Yes, they could.
Here’s the truth that is just too inconvenient for the professionally sensitive to bear:
The highest ag yields in the world are achieved by one select group of farmers: white, western (esp. US) educated, well capitalized, industrialized farmers.
In short, US farmers. European farmers are second.
When you take land away from white, western-educated farmers and hand the land over to people who have no experience in running a farm, as Mugabe is doing in Zim, you’ve just guaranteed a production crash. You could pull all the US farmers out of Brazil and watch their soybean production crash, perhaps not as hard, but you’d see the effects in the world markets.
As Mugabe runs all the white farmers off the land in Zimbabwe and you get what we have here: famine and starvation. This is not the fault of the US, and certainly has nothing to do with ethanol, regardless of whatever hyperventilation emits from the “ethanol is evil” crowd here on FR.
You might as well turn control of the space shuttle over to cave men while on final approach as turn a modern farm over to third world natives. The results will be the same.
There is no equivalent in worldwide ag development to the progress made by white European farmers in Europe and the US since the 18th century. None, zippo, nada, nothing, nowhere else in the world. There is no equivalent in the rest of the world to such men as Jethro Tull, inventor of the seed drill. There is no equivalent in the rest of the world to the US program of no-till farming, which I might add, involves subsidies.
Even now, we enjoy brilliantly colored sunsets in the western US due to the amount of dust put into the air by nearly neolithic farming practices on a wide scale in northern China and our sunsets are the result of the dust these practices create from widespread desertification. The ChiComs are ruining vast tracts of land every year with their ignorance and collective farming practices.
While we’re on the subject, there is no one man who has done more to feed the ignorant masses of the third world in the history of the world than this one American:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug
No one comes even remotely close, certainly no one in the third world.
It is pretty fair to say that US farmers and US researchers have more than pulled their weight in feeding their fellow man. People who want to blovate about what/how US farmers farm should shut their pie holes unless and until they can do better.
Given that, what would be your impression of anybody importing wheat or chicken products into the US from China (similar to importing ice into Alaska from Arizona or Nevada...)?? My own instinctive feeling is that in theory at least there should be no legal way anybody could do that and do anything other than lose money. The United States is VASTLY more efficient at producing all of the grains at the bottom of the food pyramid than anybody else on the planet, and particularly than anybody still using neolithic farming techniques.