Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book Discussion On The Reproach Of Hunger 20160319

Unlike any other. We need to preserve, protect and defend it. We need to retake it from the elites who are bullying us and forcing us into conformity. We need to crush Political Correctness and encourage all of you, barnes and noble are here with advanced copies of my book. I am happy to personalize and sign them for you. If you love america and hate Political Correctness, this is the book for you. We saw an opportunity for the National Center for policy analysis, please ask us. We stood at a place called little round top, gettysburg. When you talk about standing and facing adversity, about the common man who became uncommon in his valor, a professor at boutin college, not a professional military officer but there he stood in charge of the 20th may regimen, they start coming up that hill, he knew he was the last in the line of the army of the potomac, cannot surrender. Casualties mounted, casualties mounted, they ran out of ammunition. Alabama ready for one last time in charge. Colonel Joshua Lawrence chamber said the one word that had never been set in the entire union army up to that point in the civil war. He said bayonets. There is a moment that will come standing on little round top, where we have run out of ammunition, when we fear there is no other recourse, cannot retreat, cannot surrender. Say that one word that is the embodiment of spiritual embodiment of the United States of america, the american citizen. Thank you so much for being here today. Next month we have the former head of the Defense Intelligence agency, Lieutenant General Michael Flynn will be with us march 31st stu and it will be a great session to hear from someone who understands what is going wrong with our intelligence gathering apparatus in the United States. God bless you all, good morning, thank you for being with us. [applause] when i tune in on weekends, authors sharing new releases. Watching nonfiction authors on booktv is the best television for serious readers. They can have a longer conversation. Booktv weekends they bring author after author after author, fascinating people. I love booktv and i am a cspan fan. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] good evening, welcome to midmanhattan library. Take a moment to silence your cell phones if they are on. This event is being taped by cspan booktv. The microphone will be there microphone and it will not project into this room so please speak loudly and clearly. Tonights program is based on the book the reproach of hunger food, justice, and money in the twentyfirst century. By david reiff. The war on worldwide hunger recently was thought by leading intellectuals to be winnable, is called into question in david reiffs new book. Here david reiff discusses complex factors that are pushing the goal of eradicating hunger out of reach, the rise in the price of food staples, practice of using corn to make ethanolbased foods fuel instead of food, the Global Warming and its resulting extreme weather patterns creating severe drought particularly in africa, increased Meat Consumption in china and india reducing supply of grain for direct consumption by people, the the reproach of hunger food, justice, and money in the twentyfirst century received a start reviewing Publishers Weekly which stated that it is a stellar addition to the canon of Development Policy literature. David reiff is a political analyst, and cultural critic, he graduated with a degree in history from princeton university. His books have focused on immigration, International Conflict and humanitarianism. He is the author of eight previous books and a member of new York Institute for the humanities, collaborated as editor of the policy journal, the new republic in harpers magazine is written for New York Times magazine and Los Angeles Times book review, he is founder of the war crimes project at American University in washington dc. Please give a warm welcome to david reiff. Thank you for coming out in unspeakable weather, Global Warming or no Global Warming, we seem to have a little bit of winter even if at the wrong time and in strange places. I am very old now bleed even so it is strange to see myself described like an obituary. In fact i happen for a long time to have started writing migration in the us, i wrote two books called miami in case you dont know my work and one about los angeles, the transformation, great immigration in the 80s and 90s, i was interested in cubanamericans so i wrote a book about them as well as have some connections to that world. I became by accident a war correspondent. Between 1992 in bosnia in 2004 in baghdad, i was pretty much in all the predictable places you can think of, the balkans, Great Lakes Region of africa, afghanistan, iraq, i am too old to do that now so i wasnt that interested, didnt feel i had much to contribute about military questions. I was already 40, a preposterous age to begin and i thought i had something to say about the humanitarian facts of war in terms of relief. I spent a long time following relief workers around in all these places and many others. I was in liberia, sierra leone, central america, i did that for a long time. This book represents for me a move from emergency relief to a more general question about development. The book is really about whether the current Mainstream Model of development can work and whether the optimism surrounding it which i referred to is warranted or justifiable or not. I thought because in the end the starkest measure of poverty is hunger, i try to write a book about development and the debate over development, the effort to reduce or end extreme poverty, to end hunger which are the stated goals of major un agencies, the great philanthropies or the Melinda Gates foundation and they really believe this is the first generation in Human History that can end extreme poverty and hunger. I lay my temperamental cards on the table. I am sure if you spent 15 years of your one and only life thinking about war, watching war up close, you are not the most optimistic people, but i nonetheless found it very startling as i began to think this through, took me seven years to write this book and endless amount of travel in all kinds of places, rich and poor alike, i was at a loss to understand, hunger, famine along with war is the great killer in Human History. There has been a famine every generation, as far as most experts believe, whether it is the great Irish Economic historian the estimate is in every Society Since the beginning of time or at least since the neolithic, a great famine every 30 years. 5000 years of Human History as we think of it in definable terms, you have famines in every society and every confident continent. Seemingly with regularity. Why do people think, this is my question, i read through this literature, talked to people within the un system in these foundations and many different contextss, why is there so much optimism . I want to distinguish if you will indulge me between optimism and hope. Optimism should be empirically justifiable. Hope doesnt have to be. You can hope, hope in the religious sense, hope is a religious idea among other things, you dont have to think that a good outcome is likely to hope for one but if you say you are optimistic you are saying something very different. You are saying you believe a rational person on empirical ground should believe things are going to get better. That is what optimism is. The better doesnt have to be total. I dont want to caricature optimism as, if you permit me, optimist caricature custom pessimism. Optimism, want things to be this way, to abandon optimism is to abandon humanity. Even though people have come to the division of optimism and hope, the distinction between optimism and hope has lessened and see less of a difference. Why was there this optimism . One reading of the world, one might have thought lead one to be pessimistic. I am not telling you about war, diminished over the last hundred years. I dont agree with psychologist Steven Pinker about everything in his argument the world is Getting Better and better, he is absolutely right that both the prevalence and lethality of war has diminished in the last century. He is also right that we made extraordinary progress, the human also be in a particular region or set of powers, there has been great progress made in famine. Famine is less lethal than it has ever been. There are whole continents in which famine is unknown, even though it was known everywhere and in all civilization since the beginning of time. The historic home of famine which is not africa despite what you read, but is asia, has not seen a major famine since the chinese famine of 195862 which was manmade, not largely a function of the weather, though the weather played a role, but a function of terrible decisions in the chinese peoples republic of china. You are already talking about a famine that could have been averted with sounder state policy or the kind of murderous industrialization mao and his colleagues decided to impose on the chinese people. I am not diminishing the lethality, the most lethal event in Human History, around 40 Million People, that is in one event. You could say we dont have those anymore. Even in africa, for all kinds of reasons the last readout of famine. Famines are less lethal. A classic example, there was a famine in the 1970s which killed a quarter of 1 Million People. There was another one in 2005. Only 60,000 people, a terrible thing, but still a fact this was a famine in the same place, and confluence for disastrous things and many fewer people died because there were technologies to make, to allow many people, particularly the vulnerable to survive, despite this optimism, the world is a complicated place, there is a great german marxist philosopher, and some of you know better than i do, every document of civilization is a document of barbarism, the record is mixed and it would be foolish to play cassandra in all of this. The assertions come from all kinds of brilliant people at the institute, bill gates, bill and Melinda Gates are extraordinary people, i am in complete disagreement with their philanthropy, to say that doesnt change the fact that they are very brilliant and they have done something very remarkable. Also very wrongheaded. It seemed to me there was just as much reason for pessimism as optimism for one simple reason and that is Global Warming. Climate change. When we are talking even in these declarations in paris, we are talking 2 degrees celsius rise in global temperature and that is if we are lucky. People will be very satisfied if this can be kept to 2 degrees celsius and yet 2 degrees celsius climate rise is going to make vulnerabilities of all sorts of agriculture, plants that wont survived. Yields will decline. These are not, this is not speculative. We have run these tests in labs and controlled environments to see what a particular germplasm of wheat for example does to raise the temperature. Not talking about the apocalypse here, but it seems to me with climate change, anything why are people so confident that if you drive on first avenue to pass the un, you will see banners the organization has put up that say poverty will be eliminated by 2030, a slogan way of saying that is the gist of the argument. Since we dont know whether we will have 2 degrees celsius if we are lucky or 4 degrees if the deal falls through. These are pressing issues. If i can do a global summary there are 7 plus billion people in the world today is certainty there will be tween 9 absent the asteroid coming and killing us all it is a certainty there will be 9,000,000,000 x 2050. That is not an unalterable fact. The question then becomes will there be 12 billion in 2100 . Or will there actually be a stop to this plateau . If you talk to demographers who are not the happiest people they have been wrong so often, most flatline demographic predictions have been wrong, extrapolating from the present into the more distant future have been wrong, the inventor of demography more or less, Thomas Melton argued in the early 19th century that because Food Production could only increase automatically but population could increase geometrically, people were going to starve to death in the near future and yet that is not what happened. It is dangerous to talk to demographers. I dont think even the most optimistic among us would suggest there will be less than 10 billion people by 2100. That is an increase, you will have a third more human beings on this planet in 85 years than you do now and a steady increase along the way. How are you going to feed these people . How is one going to order the world so that the world doesnt become a place where the poor starve, the poor areas and Global Warming has been very unfair, if you will, you cant call a global phenomenon unfair because a phenomenon cannot have that agency but it will be the poor parts of the world, parts of the middle east and africa that will be most affected. The poorest people are getting the worst of it. The least resilient toward it are going to get the worst, just to keep it on food of their agriculture, the worst affected. Why all this optimism . The optimism is pervasive. I invite you to go on the websites of any of the major un agencies of the world bank, major philanthropies, most of the major relief and Development Ngos of the world and many governments in the global south, the optimism is not restricted, it is quite widespread. There is an organization based in ghana which the former secretarygeneral of the United Nations, kofi annan, is now the president , calls for a green revolution in africa. You are talking very smart people who think things are going to be steadily better, that these disasters are going to be averted. And that in the end we are going to come out with these goals of ending extreme poverty and hunger, the definition of extreme poverty is those making numb 1. 25 a day or less income of an individual. There are probably 1 billion people like this in the world, one in seven of them. Why shouldnt, if these regions, some of which are also the areas that have not begun what is called the demographic transition, that is to say falling birth rates that have coming many parts of the world, look at mexico, mexico is a very good example of a country that in 30 years has gone five kids a family to more or less replacement level, mexican birthrates in freefall and coming back to my skepticism about what can or cant be predicted i dont think anyone saw that. There was a roman writer who wrote somewhere he didnt understand soothsayers met in the road white both didnt burst out laughing. Why the optimism . I freely admit my bias which is having spent so much time in parts of the world i spent time in, optimism is hard for me. There was a profile of me in Time Magazine called mister pessimism. Be warned, full disclosure, whatever the giclee cliche, i can deploy on this. With i couldnt figure out why people felt this way so i tried to look at the mainstream view, to try to understand it and to look at critics of that view, most of whom can be, some of whom are freemarket libertarians. And economist at nyu called william easterly, wrote a famous book that was very controversial that bill gates announced in the most savage terms, a critique of Development Aid but the main opposition to the mainstream view that asserts we are going to abolish extreme poverty and hunger by 2030 is going to be found among members of the antiglobalization movement, people think fundamentally the problem capitalism cannot solve the problem it has created. In the end the slogan is, one of its most famous slogans is another world is possible, and without that other world a political and moral transformation, no amount of technological wizardry will solve these problems, will make hungry people have enough to eat or poor people not be poor anymore. Why do all the smart people, i understand the critique of the antiglobalization movement and to some extent i share it. In the book i talk about that at some point. Why do all these smart people think hunger is at the end, will or can be ended. Why jeff sachs, the end of poverty, why does the secretarygeneral ban kimoon of the United Nations continually say, in this he is firmly seconded by the head of the world bank, why is brilliant people think we reached this genuinely millennial, millenarian moment unknown in all Human History, short of abolishing mortality, people in Silicon Valley may pull that off. They are pretty much ending poverty is about as unheardof as you can imagine. All the major religious traditions take poverty for granted. The poor will always be with us the bible said. And equivalent views in hinduism, tells you that you deserve your fate. You have obviously done something terrible the last time out. At least that is a commonplace interpretation, in india. Why are they so optimistic. All these people, very smart people, to some extent the great ideological battles of the past are over or should be over. It is whether explicitly or implicitly, they accept what you might call the Francis Fukuyama end of history point of view. It does not say also a very smart guy he said basically not that bad things would no longer happen, not that we reach the end of this but we now knew what a Successful Society had to be. We should all agree, lots of people wont accept this and they will be unsuccessful. I think that view permeates the thinking of the Mainstream Development world. I think basically antiglobalization people attack them are crazy. We all agree. We are all on the same page, we all think we want free markets but also safeguards, fair taxation but not onerous taxation, democratic accountability, and we all agree on that. You think that and then you think there are no political problems. This isnt a technical problem, it is a political problem. They think there is no political problem, we solved that. I point you to jeffrey sachs, the un agency, the food and agriculture organization. When you go on the website of the Gates Foundation, the ford foundation, this is absolutely what people believe. If you asked politics out of the equation, it is easier to be optimistic because you just think all these people are not being constructive. I remember at mit, we want criticism but not the kind you give because your criticism isnt constructive and i said to him if that is really what you mean you are not talking criticism. You are talking a very different thing altogether. I spent in the late 80s and early 90s going back and forth to cuba, miami to havana and back, there is a famous speech you can find anywhere in any proper in many languages. It is called the speech to the intellectual. At the end of the speech he says within the revolution, everything outside of that. I think that is now the view of the Mainstream Development world towards its critics. What for them is the problem . What for them these are very smart people, they know about Global Warming too, not like the critics have a monopoly on intelligence. On the contrary. What is the reason they are optimistic . Beyond the end of history part, a belief that technology and science will solve every problem. I call this technoutopianism and i believe it is realistic as utopianism which means no place. But they believe, i quote a great many things in the book, i used to be a contributing writer to the New York Times, i did a long piece on the Gates Foundation and their agriculture, followed a guy who was most recently Barack Obamas administrator of the agency for International Development and all these people say look, it is true we dont have the solutions now but in ten years science will provide those answers even if we dont know what they are. That is why i think it is utopian. It is a notion of problemsolving. There are no great moral questions. We know the answers according to this. There are no great political questions because we know what it will look like. It is typical that gates who is an engineer would think in these engineering terms, which is problems are there to be solved, not managed, solved, not debated, brainstormed over, etc. Gates said in a speech he has his own blog and it is most revealing. It would have been nice to have similar insights into the thoughts of Andrew Carnegie or John D Rockefeller or whatever else you want to say. He does what he thinks taxes microsoft should pay and that is a conversation for another day. He says in one of his speech hes if i believed we were not going to make progress i would be pessimistic but i know we are going to make progress just as we have in the past. That is the question. Are we in effect living in a different time . Bill gates thinks so. Bill gates also said he is a writers dream, bill gates he said people live miserably for all of Human History until the Industrial Revolution 250 years ago. Since people are not dumb or than they were 250 years ago, and since they were good politicians before, the answer must be technology. The answer to transform everything is technology. He may well be right to some extent, although technology is also what has given us Global Warming. Buyer beware. The question you need to ask is, does the past condition the future . If you look at cnbc or foxbusiness or those stations, mutual fund, there is always a moment at the end at the mutual fund that made their profit where a voice comes on, small print, past performance is no guarantee of future profits. Bill gates was buying a company. He would not say because it has been successful for the last 50 years that he will be successful in the next 50 years. On the contrary, the Smart Business position today is eventually companies outlive themselves, it is all about creative distraction, transformation, reimagining everything, transforming companies. You could say why do they think the last 250 years are a surefire guide to the future when they wouldnt think that about if they were making an investment in a corporation . I dont know the answer to that, no one knows the answer to that question but i insist it is worth asking. It must be asked. The late governor of texas famously said of george hw bush, he thought he had a triple. You could say, the question is have we just profited from these 250 years which are the 250 years we ravaged the planet looking for fossil fuels for cheap energy. Is it a blip or the inevitable shape of things to come . The fate of hundreds of millions, billions of people will be determined by the answer. I dont have a lot of answers here. But i do have a critique of the mainstream view and a great worry that development has largely been taken over by business, business has its place, it is not a question, you dont have to be an antiglobalization person of the radical left to say that business is not everything. And yet right now the rhetoric is the private sector does everything better than the state. It is an efficient and moribund and all the creative thinking is in the private sector or the academies supported by the private sector. If you believe that, fair enough but i think there is plenty of evidence to argue against that. Most importantly there is the evidence of paying taxes. It has been calculated that if multinational corporations paid the taxes they pay in global north and global south, africa for example would be richer by half 1 trillion. If bill gates has all this money to spend it is because microsoft doesnt have to pay or has chosen not to pay or has succeeded in not paying what one might consider its fair share of taxes. You dont have to pay taxes your profits are higher and if you are bill gates you save the world on that basis. My view is the status and any of these things but rather that the state has been undermined by the present system. What has gone on is a hostile takeover of the state by business so that the state, poor people cant afford fedex unless it is an emergency. The u. S. Postal Service Becomes the thing that serves poor people, fedex serves the rich. Does that make fedex more efficient than the Us Postal Service . That is what fedex would like you to think but i think it is quite a different matter. If you take all the bright kids out of Public School and just leave kids with difficult phonelines and no tradition of learning in their family and say Public Schools are a failure, surely you have made a mistake intellectually and morally. I think it is the same mistake that has been made in the developing world. I wish i could sympathize with the antiglobalization view but since i dont think, for the moment anyway, that those views are going to prevail even though i agree with a lot of their analysis, i think this is the plea i will make it the end of the book, that the state needs to be strengthened again, needs to run development again. The world of hunger itself, the great example, the brazilian government is not a left right thing, the program started under a neoliberal president , cardoza and continued under two socialist president s, called zero hunger. What the state did was made it an absolute priority to radically reduce hunger in brazil and it is succeeding. There is plenty of poverty in brazil. Brazil is in many ways a problematic place but also a place where in the last 30 years, 30 Million People have been brought out of poverty. And now undernutrition rates have cratered. Mexico, another society where people are very negative about it, i am appalled by what happened in terms of justice and the crime rate but mexico has reduced infant mortality with a program, anyway you look at it they did it because the state imposed it. It wasnt done with outside money. It wasnt done by the private sector. It was done by the state. I am sorry, businessmen can talk all they like about their good intentions and their charitable work, they often do wonderful things. But in the end they are accountable to their shareholders. This is a corporation, not a person, which is a conversation for another day. I think for now it is all very well to imagine another world is possible, but it is not very likely. What is feasible it seems to me is particularly in the global south for the state to reclaim its authority and act. That is where i end the book. It is not a great ringing conclusion. It is not pessimistic but not optimistic either. But by analogy, the english philosopher john locke said reason is a poor candle but it is all we have. I think the state is a poor candle when i talk about the misdemeanors and felonies and incompetence of states all over the world but i still think it is the only accountable structure we have because i remind you bill gates is accountable to absolutely no one except his partner, Melinda Gates. If he finds jesus tomorrow and decides to put all his money into Building Church hes nothing will stop him, and close the foundation. And american democracy given the influence of money is in particular and some accountability, in a world lots of good things are happening and lots of terrible things as well. It is better than the alternative. I meant to speak a little bit less but i did what i did and happy to take some questions. I dont know how long, thank you. If you have questions, raise your hand. Okay. First of all, thank you for coming out tonight and sharing this with us. If i understand you right you are saying we do have the answers to these problems, correct . The question, i have been asked to repeat the question. The gentleman asks do i think we have the answers . There is a second part but let me start by answering that. I think we have some of the answers but it is a mainstream view that is incredibly hubristic that says there are a set of answers and when we figure out how to apply those answers we are home safe but please continue. Do you subscribe, which view do you subscribe to and the reason i am asking is if you do feel that it is, could you give some specific things that ordinary people could try to pursue or ask our representatives to encourage that would be positive . What can citizens do to try to bring about a better world . There are lots of groups doing just that. There is a wonderful organization which began as a Lutheran Organization run by David Beckman who i believe is a minister though i am not certain. They do fantastic Popular Mobilization to change aspects of us foreign aid and defend policies that in this country are without which a lot more people would go hungry. The wic program is constantly under attack so citizens among other things can try to persuade their representatives or try to mobilize to protect them. You abolish that you have a 50 jump in child malnutrition within a year. It is already bad enough. I am getting the just of your theory and the question has to do with extremes. The arab said aluminate extreme poverty. Where do we start in terms of where is the Tipping Point when it goes from regular poverty to extreme poverty and to famine . Doesnt that factor into the work that can be done by any organization, be it state or private . Extreme poverty is not a metaphor. It is those who live on less the numb 1. 24 us per day. That is the definition of extreme poverty. If you bring everybody above that level, then you have indeed ended extreme poverty. The problem with the famine model, i think there is a continuum, the problem with using famine, largely successful fight against famine, global fight or a disease model, the world has been successful with certain kinds of diseases, not restricted to a handful of countries. River blindness is largely a thing of the past. The problem with that is it is not at all clear the methods used to deal with famine are applicable to what most Global Hunger is, undernutrition. And calories that dont provide them. People dont die of this, what happens is aggregate, the life chances of people who are malnourished, are very much diminished. There is much neurological damage, the Brothers Foundation has done a lot of work on this. Are you familiar with the work and theories of Buckminster Fuller in terms of world gains . It has been a long time since i read Buckminster Fuller. He told about he was very admired in the day. There are a lot of things i should reread. Thank you for speaking, it is an honor to be in your presence. How much trade can be balanced . What countries are more reliable for a more balanced economy in those impoverished nations . There is a south korean economist at Cambridge University who has done a lot of work suggesting that the only way nations prosper is by being protectionist and the corian model is very interesting in that regard because in postwar korea which is a developed country started out with tremendous protectionist dynamic. He is very sure about the answers from someone who generally thinks if i think i have all the answers i must not have asked the right questions but there is certainly evidence that 19thcentury america was protectionist and south korea after the end of the korean war was protectionist and free markets and china, what is the greatest example of reduction in poverty in the world today . China. China is completely protectionist economy, it is a rigged game but the prosperity of 300 million chinese is undeniable. If you take optimistic statistics about development, poverty and strip out the chinese contributions you get much more dismal figure. In the socalled nirubian times it wasnt successful in many important ways. But we will see. I dont think there is one formula. But i do think that trusting, i think things have to come from inside places. If i had my way, i would dream it will never happen ngos in the global north would stop be opational, and just be funders. I think it is time that the imperil situation was ended. Even though a lot of these ngos do good work in emergency situations in particular. Truly admirable. But in the end, societies dont change for the better from the outside. The british were going to abolish the tree. And even the war in afghanistan as George W Bush and tony blare said was partly justified because it would empower the afghan women. I dont think that is how sustainable change happens even if you grant that was the intention rather than de facto justification which is what i believe. Yes, maam . There is opposition by some countries, particularly in europe, to gmos and does this have any factor in this globally . I dont think so. I dont have a strong opinion about gmos. There was a poet who was a great heroine of mine. Toward the end of her life i dont know had become her favorite sentence she said. And i have attempted to, you know, take refuge in that at this moment. But certainly i was convinced as i promote the book i dont have the science to write to an opinion about gmos. As a political analyst, if china and india in part, argentina, and others accept gmos what the europeans do is of very little consequence in my view. Any others . I think the lady in the front. My question is we have enough production, i mean the Food Production, for everybody on the earth. If we do i think it is a distribution. People who are hungry because they dont have money to buy food. It is not that there is not enough food on earth. That is certainly true now. The lady said that, you know, the problem is partly distribution and partly access and in that absolute production. I certainly think, and make this point in the book and should have made it into the talk probably, unless you prepare a speech and when i was a student people that lectured from readings board me so once people asked me to talk in public i decided i would wing it for better or worse. One of these days i will get up in a situation like this and open my mouth and nothing will come out. So far, so good, though. The ladys question or comment is absolutely born out by the fact by great economist who has many relatives and political philosopher, but as an economic historian, he showed in the great famine of 1943 was that there was enough food. There were strange resources because the British Empire was taking some of the food stocks and supplying it to the troops. Even then it wasnt there was no food. It was that poor people couldnt afford the price of the food. He has always argued since the problem of hunger is the problem of access and what he calls entitlement. I think that is right. As of now, is there enough food to feed everybody on the planet . Yes, absolutely. I dont want to go too far down this road because remember he only has to be right once in a particular region. He is not going to be right glob globally. The problem is coming partly back to Global Warming and i call this book food, justice and money for a reason because i think the fundamental problem of hunger is a lack of justice. My big criticism of the uns view is that it is largely marketdriven and productivist. But there is a fly in that ointment and that is lets say country x produces a huge surplus. Are they really going is country x going to make it available to poor people who cant afford to pay for it who are out of the world market in a certain sense . Or are they going to export it to countrys with rising middle classes . China is a good example of that. Or indeed are they going to use food staples that could feed hungry people for meat production . Remember what we a lot of the certainly a lot of the four staple grains are used to feed, you know, pigs and chickens and cattle and particularly cattle. That is a very inefficient way of providing for people because, you know, it is cattle that eat the energy is much larger than the energy meat provides. These are cultural questions. You are not going to talk into newly prosperous person in shanghai. I have had these conversations. You go to someone and they say i like to eat meat. It is my culture and now there is more of it. That is great. I dont know how you make access possible except through more justice and less inequality and those are political issues. That is the great problem with the scientific technological account. It is finally productive and that is not the way we will get out of this. Thank you for coming. So you talk a lot about returning the power to the state in the global south. With all of the political unrest in the south and the middle east areas that are impoverished how would you recognize these governments become stable enough to help impoverty within their regions . The first thing i would say is it is not for us to decide these things. What is the legitacy of the Ford Administration in deciding what the government of charge should do . I will give you a counter factual. Maybe that is a better way to describe it. We think it is perfectly normal to have ngos going around places where government is functional to use a polite term. It seems perfectly normal the new york base International Rescue Committee Goes to malawi or burma to do things. Just ask yourself what most people in this country would have thought if during katrina, the venezuelan government sent aid teams. Katrina was as botched as many emergency situations in history. The same description could have been given from bushs fema direct director i forgot his name. Brown. Brown it was. Nations have to work it out in the end. History doesnt go at the same time speed everywhere. I could show you books written by british imperil travelers about singapore saying the climate and confusion culture made it absolutely impossible these people could amount to anything. You know, it is by many measures the most prosperous and has Health Outcomes and education in the world. I dont think the imperil method is sustainable anyway. Some things have to be countries have to go through things. Here is another counterfactual. Imagine in 1861 when the American Civil War was about to begin that the martians had had landed and said we dont want you to fight this war. War is an uncivilized business. You must heed us. First of all, societies have to work it out. We dont want it to be worked out by war but sometimes there is a place for war. Im not a pacifist. I think these countries have to go through the things they are going through. You can help, but biggest help is not ngos it would be making corporations pay taxes they are owed. Would a lot be stolen . Sure. But at some point it is not unreas unreasonable to believe things might change. That is not optimism but not pessimistic either. I think this will be the last. One more and we are done. [inaudible question] tell that to somebody in a boat risking their neck. So thank you for your attention