Ideology, the Danger of

There was a time when I stopped reading newspapers. I was on a diet of sorts, not for my body but for my mind, which was generating an unhealthy surplus of anxieties and fears. I was determined not to introduce any additional negative stimuli in the form of violent or depressing stories that would leave me feeling even more overwhelmed or despairing.

I'm not in such a dark place anymore and so I now do read the New York Times online. Typically I skim the headlines, check out the Letters to the Editor and poke around for feature articles. I am still on a news diet, trying to carefully select what information to feed my still impressionable brain. But sometimes I do give into the temptation to click on a headline that might lead to a longer and upsetting story.

And so it was that I read Ending Famine, Simply by Ignoring the Experts, about how Malawi is now growing enough food for export after years in which it couldn't produce enough for domestic consumption. During those bleak years Malawi followed the World Bank's ideologically orthodox free market advice to not subsidize fertilizer. Without the fertilizer, farmers couldn't coax food out of the weak soil. Many people died of starvation. What is so sickening about the World Bank's advice is that the United States and Europe subsidize their farmers.

But after the 2005 harvest, the worst in a decade, Bingu wa Mutharika, Malawi’s newly elected president, decided to follow what the West practiced, not what it preached.

In my master's program, which each year produces a fresh crop of World Bank employees, I was indoctrinated in the dogma of free trade and free markets and could spout the ideology on command. Some of the economic theories underlying this ideology are seductive in their simple logic and beautiful when illustrated by an elegant curve on a graph. But insisting on transplanting these Ivory Tower ideas into Africa's, or at least Malawi's, barren terrain seems foolish at best and - in light of the resulting deaths - criminal at worst.