Things that aren't really true.

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Like this...

The most important factor is women’s education. Already today, an Ethiopian woman with secondary education has on average only 1.6 children, compared to a woman with no education who has 6 children.

We're told this again and again but raised levels of female education are a consequence of another more important change - raised levels of income and the end of subsistence farming. If people are poor (and scratching a living from a tiny, unfertile plot of land on less than a dollar a day is what we're talking about here) then having lots of children makes economic sense.

This isn't an argument against sending girls to school more an observation that parents don't send girls to school if they need human resources to scrat a living from the land. The work them and marry them off as soon as they can produce babies. So when Oxfam and others idealise marginal farming systems despite the ecological damage they do, they also prevent the growth that means fertility rates will fall.

Educated women, like lower fertility rates, are a consequence of economic growth - the former isn't the cause of the latter.

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It's capitalism not "fair" trade that lifts people out of poverty...

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It always depresses me to see people who are essentially caring led down a path that really isn't in the interests of those they care about:

An early signatory to the petition, Mrs Palframan has been invited by the Fairtrade Foundation to help hand in the petition to the Prime Minister. 

And the petition well Mrs Palframan sums it up:

“Despite producing 70 per cent of the world’s food, over half the world’s hungriest people are smallholder farmers who struggle to earn a living from their crops.

“Unless they receive support and improvements to terms of trade, they will remain in crisis due to an unjust food system.

“The farmers still only get a tiny proportion of what we pay for our food and agriculture needs to be made much more sustainable to create food security.” 

The truth, of course, is that these farmers are subsistence farmers - living mostly off the things they raise or grow and selling what small surplus they have for the small amounts of cash they need.  The problem is that people such as the Fairtrade Foundation and Oxfam wish to keep these poor farmers scrabbling in their tiny, unsustainable smallholdings. I'm guessing that, Mrs Palfreman, living in Ilkley as she does, isn't struggling to feed her family from a tiny small holding on the side of the moor! So why does she want to keep people in faraway places in that condition rather than seeing them get the same chances we have?

We've seen the fastest reduction in world poverty in our history over the last decade - over a billion people saved from poverty. This is brilliant but can we remember that it wasn't fair trade, in wasn't aid and it wasn't the hectoring of Oxfam that did this. If we'd followed their prescription that massive decline in poverty would not have happened.

What caring people should know is that is was capitalism, free trade, property rights and that evil neoliberalism that saved that billion from poverty. And, if we let it, capitalism will get the rest of the world's poor out of poverty too. And, you know folks, that means that just as we aren't subsistence smallholders all those Africans won't be smallholders either.

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Subsistence farming isn't the solution to world poverty - mostly it's the cause

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Yet that is precisely what the "Live Below the Line" campaign would have us believe - that rich kids in the UK showing off by eating the diet of a subsistence farmer so as to gain some sponsorship and "raise awareness" somehow helps change the world.

The master of the sob story, Geoffrey Lean, having described his daughter's great sacrifice to raise £500 for this "Live Below the Line" cause, clambers up onto his soap box:

This is partly because the subsistence farmers who account for most of the hungry have been neglected. The proportion of international aid provided to agriculture slumped from 17 per cent in 1980, to 4 per cent in just over a quarter of a century.

Now this makes a lot of sense. Subsistence farming is not good for humans (they starve) or for the environment (those humans chop down forests and over-cultivate poor soils without fertiliser). Therefore it is utterly stupid to do what Oxfam and the other do-gooders want us to do and to direct the international aid to keeping these poor folk grubbing away at a tiny patch of soil - you only need to look at the photograph on Lean's piece in today's Telegraph to understand.

What we see is an African subsistence farmer watering a few seedlings with a galvanised watering can. You see the dry, dusty soil and, in the background a couple of rows of plants that have grow on a little. You'll see more productive and healthier looking allotments down your street. Yet, it seems that we must be aghast at the land these men are scraping a living from being enclosed so as to grow profitable crops on a commercial scale.

They are also increasingly being turfed off the land on which they depend by investors from rich countries. Every six days an area the size of London is either bought or leased by them in developing countries; nearly a third of Liberia’s farmland for example, has been acquired by companies. And around two thirds of these foreign investors intend to use the land entirely to grow, not food for local consumption, but commodities for export. 

"Turfed off" being trendy environmentalist speak for selling up and move to the city where there's more chance of a better life. We rightly note - and Lean does just that - how that last decade or so has seen the biggest and fastest reduction in extreme poverty in human history. But what these trendy environmentalists and socialists fail to acknowledge is that subsistence farming is the problem not the solution.

Instead these people want to keep those starving farmers on the land they can barely survive on - through aid and subsidy. The focus is on:

...aid for hungry farmers, land grabs, biofuels and the company tax avoidance that deprives poor governments of three times as much revenue as they get from aid.

Rather than realising how free markets, free enterprise and free trade provide the escape from poverty, these people want to trap poor Africans into dependence on the state's largess while trying to lay the blame on the businesses that create the means of escape from starvation, ill-health and penury.

Keeping farmers poor is not, and never will be, a solution to world poverty. Yet that is what the international aid establishment (living well and fat off our donations and our taxes) propose. Utterly shameful.

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