I’m waking up, and the clock radio is playing, and a sponsorship (advertisement) came on from the Maryland Alpaca Breeders Association.
The Maryland Alpaca Breeders Association?
Seriously?
I wouldn’t think that there would be enough Alpaca breeders in Maryland to organize a softball game against the Pennsylvania Potbellied Pig Breeders Association.
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Growing marijuana is illegal, so the growers tend not to be particularly solicitous of EPA regulations, and as a result the Fisher may be placed on the endangered species list:
A rare west coast mammal is up for Endangered Species protection thanks to the threat posed by California’s illegal marijuana industry.
The fisher, a carnivorous cousin of the weasel found in the old-growth forests in California, Oregon and Washington is already rare, its numbers reduced by fur trappers and loggers going back to the 1800s, as well as by urban development. Only two naturally occurring wild populations exist, according to the Center for Biological Diversity: one is in the southern Sierra, and the other is in southern Oregon and Northern California. A third was reintroduced into Washington’s Olympic National Park in 2008. But the motivation for the new level of protection, according to U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials, comes from the use of rat poison on marijuana plantations. Of 58 carcasses tested by one 2012 study, nearly 80 percent tested positive for traces of rodenticide.
“It is an illegal activity so it’s not like we know a lot yet,” explained Paul Henson, state supervisor for the FWS in Oregon. “But we know it’s fairly widespread within the range of the fisher, because that’s also where a certain amount of the illegal cultivation occurring on public lands.”
Make pot legal now.
The latest round of WTO talks have collapsed over the issue of allowing Wall Street to loot food supplies:
The World Trade Organization failed Thursday to ratify an agreement designed to streamline the global trade system, frustrating a late push by U.S. officials to convince India to reach a compromise that would have secured a deal.
“I do not have the necessary elements that would lead to me to conclude that a breakthrough is possible,” WTO Director General Roberto Azevedo said. “We got closer—significantly closer—but not quite there.”
The WTO reached an agreement in December on the Indonesian resort island of Bali to streamline customs procedures. The deadline to ratify that agreement was Thursday, but India declined to do so without a parallel agreement allowing developing countries more freedom to subsidize and stockpile food.
Some economists have estimated that the Bali agreement, which seeks to standardize customs practices and remove red tape, could save WTO members more than $1 trillion eventually.
Failure to achieve a consensus before the WTO’s own deadline deals a severe blow to the Geneva-based body’s credibility, already tenuous after years of stalled talks on tariff reductions. The trade-easing deal was viewed as a way to create some momentum.
As a raft of regional trade deals moves ahead, the WTO’s ability to act as a catalyst for global trade liberalization is in doubt.
India had insisted for weeks that it wouldn’t sign off on the Bali pact unless the group comes to a faster accord on exempting food-subsidy and stockpiling programs like India’s from current WTO rules that limit them.
Remember when international food prices spiked a few years ago because of aggressive market manipulation by Wall Street in the US and the City in London?
The “subsidies” in question are providing sub-market price food to poor people in those countries, and stockpiles to mitigate market manipulation by the banksters.
India wants a permanent solution to this, they (correctly) consider it a matter of national security, but what they got was non-binding language that would render any attempt to protect their citizens from the vicissitudes of the market inoperative by 2017.
I approve.
I am referring to Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who is doing his level best to create a violent confrontation with federal authorities after refusing to obey the regulations, and pay the rent, required for maintaining a grazing permit:
Wielding signs and slogans, several hundred demonstrators rallied Monday to support beleaguered Nevada cattle rancher Cliven Bundy after authorities began to seize his cattle from federal land.
Protesters had responded to an alert that promised: “Range war begins at the Bundy ranch at 9:30 a.m. We’re going to get the job done!”
Federal officials say Bundy is illegally running cattle in the 600,000-acre Gold Butte area, habitat of the federally protected desert tortoise. A federal judge ruled last year that if Bundy did not remove his cattle, they could be seized by the Bureau of Land Management. That seizure began Saturday.
Bundy and his supporters remain unbowed.
“We have hundreds of people here standing behind us,” said Bundy’s daughter Bailey Logue, 22, during a telephone interview Monday from the family ranch, as a rooster crowed in the background. “We’re letting these federal people know that the Bundy family is not the only ones who care what happens to this land.”
Bundy, 68, has refused to pay BLM grazing fees since 1993, arguing in court filings that his Mormon ancestors worked the land long before the BLM was formed, giving him rights that predate federal involvement. His back fees exceed $300,000, he says. The government puts the tab above $1 million.
Federal authorities have closed off the Gold Butte area and are rounding up what they call “trespass cattle,” many of which belong to Bundy. By Monday, 134 cattle had been impounded, according to the BLM website.
“Cattle have been in trespass on public lands in southern Nevada for more than two decades. This is unfair to the thousands of other ranchers who graze livestock in compliance with federal laws and regulations throughout the West,” the BLM said on its website.
………
For years Bundy has insisted that his cattle aren’t going anywhere. He acknowledges that he keeps firearms at his ranch, 90 minutes north of Las Vegas, and has vowed to do “whatever it takes” to defend his animals from seizure.
………
Kirsten Cannon, a spokeswoman for the BLM in southern Nevada, said Bundy “owes the BLM and American taxpayers more than $1 million in grazing fees and trespass fines.”
“He has been running more than 900 cattle while he only has the authority to graze 150,” she said Monday. “He has also made a number of inflammatory statements, saying that he will do what he needs to do to protect his livestock. When such threats are made, the federal government has the responsibility to protect public safety.”
So in addition to regular federal subsidies available to farmers, he’s also been squatting on federal land, and destroying it through overgrazing, and somehow he’s become a hero for the militia movement, because ……… Freedumb!!!
Here is something that I missed.
I knew that antibiotics served to make animals to gain weight faster, but it never occurred to me that antibiotic residues are making the American public fat as well.
It makes sense antibiotics make cows, chickens, and pigs gain weight faster, so why shouldn’t it have the same effect on humans?
This is particularly significant with pigs, because as opportunistic omnivores, they are metabolically quite similar to us:
If you walk into a farm-supply store today, you’re likely to find a bag of antibiotic powder that claims to boost the growth of poultry and livestock. That’s because decades of agricultural research has shown that antibiotics seem to flip a switch in young animals’ bodies, helping them pack on pounds. Manufacturers brag about the miraculous effects of feeding antibiotics to chicks and nursing calves. Dusty agricultural journals attest to the ways in which the drugs can act like a kind of superfood to produce cheap meat.
As an aside here, we know that this produces cheaper meat, and thanks to the Danes experiences with their antibiotic ban over the past 15 years, we know about how much money it saves, and it is less than 10¢ a pound.
It is basically negligible.
But what if that meat is us? Recently, a group of medical investigators have begun to wonder whether antibiotics might cause the same growth promotion in humans. New evidence shows that America’s obesity epidemic may be connected to our high consumption of these drugs. But before we get to those findings, it’s helpful to start at the beginning, in 1948, when the wonder drugs were new — and big was beautiful.
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In 2002 Americans were about an inch taller and 24 pounds heavier than they were in the 1960s, and more than a third are now classified as obese. Of course, diet and lifestyle are prime culprits. But some scientists wonder whether there could be other reasons for this staggering transformation of the American body. Antibiotics might be the X factor — or one of them.
I think that it’s clear that the major issue here is sources of chronic antibiotic exposure, with meat and poultry being the primary contributors, though the article downplays this:
Of course, while farm animals often eat a significant dose of antibiotics in food, the situation is different for human beings. By the time most meat reaches our table, it contains little or no antibiotics. So we receive our greatest exposure in the pills we take, rather than the food we eat. American kids are prescribed on average about one course of antibiotics every year, often for ear and chest infections. Could these intermittent high doses affect our metabolism?
This statement is at best an inaccurate generalization.
There are numerous reports about issues involving antibiotic residues in meat, and it is one of the reasons that the FDA is proposing tighter restrictions on antibiotic use on livestock.
You really need to read this account of a systematic program of harassment and libel against Tyrone Hayes for his research showing that Syngenta’s herbicide atrazine was dangerous:
In 2001, seven years after joining the biology faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, Tyrone Hayes stopped talking about his research with people he didn’t trust. He instructed the students in his lab, where he was raising three thousand frogs, to hang up the phone if they heard a click, a signal that a third party might be on the line. Other scientists seemed to remember events differently, he noticed, so he started carrying an audio recorder to meetings. “The secret to a happy, successful life of paranoia,” he liked to say, “is to keep careful track of your persecutors.”
Three years earlier, Syngenta, one of the largest agribusinesses in the world, had asked Hayes to conduct experiments on the herbicide atrazine, which is applied to more than half the corn in the United States. Hayes was thirty-one, and he had already published twenty papers on the endocrinology of amphibians. David Wake, a professor in Hayes’s department, said that Hayes “may have had the greatest potential of anyone in the field.” But, when Hayes discovered that atrazine might impede the sexual development of frogs, his dealings with Syngenta became strained, and, in November, 2000, he ended his relationship with the company.
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[Former student Roger] Liu and several other former students said that they had remained skeptical of Hayes’s accusations until last summer, when an article appeared in Environmental Health News (in partnership with 100Reporters)* that drew on Syngenta’s internal records. Hundreds of Syngenta’s memos, notes, and e-mails have been unsealed following the settlement, in 2012, of two class-action suits brought by twenty-three Midwestern cities and towns that accused Syngenta of “concealing atrazine’s true dangerous nature” and contaminating their drinking water. Stephen Tillery, the lawyer who argued the cases, said, “Tyrone’s work gave us the scientific basis for the lawsuit.”
Hayes has devoted the past fifteen years to studying atrazine, and during that time scientists around the world have expanded on his findings, suggesting that the herbicide is associated with birth defects in humans as well as in animals. The company documents show that, while Hayes was studying atrazine, Syngenta was studying him, as he had long suspected. Syngenta’s public-relations team had drafted a list of four goals. The first was “discredit Hayes.” In a spiral-bound notebook, Syngenta’s communications manager, Sherry Ford, who referred to Hayes by his initials, wrote that the company could “prevent citing of TH data by revealing him as noncredible.” He was a frequent topic of conversation at company meetings. Syngenta looked for ways to “exploit Hayes’ faults/problems.” “If TH involved in scandal, enviros will drop him,” Ford wrote. She observed that Hayes “grew up in world (S.C.) that wouldn’t accept him,” “needs adulation,” “doesn’t sleep,” was “scarred for life.” She wrote, “What’s motivating Hayes?—basic question.”
………
In January, 2001, Syngenta employees and members of the EcoRisk panel travelled to Berkeley to discuss Hayes’s new findings. Syngenta asked to meet with him privately, but Hayes insisted on the presence of his students, a few colleagues, and his wife. He had previously had an amiable relationship with the panel—he had enjoyed taking long runs with the scientist who supervised it—and he began the meeting, in a large room at Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, as if he were hosting an academic conference. He wore a new suit and brought in catered meals.
After lunch, Syngenta introduced a guest speaker, a statistical consultant, who listed numerous errors in Hayes’s report and concluded that the results were not statistically significant. Hayes’s wife, Katherine Kim, said that the consultant seemed to be trying to “make Tyrone look as foolish as possible.” Wake, the biology professor, said that the men on the EcoRisk panel looked increasingly uncomfortable. “They were experienced enough to know that the issues the statistical consultant was raising were routine and ridiculous,” he said. “A couple of glitches were presented as if they were the end of the world. I’ve been a scientist in academic settings for forty years, and I’ve never experienced anything like that. They were after Tyrone.”
………
Michelle Boone, a professor of aquatic ecology at Miami University, who served on the E.P.A.’s scientific advisory panel, said, “We all follow the Tyrone Hayes drama, and some people will say, ‘He should just do the science.’ But the science doesn’t speak for itself. Industry has unlimited resources and bully power. Tyrone is the only one calling them out on what they’re doing.………
The Supreme Court has said that corporations are people in the Citizens United case.
Why isn’t Syngenta being criminally prosecuted for stalking?
They blew up a barn in Germany.
The official story is that methane buildup from cow flatulence caused this:
Methane gas from 90 flatulent cows exploded in a German farm shed on Monday, damaging the roof and injuring one of the animals, police said.
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One cow was treated for burns, a police spokesman added.
We know better though it’s part of the great ruminant conspiracy.
Scientists are working to develop a flatulence free cow:
A new research project looks into the possibilities of adapting every aspect of cattle husbandry and selection processes to lower their greenhouse gas emissions.
You may think that climate change is being caused by burning oil, coal and gas. But not so fast! The emission of methane from cattle is a surprisingly important factor. Methane from cows — a greenhouse gas 25 times more powerful than carbon dioxide — makes up 20% of greenhouse emissions from agriculture, or about 1% of all anthropogenic greenhouse gases. That’s according to Phil Garnsworthy, professor of dairy science at the University of Nottingham in the UK. He is also one of the project scientists of an EU-funded research project, called Ruminomics, which is using cutting-edge science to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from cattle.
The key to the project, Garnsworthy says, is that cattle vary by a factor of two or three in the amount of methane their stomachs produce. It is therefore possible to imagine a dairy herd producing the same volume of milk for lower greenhouse gas emissions. In addition, different diets mean that cows can produce the same amount of milk with lower emissions. “It is possible to imagine cutting emissions from cattle by a fifth, using a combination approach in which you would breed from lower-emitting cattle as well as changing their diets,” Garnsworthy said.
Different genetic strains of cow emit different amounts of methane. “There are three issues: diet, genetics, and the microbiology of the cow’s rumen. We think that animal genetics may well influence their gut microbiology. However, this link has not been proved and we are still in the data collection phase,” explains Lorenzo Morelli, director of the faculty of agriculture at the Catholic University of Sacred Heart in Piacenza, Italy, who is a microbiologist and a project scientist.
Until now, the European cattle industry was mainly interested in improving aspects of livestock such as their fertility and their overall shape. But Morelli thinks that the market will soon add lower methane production to the list of desired cattle characteristics. Indeed, a herd that emits less methane is likely to be more productive. “The methane is lost energy that could go into producing milk. So if we can find the right genetic mix, we can find cattle that are less polluting, more productive, and more profitable for the famer,” Morelli said.
I, for one, welcome this effort to push back against bovine tyranny.
They are cioncerned that these pesticides are causing colony collapse disorder:
Environmentalists hailed a “victory for bees” today after the European Union voted for a ban on the nerve-agent pesticides blamed for the dramatic decline global bee populations.
Despite fierce lobbying by the chemicals industry and opposition by countries including Britain, 15 of the 27 member states voted for a two-year restriction on neonicotinoid insecticides. That gave the European Commission the support it needed to push through an EU-wide ban on using three neonicotinoids on crops attractive to bees.
Tonio Borg, the EC’s top health official, said they planned to implement the landmark ban from December. “I pledge to do my utmost to ensure that our bees, which are so vital to our ecosystem and contribute over €22bn annually to European agriculture, are protected,” he said.
Britain was among eight nations which voted against the motion, despite a petition signed by 300,000 people presented to Downing Street last week by fashion designers Vivienne Westwood and Katharine Hamnett. The Independent has also campaigned to save Britain’s bee population.
Four nations abstained from the moratorium, which will restrict the use of imidacloprid and clothianidin, made by Germany’s Bayer, and thiamethoxam, made by the Swiss company, Syngenta. The ban on use on flowering crops will remain in place throughout the EU for two years unless compelling scientific evidence to the contrary becomes available.
More than 30 separate scientific studies have found a link between the neonicotinoids, which attack insects’ nerve systems, and falling bee numbers. The proposal by European Commission – the EU’s legislative body – to ban the insecticides was based on a study by the European Food Safety Authority, which found in January that the pesticides did pose a risk to bees’ health.
The argument against this is that the evidence is not sufficiently conclusive.
Hopefully, the two year ban should provide some good data, though the Wiki indicates that the pesticide can persist in the environment for more than two years.
Because we are killing the bees necessary for these crops in unprecedented numbers:
A mysterious malady that has been killing honeybees en masse for several years appears to have expanded drastically in the last year, commercial beekeepers say, wiping out 40 percent or even 50 percent of the hives needed to pollinate many of the nation’s fruits and vegetables.
A conclusive explanation so far has escaped scientists studying the ailment, colony collapse disorder, since it first surfaced around 2005. But beekeepers and some researchers say there is growing evidence that a powerful new class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids, incorporated into the plants themselves, could be an important factor.
The pesticide industry disputes that. But its representatives also say they are open to further studies to clarify what, if anything, is happening.
“They looked so healthy last spring,” said Bill Dahle, 50, who owns Big Sky Honey in Fairview, Mont. “We were so proud of them. Then, about the first of September, they started to fall on their face, to die like crazy. We’ve been doing this 30 years, and we’ve never experienced this kind of loss before.”
In a show of concern, the Environmental Protection Agency recently sent its acting assistant administrator for chemical safety and two top chemical experts here, to the San Joaquin Valley of California, for discussions.
In the valley, where 1.6 million hives of bees just finished pollinating an endless expanse of almond groves, commercial beekeepers who only recently were losing a third of their bees to the disorder say the past year has brought far greater losses.
They talked to a bee keeper who was planning to take 13,000 hives to California for the almond season, but only had 3000 because of hive losses.
The long-persistence neonicotinoids are being fingered as the likely cause, but given the mode of both the EPA and the Department of agriculture will demand definitive proof of harm, rather than requiring proof of safety, particularly when big Ag, like the seed suppliers who have taken to using said pesticides to pre-treat the seeds (Monsanto and their ilk), we are in for a bumpy ride.
The Meat Industry Now Consumes Four-Fifths of All Antibiotics.
FWIW, this implies that agriculture is not responsible for something like 80% of all the antibiotic resistance.
Just so you know, they banned antibiotics in Denmark, and it added less than a nickel a pound to the cost of meat.
An Indiana soybean farmer, bought seeds from the local elevator and replanted them, and was promptly sued by the axis of evil Monsanto, and the Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case:
As David versus Goliath battles go it is hard to imagine a more uneven fight than the one about to play out in front of the US supreme court between Vernon Hugh Bowman and Monsanto.
On the one side is Bowman, a single 75-year-old Indiana soybean farmer who is still tending the same acres of land as his father before him in rural south-western Indiana. On the other is a gigantic multibillion dollar agricultural business famed for its zealous protection of its commercial rights.
Not that Bowman sees it that way. “I really don’t consider it as David and Goliath. I don’t think of it in those terms. I think of it in terms of right and wrong,” Bowman told The Guardian in an interview.
Either way, in the next few weeks Bowman and Monsanto’s opposing legal teams will face off in front of America’s most powerful legal body, weighing in on a case that deals with one of the most fundamental questions of modern industrial farming: who controls the rights to the seeds planted in the ground.
………
As David versus Goliath battles go it is hard to imagine a more uneven fight than the one about to play out in front of the US supreme court between Vernon Hugh Bowman and Monsanto.
On the one side is Bowman, a single 75-year-old Indiana soybean farmer who is still tending the same acres of land as his father before him in rural south-western Indiana. On the other is a gigantic multibillion dollar agricultural business famed for its zealous protection of its commercial rights.
Not that Bowman sees it that way. “I really don’t consider it as David and Goliath. I don’t think of it in those terms. I think of it in terms of right and wrong,” Bowman told The Guardian in an interview.
Either way, in the next few weeks Bowman and Monsanto’s opposing legal teams will face off in front of America’s most powerful legal body, weighing in on a case that deals with one of the most fundamental questions of modern industrial farming: who controls the rights to the seeds planted in the ground.
I really, really, hope that Bowman cleans their clock in the Supreme Court.
The idea that the right of farmers to replant seeds, a right that is literally thousands of years old, and this right should not be, to paraphrase William Jennings Bryan, “Crucified on a cross of patent law.”
My guess is that it is likely that Bowman will prevail, as Monsanto prevailed at the district court, and then at the patent court, and these days, the Supreme Court only takes these cases when it wants to throw a brush back pitch at the patent court being nuts.
The case is Vernon Hugh Bowman v. Monsanto.
One of the largest food trading firms in the nation is bragging about how drought and food shortages will make them lots of money:
Every so often a business titan forgets himself, drops his guard and tells us what he’s really thinking.So it was that a big cheese at the world’s largest commodities trader bragged that the worst drought to hit the US since the 1930s – and the worrying volatility in food prices around the world – will be “good for Glencore”.On one reading, Chris Mahoney, the business titan in question, appeared to be celebrating the destruction of 45 per cent of America’s corn and 35 per cent of its soya bean crops this year. The crisis threatens to push cereal prices to a new record in a move that will put further pressure on the world’s poorest people and raises the prospect of a fresh round of food riots.Mr Mahoney’s comments have put the spotlight firmly back on food prices, which rose by an average of 6 per cent globally in July, while cereals accelerated considerably faster still, jumping by 17 per cent to within a whisker of their record in April 2008, according to the UN.“The US weather starting mid-May…has been among the worst three or four years of the century, comparable to the dust bowl years of the mid-30’s,” said Mr Mahoney, Glencore’s head of agriculture, suggesting that it won’t be long before cereal prices hit a new record.“In terms of the outlook for the balance of the year, the environment is a good one. High prices, lots of volatility, a lot of dislocation, tightness, a lot of arbitrage opportunities [the sale and purchase of an asset to profit from price differences in different markets],” he added.
The usual suspects were suitably appalled, but as Concepcion Calpe of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization noted, it won’t happen because agribusiness in general, and Glencor in particular, “Know this and have been lobbying heavily around the world to water down and halt any reform.”
Our economy is run by and for sociopaths, and they control our food.
This has been another episode of simple answers to simple questions.
Farmers in Brazil have won a 7½ billion dollar lawsuit against Monsanto for shaking them down for never-ending fees:
Monsanto may soon be forced to pay as much as 7.5 billion dollars back to the farmers who say that the mega corporation took their rightfully earned income and taxed their small businesses to financial shambles. It all started with a monumental lawsuit launched by over 5 million farmers against Monsanto looking to recover financial losses from ridiculous seed taxes that bankrupted many families.
Back in April, a Brazilian court ruled that Monsanto absolutely was responsible for paying back the exorbitant amounts of cash back to the farmers, ordering the company to issue back all of the taxes collected since 2004 — a minimum of 2 billion dollars. Afterwards, Monsanto appealed the decision and the case is now suspended until a further hearing is initiated by the Justice Tribune of the local court stationed in Rio Grande do Sul.
Recently, however, the Brazilian Supreme Court declared that any decision reached in a local court case should apply nationally. The result? Monsanto now faces even larger charges, due to the larger legal application on a national level. Now, the charges total or exceed 7.5 billion dollars.
I don’t expect this to survive appeal, because, after all, it’s peasants versus Monsanto, and you can be sure that the Department of Commerce is already burning up the phone lines trying to fix this, shortly to be followed by State, and probably the Pentagon as well.
Silly peasants, don’t you know that the laws doesn’t apply to rich people and transnational corporation?
Small farmers in Mexico have managed to block a law to legalize Monsanto’s seed monopolies:
Progressive small farmer organizations in Mexico scored a victory over transnational corporations that seek to monopolize seed and food patents. When the corporations pushed their bill to modify the Federal Law on Plant Varieties through the Committee on Agriculture and Livestock of the Mexican Chamber of Deputies on March 14, organizations of farmers from across the country sounded the alarm. By organizing quickly, they joined together to pressure legislators and achieved an agreement with the legislative committee to remove the bill from the floor.
What’s at stake is free and open access to plant biodiversity in agriculture. The proposed modifications promote a privatizing model that uses patents and “Plant Breeders’ Rights” (PBR) to deprive farmers of the labor of centuries in developing seed. The small farmers who worked to create this foundation of modern agriculture never charged royalties for its use.
Although the current law, in effect since 1996, pays little heed to the rights of small farmers, the new law would be far worse. Present law tends to benefit private-sector plant breeders, allowing monopolies to obtain exclusive profits from the sale of seeds and other plant material for up to 15 years, or 18 in the case of perennial ornamental, forest, or orchard plants–even when the plants they used to develop the new varieties are in the public domain.
The legislative reform would extend exclusive rights from the sale of reproductive material to 25 years. Further, it seeks to restrict the rights of farmers to store or use for their own consumption any part of the harvest obtained from seeds or breeding material purchased from holders of PBRs.
The bill wasn’t defeated, it just didn’t pass, so this is a temporary victory.
Monsanto and its ilk will come back again … and again … and again until they get their bill.
In the latest episode of this, we have farmers complaining because the Iraqi people have decided not to buy their overpriced rice:
The talk of the day among Ray Stoesser and other rice farmers is Iraq’s decision not to buy U.S. rice, a stinging move that adds to a stressful year punctuated by everything from drought to unusual heat.
Stoesser and other farmers know Iraqis struggled during the U.S. invasion and subsequent occupation. They know most countries , and people , buy based on price.
But at the moment, with production costs rising, export markets shrinking and rice prices dropping, it’s difficult to be rational and suppress emotions so intimately intertwined with their land and livelihood.
“That’s just not right,” the 63-year-old Stoesser fumed. “If we’ve got some rice to sell, they ought to pay a premium for it just because this is the country that freed them.”
Iraq imports most of its rice, about 1 million metric tons per year, making it a significant player in the global market. In the past decade, about 10 percent to 15 percent of that total came from the United States. But Iraq hasn’t bought any U.S. rice since late 2010.
“You would think with all that we’ve done over there, there would be a way to get them to do business with us,” said Ronald Gertson, who grows rice in Lissie, Texas.
So, we invade their country, setting off massive ethnic cleansing, a collapse of their infrastructure, a retreat to reactionary religious oppression, daily violence, and a political leadership who take their orders from Tehran.
And that’s ignoring the fact that we caused over 100,000 deaths, and over a million refugees.
And they are supposed to be grateful that we broke their country and are in the process of stealing their oil?
What the f%$# is wrong with these farmers?
H/t Atrios.
They have given up on attempting to regulate the massive overuse of antibiotics in livestock:
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) pulled a Scrooge move just before Christmas. The agency published an entry in the Federal Register declaring that it will end its attempt at mandatory restrictions on the use of antibiotics in animal agriculture. The agency isn’t advertising the shift, though: This news would have remained a secret if not for Maryn McKenna’s Superbug blog over at Wired. McKenna, who specializes in writing about antibiotics and their link to pathogens, caught the Federal Register notice.
This is a sorry end to a process that began in 1977 (!), but McKenna created an excellent timeline that traces the history of the issue back to the 1950s. In 2009, the Obama administration breathed new life into a moribund process because the top two Obama appointees at the FDA, Commissioner Margaret Hamburg and her then-deputy Joshua Sharfstein, strongly supported restricting antibiotic use in agriculture.
But despite Hamburg and Sharfstein’s many supportive statements, the FDA has only produced a draft set of “voluntary” guidelines. And, with this latest announcement, it looks like that’s as far as they’re willing to go.
The depressing thing, in addition to the fact that this practice creates “superbugs” that kill people, is that we know how much this would cost the consumer, based on the Danish experience, and it’s less than 10¢ a pound.
By way of putting this into perspective, antibiotics used at sub-therapeutic levels in feed accounts for 80% of all antibiotic use in the US.
Our feedlots are a petri dish for MRSA, antibiotic resistant E. Coli, etc.
Congress has ended both the subsidy on corn ethanol and the tariff on imported Brazilian sugar based ethanol:
Tom Buis, CEO of Growth Energy, an ethanol trade group, clearly wasn’t thrilled with the decision, but in an interview earlier this month he claimed the ethanol industry would survive without government handouts stating, “The blenders’ tax credit initially helped the ethanol industry develop. But today, we don’t have a production problem, we have a market access problem. Without the tax credit, the ethanol industry will survive; it will continue to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, create jobs and strengthen our economy.”
By some estimates the total gifts to corn ethanol business totalled $45B USD since 1980.
The subsidy cut — approved by a 73-27 Senate vote in June — also is accompanied by the end of a tariff on the importation of Brazilian ethanol. Brazil has an excess of sugarcane ethanol, but the U.S. government had previously penalized this fuel stream as a means of allowing U.S. ethanol producers to escape competing on the free market.
The ethanol debate has divided both political parties and even set federal representatives within certain corn-producing states against each other.
I wonder if this says something about the increasing irrelevance of Iowa caucuses this year.
I’m pleasantly surprised by this development.
It turns out that what Montsanto thought was a win-win, it use of genes to create Roundup resistant crops, allowing it to make money on both the crops, and on the increased sales of its popular herbicide has had a not-unexpected side effect.
It seems that with Roundup Ready® ready crops, farmers soak their fields in the herbicide, and so now we are seeing an explosion of herbicide resistant weeds:“Superweeds” are plaguing high-tech Monsanto crops in southern US states, driving farmers to use more herbicides, return to conventional crops or even abandon their farms.
How has this happened? Farmers over-relied on Monsanto’s revolutionary and controversial combination of a single “round up” herbicide and a high-tech seed with a built-in resistance to glyphosate, scientists say.
Today, 100,000 acres in Georgia are severely infested with pigweed and 29 counties have now confirmed resistance to glyphosate, according to weed specialist Stanley Culpepper from the University of Georgia.
“Farmers are taking this threat very seriously. It took us two years to make them understand how serious it was. But once they understood, they started taking a very aggressive approach to the weed,” Culpepper told FRANCE 24.
“Just to illustrate how aggressive we are, last year we hand-weeded 45% of our severely infested fields,” said Culpepper, adding that the fight involved “spending a lot of money.”
In 2007, 10,000 acres of land were abandoned in Macon country, the epicentre of the superweed explosion, North Carolina State University’s Alan York told local media.
Imagine that. It’s so bad, that farmers are abandoning land.
The problem here is that the rulings changing the patent laws over the past few decades, which allow the patenting of genes and species, have made the seed business so lucrative that companies like Monsanto are inclined to skip appropriate testing in the rush to market.
The solution is, in addition to stricter regulation, is to remove the IP protections to genes and species, which will remove much of the incentive to cheat.