The Falklands or Las Malvinas?

by Liberty and Power

Richard Gott suggests that Argentina's claim on the Falklands is still a good one.

More Comments:

Andrew D. Todd - 4/5/2007

What makes these very different climates similar is the fact that they are all nontemperate, and western civilization is built upon the temperate zone. To have a good ecological fit with these climates, westerners would have to learn to eat new and different kinds of food. If you go too close to the equator, the weeds and the insects are so vigorous that a temperate-zone farmer just cannot win. The sensible person reverts to swidden (slash and burn) cultivation, like a Melanesian or an Amazonian Indian. He learns to take poisonous plants, such as manioc, and process them into an edible foodstuff and a strong poison for his arrows. Likewise, if you go too far out into the desert, there is so little water that a temperate-zone farmer just cannot win. The sensible person reverts to rabbit-hunting, like a Kalahari bushman or a Navajo, or of course your own Aborigines living on kangaroos. Similarly, if you go too close to the polar regions, the growing season is so short that a temperate-zone farmer just cannot win. The sensible person reverts to hunting a readily available "top predator," like an Inuit (polar bear and seal), or minimally herding a large and hardy animal, like a Lapp (reindeer/caribou). In the case of the Falklands, this would presumably mean eating penguin. A penguin rookery can have something like a million penguins. That is surely enough to sustain a population of a thousand people or so in subsistence mode. However, if you want to have an automobile, you would have to persuade someone in Nagoya that he likes smoked penguin. That could be rather a tough sell.

As for the Scottish islands, the essential fact about them is that they are only about forty or fifty miles by sea from a railroad and/or a paved highway. Even before air transport became available, island farmers were sometimes selling live lobsters to London. Even so, many islands have become depopulated. Large sections of the Scottish Highlands have been turned into pinewood plantations, which only require attention every few years. About the only comparative advantage the Falklands has over the rest of the world is penguins.

Ref: John McPhee, The Crofter and the Laird.
Gavin Maxwell, Harpoon Venture.

Sudha Shenoy - 4/5/2007

The Falklands are at 51/42 S latitude -- south of Tasmania (approx. 42 S.) The Northern Territory runs from 1/40 S to 26 S latitudes -- near the Equator. So NT has a tropical climate; the Falklands are more like the Shetlands & the Orkneys -- cold, with long dark winters.

Andrew D. Todd - 4/4/2007

Specialist firms:

Well, of course that is substantially the same pattern as "contract cutters" in the American Great Plains. I don't know if you have something comparable in Australia, your cultivatable land area being so much smaller, but an American contract cutter will own a few million dollars worth of agricultural machinery, meaning things like combine harvesters, 18-wheel trucks, etc. The firm will start harvesting grain in Texas, and work its way north with the lengthening seasons to Montana, thus getting efficient utilization out of its equipment. I suppose that contract cutting could in principle proceed into Canada, but in practice, quite apart from trade restrictions, Canada does not encourage irrigation to anything like the same degree as the United States. If one looks at a satellite photograph of the border, the line is easily visible as a change of color. When cultivation is pushed to the limits of ecological feasibility, one of two things happens: a) civilized men go native, like Frederick Jackson Turner's frontiersman "learning to take the scalp in orthodox fashion," or, less bloodthirstily, the Japanese immigrants in Peru; or b) giant organizations set up factory farms. I think the Falklands resemble Australia's Northern Territory more than they resemble New South Wales. I understand that reindeer have recently been introduced to the Falklands. In biologist's terms, South America is a lot like Australia, tens of millions of years behind the times. Intrusive species are likely to swarm. My guess is that, being better adapted to the climate, the reindeer will probably drive the sheep out, very possibly at antler point. A reindeer has much more of a turn of speed than a sheep has, and very probably round-ups (musters, as you call them in Oz) would have to be on an all-island basis.

Falklands Sheep Production and Rural Population:

The Falklands government is approximately as disingenuous as Enron, and its "facts" cannot be taken at face value. However, I found the hotel guide a useful source of information. When an "innkeeper" states that he has rooms for rent, and that "basic groceries" can be obtained in the settlement's shop, but that bread is not available, that amounts to a tacit admission that the settlement is a ghost town, and there is not even someone close enough to drive over with a hamper of supplies. If there were a single house occupied in the summer, the housewife would be supplying anyone who happened to be around out of her larder, and dishing up meals for all and sundry. Obviously, the government encourages people to go through the motions of being innkeepers, to create the appearance of habitation. One can imagine some low-level government functionary scurrying around Stanley, the capital and sole population center of the Falklands, visiting all the people who own more or less abandoned houses in the outback, and pressuring them to provide descriptions, etc., making the most optimistic claims the property owners could be gotten to endorse. Occasionally, a stubborn fellow insisted on throwing in some caveats, for fear of being made into a liar. What actually seems to be happening is that farmers commute to their work on the ranches via government airplanes, of a type costing perhaps half a million dollars each, and a thousand dollars per hour to operate, of which the passengers pay only a small fraction. The British government is going to extravagant lengths to preserve the illusion of a civil population. What it comes down to is that they chose to spend their money not to achieve an unmanned farming operation, but to achieve visibly manned one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falkland_Islands_Government_Air_Service
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Britten-Norman_BN2_Islander

A price list for a BN2 operator in the Bahamas (Right-hand column is the BN2)
http://www.goldenwingscharter.com/Price_List/price_list.html

Stephen J. Pyne, _The Ice: A Journey to Antarctica_ (1986), refers to this kind of thing as "creating facts," and notes that the Argentines and Chileans do it as a matter of course. The reality is that these countries have not even been able to get much economic mileage of the southernmost portions of the lands they have clear title to. He creates a rather interesting analogy between the Antarctic and the American space program, as exercises in nations projecting their inner inadequacies outwards.

Sudha Shenoy - 4/4/2007

1. Victoria River Downs in the Northern Territory is the world's largest cattle station & Australia's largest pastoral property.

Mustering with helicopters is now standard, done by specialist firms. Some, esp. in the Northern Territory, are _relatively_ large; most are quite small. Most operate on relatively slim margins: what with rising fuel & regulatory costs, & the ups & downs of the pastoral industry.

2. I don't think the Falklands were ever on the sheep production map. Their main importance has always been political. At one point there was some vague mention of oil offshore, but nothing more.

Andrew D. Todd - 4/3/2007

I was referring specifically to Victoria River Downs, which I believe is operated on a somewhat larger scale. There was an article several years ago in Flying Magazine, which I cannot immediately locate. However, I have dug up some web references. Manned helicopters are comparatively expensive, though a typical helicopter used for cattle herding would be a piston-powered Robinson R22, costing _only_ a couple of hundred thousand dollars, or about a hundred dollars an hour to operate. The price of manned aircraft and their components is driven by safety considerations. A small aircraft engine costs many times what an automobile engine of comparable power would cost, because the consequences of failure would be so drastic. However, the next stage of progress would be to use unmanned aircraft, such as are presently being used by the military in the Middle East. These unmanned aircraft can be very small fixed-wing types, with low operating speeds. Such aircraft, being expendable, can be powered by inexpensive automobile or motorcycle engines. They can be fitted with such refinements as infrared imagers, etc. Similarly, wildlife biologists sometimes fit elk, etc. with radio transmitter collars, in order to study their habits. The details are open to discussion, of course, but it seems probable that the price of wool and mutton are likely to be driven down to a point where the Falklands simply cannot compete. According to Miller, a sheep in the Falklands requires something like 4-6 acres of pasture, something like fifty times more than for the eastern United States, reflecting the fact that the Falklands are very marginal land.

http://www.zreportage.com/Jackaroos/JackaroosTEXT.html

http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0509/p01s02-woap.html

http://www.heli-musternt.com.au/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson_R22

Sudha Shenoy - 4/3/2007

Steady on. Helicopters are expensive. A few of the very largest cattle stations in the Northern Territory, because of their size, can afford a single helicopter. Otherwise stations use helicopter services -- mostly small operations, but a couple are larger. Mustering timetables are drawn up around the dates a helicopter is available.

Andrew D. Todd - 4/2/2007

Well, the civil nongovernmental economy of the Falklands seems to be collapsing. It is based on sheep, and the state of the art in ranching for sale to the world market, as represented by Australian practice, involves using helicopters instead of horses. Most American ranchers can only stay afloat with the aid of crop subsidies. The Australians have ranches ("stations," as they call them), which are about the same size as the whole Falklands sheep industry, big enough to support a flight line with a couple of dozen helicopters, the necessary mechanics, etc., and a population of perhaps a hundred.

The Falklands are pretty much similar to certain districts of North Dakota. There is a certain type of rancher who lives in some place like Grand Forks, and drives a hundred miles to his ranch once a week or so, and hires a contract crew for certain seasonal chores. The members of such contract crews often commute between the northern hemisphere and the southern hemisphere (Australia or Argentina) in order to get a full year of employment. This is of course a rational adaptation to prevailing crop prices. However, a Falkland landowner who wanted to employ a similar strategy would find that the nearest town with reasonable level of amenities, not propped up by military expenditure, is Buenos Aires.

The Falklanders have effectively become Royal Air Force camp followers. Falklanders shop in the RAF shopping center; they fly back to Britain on the RAF's private airline; and so on. The aging population of the Falklands, together with the younger population of the RAF dependents, can only manage to maintain a primary school, and a junior high school, but not a senior high school, so the children go to school in Britain from the age of sixteen onwards. The RAF generates a kind of economy, by in effect, threatening to sink Chinese fishing vessels unless they buy fishing licenses. We are talking about something which is more nearly akin to buccaneering than to economic activity in the traditional sense of the word. Forty years ago, these fishing grounds were clearly regarded in international law as part of the high seas. The Falkland government does not have the excuse that the Icelandic government did in the "cod wars," of maintaining fishing employment for its own nationals, or of using the product for its own consumption or further manufacturing. Suppose one were to take a reasonable demarcation principle, that territorial seas less than two hundred miles from the coasts of more than one country should be awarded in proportion to the land area they are based on. In that case, Argentina would get the lion's share. The Falklands do nothing but collect the rent. It is a pure and simple case of "run up the Jolly Roger."

Take a look at Robert Miller, _Liability or Asset: A Policy for the Falkland Islands_, 1986, Institute for European Defense and Strategic Studies, Occasional Paper No. 22.

Also, look at Dayton O. Hyde, _Yamsi_, 1971, for a sense of the problems of an agricultural operator on the margins of the viable zone. Hyde, in Eastern Oregon, was relying on aging cowpokes who did not want to learn a new way of life, and for whom there were no younger replacements. The old coots were happy to sit around the bunkhouse of a winter day, many miles from the nearest town, telling tall tales, and going out just long enough to feed the cattle. If one of them were to have a heart attack, there would have been no feasible way to get him to a hospital or a doctor, but of course, these kind of men would have really hated winding up in a hospital anyway. When one is talking about agriculture, one cannot avoid the geriatric aspects.

http://www.falklands.gov.fk/9c.htm
http://www.falklands.gov.fk/
http://www.falklands.gov.fk/education.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falkland_islands
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_of_the_Falkland_Islands

Otto M. Kerner - 4/2/2007

Argentina's claim to the Falklands is rubbish. The area had never been consistently inhabited by anybody prior to the current British settlement. The Argentinian colony in 1833 might have survived had the British not invaded ... or it might not. That's a historical question now; it is only under the British that the islands have been home to generations of people. In theory, there may be some living people in Argentina who have a claim to own land in the Falklands because their ancestors were evicted in 1833, but they would be difficult to find. I don't think this implies that the Argentinian state has any claim at all. In fact, since Richard Gott takes no steps at all to try to justify the idea that a state might have a valid claim in a situation like this, I don't really understand what this article has to do with a libertarian blog.