Them belly full, but we hungry

A pot has cooked but the yeild´s not enough. A hungry man is an angry man....

All over the world, higher prices of commodities are causing widespread unrest. People are rioting in Haiti, the Philipines, Burkina Faso and the list goes on. People are incorrectly/unfairly blaming their governments for the increase in goods that they depend on for day to day living. They want their government to do something about their woes yesterday already.

In our little country, we insist on importing a majority of the goods that we consume. Currently, the gas has to be imported because we cannot produce it. The price of oil currently fluctuates around a couple of dollars above 100 dollars per barrel. It used to be around 30 dollars a couple of odd years ago.

We have a tendency as a people to demand that our government should intervene in cases like this and set price ceilings. We have supposedly educated journalists, screaming on their front pages that the government must do something about this and go in and reduce the price of, for example, rice.

Let me inform you of some facts:

1. Price control is a thing of the past, unless you have a budget to subsidize the importer (which we don´t have).

2. You could impose price ceilings, with the effect that whoever is in the business of importing the commodity would be selling at a loss and refrain from importing it, causing a shortage. This shortage would cause the price of the goods to increase further as the basic laws of supply and demand. Demand is greater than supply of the goods causing momentary price hikes. No sensible person is in business to lose money.(Check out the empty shelves in Zimbabwe)

3. In "normal economies", when the price of goods increase as they have, producers of the said commodity usually jump at the opportunity to produce as much of it as possible and maximize their profit while doing so. This usually increases the supply of the good in question, and over time reduces the price of the good.

4. Liberia is not a normal economy. Everyone prefers to sit in the overcrowded capital and complain and play politics, instead of going and producing what is needed in terms of food. Unfortunately, this attitude is a remenance of the society created by returning settlers during the 1800s, always depending upon the outside world to supply supply the goods.

5. We have enough fertile land in this country. Our president has shown us what modern agricultural technology can yield in the terms of rice production just outside her yard. Is it her job to start rice farms to feed us now?

My people, the incentives are there. Plant your seed, and you will reap the harvest. Either that or you will have to eat cassava and edoe for the rest of you life. Sit down there and let foreigners come here and do it for you, and even more money will flow our of our country.