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Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

>food products on an airplane destined for Europe. At the same time, another team was busy unloading sacks with food aid from a second plane.

while everyone should acknowledge the degree of poverty that is still rampant in countries like Ethiopia, that image is not particularly well suited to make a point.

It can be true that at the same time that Ethiopian farmers sell produce to Europe, while people from somewhere else try to alleviate poverty in the country.

It would not make sense for farmers in Ethiopia to stop trading food with the world at large just because people in the country are hungry. In fact, depending on whatever economic transaction is going on, the food coming in might be significantly cheaper than the food going out. Trade and reducing poverty or hunger are not at odds.

The goal should be to generate better incomes and social services for poor Ethiopians, not stopping businesses from trading with Ethiopia globally.

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> It can be true that at the same time that Ethiopian farmers sell produce to Europe.

It is mentioned multiple times in the movie, and in these comments, that it is not Ethiopian farmers those who trade with anyone. Foreign corporations on incognito or behind domestic providers are those who suck money out of a poor country presumably without or with astonishingly weak trade legislature. More strikingly, doing so at the cost of famine of the blatantly low paid workers while violating not only ethics but also human rights of those exploited humans.

If those corporations were so savvy investors they would make profit at home under well ordered trade system.

Farming high value cash crops for export and importing rice should be perfectly fine, agreed. But the problem of foreign investors taking all the gains abroad, forever, after striking some very one-sided deals through power imbalance and/or knowledge imbalance and/or one-time paying off some representatives remains untouched by that argument.

Actually I believe that for a country rich in cash crop potential, some form of communism might actually be not so bad (e.g. free market with a strong legal bias favoring the formation of co-ops in agriculture). Certainly not worse than an economy dominated by a few plantation lords (doubly so if those are foreign entities), if that's the only alternative. I wouldn't suggest anything for Ethiopia though, wouldn't suggest anything, just too dang little knowledge about the place (and my personal threshold for feeling comfortable with playing armchair president is embarrassingly low).

>Actually I believe that for a country rich in cash crop potential, some form of communism might actually be not so bad

The international community / western marketplace obliterates any country that dares expropriate / nationalize the lands of the (white colonialist) landholding class.

Just look at how the West has cut off Cuba and Venezuela.

> Just look at how the West has cut off Cuba

The US cut off Cuba, but even with US retaliatory sanctions much of the rest of the West did not.

Not true in Ethiopia's case, it was never a colony for any meaningful amount of time.

It defies the "african countries are poor only due to the oppressive white colonialism" narrative.

EDIT: As for Venezuela, 1 USD was ~6-7 Venezuelan bolívars in 2013.

Last time I checked it was roughly 1,100,000. A staggering 180 000 times drop in only 5 years.

External political climate remained roughly the same in that time span.

Add Guatemala 1953 for an even more blatant example. Or the ousting of Allende in Chile. Nothing short of disgusting.

These are all solvable problems without requiring the expropriation of foreign investors. A sensible legislature which allows workers to unionize and a tax collecting agency which actually does its job - in short working institutions - can reduce most of these problems.

But what happens most of the time in these unstable African governments is that they gravitate from one extreme to another: Either they enforce zero workers rights and exert very little control over foreign investors - allowing them to pay bribes to individuals rather than taxes which would benefit state run institutions. Or they nationalize every last farm and shop in the country, scaring away foreign investment and know-how and end up with lower productivity and mismanagement of local industries.

You are saying this, as if the decision to strip the population from their subsistence and working rights was made ONLY by local politicians. This is in fact a collusion between politicians and foreign investors. In this collusion, foreign investors have much more responsibility because, after all, local corrupt politicians have less opportunities than foreign capital owners, and therefore it is harder for them to make ethical decisions. Moreover, developed countries love to put all the responsibility of corruption in the hands of local politicians, as if they were really supporting in some way the non-corrupt ones, which is completely untrue as anyone from a third world country will point out.

I agree that it's a collusion between politicians and foreign investors. I wouldn't go so far as saying that one party has more responsibility than the other. But I would add a third party that also carries responsibility: The electorate - if the country in question has a democracy.

Once a country has reached certain threshold of poverty, elections can get very sensitive to bought support. Maybe not direct, checked "money for vote" transactions, but gaining "genuine" support by being generous (genuine as in the voters don't realize that they are being manipulated).

And if toxic investors are clever, they might even support every major candidate a little: they have already reached their goal if the eventual winner believes that his secret supporter was acting as kingmaker. Might be much cheaper in total than actually forcing a result with money.

Even in a mature democracy, like in the USA, it is difficult for voters to determine who is acting in their interest due to the multiple layers of non-declared interests that exist in each political party. Now imagine what happens in a poor country. Your supposition that the electorate is responsible for this is as true as assuming that a victim of theft is responsible for the robbery.

It's actually historically the normal case that governments try for the sensible middle road, then get pushed towards communism by the West. Allende, for instance, was pretty liberal - but the USA was convinced he was a communist, and torpedoed the Chilean economy.

On the contrary, the image itself is uncomfortably well suited to make a point. This comment is a classic example of defending an obvious absurdity of capitalism by appealing to the overall system.

It's true that individuals are all acting rationally, and that imposing limits on exports would not be a panacea. However, at the most basic level, it is monstrous that food exports are happening in the context of local starvation. The rationality of the outcome within capitalism shouldn't blind us to the absurdity of the outcome itself.

There's really nothing absurd about this. A country like Ethiopia consists of independent actors. Someone might sell food abroad to Europe, someone in Europe might decide to send food to Ethiopia.

There's really no way to stop this other than to outlaw all exports of food while starting to centrally distribute food in Ethiopia. This is neither productive nor would it reduce the amount of starving people in Ethiopia. In fact, it would increase the amount of poverty.

There are certainly poor people who have trouble affording basic goods in California. Still the solution is not to stop all exports of goods from California to Washington and vice versa. This would just make everybody worse off.

A thing could be both morally/ethically absurd and, when viewed through the tinted lens of capitalism, totally logical, rational, and expected.

Any country that pretend to develop and keep some independence need to prioritize a minimum of food production. That's a strategic need. Europe is a good example of that, where food production is strongly protected. I bet is the same in the States.

The point of the original post is that those "independent actors" are not "independents", not from Ethiopia.

> Any country that pretend to develop and keep some independence need to prioritize a minimum of food production. That's a strategic need.

To turn this back to software, I am strongly reminded of Joel Spolsky’s discussion of when and what to outsource:

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/10/14/in-defense-of-not-...

“If it’s a core business function — do it yourself, no matter what.”

- "independent actors are acting rationally in this situation."

- "the only alternative is this particular strawman policy, which would make things worse"

- "there's nothing absurd about people starving due to preventable causes"

> it is monstrous that food exports are happening in the context of local starvation

This is only absurd if you consider the nation-state to be the fundamental unit of mutual aid.

If you consider a different division of population - the corporation, or the city-state, or the tribe, or the individual, for example - it makes perfect sense. Even before "monstrous" capitalism, you'd get plenty of situations where one tribe would actively pillage the farms of a neighboring tribe - food "exports" and local starvation.

You might argue that this is monstrous as well, and I'd even agree with you, but that's an argument against being shitty to your fellow human beings, and not specifically against capitalism. Capitalism is just yet another definition of "tribe", where the corporation that employs you is the tribe that you owe allegiance to, damn all the other tribes.

It seems to me that the problem is that open markets (capitalism is too general for this I think) is sold like the perfect panacea that will solve all the problems, even if the evidence is against it.

The path followed for development by the developed nations have nothing to do with the path they (we?) recommend to underdeveloped nations.

Yes, before capitalism, which is bad, things were even worse. I can critique both capitalism and what came before it. And it's not just an argument"against being shitty."

Capitalism really doesn't have anything to do with tribalism though. Workers don't have any allegiance whatsoever to their employer beyond that dictated by the imperative of not starving to death. The structural constraint under critique is the one where capital seeks to maximize profits regardless of the human cost. So, when a grower exports food for money instead of giving it to starving people for free, that's what I'm talking about.

> It's true that individuals are all acting rationally

At least one party in the food market isn't acting rationally. The situation where food is produced in Ethiopia for consumption in Europe and food is produced in Europe for consumption in Ethiopia could equivalently be solved by keeping the food in its country of origin and everyone saves on transport costs.

But maybe the Ethiopian "food" was just something like coffee beans which can't really feed a population, in which case there also isn't any problem with exporting them.

That is a simplistic argument that ignores trade. Sure Ethiopia could grow it own food: cut down the coffee trees (bush?) and plant something else. What you are missing is that those foods that would replace the coffee tree don't grow as well in Ethiopia as coffee does.

Both Ethiopia and Europe would be worse off for your plan. Ethiopia because instead of the profit from coffee they subsistence farm something that doesn't grow as well. Europe because they don't have coffee and they get even more of the crops they already grow too much of.

Now some have pointed out that the profit from Ethiopian coffee might not got to Ethiopia. That might be true (I don't know), but even if so, Ethiopia retains more money than if they quit exporting coffee and the profits.

This is all well and good as long as Ethiopia can buy more food then it could have grown in those coffee fields.

Unfortunately, it also puts it at the mercy of forex rates, collapse of their monoculture, food shortages in other parts of the world causing rising food prices, any disruptions in foreign trade... Any of those things go south, and now you have millions of starving people. Sitting on a pile of coffee beans.

Why do you think the US government pushes billions of dollars into agriculture subsidies? Wouldn't it be so much cheaper if it just imported all of its food from abroad - where farmers get paid ~$1/day, instead of $6/hour.

There's a simple reason - it's because it doesn't want food riots, caused by some factor outside of their control. Nothing brings about regime change faster then the price of bread. [1] No well-ran country wants to be dependent on food, or oil imports.

Ironically, these same agriculture subsidies are what cripples agriculture in other nations - they can't always compete with Uncle Sam's subsidies.

[1] Just ask Mubarak. Or the Romanovs.

> everyone saves on transport costs

These things became more common in the modern world because transport costs fell so low that it doesn't matter in most cases.

>Trade and reducing poverty or hunger are not at odds.

This is a statement that is not necessarily true on its face.

When the country's currency is gradually inflated away to worthlessness [1] and economic prospects are limited for non-landowning classes of people, trade and reducing poverty can indeed be at odds. You need only look at history [2] to see the real effect imperialist export policies can have on a population.

1. https://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=USD&to=ETB&view=10Y 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)

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