Free the farms and the rest will follow
Monday, November 28, 2005 at 3:57PM ■"The harnessing of nature's bounty: The inexorable rise of Brazil as an agricultural superpower forms an important backdrop to world trade negotiations," The Economist, 5 November 2005, p. 73.
In BFA, I argue that the voyage from Gap to Core is essentially captured in the journey from rural to urban: you have to surmount sustenance agriculture to start the process of development. Once you can feed yourself, you can feed others, and rural labor is freed up for industrial use in the cities, so long as foreign direct investment can be attracted.
But to feed others, you have to be able to export to others, which is why the Old Core's ag subsidies (Europe, Japan, U.S.) are strategically insane. You want to win a Global War on Terror, you gotta shrink the Gap, and to shrink the Gap you have to liberate those countries' ag industries just like Deng did in China in the 1980s (and the Green Rev did in places like India and Brazil).
Brazil knows the causality behind its economic trajectory, and it wants to blaze a path others can follow. For this I deeply respect Brazil's efforts in the WTO and the Doha Round. It proves my maxim that the New Core sets the New Rules.
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