NIGER AND THE FREE MARKET:

…In Niger specifically, the controls of a command economy are still very visible. The second-poorest country in the world derives almost half its income from international aid, and another substantial chunk from uranium exporting companies controlled by Niger’s former colonial overlord, France. This is hardly a solid base for a free market. Price controls and government intervention in the grain market stopped only in the last decade, meaning a free market has not yet developed in full. The obstacles to new business development and foreign business participation are manifold. Much of the agricultural sector is still government-run. Worst of all, tiny Niger, in which only 15% of the land is arable and non-desert, depends on its neighbors for cereal imports every year. But this year, those command-controlled neighbors, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, and Mali, are restricting exports to Niger, despite the fact that they’ve signed trade treaties against such hoarding. In other words, Niger’s children are starving because of a failure to trade freely, and not a failure of the free market.

Niger’s situation is nothing new. Command-controlled, totalitarian and authoritarian regimes have regularly bred famine because they can’t respond quickly to resulting conditions or to bad harvests, and because their comfortable ruling elites ignore the starvation their policies cause, according to Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen, who wrote Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation. Other academics have argued the point even more forcefully, alleging that socialist regimes’ starvation of millions of people constitutes deliberate neglect, if not deliberate killing.

more; via The Corner