> It makes a lot of sense to me that Japan and Korea should import
> grains and other bulky staples - their land isn't really friendly
> towards growing that sort of thing
Never been to Korea, but have spent much more time in rural Japan in the last four years (going from hotspring inn to hotspring inn) than in the rural US. The fields looked as friendly to the rice growing in them as one could imagine.
"Market-driven efficiency" is as problematic in world agriculture as it is in health care. Like the argument (not yours, Doug) that "low" food prices from free trade in grains benefit the most wretched of the propertyless - after (of course) they have been forced off their land.
There's enough food globally for everyone now, and _Governments_ have the responsibility of providing enough (grain and veggies and ordinary wine anyway - not Roquefort) for everyone - for instance by subsidizing the price of grain and veggies and ordinary wine to keep food cheap enough for everyone to afford.
Surely the task is to use human intelligence to act ("to plan") so as keep suffering at a minimum. Peasants should leave the land only if they want to get to see the big city and other decent reasons, not because some Banker or Lawyer or AcademicEconomist-turned-FreemarketGauleiter (not the "market" but some real life piece of walking talking shit) tells them they cannot live and work there any longer.
Add Commissar to that list, wasn't this "efficiency" argument a leading cause of the forced collectivization error?
Doug continued:
> By the way, there's more than a touch of Poujade about Bove too,
> isn't there? I didn't think that socialists had much in common with
> the reactionary petit bourgeoisie. As Robert Graham wrote in the FT's
> obit for Poujade:
>
>
>> It has found significant echoes in both the stance of Jean-Marie Le
>> Pen, the leader of the extreme rightwing National Front, and the
>> support base for Jose Bové, the anti-globalisation activist and
>> leader of the radical small farmers' organisation.
>Is this wrong?
Only in that it misses the key point. Many of the dispossessed small bourgeoisie in Weimar turned to the right, but some turned to the left. If more had gone in the "Bové" direction and less in the "Le Pen" direction the world would have been (indeed would be) a far far better place.
Anecdote - my father sent me to school in Montpellier for a year when i was 17 (i was coming off a year in which an ultimately unsatisfactory sexual relationship with a 3rd string halfback had set off some flamboyant self-pity that i was heroically but unsuccessfully disguising). Time- early in the 5th Republic. (Think Premier Debré going on TV to ask citizens to go to the airports and persuade any foreign legion paras landed from Algiers to go back. My landlady listening to this bizarre program said "I can't do that - I don't speak German").
Anyway, I met a young Communist uni student eager to persuade (of all odd things the first person he had ever met from the US) of the red truths as he (and his hero a young professor of economic geography) understood them. I was eager to be a quick learner, for reasons between my legs.
Anyway, he took me home (near Lodéve) on a short vacation (forget which). Papa smoked a pipe, had some acres of vines and some cows, wore high rubber boots, and shaved irregularly. Picture of Jaurès on the wall. Outhouse with squat hole.
Son told me he had been in the resistance; he denied it but after son barked at him said he had helped some people (at least that is what i thought he said, i had a hell of a hard time understanding him). What I did understand - because he said it several times to make sure i got it - was that he was a Communist because "it was the party of small propertyholders who worked with their dirty hands."
I visited Paris twice that year and started every night in Paris by buying a standing room ticket at the Olympia to hear Piaf. Gonna go put on a Piaf tape now; we'll win on Tuesday when we get back to Chicago.
john mage