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Friday 3 July 2009

How bad government caused the food crisis

Julian Morris argues that recent shortages and price rises of staple food in Asia and Latin America have been caused as much by parasitical politicians as by poor harvests

On the road to Agra, travelling to see the Taj Mahal, we found ourselves passing a seemingly endless convoy of trucks. Well, not so much a convoy as a convention, since the trucks were stationary. Miles and miles of motionless juggernauts, their drivers smoking biddies or drinking chai on the roadside. I turned to my colleagues and said, facetiously, ‘Sustainable transport.’

We had intended to see one of the Great Wonders of the World that day, but had stumbled across another. Our driver explained that the trucks were queuing to pay a toll levied by the Delhi government. The queue can last up to four days, though some drivers expedite the process with palm grease.

In temperate climates, food left in a truck for a day may suffer some spoilage. In India in May, with outside temperatures pushing 40˚C, the consequences of four days in an unrefrigerated truck are devastating. Yet, amazingly, Delhi’s inefficiently administered tolls are not unusual. In much of Asia, Africa and Latin America, such barriers are commonplace.

When the Economist’s Robert Guest hitched a ride on a truck transporting Guinness through Cameroon, a day trip turned into a four-day marathon, in part because of ‘swampy roads and a collapsed bridge’, but mainly because of ‘police road blocks, of which we met 47’. Such road blocks are a symptom of the lack of the rule of law: police officers are not held to account for applying ‘laws’ that for the most part they make up on the spot. In Britain, they could be prosecuted for trespass or false arrest; not in Cameroon.

Globally, nearly 50 per cent of food spoils before it reaches consumers. The blame rests mainly with governments, whose culpability comprises not only absurd internal levies, a failure to apply the rule of law, and incompetence in providing transport infrastructure, but also taxes and other barriers imposed on the use of technologies such as packaging and refrigeration that might have helped preserve food.

More articles from: Julian Morris | this section

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