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Originally Posted by Twig6
I don’t post as much or engage at all with certain people on this site anymore because I seriously don’t have time to respond to faux moralizing and dishonesty instead of real arguments where each side thinks critically and gets to learn something.
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I am aware that many people look for evidence to affirm their existing views rather than to determine what is correct, but you take this to a whole new extreme. As soon as any of your views are challenged you accuse the challenger of dishonesty, not because you can prove what they said was wrong (you never give any evidence – just talk in generalities about how you have disproved the point in other posts), but it appears because it threatens your world view.
To say “if they hadn’t been given cheap food before, there would be fewer people in Haiti now” is technically correct, but rather unhelpful as a strategy. So what happens to the extra people? There are only two possibilities, they starve or leave.
There is clear evidence that human birth rates decrease with increasing economic prosperity. For example:
Population and environment-Box 1
http://www.un.org/esa/population/pub...nalrevised.pdf
The birth rate would not have decreased in Haiti regardless of whether they were given cheap food or not.
If you were to take a break from looking at the world through neo-Leninist glasses with corporations, the IMF, WTO, and the US Government as the new imperialists, perhaps you might recognise that the world is not black and white, but composed of many shades of grey.
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Originally Posted by Twig6
Information to dispute every word of the above 2 posts already exists in the other posts on this thread and the links in them, and I’m not going to retype them.
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What a silly thing to say. You want to dispute that Haiti imports 50% of its food? Or that the Haitian government subsidized its rice industry?
To be frank, I get the strong impression that you know very little about agriculture and virtually nothing about world trade. Yet that doesn’t stop you pontificating about these subjects. In case you hadn’t notice, trade is a contract between a buyer and a seller. The buyer wants the lowest possible price, the seller the highest price. The value of the goods is dependent on the strength of interest by the buyer compared with the strength of interest by the seller. Goods with high demand, but low availability will have high prices compared with goods with low demand and high availability. From Haiti’s view THEIR terms would be for cheap food. Unfortunately because of the strength of interests by buyers, they are not going to get this. Hence the food riots.
The fact that food has been relatively cheap for Haitians for the last 20 years, merely means the riots are happening now rather then 20 years ago.