Oxfam and the hubris of central planning.

The solution to rising food prices? How about – nothing at all

We’re all going to starve, apparently. Well, some of us, anyway. Food prices are surging, and not just because of a one-off commodities spike. According to Oxfam, the price of such staples as cereals will rise by between 120 and 180 per cent over the next twenty years. “Yea, the hind also calved in the field, and forsook it because there was no grass. And the wild asses did stand in the high places, they snuffed up the wind like dragons; their eyes did fail, because there was no grass.”

Oxfam’s proposed solution? Politicians should step in and regulate food prices. It is, of course, the eternal function of NGOs to demand that The Government Must Do Something; but surely even Oxfam has noticed that famines tend to occur in places where food production is regulated.

Fortunately, there exists an almost perfect mechanism to distribute food: the market. The current rise in prices is telling us that land given over to ethanol or wind farms might more profitably be returned to the combine harvester. That process will happen on its own: investors, collectively if not always individually, will respond rationally to market demand, without needing government intervention or even Oxfam hectoring. The market has delivered more food to more people than any system devised by human intelligence.

So is there anything politicians could usefully do? Yes. They could get out of the way. Specifically, they could allow the advances in GM to feed millions. They could stop subsidising the eco-projects that take land out of production. Above all, they could dismantle the food tariffs that condemn some of the most wretched people on Earth to preventable poverty. Scrapping the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy would do more for the Third World than any amount of aid – and would make European consumers better off into the bargain.