On Politics

Say you’re a scientist and you want to send a grant to the National Science Foundation (NSF). According to The Rules, you will pro -pose a detailed plan of future work. In some (more theoretical) fields this is absurd: you have to do half the work in order to write that plan! And in other (less theoretical) fields, your grant will be reviewed by... See more

Rather, they were trying to work around some rules that they saw as silly and inflexible barriers that were preventing them from accomplishing something important.

However, most governments see this as an add-on, not a substitution. Rather than removing the existing supports or reducing the existing supports for staples, governments have just added sup -ports for other crops. That creates some marginal improvement for some of the other crops, but your fundamentals don’t change. The crop-neutrality argument... See more

A farmer can’t say, for exam -ple, “I’m getting a better price for onions in the market, so maybe I should switch from rice to onions.” The onion production doesn’t have the support system that rice production does, so onion production tends to be much riskier.

The second is that after the forma -tion of the World Trade Organization in 1995, international trade in food became very prevalent. In many of the big population centers in Africa, it’s often cheaper to import food from other countries than it is to grow domestically. The terms of trade have made it very hard to create a competitive supply system... See more

Rice and wheat productivity went from one (metric) tonne per hectare to four, five, even six times that. In the case of millet, we’re still talking about going from a tonne to maybe two.