilseeds, sugarcane etc. Maybe not. It's perfectly possible that some crops are better industrialized and some not. Or it's possible that all are better industrialized. I'd just like to see some reliable figures and causal explanations of why this is so. But just to take your first example of cotton, are we sure cotton really is an exception? Our man Roger Thurow at the Wall Street Journal (who seems to be working Mali beat) wrote an article that was posted to Pen-l a month ago that seems to suggest the opposite: Thurow, Roger and Scott Kilman. 2002. "U.S. Subsidies Create Cotton Glut That Hurts Foreign Cotton Farms." Wall Street Journal (26 June): p. A1. "Cotton could be a key engine of poverty reduction for Mali and nearby states, according to a joint study by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. In West and Central Africa, cotton cultivation employs more than two million rural households. African cotton, much of which is hand-picked, is just as good as American cotton. The report estimates that the removal of U.S. subsidies -- which account for much of the $5 billion a year in subsidies world-wide -- would produce a drop in U.S. production that would lead to a short-term rise in the world price of cotton. In turn, that would increase revenue to West and Central African countries by about $250 million. That is a princely sum in a region where vast numbers of people live on less than one dollar a day." "Instead, the opposite is happening. The new farm bill increases the amount of money a U.S. cotton farmer can count on making this year by at least 16%. At the same time, in Mali, where cotton makes up nearly half the nation's export revenue, the government is telling cotton farmers they will be getting about 10% less this year from the state cotton company." If Mali employs 2 million households in cotton cultivation -- combined with its general level of income -- it seems like it must be pretty damn unindustrialized. And yet on some level it's able to compete with the most industrialized process in the world? Or could if there were no subsidies? Doesn't that at least suggest that we can't accept at face value the claim that the industrialization of agriculture, even of non-food export crops, necessarily leads to unmatchable leaps in productivity? And mind you, this is before applying science and technology and capital to the counterfactual task of increasing Malian output within its small scale framework. So it could be that the John Henry's of agriculture are not by nature doomed. It's counterintuitive, I admit. But our intuition comes from the dominant common sense, constantly repeated. Which has turned out to be wrong at times before. I'm not saying for sure it's wrong here. I just want to hear a good defense. Michael
