Food and agriculture have been getting closer scrutiny is recent weeks. There's nothing like food riots to get media attention. One theme that has emerged is that the policies and attitudes of corpulent western societies are devastating to those less well off.

I've linked and discussed a few commentaries as they were published, and now there are commentaries about the commentaries, each highlighting some aspect. The focus seems to be sharpening and the bad finger is pointing at paleo-environmentalists, green posers, food fetishists and the like.

John Tierney: Greens and Hunger

This issue is timely today not just because of the current food shortages but because greens are calling for vast sums of money to be spent off future climate change. And just as money was diverted from agricultural research for environmental projects in the 1980s, there’s a danger that immediate problems in poor countries will be shortchanged by pursuing the long-term agenda of wealthy Westerners, as Bjorn Lomborg has been arguing. When I wrote about Dr. Lomborg’s proposal to focus less on climate change and more on problems like malnutrition and disease, he told me: “I don’t think our descendants will thank us for leaving them poorer and less healthy just so we could do a little bit to slow global warming. I’d rather we were remembered for solving the other problems first.”

His column was prompted by an article by Keith Bradsher and Andrew Martin: World’s Poor Pay Price as Crop Research Is Cut

Now, a reckoning is at hand. Growth of the global food supply has slowed even as the population has continued to increase, and as economic growth is giving millions of poor people the money to buy more food.

With demand beginning to outstrip supply, prices have soared, and food riots have erupted that have undermined the stability of foreign governments. . .

But cuts in agricultural research continue. The United States is in the midst of slashing, by as much as 75 percent, its $59.5 million annual support for a global research network that focuses on improving crops vital to agriculture in poor countries. . .

The biggest cutbacks have come in donations to agriculture in poor countries from the governments of wealthy countries and in loans from development institutions that the wealthy governments control, like the World Bank. Such projects include not only research on pests and crops but also programs to help farmers adopt improved methods in their fields. . .

Additional factors prompted wealthy countries to shift their donations away from agriculture. For instance, advocacy groups criticized some of the environmental problems arising from intensive farming, weakening support for the Green Revolution. And urgent new priorities like the AIDS crisis in Africa captured the world’s attention.

Advocates for agriculture fought a losing battle to stop the cutbacks — nowhere more than in the World Bank, the huge institution in Washington that makes low-interest loans to poor countries for development projects.

Andy Revkin jazzed on that theme extended it: The Food and Energy Research Gaps

When I started reading, I was immediately struck by the parallel to a 2006 story I wrote for our ongoing Energy Challenge series on dwindling federal and private funding for basic research on energy frontiers, even as scientists were projecting energy demand is likely to triple or more as the world heads toward 9 billion people seeking a decent life.

Over and over, there have been warnings about the importance of sustaining a vigorous scientific and technological enterprise, in part by invigorating science education and also by investing some public wealth exploring the edges of knowledge. . .

Societies and economies today are built on advances in technologies and practices in fields like agriculture and energy that were spurred by significant public investment a few decades ago. But there doesn’t seem to be much evidence that the current generation is willing to keep filling the innovation pipeline for successors. In a world with a population likely to add the equivalent of two more Chinas in the next two generations, my sense is that gap could lead to some hard knocks.

A couple of weeks ago comments on a post at an FT blog (discussed here in Grim Romance) by Paul Collier, author of The Bottom Billion, more pointedly identified culprits.

We laud the production style of the peasant: environmentally sustainable and human in scale. In respect of manufacturing and services we grew out of this fantasy years ago, but in agriculture it continues to contaminate our policies. In Europe and Japan huge public resources have been devoted to propping up small farms. The best that can be said for these policies is that we can afford them. In Africa, which cannot afford them, development agencies have oriented their entire efforts on agricultural development to peasant style production. As a result, Africa has less large-scale commercial agriculture than it had fifty years ago. Unfortunately, peasant farming is generally not well-suited to innovation and investment: the result has been that African agriculture has fallen further and further behind the advancing productivity frontier of the globalized commercial model.

Collier's comments have prompted a couple of posts at The Economist blog noodling on the theme. Recently, The road to serfdom

But some on the far left are beginning to argue that a return to self-sufficiency is the solution to all our problems.

Writing in the Nation this week, Walden Bello spins a tale of destructive liberalisation while making a case for "food sovereignty." He has harsh words for developed nation farm policies, but rather than advocate for their removal, he suggests that we ought to shut the whole darn system down. What people in developing nations ought to be doing, he notes, is farming. Never mind that the growth trajectory of practically every rich nation involved a mass movement of labour from the agricultural sector to manufacturing or services. Never mind that trade in agricultural goods allows workers the freedom to not have to grow their own food, accepting all the risks that self-sufficiency entails. Never mind that the primary source of current high food prices isn't nefarious WTO policy but rapid, export-orientated growth in places which are mobilising their agricultural populations. . .

Admittedly, the Washington consensus was not all it promised to be for much of the developing world. It should be clear, however, that anyone arguing in favour of undoing the urban-industrial world and returning to peasant life is no friend of the world's poor. No friend at all.

The Tierney post draws heavily on an old Atlantic Monthly article on Norman Borlaug by Gregg Easterbrook, Forgotten Benefactor of Humanity

[By]the 1980s finding fault with high-yield agriculture had become fashionable. Environmentalists began to tell the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations and Western governments that high-yield techniques would despoil the developing world. As Borlaug turned his attention to high-yield projects for Africa, where mass starvation still seemed a plausible threat, some green organizations became determined to stop him there. “The environmental community in the 1980s went crazy pressuring the donor countries and the big foundations not to support ideas like inorganic fertilizers for Africa,” says David Seckler, the director of the International Irrigation Management Institute.

Environmental lobbyists persuaded the Ford Foundation and the World Bank to back off from most African agriculture projects. The Rockefeller Foundation largely backed away too — though it might have in any case, because it was shifting toward an emphasis on biotechnological agricultural research. “World Bank fear of green political pressure in Washington became the single biggest obstacle to feeding Africa,” Borlaug says. The green parties of Western Europe persuaded most of their governments to stop supplying fertilizer to Africa; an exception was Norway, which has a large crown corporation that makes fertilizer and avidly promotes its use. Borlaug, once an honored presence at the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, became, he says, “a tar baby to them politically, because all the ideas the greenies couldn’t stand were sticking to me.”

There are a lot of factors that converged to create the current food riots - biofuels, drought, energy prices, etc. - but it is useful to understand that the root cause of hunger in developing countries is that their agriculture sectors are not developed, and a great deal of the blame for that lies with the dain bramaged ideas of those who flock together under greenish banners making all sorts of slimebag arguments about romance, culture and environments. The stark reality of their policies is starvation and death in the extreme, and everyday degradation even when there are no emergencies like the current one. As population rises things will get worse, if we continue current policies. They are reactionary fantasies that coldly accept that millions, even hundreds of millions, will die. In this view it is the inevitable and entirely just punishment for the sin of procreation. Humans deserve to die, there are too many of them.

I'm appalled that such views have become fashionable.