whythawk ratings: measuring effective development

1.
(Comments)

...hat property-rights need \"revisiting\". The short answer to property is this: if you want your own farm, buy it. When you say it\'s ok for you to take it from the person who rightly owns it, you...

2.
(Comments)

...f the world. \"You could be the Middle East of biofuels,\" he said in awe. None of that land is being farmed since all three countries suffer from neglect and brutality. In Mozambique and Angola mo...

3. Higher food prices mean downgrading that Turkey to a Chicken
(Analysis/Analysis)

... of total GDP. This shrinking profitability has resulted in consolidation, the creation of super-sized farms, improved farming techniques and productivity, as well as falling employment in the sector...

4. Perlemoen and the Tragedy of the Commons
(Analysis/Analysis)

...ring the 15th and 16th centuries in England, starvation in the countryside was widespread. Subsistence farmers grazed their sheep and cows on commonly held grazing land. Herds intermingled, livestoc...

5. Slaves to land, the policies of Land Affairs
(Analysis/Analysis)

The land that peasant farmers, or shack-dwellers, live on is frequently either public land, or land that vests in a tribal chief. The residents act to improve that land in some form, either by farmin

6. Killing the Golden Goose, a lesson in Economic Freedom
(Analysis/Analysis)

Aesop's Fables tell of a Golden Goose that, each day, would lay a single golden egg. The farmer who owned the goose was ecstatic but it wasn't long before his wonder gave way to greed. Why

7. Black Swans, Cost Overruns and Industrial Tariffs
(Analysis/Analysis)

...ds, the US$20 billion per year is as much as the US spends giving direct cash subsidies to their cotton farmers. This is important, but it takes attention away from what developing nations can do for...

8. Atlas Shrugged at 50
(Analysis/Analysis)

...der a préci: In 2001 Zimbabwe's president, Robert Mugabe, started taking the most productive farms away from their owners and passing them on to his ministers. The reason given was that the...

9. Zimbabwe: the Hollow State
(Analysis/Analysis)

...ted on Zimbabwe is short of everything and produces virtually no food on some of the most productive farmland in the world 80% of the population depends on the informal sector for jobs and suppo...

10. Zimbabwe: recovering the irrecoverable
(Analysis/Analysis)

...as accepted every tenet of the anti-globalist anti-free-market lobby. He nationalised large commercial farms and gave them to the landless poor. He printed cash and gave it to veterans and the rural...

11. The tragedy of innovation: how brilliant ideas are criminalised
(Analysis/Analysis)

...e us sick."African civil society organisations at the World Social Forum in Nairobi, 2007 Reading Farming Solutions, a joint initiative of Oxfam and Greenpeace, we discover who is behind this sa...

12. Dave Bullard and Graham Knox: "We can't walk on water so why not try wine?"
(Analysis/Analysis)

...you have a glut of unsold goods and all players find it impossible to survive. South Africa offers its farmers only limited protection, as any good market-led government should.  So much for the...

13. The efficiency of markets and how protectionism leaves the poor behind
(Analysis/Analysis)

...ping in the seeds and rotating the crops every season to get nitrogen back into the ground. Now entire farms are mapped according to alkalinity, fertility, moisture, sunlight, orientation. Tractors ...

14. Sarkozy's French Election: when elephants fight only the grass gets trampled
(Analysis/Analysis)

... the poor.  France would rather make donations to African countries and protect its tiny number of farmers, than it would to compensate and retrain those farmers and buy what they need from cheap...

15. Melamine, China, and the peril for emerging markets
(Analysis/Analysis)

... trading partners, the African, Caribbean and Pacific nations.  The big losers were Latin American farmers. Germany, joining the European Union in 1987, and with no historical colonies to protect...

16. Have you paid your car guard today?
(Analysis/Analysis)

...; Industrialising England of Charles Dickens’ time held the same horrors for the rich as improved farming methods and land enclosure forced poor, uneducated people out of the country and into th...

17. From Linux to Mozilla: donations mean that open-source isn't really free
(Analysis/Analysis)

...ould save and buy another. For it has opened our world and increased our profits," says a peasant farmer, in a shed housing a battered desktop PC, surrounded by other nodding farmers. ITC, one ...

18. The US$ 5 trillion market at the bottom of the pyramid
(Analysis/Analysis)

...biggest milk producer in the world. GCMMF buys their milk directly from individual village subsistence farmers – more than 2.5 million of them across India.  The milk is valued according t...

19. Unions, the leverage of the highly skilled, and the future of work
(Analysis/Analysis)

...  The actual manufacturing of the product is now akin to the type of manual labour seen on a large farm in the 18th century. Unions used to represent virtually everyone at a company who wasn&rsq...

20. Racial arguments muddy human rights and the ending of poverty
(Analysis/Analysis)

...ustified his oppressive and heavy-handed dictatorship in terms of redistribution of land owned by white farmers.  Iran’s fear of “the great Satan” and the rule of democracy.&nbs...

21. What happens when they hate you? The impact of charity.
(Analysis/Analysis)

...ntive to produce food is removed, supplying free food from the surpluses produced by your own protected farmers; as Europe does.  These are moral conundrums; creating the seeds for frustration. ...

22. The redistribution of poverty
(Analysis/Analysis)

...st of basic foods to urban poor – that food prices are fixed at below their production cost, then farmers will stop farming to take advantage of the cheap food as well.  The government will...

23. The 'War Against Corruption' starts with ending the 'Culture of Entitlement'
(Analysis/Analysis)

...ed that poverty was associated with landlessness and that peasants were unable to engage in subsistence farming without land.  This lead directly to legislative initiatives to expropriate land fr...

24. We're from Mars and we want to help: four lessons in development
(Analysis/Analysis)

...sophisticated countries; and they doom the poorest to perennial dependence on unpredictable subsistence farming.  If development organisations are really serious about ending poverty then we rec...

25. Coffee, the miracle of poverty, and other wonders
(Analysis/Analysis)

...ucers.  Prices are significantly higher than the “c” price and it would look as if the farmers get a good deal.  But they don’t.  Until very recently the entire sale p...

26. Is the ownership of property at odds with the needs of the poor?
(Analysis/Analysis)

...ere worth significantly less than fresh beef.  The reason was that marauding soldiers would attack farmers and kill them, then take their cows away.  No-one wanted to own a live cow for fear...

27. Does the new Apple iPhone cause poverty?
(Analysis/Analysis)

...e.  ((Cellular phones)) have improved the livelihoods of millions of ((poverty|poor)) subsistence farmers by allowing them to contact buyers and learn what consumers want.  Daniel Mashva, a...

28. The quiet nobility of the men by the side of the road
(Analysis/Analysis)

...nce more.  They were having good rains and the soil there is so fertile and rich it would make any farmer weep with joy. Yet, no land was under plough.  Instead the locals were queuing pati...

29. A revitalised UN may improve development in Africa
(Analysis/Analysis)

..., South Africa, Tanzania and Mozambique.  Most of the agricultural land in South Africa is already farmed but the country, with its deep-water ports and good infrastructure, would be a perfect ga...

30. The poor have never had it so good ... now what?
(Analysis/Analysis)

...ng people the things they lack.  Oxfam has, since the early 1980s, assisted subsistence and micro-farmers to grow coffee around the world.  Their success at raising charitable donations for...

31. Ithala and The Corruption Of Development
(Analysis/Analysis)

...evelopment funds to Ithala.   In addition to receiving R13-million in state-funded loans to buy a farm outside Pietermaritzburg, May also applied for Ithala loans for other enterprises, includin...

32. What do Richard Branson and Che Guevara have in common?
(Analysis/Analysis)

...ce and a food staple will henceforth be sold at a fixed price no matter what it costs to produce.  Farmers will look at that price and, if they realise it will cost them more to produce than they...