JBeukema
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The Politics of HungerSpotlighting China as an example, BBC News reports that [t]he Food and Agriculture Organizations food price index is at its highest level since being created in 1990. As food prices rise, the story adds, so does poverty. In just the first few months of this year, some Asian markets have witnesses as much as a 10 percent increase in local food prices, a shift that could potentially plunge almost 65 million people in poverty, according to some estimates.
Though observers and commentators are quick to importune governments to act, making all the usual allegations of market failure, the worldwide food problem is a feature of statist intervention. As law professor Siva Vaidhyanathan observed (regarding intellectual property laws), Content industries have an interest in creating artificial scarcity by whatever legal and technological means they have at their disposal.
And the same is true of commodity providers whose interest it is to ensure that the nutrition we need to survive comes through them. If a few giant, state-subsidized and -protected farms, and wholesalers, and retailers can unilaterally command supply, they can demand in payment whatever capricious price they determine. This propensity ever more cartelized industry with ever fewer competitors is endemic to state capitalism, but it is not a feature of genuine free markets.
Free markets, on the contrary, divide and moderate market power by denying special protection and privilege and opening competition to a wide assortment of both entrants and methods. Only where potential threats to corporate monopolization are precluded by force of law through, among other impediments, safety and consumer protection standards can todays captains of industry ascend to market dominance.