In the next round of the WTO talks, the EU is offering to cut farm tariffs by 60%, which I count as either an empty gesture, or funny numbers. Farmers have too much power in EU nations, particularly France, for this to happen.
In related news, negotiators are targeting US farm support, though again, I doubt any meaningful movement will be made.
George Monbiot notes that smaller farms actually produced more food per acre than large ones.
He notes that he agrees with Robert Mugabe is right, that land reform is crucial in agricultural production and food security, and then further notes:
Of course the old bastard has done just the opposite. He has evicted his opponents and given land to his supporters. He has failed to support the new settlements with credit or expertise, with the result that farming in Zimbabwe has collapsed. The country was in desperate need of land reform when Mugabe became president. It remains in desperate need of land reform today.
Which is, of course, completely true.
In his extensively footnoted essay, which also appeared in the The Grauniad*, he notes that in nearly every case where it has been examined, smaller farms outperform larger ones.
Of course, the developed world is working against this reality:
Big business is killing small farming. By extending intellectual property rights over every aspect of production; by developing plants which either won’t breed true or which don’t reproduce at all, it ensures that only those with access to capital can cultivate. As it captures both the wholesale and retail markets, it seeks to reduce its transaction costs by engaging only with major sellers. If you think that supermarkets are giving farmers in the UK a hard time, you should see what they are doing to growers in the poor world. As developing countries sweep away street markets and hawkers’ stalls and replace them with superstores and glossy malls, the most productive farmers lose their customers and are forced to sell up. The rich nations support this process by demanding access for their companies. Their agricultural subsidies still help their own, large farmers to compete unfairly with the small producers of the poor world.
Obviously, as he concludes, the moves of people to buy into “fair trade” agricultural practices do more than lift small farmers out of abject poverty. They actually produce more food for everyone in the end.
It is remarkable just how destructive, and just plain evil the agricultural practices of the Western World are.
*According to the Wiki, The Guardian, formerly the Manchester Guardian in the UK. It’s nicknamed the Grauniad because of its penchant for typographical errors, “The nickname The Grauniad for the paper originated with the satirical magazine Private Eye. It came about because of its reputation for frequent and sometimes unintentionally amusing typographical errors, hence the popular myth that the paper once misspelled its own name on the page one masthead as The Gaurdian, though many recall the more inventive The Grauniad.”
This is kind of neat. Let’s hope that it’s a female tree, and thus can bear fruit.
Researchers confirm age of “Methuselah” tree
Thu Jun 12, 2008 2:00pm EDT
By Ari RabinovitchJERUSALEM, June 12 (Reuters) – Israeli researchers who grew a sapling from a date seed found at the ancient fortress Masada said on Thursday the seed was about 2,000 years old and may help restore a species of biblical trees.
Carbon dating confirmed that the seed — named Methuselah after the oldest person in the bible — was the oldest ever brought back to life, Sarah Sallon, a researcher at the Hadassah Medical Centre in Jerusalem, reported in the journal Science.
The seed came from the Judean date palm, a species that once flourished in the Jordan River Valley and has been extinct for centuries, Sallon said. It was one of a group discovered at Masada, a winter palace overlooking the Dead Sea built by King Herod in the 1st century BC.
……
There are lots of people out there who have significant concerns about the safety of US food.
Perhaps if the AG department wasn’t spending more time promoting big AG’s agenda than actually regulating food safety, as it has with it’s ban on testing for mad cow, its definition of “organic”, and its attempt to ban milk labeled “BGH free”, we would have less concern.
This time, it’s a $3 billion cotton subsidy dispute with Brazil.
The US claims that this does not distort world markets, which is absolutely laughable.
It’s likely that Brazil will, “target U.S. trademarks, patents and commercial services”, in terms of imposing trade sanctions.
I’m kind of hoping that they set up a Bit Torrent free zone.
It appears taht the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is looking toward an investigation to see if market arbitrage has artificially inflated prices, while this is not regulation, the results of the study may result in new regulations.
In particular, they are looking at the role of commodities index funds on this process.
Interestingly enough, this was not brought on by the oil price run up, but by spikes in cotton prices, which have increased despite events which ordinarily would have lowered prices.
As a part of moving toward greater regulation of the commodities market, Senators Levin and Feinstein are moving toward granting the CFTC explicit regulatory authority on trades on the London Oil Bourse executed from the US, on the basis of the fact that the exchange has physical terminals here.
Congress leaves 34 pages out of the farm bill that Bush Vetoed, so they will have to pass it again, have Bush veto it, and then do the override.
Someone should get fired because of this, but no one will be.
Not surprising, and given that it passed with veto proof majorities, it should be overridden.
Yes, the US Department of Agriculture is taking cattle ranchers to court to prevent them from doing Mad Cow tests on beef intended for export.
A number of foreign customers, particularly the Japanese, are demanding this, but the Ag Department wants to prevent testing, because it might “confuse” consumers.
The real reason is that they are in big beef’s pocket, and they are fairly sure that if testing were done, they would get some native home grown positives.
Monsanto has created an astroturf group that is lobbying to prohibit rBST and BGH free labels. They argue that it is “too confusing to consumers”.
I understand that Monsanto wants to market its industrial waste as widely as possible, but I object to their attempt to keep me, and the rest of the general public in the dark about it.
This is not confusing at all. I don’t their crap in my kid’s milk. Period, full stop.
This is an interesting activity. Basically, they have created a giant deep freeze in a cave deep below the Svalbard Islands off the coast of Norway, and they are placing samples of agricultural species in order to preserve them.
While the stated purpose is to account for disaster, I think that it’s more important in the context of preserving old genes in various staple crops as they increasingly become mono-cultural world wide.
As a result of the Opium eradication efforts in Afghanistan, farmers are switching to Marijuana.
This is development is best summed up by the comment, “The powers that be often forget that people are NOT going to voluntarily starve to death.”
It’s called the Bhut Jolokia, and it rates 1 MILLION Scovilles*. The next hottest is a habanero at 577,000 Scovilles.
It’s grown in India.
I’m pretty sure that this would more than I could possiubly bear, and the experience 12-36 hours later might be even less pleasant.
*A measure of the spicy-hotness of peppers
It’s really pretty simple. In 2002, over a thousand people in the country starved to death. In 2005, they had a famine crisis that had NGOs scrambling. This year, there is a 400 ton surplus of Corn (maize) much of which is alleviating the hunger in neighboring Zimbabwe.
So, what happened? The government ignored the free market fundamentalists, who are less idealogical than Osama bin Laden, and they did the right thing.
To quote Paul Harvey, and now, the rest of the story.
“What is different [this year] is the access to inputs,” explained Patrick Kabambe, permanent secretary in the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security. “People are so poor they use recycled seed and no fertilizer. They can’t meet their needs that way and they grow no surplus. People sink deeper and deeper into poverty. It’s a vicious cycle. We had to do something.”
Starting in 2006, and on a larger scale this year, the government distributed coupons to low-income farmers to allow them to purchase 50-kilogram sacks of fertilizer for 950 kwacha($7) rather than the market price of 4,500 kwacha. As a result, the average farmer’s yield jumped to two tonnes a hectare from 800 kilograms.
Malawi had this program throughout the 1990s, but in 2000, donor nations insisted that they scrap the program, saying that it “distorted the market”.
Some blame fell on poor rains, but it was also true that the 75 per cent of the population who are subsistence farmers could not afford either fertilizer or seeds.
That left them vulnerable to what the development industry calls “shocks” – such as one household member contracting HIV or malaria and being too sick to farm – leaving them with too little to eat and forced to sell items of value to survive. At the same time, larger farmers and traders capitalized on the poor harvest by stockpiling, while the government made decisions that were both ill-advised and corrupt, and mishandled the national strategic grain reserve. The next few years were a disaster.
And the cost?
The fertilizer subsidy cost the government $62-million – 6.5 per cent of the total government budget, a “whack of cash” in the words of one top economist – but that pales in comparison to the $120-million the government spent importing food aid in the 2005 famine. And the sale of maize to Zimbabwe and other countries will inject an additional $120-million into the national economy, a sizable figure here.
I’ve come to believe that a lot of international aid is really about making sure that the economies do not develop, so that, when a famine hits, subsidized western farmers can make a killing selling food aid.
I was exercising (stationary bicycle), and watching TV at the Gym. CNN was focusing the bridge collapse and the trapped miners, and on the next TV over, Fox News was screaming “run for your lives, and put your trust in Bush”, about the Foot and Mouth* outbreak in the UK.
Fox News is really into creating terror as a way to hold onto viewers.
Let’s be clear. This is not terrorism. The subvariant of the virus is not one commonly found, but it is very close to the one in the 1967 outbreak, which is used for vaccine manufacture at a laboratory in Pirbright, which is is within the 3- kilometer protection zone.
If someone wanted to do bio-terrorism with hoof and mouth, it would be easier to go to areas of Asia or Africa where the disease is endemic (the 2001 outbreak was the “Type O pan Asia” strain), collect samples, and cover most of the country in a car for multiple outbreaks in multiple locations.
I once priced it out, and you could probably do this for less than 50 grand.
*Foot and Mouth and Hoof and Mouth are the same thing. The Brits call it the former, and we call it the latter.
This is not a farm impliment. It’s the non-nuclear alternative to neighborhood nuclear superiority.
Watch the vid, it’s funny as hell, and proof that Nesmith is a genius.
Danes tout flamethrower-packing robot ‘farmworker’
By Lewis Page
Published Thursday 5th July 2007 13:50 GMTDanish agro-boffins have developed a robot which appears at first sight to be a welcome diversion from the ongoing parade of deadly military slaughter machines.
“Hortibot“, brainchild of Scandinavian scientists led by Dr Rasmus Nyholm Jørgensen of Aarhus University, is supposedly a peaceful robot farmworker. It uses GPS to navigate itself around the fields, mowing, spraying, or doing other tiresome tasks while the human landowners fill in the subsidy forms.
Hortibot can even do the weeding, and not simply by spraying chemicals about. The Daily News of Ludington, Michigan, got the story when one of the Danish designers visited the States.
“Currently, the robot can identify approximately 25 different kinds of weeds,” according to the Michigan newshounds.
“Hortibot has a variety of weed-removing attachments and methods. It can manually pick weeds,” apparently.
This is good news indeed; at last, a faithful robot pal intended to toil away for the benefit of humanity rather than spying on people or eliminating them in an apocalyptic mechanised bloodbath.
But such foolish dreams of amity and between man and machine were swiftly unsettled. It seems that Hortibot also has other, more robust capabilities as well as its weed-picking apparatus. The agro-droid can also target its adversaries with “flames, or a laser”.
…
“The labour problem will bring this in, when the government gets done with their immigration laws,” Schwass reportedly commented. He was no doubt referring to the US Border Patrol’s plan to install Eye-of-Sauron style scanner towers along the Mexican border in order to stand off the terrorists and huddled masses.
Antibiotics have been banned in Holland for years.
It just requires a bit more cleaning. Real end cost is less than $0.05/pound.
That’s not much of a price to pay for not creating a superbug.
Tyson is using it to go up market though.