As I pointed out in a previous post, it seems to be a law of nature that nature hates duplication, and will eliminate it. I assume that this is because nature (as God’s handiwork) hates waste, which duplication IS, and so puts a stop to it. We see this in the current world situation, where millions of people in poor countries face starvation because their usual sources of IMPORTED foodstuffs (including the US) have either reduced their exports, or greatly raised the price, or both. For many years, countries of the developed kind (the US, Europe, Australia, and the better-off Asian countries) have shipped colossal amounts of food for low or no cost to poor countries, precisely to prevent the starvation of their people. This led directly to the people of those countries reducing their efforts to feed themselves. Farming is hard work, and pays poorly, and when imported food is available cheaply, it seems better to move to the city, get a decent-paying job that has better hours than farming, and buy all the food necessary for living. Also, governments were free to pursue stupid, corrupt, evil policies that were either neglective or destructive of farmland and oppressive to farmers,accelerating the farmers’flight to the cities. Treehuggers from rich countries added to the problems by insisting on wrongheaded policies that were likewise anti-farm and anti-farmer. This all worked for awhile because of the availability of cheap food from other places. Now, those far-away places have changed THEIR farming practices and policies, and there is both less food available for export, and a much stronger market demand for it, and some is being diverted for fuel production, partly due to the pressure of the native treehuggers’ demands for a reduction in oil imports,drilling and use. All that happened over a fairly short period, and the poor countries, led as most are by poorly educated, greedy, short-sighted, stubborn, doctrinaire dictators, haven’t adapted yet to the change.
We can also see from this the HAZARDS of globalization for ALL countries. To the extent that we let ourselves become dependent on another country for a commodity, we lose the drive, and eventually the ability, to produce that commodity domestically. If, for some reason, that country then decides to raise the price of that commodity, or even to refuse anymore to sell it to us, we are at their mercy, if they have any. I am sure that part of the reason that we have less food to export is that so much of our farmland has been lost to development, so our ability to produce food has been lessened. We will NEVER get back to the amounts of crops we used to raise annually in America, and the fact that we import more and more of our food all the time means that, if that does not change, we will see an accelerating loss of farmland and therefore our ability to produce food. We will see some kind of OPEC of FOOD-exporting countries, and we will have food riots HERE.
May we learn from the sufferings of others, and NOT allow that to happen!
