Because of rising food prices, rice is now as profitable as cocaine
Wow!
This is pretty interesting. The International Herald Tribune reports that “soaring food prices may yet achieve what the United States has spent millions of dollars trying to do: persuade Bolivian farmers to sow their fields with crops other than coca, cocaine’s raw ingredient.”
The IHT article goes into the details of the United States farm subsidies to entice farmers to not grow coca plants (the base ingredient of cocaine) as well as the past politics of Bolivia’s president, but basically the farmers are more willing to grow crops to feed the rest of their country, instead of coca, which gets eventually exported anyway. The US subsidies encouraged the farmers to grow export items like bananas and pineapples (putting the farmers up against big fruitcentric corporations, but now the rice can at least be sold at local markets to feed local people.
One of the facts about the coca growers that I had no idea about was that, strangely, farmers across Bolivia are basically allowed and encouraged to grow the coca plants by the government.
The Treehugger site puts it pretty well: “It is an interesting demonstration of what happens when cheap fuel and subsidies no longer distort the marketplace: prices rise to a level to where it is possible for farmers to make a living growing food for the local market, rather than being forced into growing commodities.”
Leave a Reply