The Tomato Panic of '08

Earlier this year, farmers in China's Guizhou Province overestimated the demand for tomatoes and ended up with 60,000 kgs of tomatoes they couldn't sell. The local government's solution was to order public employees to buy 50 kg each. "Oh, China," I thought when I first read about this. "You are so zany."

But then I started thinking about the proposed bailout of the U.S. financial system, and parallels immediately appeared as I read a discussion about the tomato tempest in the magazine I work for.

Those who support the mandatory tomato purchases argue that the government has a responsibility to intervene to prevent further losses, even if it means violating market economy rules: "If it had done nothing in this crisis, the government would not be blamed for interfering with economic affairs, but the price to pay would have been a huge amount of tomatoes rotting in the fields."

Opponents say the farmers found themselves in this situation because they were left to their own devices, and that a better solution would be more government supervision (hello!).

But the comment I found most interesting came at the end: "Compared with guiding the restructuring of the entire agricultural sector, it's much easier to create a favorable market within a certain region, but this practice is in nature abusing the government's administrative power."

China Fun Fact: Big news this weekend as China conducted its first space walk. So here's a new vocabulary word: An American in space is an astronaut, a Russian in space is a cosmonaut, and a Chinese person in space is called a taikonaut.