The Rise of New Colonial Farming

The Saudis are coming, and they're buying your farmland.

Andrew Rice has an interesting article in the NYTimes Magazine, Is There Such a Thing as Agro-Imperialism?, that reveals how wealthy, import dependent countries like Saudi Arabia are buying and leasing land abroad to hedge their food supply. These nations, which include other Gulf states, South Korea, and Japan, got spooked by the global commodity price spike last year.

The problems of being agriculturally import dependent in the global economy are fairly obvious. If you have no wheat or rice of your own, you're at the complete mercy of both price swings and export cessations. Life starts to suck then. The immediate benefits to the wealthy nation of securing and farming otherwise unused arable land in distant climes is likewise obvious. Cheap land plus cheap labor plus modern farming technology equals win, win, win.

The payout for host countries looks pretty bright, too. It's certainly appealing to start with: unfarmed arable land becomes productive; your people get jobs; you get some payment from the farming nation; and you even win the advantage of more agricultural output for the domestic market.

The less immediate problems are several, and left unchecked, serious.

First, the arrangement assumes that unfarmed land was left fallow for lack of enterprise. Secondly, it assumes that the fallow land can rightfully be transferred. From the article:

Decades ago, they said, during the rule of a Communist dictatorship in Ethiopia, the land was confiscated from them. After that dictatorship was overthrown, Al Amoudi took over the farm in a government privatization deal, over the futile objections of the displaced locals. The billionaire might consider the land his, but the villagers had long memories, and they angrily maintained that they were its rightful owners.

Third, all of this modern agriculture depends on irrigation. Irrigation is the transport of water from one location to another for the purpose of farming. That is a simple definition unless water is in short supply, poorly managed, or the rights to water resources are questionable. See "California" for an example.

Fourth, what happens when their is food scarcity at home and the domestic farms are underproducing the foreign controlled farms? Will the government allow continued export of food from those farms?

There is an underlying cause to these problems and a plausible scenario to expect in a few years, or perhaps a decade. The scenario is populist revolt. Whether or not foreign controlled farms are pareto optimal - that is, increasing benefits without additional costs or harm to other parties - they do have a colonialist tinge. Without government muscle, it's difficult to imagine people peacefully watching rich nations farm their land and exporting the bounty. Resentment is more powerful than wages.

But the underlying cause of the problems these nations face - and will - is not technology, methods, or even water. It's poor governance. Shitty government! You cannot heap investment into a country without predictable and accepted rule of law and expect miracles. It's easy in the West to see the government as a drag on the economy and forget that without a rational bureaucracy, equal contract enforcement, and at least some accountability, the economy we know wouldn't exist.

Improved governance in Ethiopia and Sudan wouldn't help Saudi Arabia with its food security, but it will help those nations with their own food security in a way that foreign aid cannot match.

Popper on Health Care Reform

Karl Popper on the holistic social planner:

Unable to ascertain what is in the minds of so many individuals, he must try to simplify his problems by eliminating individual differences: he must try to control and stereotype interests and beliefs by education and propaganda.

This near about sums up the Obama administration's approach to opponents of the President's current health care reform initiative. In the face of valid concerns the White House and its allies have fallen to branding opponents as paid stooges. Beyond the asinine critiques from the likes of Sarah "soaring under the midnight sun" Palin there is an actual set of policies that will effect deep changes and need to be pieced apart.

Perhaps the greatest criticism is that it is too much at once.

It is very hard to learn from big mistakes.

From The Poverty of Historicism.

I saved the dodo bird and all I got was this lousy tshirt

Does an heirloom tomato have any greater a priori value, strictly biologically, than a genetically altered tomato? Surely there is intuitive benefit to the heirloom tomato, in part at least because of its rareness and the diversity it offers to the tomato plant’s available genetic pool. But as genetic code, does the genetic code of an heirloom tomato offer anything by which we should value it greater than that of a genetically altered tomato?

If we could somehow reintroduced the dodo bird through genetic engineering, would the “new” species deserve endangered species status? If we could reintroduce the genetics of the dodo bird through a dodo-puffin combination, would this new species have as much a priori value as either of its antecedent species? Presumably the animal, even though a strictly laboratory creation, would be covered by animal cruelty laws, so we could not wantonly kick the dodo-puffin as it tried to waddle down the street. But if we had to save the animals of Earth on an ark, would we save the dodo-puffin?

In sum, does the natural world have any a priori value?

I submit that, not to its detriment, nature has no a priori value since value is an inherently human assessment. Mathematical truths may exist without us, but ethical values cannot.

The Genesis of the Vegetarian Diet

Noah took the animals two by two into the ark. So what did the lions eat when the animals decamped? Did they fast for a few decades to let the gazelle and water buffalo populations increase?

Limited Upside and Healthcare IT Innovation

Does positive health have a multiplier effect? Will better information sharing substantially reduce the cost of treatment? Can a common medical record schema fix the American diet?

These aren't idle questions. Aneesh Chopra, the federal CTO, announced at the Open Government and Innovations Conference that the US if falling behind in innovation. However the US can still lead in such areas as healthcare IT innovation, he said. Putting aside the fact that the quoted metrics, such as broadband activity and tax credits, don't describe the progress of "innovation," you have to wonder about the real benefits of healthcare IT innovation.

On its face, any improvement in healthcare IT or any other facet of healthcare in the United States is beneficial. The question is to what degree.

Kundra's hope for success from investment in healthcare IT requires a couple of assumptions. That the problems of our health care system can be solved with better IT. That the primary driver of high cost is related to information, not market/institution structures. That improved healthcare IT will have a sufficient effect on individual health.

When you compare an investment in healthcare, IT or otherwise, to an investment in something like energy use, you need to compare the, well, the down stream benefits. Healthcare as we know it gets us back to the zero point of wellness. If you're sick or injured, medical treatment gets you back to the point where you were before your illness or injury. Preventive medicine keeps you from reaching below the point of wellness. Neither improves your wellness beyond that point. We're not making Übermensch. Medical treatment doesn't actually make you better like we say it does, it makes you back-to-healthy. Which is to say, it doesn't let you do more things or do things better.

The negative multiplier effect of poor health is arguably real and visible in our everyday lives. A sick populace is unproductive and unhappy, even those who are not sick. So investments in healthcare technology, including IT, are more than welcome. But should we usher in healthcare IT innovations as national triumphs of innovation?

If your concern is innovation for innovation's sake, you should be concerned with the metrics and relationships that actual describe and spur innovation. The output of research science and the ability of industry to capitalize on the discoveries of academia. If your concern is innovation for the good of our economy, you should probably be concerned with innovation in the energy sector first and foremost. But if your concern is the delivery or cost of healthcare, there are institutional problems - market and policy incentives - to address, the outcomes of which far overshadow those of improvements in healthcare IT.

Screw you, median voter

Now that Alaska Governor, soon to be ex-Governor Sarah Palin is free of her obligations in Anchorage, national Republican leaders including Michael Steele are rolling out the welcome mat for her to campaign nationally for Republican candidates. Quite understandable, given the fervent support she manages among people who put political bumper stickers on their cars and signs in their lawns. But the Associated Press reports that in Virginia and New Jersey the state Republican Parties are "wary" of inviting soon to be ex-Governor Sarah Palin to campaign on their behalves.

The AP leans too far - that the parties aren't actively seeking out Palin when no one yet has a clear idea of what she's really doing hardly means they're wary of her. But at least in Virginia the Republican Party would be wise to maintain some distance. In a state that Democrats have won in both national and state elections, it makes little sense to inject a polarizing figure remembered more for her incoherent interviews than her significant policy ignorance. Or maybe its the other way around.

Palin's rhetoric may resound with voters in states harder hit by the economy. But anyone who thinks that Virginia's median voters are going to vote for someone associated with a losing VP candidate, resigned governor should probably go slay some salmon.

Medicinal marijuana and social media

Aren't social media proponents kind of like medicinal marijuana supporters? How many protesters are really that concerned about providing pot to terminally ill patients? The proscribed use case matters, but I'd venture that for most its just a rationale.

Sometimes all you need is a goddman aspirin. Sometimes another PR blog isn't the answer.

Imagining a fearful future

We make an important error in assuming that we can extrapolate what the future will hold based on past events. Equally we err by assuming what the future will hold based on a vivid imagination.

British risk expert John Adams describes an architectural competition in which entrants are supposed to design a building designed to withstand a specifically described terrorist attack (pdf, 3 pages):

Why is this pernicious? It is a classic example of paranoia. The threat that those entering the competition are required to design against is unprecedented. It is a gross exaggeration, a figment of the anticipator‟s imagination.

Meanwhile, Adams goes on to say, more people were killed in road accidents in one week in Britain than died in the July 7, 2005 suicide bomb attacks in London. But we keep imagining and preparing for new catastrophic scenarios at the expense of tangible, correctable accidents and disasters (see: hurricanes, auto accidents).

We can only infer so much about the future from the past, but by building fictionalized scenarios into our plans we overcompensate. It's generalizing based on fictional evidence.