Starve Thy Neighbor

Nice post by Harvard’s Jeff Frankel on the little-followed but surprisingly important issue of export control on food crops. The United States hasn’t tried to contain food prices by embargoing exports since Richard Nixon briefly stopped foreign sales of soybeans and set in motion the rise of Brazil and Argentina as formidable competitors. But it’s an all too common practice in the Third World, where the price of grain can mean life or death for the poor. Frankel’s argument: everybody’d be better off if nobody did it.