Political Language

My thoughts today are these:

Paul Krugman has suggested in his NYTimes article today that cheap food, like cheap oil, may be a thing of the past. He points out that the world financial crisis is a big deal and has affected quite a few people, but he also suggests that the world food crisis that has emerged as a result of rising costs is an even larger problem affecting a greater share of people.

I enjoyed the first half of his article, as he adroitly pieced together the litany of factors that have resulted in higher food prices, a problem for African families that spend more than half of their income every year on food.

Krugman describes the contributing factors: farm-supplying countries limits on exports to protect domestic consumers; the need for more grain to feed cows in order to meet growing demand for meat in expanding countries like China, oil prices, bad weather(climate change), and lastly, the "rise of the demon ethanol" and the use of subsidies to support the venture.

The problem arises when he takes part of the problem and makes it the whole problem. He says, "People are starving in Africa so that American politicians can court votes in farm states." Is that really fair? Are children in Africa starving because Argentinian politicians have yielded to consumer pressure? The answer is, in part, yes. But is the problem that simple? No.

This sort of language strikes me as particularly reductionist, and I think its indicative of a fairly prevalent problem: the tendency to reduce large and complicated problems into inculpatory political statements. (Take Barack's and Hilary's use of NAFTA for example, or the blaming of the Bush administration for the financial meltdown)

Of course farm subsidies are part of the problem here, but he's made it clear that there are many other contributing factors.

So why make grandiose statements about how children are starving in Africa because of the ways of Washington? Don't get me wrong. I'm not defending the use of farm subsidies for votes' sake (or at all for that matter), but what I am defending is our need to understand tough problems without reducing them down to simple "politicisms." (if i may invent a word here)