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Originally Posted by Charlatan
This isn't a "win" for socialist policy per se. Rather, it is an indication that the key is a balanced system. Neither a completely free market, nor a completely planned market would be an ideal.
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So, it's got nothing to do with the worldwide influence (domination ?) of US corporatism (government welfare subsidies to companies like ADM) and US corporate executive criminality and collusion with corrupt or misguided politicians in high places in state and federal government, resulting in price fixing of food products and food growing staples like seed and fertilizer? Seed, for example, is intentionally designed by US agribusiness suppliers to yield crops with infertile seed.
The subsistence farmers of Malawi should not all be growing corn, or maize. It is the primary diet of their children from the moment they are weaned, and it <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=pubmed&uid=14734876&cmd=showdetailview&indexed=google">stunts their growth</a> from the outset because it is lacking as a "be all, end all" nutritional staple.
Malawi has a fragile ecosystem with huge lake Malawi containing the world's greatest diversity of fish species in one location. The country is one of the poorest and most HIV plagued, per capita, in the world.
This story seems to be about what is best for US agribusiness, whether it is dumping subsidized, surplus food in food aid programs, or selling artificial fertilizer and genetically engineered corn seed to a country that cannot afford to purchase it or cope with the effects of it on it's ecosystem and it's peoples' long term nutrition.
They should be encouraged to grow indigenous crops that are drought resistant and nutritionally diverse, and sustained by compost produced, natural fertilizer, and planted with seed that is not infertile and expensive.
We're from the country with the corporations that have kept selling pesticides banned here, to foreign countries, and push tobacco products, using advertising and other promotions long illegal in the US, to attempt to addict young foreign residents.
Around the world, we export our corporatist goals in a "slow mo" version of what our corporatist alliance has accomplished in Iraq....the result is that we distort their economies and societies to "soften them up" as new targets for out products, which they mostly do not need and cannot sustainably afford.