February 12, 2007

MILTON FRIEDMAN SMILES BENIGNLY AS THE NEW YORK TIMES MISSES THE MARK ONCE AGAIN

There is a cynical old joke from Soviet Russia that goes something like this: What happens when you bring socialism to the Sahara Desert? Nothing happens for seventy-five years and then there is a shortage of sand.

The front page of the Sunday New York Times—usually a space devoted to hand wringing, heart wrenching stories of the luckless, the losers, the benighted, the oppressed, the victims of the nation who cannot even find their way onto the pages of the daily Times as political constituencies—had a really up-beat story about Niger.[click HERE] It took up about a third of the page and then another whole page further into the front section. The headline read: IN NIGER, TREES AND CROPS TURN BACK THE DESERT. “Farmers in Niger have used simple techniques to help a once barren region become greener.” Lydia Polgreen was the reporter who tells the story innocently, naively, as though the news is “the simple techniques” that are driving the desert back and saving this vulnerable nation from starvation. Unfortunately the reporter’s naiveté or ignorance was not understood or recognized by the front page editor so that the real meaning of the facts remained hidden.

The real story is this. Niger is a country about twice the size of Texas, just south of the Sahara. Only 16% of it is arable at all, but over the years more and more of its land was being lost to the desert. Why? Because of the gradual destruction of its trees. Over the years more and more of its trees were being cut down by the farmers for firewood and use as building materials. And when the trees disappear, there are no longer any tree roots to hold the water in the ground and the water table disappears. When this happens the ground becomes hard, dry, and resistant to planting crops.
Over the years much land had been lost and the nation, already vulnerable to seasonal variation, became susceptible to food shortages and starvation.

Thus, all of the downward spiral over the years, economically and agronomically, leads back to the destruction of the standing trees in the country since time immemorial. Behind the destruction of the trees is a law that goes back to colonial times that nationalized all trees, made them the property of the state. But the state had no way of protecting its property—no tree police, foresters—so the farmers simply cut them down and found uses for them. This, of course, has been going on for centuries, until it went too far. “About 20 years ago, farmers like Ibrahim Danjimo realized something terrible was happening to their fields.

“We look around, all the trees were far from the village,” said Mr. Danjimo, a farmer in his 40s who has been working the rocky, sandy soil of this tiny village since he was a child. “Suddenly, the trees were all gone.

“Fierce winds were carrying off the topsoil of their once-productive land. Sand dunes threatened to swallow huts. Wells ran dry. Across the Sahel, a semiarid belt that spans Africa just below the Sahara and is home to some of the poorest people on earth, a cataclysm was unfolding…. The desert seemed determined to swallow everything.
But in the mid 80’s the government has recognized the benefits of allowing individuals to own their own trees. Farmers make money from the trees by selling branches, pods, fruit and bark. Because those sales are more lucrative over time than simply chopping down the tree for firewood, the farmers preserve them. So Mr. Danjimo and other farmers in Guidan Bakoye took a small but important step. No longer would they clear the saplings from their fields before planting, as they had for generations. Instead they would protect and nurture them, carefully plowing around them when sowing millet, sorghum, peanuts and beans.

“Today, the success in growing new trees suggests that the harm to much of the Sahel may not have been permanent, but a temporary loss of fertility. The evidence, scientists say, demonstrates how relatively small changes in human behavior can transform the regional ecology, restoring its biodiversity and productivity.
Thus, because of the transformation of the tree economy from socialism—state owned trees—to capitalism—individually owned trees with a free market to buy and sell them and their products, seven million acres and the entire economy has been rescued from oblivion and transformed socially.

For example, Ms. Polgreen tells of Ibrahim Idy, a farmer who has 20 baobab trees in his fields. Selling the leaves and fruit brings him about $300 a year in additional income. He has used that money to buy a motorized pump to draw water from his well to irrigate his cabbage and lettuce fields. His neighbors, though, who have fewer baobabs, use their children to draw water and dig and direct the mud channels that send water to the beds. While their children work the fields, Mr. Idy’s children attend school.

The transforming economic ideas which have resulted in this surprising reversal of fortune for Niger were proposed two hundred years ago by Adam Smith and reprised again and again in the past fifty years by Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman. Do you think Ms. Polgreen or her Sunday editor ever heard of them? Probably not—they were only a pair of dead white males.