Yesterday, Pres. Bush referred to the huge subsidies the US government gives to farmers to grow corn for conversion into ethanol, a car fuel, by saying:
"the truth of the matter is it's in our national interests that our farmers grow energy, as opposed to purchasing energy from parts of the world that are unstable or may not like us."
For many years, those two words "national interest" have been widely used in US political discussions as a kind of conversation-stopping trump card. "Oh! The 'national interest' is at stake! Then I'd better stop criticizing the president!" -- that was the kind of reaction past leaders sought, and too often won. But who defines this slippery thing called the "national interest", anyway? In Chap. 7 of Re-engage!, I write:
[I]n line with the human security precept that true security is people-centered rather than state-centered, we can start thinking about our own country’s national interest in a new, more people-centered way, very different from the “big power” way it has generally been understood until now.
I then go on to ask some questions about how the adoption of this definition of the US "national interest" might actually change many aspects of our relationship with the rest of the world. (Posing queries intended to stimulate further discussion is a very Quaker thing to do. Anyway, I hope you find these queries in my book thought-provoking, when you read them.)
This currently mounting global food crisis is an instance in which we certainly need to adopt the people-centered rather than big-business-centered definition of "national interest".
It is certainly not in our interest, as US citizens, that the activities of our country's very well-funded Big Ag sector and the financial sectors that have been speculating heavily in foodstuffs-- and fuel-- over recent months should be allowed to continue to pursue policies that are driving hundreds of millions of our fellow-humans in poor countries into hunger, and towards outright, directly life-threatening starvation.
These big business sectors need to be effectively controlled and regulated by a political leadership that understands-- finally!-- that the greed of US car-owners should never be allowed to over-ride the right that all the world's men, women, and children have to adequate and assured sources of nutrition. (Elsewhere in the book, by the way, I note that most "rights" activists in the US have focused far too tightly on issues of civil and political rights around the world, and have given short shrift to the frequently far more pressing issues of social and economic rights.)
The Washington Post's smart and thoughtful business columnist Steve Pearlstein has a good column in today's paper on the role that speculators have been playing in the current food crisis. For those of you who are interested, the whole of the column is worth reading. (As was his previous column, here. )
Some highlights from today's Pearlstein:
Speculators have always played a prominent role in commodities markets, but in the past year, they have literally overwhelmed them, causing a dramatic increase in trading volume, volatility and prices and disrupting many of the normal relationships between producers and end-users.
Many of these were the same hedge funds and hot-money investors who had gorged on sovereign debt of developing countries, tech and telecom stocks, subprime mortgages and commercial real estate and now needed a new thing to focus on. Others -- including, it is said, some sovereign wealth funds -- looked to commodities as a hedge against the falling dollar. But perhaps the biggest push came from pension funds, foundations and university endowments whose managers had all gone to the same conferences and read the same academic papers, suggesting that a basket of commodity futures would provide a good hedge against stock and bond market declines.
...[T]he Bank for International Settlements estimates that the value of all the derivative contracts traded on the unregulated over-the-counter markets surged from about $3 trillion in the spring of 2005 to more than $8 trillion today. Whatever the number, it's hard to imagine that it wasn't a significant factor in skyrocking prices...
... [T]he only people who don't believe speculation is driving a commodities bubble are the big commodity traders and the commodities exchanges, which are profiting handsomely from the soaring prices and trading volumes, and the regulators at the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, whose economists cannot seem to find statistical evidence that financial investors have had much of an impact on commodity prices.
US citizens need to start acting responsibly and quickly to bring these devastating speculations in basic foodstuffs under some form of rational and accountable control. This is in our direct interest as a citizenry, since so many of our own citizens are being harmed by the food-price rises.
But in today's irreversibly hyperconnected world it is always, also, in our interest to make sure that actions taken by our government and our fellow-citizens on Wall Street, in Big Ag, and other big-business sectors stop inflicting harm on the world's poorest, most vulnerable people.
(Cross-posted at Just World News.)
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