| Interesting. There are a lot of stories from the 1960s about us giving/trading food to India. The US had a massive surplus, and was trying very hard not to destroy excess food. They sent food to India, because the alternative was to let it go bad. And they would thank India for taking it. But when diplomats realized this was happening, they tried to use it to extract concessions from India. So India was being told “please take this food,” then “now that you’ve taken the food you owe us.” India wasn’t exactly pure in this either. India has been thankfully free of widespread famine since the British left. But internal controls created shortages, which were unnecessary. India could have fed itself, but that was politically untenable, just as it was politically untenable for the US government to destroy food or stop paying farmers to overproduce. |