Pretending to Fight Hunger

Yesterday Bill Gates, Microsoft founder and world’s richest philanthropist, and Timothy Geithner, US Treasury Secretary, announced a new initiative to fight global hunger and poverty. This new initiative, with the catchy title of Global Agriculture and Food Security Program, is a new fund “to help the world's poorest farmers grow more food and earn more than they do now so they can lift themselves out of hunger and poverty.” The fund will supply “financing to low-income countries with high levels of food insecurity” and will “invest in infrastructure that will link farmers to markets, promote sustainable water-use management, and increase access to better seeds and technologies.” The program will focus on rural communities with small and medium size farms. The ultimate goal of this program is “to create a world free of hunger and extreme poverty.” (Wall Street Journal, April 22, 2010)

This proposed solution will not fix the target problems of poor agricultural productivity and poverty, and it will only be a waste of money. It will not fix any problems because it is based on false premises of the causes of those problems. Low agricultural productivity and poverty can not be fixed by some form of investment in small scale farming. Small farms are the problem. There is a direct inverse relationship between the percentage of the population of a country involved in agriculture and the GDP per capita of that country. That relationship is not coincidental -- it is causal. A high percentage of the population engaged in agriculture means that farms are small – and that farming is subsistence.

There is no natural reason for agricultural productivity to be low in these countries. In a world in which all of the knowledge necessary to increase agricultural productivity is broadly known, it is the artificial economic restrictions in these countries that perpetuate fragmented, inefficient agriculture. Low agricultural productivity and widespread poverty are almost always self-inflicted. If Gates and Geithner really wanted to help these countries, they would work to eliminate the economic shackles that they place on themselves. Then a few people could become very productive at agriculture and the rest could go do something else productive. Successful farmers will squeeze out or buy out less successful farmers, and country-wide agricultural productivity will rise. You don’t need to teach every farmer how to be productive; you just need to let the ones who learn fastest succeed to their fullest potential.

But ripping apart a quaint agrarian culture and building a modern economy doesn't provide a "feel good" experience for liberals, despite the long-term positive results. And isn't liberal "feel good" what this initiative is really all about, after all? The people behind this initiative are not really fighting hunger in any way that will have broad, long-lasting results.

The real disappointing and disheartening lesson from this initiative is what it says about Bill Gates. Mr. Gates is a man whose technical and business acumen – brilliance even – enabled him build the foundation of the knowledge economy and significantly change the lives of millions of people around the world for the better. In the process he built a company which is now one of the pillars of the US economy, and made himself the richest person in the world. Yet since his retirement from his day job, Mr. Gates has been not just ineffective as a philanthropist – but stupid. The failures of his Foundation to improve world health (which were also based on false premises of causes) reveals Mr. Gates as just another man whose hubris overreaches his abilities. Clearly Mr. Gates has a gifted vision of information technology and how to build a business. Also clearly the gift of his vision does not extend to less familiar territory – particularly economics, politics and the broader realm of human behavior. The lesson that the last few years should have taught Mr. Gates is that he has limitations. It is disappointing and disheartening that such an otherwise heroic individual has not been able to learn that lesson.