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Bad ideas on economics

I see that the former BBC presenter of a programme about gardens and gardening, Monty Don, has recently argued that we should aim to be self-sufficient in food. The trouble with such calls for self-sufficiency is that the unit in which such activity should occur is not spelled out. Does Mr Don think trade should be confined to within Britain, or within a region of it, or a village? Has this character no idea of how starvation frequently accompanied those societies cut off from the benefits of trade? Has he no notion of the benefits of trade, division of labour, regional specialisation, etc?

Of course I have nothing against owners of land looking to grow their own food if they want – how could I? But of course I doubt that Mr Don or other self-sufficiency types want to adopt such a grass-roots policy, to excuse the pun. I grow most of my own herbs, for instance. People have at times brewed their own beer to avoid the insipid stuff on sale in the shops, and as a result, this encouraged the “micro-brewery” movement in the US and elsewhere. But that is an example of enterprise at its best. The trouble with Mr Don, I suspect, is that his approach tends to be accompanied by calls to restrict imports, and the like. I remember once watching a programme in which Mr Don went to Cuba, and presented a remarkably uncritical, almost fawning eulogy to the wonders of Cuban home-grown food. He is quoted gushingly by some Cuban website here. Ugh.

Talking of bad ideas, it does appear that Naomi Klein’s argument that crises provide fok with an “excuse” to “impose” free markets seems to have been rather turned over. In fact, the current crisis seems to have provided politicians and their media supporters with a great excuse to bash free markets, trade and entrepreneurship. It may be that eventually, of course, the disastrous consequences of interventionism will cause a reaction back towards free markets, in which case Klein will be correct, but not in a way she realises.

David Boaz has a good article on this issue.

23 comments to Bad ideas on economics

  • Bendle

    It’s certainly a bizarre ambition – I wonder if the British Isles have EVER been self-sufficient in food in the last 2000 years. We certainly wouldn’t have chips or tea if mr Don had been King a few centuries ago.

    I’d have thought you have to take the issue of long-term security of food supply seriously, though, unless you decide our trade routes will never be threatened by war again.

    I suspect Mr Don has another agenda here, ie the promotion of more organically-produced food. There is a sleight-of-hand performed by the new sentimentalist food lobby which tends to equate organic/premium/”sustainable” food with “local”. It’s nonsense. An intensively-produced chicken is more or less the same thing, and has the economic significances, if it is produced in Thailand or just down the road.

  • Kevin B

    To give Mr. Don some credit, I reckon he’s just mouthing platitudes that he hasn’t really thought through. On the few times I’ve seen him on the box, he doesn’t come across as the brightest petunia in the flower bed.

    Having said that, the intellectuals that promote these ideas probably have thought them through, and I strongly suspect that to them the starvation that frequently accompanies these sort of policies is a feature, not a bug.

    I’ve said before that I think they want to return us to the 17th century, with them as the Lords of the Manor and us, those of us that survive, as the serfs.

  • RAB

    I seem to remeber reading somewhere lately, that to make Britain self sufficient in food, you would have to reduce the population to about 17 million.
    The house I was born in had a really huge garden.
    At the bottom of which was our vegetable garden in which we grew everything that will grow in Britain, from potatoes through peas and beans cabbage etc etc.So we really were self sufficient in vegetables.
    But the only reason it was there (it had been a Tennis court before WW2) was the previous owners had dug for Victory.
    Nothing wrong in growing your own. I wish I still lived there in some ways. First being a tight fisted git, it would save me a lot of money, and second I like my food as fresh as possible. But bugger organic. We used to use pesticides etc The only difference I can discern between organic and ordinary is the bloody price of the organic!

  • Laird

    Hey, why should politicians and professional economists have a monopoly on “bad ideas on ecomonics”? There are more than enough to go around!

  • Laird

    Oops. “Economics.” Typo noted.

  • Kevin B

    Wasn’t ecognomics something out of a Terry Pratchett book?

    (Oops, sorry Sir Terry. And well deserved if I may say so.)

  • Paul Marks

    First the idea is not practical.

    Britain is smaller than New Zealand – and has about sixty million people, as opposed to about five million people.

    Secondly even if the idea was practical it would be a corrupt ripoff – just as the Corn Laws (repealed in 1846) were.

    This does not mean that I do not wish for profitable British farming – indeed I would argue that by the early years of the 20th century such an industry had finally emerged (after the great difficulties of the late 19th century). But then the First World War came along and messed it all up – as it did so many things.

    Why do ignorant people (not “morons” – I should not be so loose with language, when I mean people who are ignornate of economic principles I should say “ignorant”) get such chances to come out with their nonsense?

    Because the general background is ignorance.

    After all most academics (and, therefore, media people and politicians) think that increasing govenment spending and the fiat money supply is a good thing to do in a recession.

    And this doctrine is a lot more absurd than people who want to “protect” the farming industry.

    At least one can make some sort of national security argument for “protection” for farming.

    “The economy is in trouble – let us spend more money to stimulate it” is just headbanging insanity.

  • RobtE

    I wonder if the British Isles have EVER been self-sufficient in food in the last 2000 years.

    Well, certainly not in the 20th century. The extent of this came as something of a surprise to me:
    “At the beginning of World War II, the UK imported 55 million tons of foodstuffs per year (70%), including more than 50% of its meat, 70% of its cheese and sugar, nearly 80% of fruits and about 90% of cereals and fats.”

    Hmm. OK. Twenty years ago I lived in small-town America. We had a small veg patch where we grew beans, tomatoes and sweetcorn. But then again, we had American summers, where the corn was supposed to be “knee-high by the 4th of July.” Now I live in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. We cannot grow sweetcorn here. Even tomatoes require a glasshouse.

    So let’s say I become self-sufficient. Let’s say I decide, like the oh-so-slappable Pip Archer, that for Lent I will eat nothing not grown within five miles of where I live. What does leave me? Potatoes, maybe? Cabbage? Do we grow turnips in the Northeast?

    Hmm. This isn’t exactly sounding very healthy, let alone interesting. Perhaps we’d like to spend the next 40 days eating Woolton Pie. No? I don’t think so either.

  • Eric

    To give Mr. Don some credit, I reckon he’s just mouthing platitudes that he hasn’t really thought through. On the few times I’ve seen him on the box, he doesn’t come across as the brightest petunia in the flower bed.

    That’s giving him credit? Wow, I’d hate to see what not giving him credit looks like.

    I find gardening enjoyable, myself, but I’m under no illusion this makes any kind of economic sense. Isn’t civilization all about task differentiation?

  • Bendle

    I wonder if the British Isles have EVER been self-sufficient in food in the last 2000 years.

    Yes RobtE, I was getting a bit carried away there. I imagine the big change came with the steamships that allowed for mass importation of grain from North America 200 or so years ago. I was trying to make the point, in line with what you say, that many of our basic staple foods began as “imports”. Potatoes we all know about; cabbages and turnips were introduced by the Romans.

    My family had a small farm in Yorkshire for several generations, but finally went out of business a few years ago in circumstances which were privately quite heartbreaking. I feel sure this was at least partly due to effects of the CAP. This might have been conceived to ensure security of supply for Europe, but it has been disastrous for British farmers, the gripping fear of losing subsidy leading to terrible business decisions, and driving them into the hands of people who certainly do not have their best interests at heart.

  • Eric earns the economics badge of honor. Take away division of labor and trade, and you have Juche. Sure, you could grow tomatoes even in the Antarctic, as some nutty scientists demonstrated, but that does not make it a good idea.

  • No RAB, you didn’t read that “somewhere”. You read it via my blog.

    I’ll do Mr Don a deal. I will go self-sufficient when Felicity Kendal marries me and Margot and Jerry move in next door to bale me out when the inevitable shit hits the fan.

  • Eric nails it. Civilisation is about task differentiation. I know that, Adam Smith knew that and everyone should know that.

  • @Paul Marks, speaking about food self-sufficiency

    First the idea is not practical.

    You’d be surprised. The UK hasn’t been self-sufficient in food since the late 18th century, with the massive increase in population following the Industrial Revolution.

    However, currently the UK agricultural sector, while only 4% of the economy, produces by volume in excess of 90% of the UK’s total food requirement. This isn’t to say 90% of all food consumed in the UK is produced domestically, as we export quite a bit. Contrast that with the figures during the Second World War when British agriculture was a significantly larger part of the economy, but barely produced half of the UK’s food needs.

    Get rid of the crippling handicap of the GM luddites and the CAP, and the UK could easily produce 100%+ of domestic food requirements, even if we become the most populous country in Europe with 70 million.

    That’s not to say that we should of course, merely to say that, if needed, we could.

    I personally would prefer that we continue to trade stuff we’ve got for stuff we want, as, in the modern era, we always have.

  • Bendle

    However, currently the UK agricultural sector, while only 4% of the economy, produces by volume in excess of 90% of the UK’s total food requirement

    Edward can I ask your source for the 90% figure? The biggest estimate I have ever seen is 75%.

  • Bendle writes:

    Edward can I ask your source for the 90% figure? The biggest estimate I have ever seen is 75%.

    Bendle, my figure was from MAFF statistics showing 95% self-sufficiency in food, but the numbers are from 1983. Looking at current statistics, DEFRA estimates 75% for 2007, as you state. For those interested, DEFRA’s current publication Ensuring the UK’s Food Security in a Changing World will supply the numbers.

    My point remains I think. For example, the UK is currently a net exporter of wheat; which may surprise some people as we’re hardly Saskatchewan! We could be self-sufficient in food if we had to be given the advances in agricultural technology… but we don’t have to be. And that’s a good thing I believe.

  • Pa Annoyed

    If you allow nuclear-powered multi-storey hydroponic farms as a possibility, we can be theoretically self-sufficient on a much smaller area than even the above indicates.
    (See chapter 6 of The Ultimate Resource – and I’m sure technology has moved on since then.)

    The question as so often is not technological feasibility, but what is economically most efficient. That Britain only supplies 75% of its needs does not imply that’s all it could manage, only that this is what the current economics supports. We could easily be self-sufficient if we wanted to be, but it’s more efficient to import it, and by the magic of the market’s allocation of labour, we all benefit.

  • Bendle

    The question as so often is not technological feasibility, but what is economically most efficient.

    But surely you’re not saying that food exports and imports are governed by free markets? Various subsidy systems around the world make the use of the word “efficient” suspect in this context. When combined with the near monopoly in the international grain trade, they create a trade system that makes a nonsense of the idea of a “market”.

    It’s worth bearing in mind, when anyone talks about food prices, that the CAP costs the British about £6.5bn annually.

  • Pa Annoyed

    Not free markets, no.

    Subsidies and tariffs are a context to the market, and it finds the best way it can of making money in their presence. Sometimes that’s to milk the subsidy instead of the cows. But when it decides on the cows, it generally does so with efficiency in mind.

    The protectionist subsidies are working to stop imports, and the green subsidies working to reduce land use. If we’re still importing stuff and growing it in fields nevertheless, you can be confident there’s a good reason for it.

    £6.5bn / 60m = £100 each. That would be £2 a week per person on our food bills, on average. Annoying and unnecessary, yes. But would that really be enough to stop me buying hydroponic veg, if I had the choice? I’m not convinced.

    Hydroponics are in commercial use for some applications, and even farmscrapers are being taken seriously, but they haven’t taken off. My point was simply that this is a matter of economics, not feasibility. Electric lights and power cost.

    The Greens’ talk of “sustainability” is the most pernicious Malthusian nonsense. It’s a murderous, deranged philosophy. We have to reduce our population to 17m, eh? And to use claims that we can only provide a fraction of our food needs to support it is something I felt a need to comment on.

  • Bendle

    I see what you mean. And how interesting to see the Greens’ sustainability arguments in Malthusian terms – that had never occurred to me before. Likewise the hydroponics.

    I commented re free markets because in the past some MAFF and DEFRA ministers have countered British farmers’ criticisms of Government policy by telling them they need to become more efficient in order to compete on the market with European and American producers. I think Margaret Becket made exactly this point a few years back. In fact British farmers are among the world’s most efficient, but the iniquities in the CAP can still leave them unable to compete on price.

  • Pa Annoyed

    Agreed. And you made a valid point. Unfortunately, I can’t always fit in every caveat, clarification, and footnote I’d need to make a blog comment watertight. 🙂

    Many of the Greens’ theories are fundamentally Malthusian. If you’ve never read it, Julian Simon’s book that I linked to above is highly recommended. Even as a free-marketeer, I found it an eye-opener.

  • Bendle

    Thanks for the tip, Pa Annoyed. What I’ve read of the chapter so far seems fascinating.

  • Pa Annoyed

    Don’t forget the rest of the book.

    (And a number of his other books and articles are good too.)