India Threatens To Derail WTO Deal Over Public Stockholding Of Food

forbes ^ | 7-26-2014 | Tim Worstall

[Citizen Zed]

India’s food system has the government purchasing food which is then handed out in kind as a dole. This is also grossly inefficient with multiple opportunities for brokers and middlemen to capture either the purchase money or to hijack the food itself. A vastly better system would simply be to take the same amount of money and then give it to the poor so they could go buy food on the market. This has been recognised by places such as Iran for example, instead of giving the poor cheap energy give them money so that they can purchase energy. And it’s also the way that the US deals with provision of food to the poor. We give them food stamps so that they can go and get regular food at the regular store: we don’t try to set up an entire purchase and distribution system just for food for poor people.

[Citizen Zed]

I would think the economies of scale would feed more people for less when the government pays wholesale and supplies healthy food choices to the hungry.

[4rcane]

if government was running things, wholesale prices will become retail prices, so no savings

[driftdiver]

Yes central planning is always more efficient. /s

[Foundahardheadedwoman]

So the WTO wants to tell a sovereign nation how much food it can have on hand to feed its people. Looks like the WTO will soon be calling all the shots right down to the smallest detail. Let’s hurry and sign up for this wonderful idea, trade in our would be dictator for the real deal, once again clothed in some sort of compassion, for the children. Great idea.

[BenLurkin]

Food stamps in the US have NOT been inefficient and rife with fraud.

This author is dead wrong.

[Wuli]

“A vastly better system would simply be to take the same amount of money and then give it to the poor so they could go buy food on the market.”

Hold on there. If they did that then they’d be upsetting the political culture of India, in which political power over handouts and the accompanied corruption goes hand in hand with party-building and more intimately and directly than similar buying of votes by Marxists and Progressives in this country, through government policies they promote and/or run.