Let Them Eat ... Uh ... Let Them Buy Arms

Mark Steel, "If the poor of Africa are hungry, send them arms"

It's arguable there isn't a food shortage at all. According to the World Hunger Education Service, there are now 17 per cent more calories produced per person each day than there were 30 years ago. The problem is that, for example, in India, while 48 per cent of children under five are malnourished, in 2004 they exported one-and-a-half-billion dollars' worth of rice to meet trade agreements.

But instead the most common solution offered is that Africa has to attract the free market, and then trade itself out of hunger. Kofi Annan, on Monday's Newsnight agreed with this, in his amiable helpless way. There was no alternative, he said, to attracting Chinese trade, regardless of their human rights records or whether that trade will encourage the dictators they trade with. Because that's what the starving need – people who are prepared to make a few quid out of them.

The only flaw is that these people are already the ones who've wrecked the place. In Nigeria entire villages were uprooted to make room for Shell Oil. In Tanzania the water supply was sold off to a consortium, which spent a huge chunk of Tanzanian public money and was so disastrous even the World Bank kicked them out. In South Africa tens of thousands were left without electricity after privatisation.

But the more chaos these companies cause, the more we're told they're the only answer. Maybe that's how these companies advertise, with little boxes in the Yellow Pages that say "Balfour Beatty – making disaster come faster". Or they send out leaflets that say: "Not long ago no one had heard of the Shanto region of Ethiopia. But since Unimax Ltd. forced the farmers to make cheap coffee for export, many inhabitants now feature regularly on Christmas charity videos! Unimax – we put the star into starvation."