Correction, please!(current events)(Column)

The Famine Feast

ITEM: At the World Food Summit in Rome on June 10th, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan told delegates there was "no time to waste," stated a UN press release. "If we want to reverse the current trends and halve hunger by 2015, we need a comprehensive and coherent approach that addresses the multiple dimensions of hunger by pursuing simultaneously wider access to food, and agricultural and rural development. We need an anti-hunger programme that could become a common framework around which global and national capacities to fight hunger can be mobilized." Africa especially needs development strategies, Annan said, with "outright famine" threatening southern Africa.

CORRECTION: Unfortunately, government programs and corruption contribute to food scarcity, with famine more likely where there are centralized, authoritarian regimes, such as Africa. "If all black African leaders were to ... lift price controls to permit their peasants to sell their produce in open free markets," observed Ghanaian economist George Ayittey, "there would be no food crisis in the continent."

Some African governments actually hurt their own people. Some block emergency aid, as in southern Sudan and Zimbabwe. Robert Mugabe's government in Zimbabwe is also confiscating 95 percent of the land owned by white farmers and giving it to cronies -- driving production down. Inflation there has hit 113%, reports the BBC, and food is used as a weapon. "We've even heard of children whose parents are suspected of supporting the opposition being turned away from feeding lines at schools," remarked Andrew Natsios, head of USAID.

Subsidized Fuelishness

ITEM: Speaking in Des Moines, the president called on Congress "to endorse an energy policy that promotes ethanol ft is a "popular cause in farm states" reported the June 8th Washington Post. Said Mr. Bush: "It is in our national interest to have more forms of energy produced at home, so we're less reliant upon foreign sources of energy."

CORRECTION: The domestic energy argument might have more punch if the president hadn't just made "off-limits" some 2.6 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, in the Destin Dome Unit in the Gulf of Mexico, as a political payoff to development opponents in Florida. Massive ethanol subsidization is another political ...