The sweet spots for the news media are the beginning and the end of stories, it's the middle that requires resources and time, and few news organizations have either now. There's the dreadful "good story" syndrome when something breaks, no matter how awful the news is (fortunately it's just said in newsrooms). What facts there are are gathered, and the worse the news is the more difficult it is to get information. My rule of thumb really came from a speech by Eric Malling, the celebrated investigative journalist who worked both for the 5th Estate on CBC, and W5 on CTV. He said very few people who go "on the record" (ie. do an interview) will tell you anything worthwhile, it's the "off the record" stuff that really has value. My feeling was the least we could do is find out what's really going on, and if that meant several off-the record conversations, then so be it. Producers like (and reporters do too) "on the record" confirmation from players in a story, and it certainly makes for better story telling in the finished product, but demanding that there be "clips" before a story can be done really puts control of the story in the participant's hands. If they don't talk then often the story doesn't get told (until a media competitor does it). It's one of the reasons crime stories, fires, and accidents have such a hold on newsrooms. Something unusual (news) has happened, the facts are generally there for everyone to see, and police/ fire chiefs are credible sources of information (not always great interviews). I used to wonder how relevant these stories are to people's lives (other than feeling "there but for the grace of someone go I"), but in every case these tragedies are very important to someone, and certainly in the familiar and tight communities in the Maritimes, people want to know.
The first day of a story is critical for the participants involved too, because it's those first impressions that almost always stick, even if the facts are wrong, and partisan politics often leads stories astray. I can remember a few years ago when Waste Watch fees went up just as stories about the poor quality of the compost being produced at the Brookfield site came to light. The then Liberal opposition linked the two together, "poor quality compost meant the private company operating the site needs more money, so waste watch fees went up". Sounded credible, but it just wasn't true. There was a fixed contract that determined what the company was paid that still had another year or two to run, in fact it was the Island Waste Management Corporation (a crown corporation) that needed more money from Waste Watch fees, but the first version was just too good not to be true.
The lack of time and resources in hard-pressed newsrooms is very real. There was a time when Compass was just an hour, had three more producers, production assistants, three more reporters, and two more editors/camera operators. There was a full-time "current affairs" unit that would daily churn out five to six minute stories on the issues of the day, and you could even have two or three days to work on these stories. That's long gone now. Two minutes or less is what's demanded, and a story needs to stand up on all the "platforms" radio, tv, the web. It's a more efficient use of resources, and all that people can possibly do, but I doubt anyone at CBC would argue that audiences are as well served as they once were. My former colleagues will know this, but it's the two minute hard time limit that always confounded me. I'd always argue that the story, and the elements you're able to gather, should dictate the length of the story, and that unlike other urban markets, people aren't going to rush off to some other news channel if something goes two and a half or three minutes. (these were arguments I always lost).
I mention all of this because I think we are in the "dreaded middle" of an important story: the economic and social collapse in rural areas in the Maritimes. The economic struggles of primary producers is hardly new (or news), and the last farm family hasn't turned the lights out. The real key for me are the number of families that are hanging on by bleeding away their equity, and are insisting that their children do anything but farm or fish. It's a complex story of shifting economic power to middlemen and retailers, free trade, staggering debt levels, political disinterest, and a reassuring focus on what people who work in newsrooms see everyday, supermarkets filled to the brim with food from everywhere, at prices, relative to income levels, most in the world can only dream of. It's not neat and tidy, and certainly needs more than two minutes to make sense of.
Monday, 13 June 2011
Sunday, 12 June 2011
Thinking a Little More About Raisng Meat
I have a friend I buy pork from whenever I can. He works with a traditional breed called Berkshire (that's the boar above), farms organically and takes it seriously. I always pay well above market price and I'm sure his other customers do too. He'd like to make it a full time business, but he knows if he did it would be a quick trip to the poor house.
The complications and economics of raising livestock properly (traditionally really) is captured well in this longer article. Somehow we have to keep people like my friend at least thinking he can make a living, and maybe one day he will be able to, but not when the lowest price is the law.
http://eatocracy.cnn.com/2011/06/02/chefs-with-issues-five-sustainable-lessons-from-a-family-farm/?iref=obnetwork
Five sustainable lessons from a family farm
June 2, 2011 •by
Craig Rogers
Craig Rogers
Over the years, I have heard farmers speak of their "sustainable" farms, only to wonder what they actually meant by that term. Perhaps it is the engineer in me that desires precise definition, but I have not yet grasped the fidelity of sustainable land-based farming. I understand sustainable fishing and marine-based harvest4, but on the East coast of the United States, most farmers are working on land that either wishes to return to its natural forest state, or is forced into nutrition alien to its heritage.
So although I wonder about the subtleties of terminology, I have been clear on one fundamental issue all farmers face: there is nothing sustainable about losing money.
A couple of weeks ago, I heard through the grapevine that one of the South’s most noted pork purveyors, Fudge Family Farms5, was going out of business. On one hand it was a shock as Henry Fudge had created a fine reputation with many of the South’s most noted chefs. He had grown his operation from simply supplying the hogs he personally raised on his farm in Alabama, to aggregating the efforts of some 30 other family farms from six surrounding states. Not only did his closure affect 30 small family farms, it left many chefs in the South scrambling to find new sources of pork.
On the other hand, a farmer in financial difficulty is hardly breaking news. So what went wrong?
Henry Fudge is the sort of gentleman with whom any chef would want to do business. He is a preacher who has a soft voice and temperament that just barely veils the passion of a farmer with great pride in the livestock he produces. Any first conversation with Henry about his pigs is certain to become a lesson in genetics and the virtues of various heritage breeds. He has passion for farming, the breeding of animals great chefs admire, interest in old world feeding protocols of hogs, and he has a heart that wants to help others of like mind.
But business is not easy, and farming enterprises are even more challenging than most. Mr. Fudge is very open about what went wrong and why he had to close his doors - or least change course.
His lessons are fundamental and important to anyone considering the direct marketing of meat to restaurants.
1. There is nothing sustainable about losing money.
"Sustainable" agriculture has been all the vogue, but it is not just about how the land is cared for. A farmer must be able to pay the bills at the very least, and try to make a decent living. Providing protein to a restaurant and a great chef is no more noble a pursuit requiring charity than the chef feeding their patrons. It’s all business.
Small family farms are not able to compete with commodity protein on price or in delivery charges. Chefs who visit the farm where they are considering sourcing from understand that better than most.
How many lambs must my farm kill to buy a tractor? I need to kill and sell approximately 30 lambs in order to pay the annual audit fees for my be “certified organic.”
As a shepherd, I have decided the certification route is not how I wish to honor the lives of my lambs. I will use my lambs to buy a tractor, build a barn, purchase hay - all things that I believe advance the farm and life of our animals. That is my choice and that is how I wish to farm. Each farmer has their own unique set of values that guide their business decisions.
Some producers get caught up in who is buying their product and some of the “big names” simply don’t understand how to work with small family farms. They push the farmer to compete with commodity pricing. Many large restaurant groups provide incentives through cash bonuses to chefs to keep their food cost down, thereby discouraging the use of more expensive local products. Family farms do not need to feed everyone, or sell to every restaurant, but one of the hard lessons is figuring out who not to sell to – when it is best to just walk away and deal with a chef who "gets it."
Perhaps one of the most important lessons in growing a business is learning how to say “no” to a sale. No chef or restaurant is worth losing money for the small producer. Loss leaders and other such marketing approaches are a part of business for those who can afford it – generally not the small farm producer.
2. The farmer relies on a good abattoir and butcher.
Many have lamented the lack of USDA slaughter facilities, and indeed that is a challenge. However, the greater challenge is to find a slaughter facility where they can do quality custom butchery instead of commodity packing. Mr. Fudge was handcuffed by not being able to find a quality butcher who could cut the quality of hams that country curing required. That resulted in excess inventory of product that could not realize it true market potential.
3. Whole animal usage is essential.
In general, most livestock producers who are selling directly to chefs work on a margin that is so slim, it corresponds to essentially one cut of the animal. I must sell the entire animal, minus one of the prime parts simply to cover the cost of the animal and the slaughter and processing bill. If I keep any legs, racks or loins in inventory, my operating revenue is sitting in a walk-in cooler or freezer and not paying the bills.
Chefs who use whole animals are saviors to small family livestock producers. It is interesting to me to see how many of the most lauded Southern chefs - like my customers Sean Brock6, Linton Hopkins7, Bryan Voltaggio8 and Dan Guisti9 - are the ones who use whole animals.
What has made my growth possible, however, are the chefs who use only parts of the animals but have an appreciation for the use of the whole animal. As an example, Adam Sobel10 of Bourbon Steak in Washington, DC recently switched from using whole animals to parts. But he did it in way that was financially sustainable for me.
He wanted to use more lamb loins, which along with racks, are the hottest sellers in the lamb world. In order to kill more animals to provide the loins, I can easily sell the rest of the animal - except for the legs. He agreed to buy two legs of lamb for every lamb saddle/loin he purchased. This turned it into a win-win. He got the loins he wanted, it provided more racks, shanks, and necks for which I always have a high demand, and I was not left with any inventory.
Likewise, I have many chefs who are willing to purchase and use whatever cut of lamb I am accumulating to help maintain my whole animal usage and limit my inventory. The chef who is willing to be adaptive is every bit as important to my business as the whole animal chef.
4. Beware of wholesalers who do not purchase whole animals.
Mr. Fudge is honest about his successes and failures. One of the mistakes he admits to is growing through the use of a wholesaler who could sell all the prime cuts of his hogs but was not purchasing many of the “off cuts.” Although total revenue went up when he started working with a distributor, so did his inventory. His cash flow went south.
I have been approached by major distributors and I find their methods remarkably out of touch with the realities of farming. Every major protein distributor wants a piece of the "local" pie. As soon as they see a significant number of the customers ending their purchases of commodity protein in favor of locally-farmed meat, they want in - but only on their terms.
They want to purchase parts based on customer orders, not whole animals. As Mr. Fudge soon learned, that only hurts the local farmer. Anyone can sell racks of lamb, but each animal only has two, and that constitutes only about seven percent of the whole animal carcass.
I started my business by cold-calling chefs and knocking on doors. I sell to fewer than 100 chefs in ten states. Any of the big truck grocers call on more than 100 restaurants in any medium size city. If a farmer can sell whole animals by knocking on doors, surely a big truck grocer can make a commitment to a farmer to buy whole animals and find a way to sell all the parts.
The lesson for small family protein farmers is not to get caught up with wholesalers who don’t have a commitment to whole animal usage. And wholesalers, if you don’t have a sales force capable of moving all the parts of an animal and making a whole animal commitment to a farmer, then don’t try to entice farmers to work with you in the name of sustainability.
How many small farmers need to find the fate of Mr. Fudge before the importance of sustainable business is appreciated?
5. Use your own money.
Mr. Fudge and so many farmers have found their demise at the hands of creditors. To paraphrase John F. Kennedy, farming is the only profession where you buy everything at retail, sell everything at wholesale, and pay the the shipping costs both ways.
That is compounded by the dual realities that farms are perhaps second only to restaurants as credit risks, and small family farms must generally pay for everything in cash. I don’t know of a slaughterhouse that would not require the farmer to pay the slaughter and processing bill when they pick up the product. If farmers decide to sell directly, they must sell their product to restaurant groups on 30 day terms or worse.
It is also remarkable that essentially all of my whole animal customers also pay cash on delivery. They understand the reality of small farms and are willing to work with farmers.
Many who have decided to grow their direct protein sales have done so by buying other farmers' animals. On one hand, that is a noble gesture. If they are paying more than the auction price, it is helping more farmers in rural areas who most likely do not have the skills to sell directly to high-end consumers or chefs.
On the other hand, farmers want to get paid. So, if the farmer is paid when the animals are delivered, it creates a need for capital to handle the cash flow.
Mr. Fudge and others have done this with “investors” or friends who lend them money. The margins are simply not great enough to assume much risk. A butcher who does not cut a customers animal correctly, or a delivery truck that breaks down on the road, or a drought that reduces the hay crop and increases feed costs all can equal up to negative cash flow and negative margins. Debt is not a farmer’s friend.
Thus, Mr. Fudge’s recommendation to others is to sell what you can grow, grow what you can pay for, and pay for it all using your own money. If you can afford to do more, then please think of helping another family farmer by buying their animals, cash up front, for a fair price.
Most importantly, thank any chef who appreciates the work of a farmer enough to use a whole animal or will be adaptive to the whole animal needs of the farmer.
The story of Mr. Fudge and Fudge Family Farms continues as many good farmer stories do, and there are many chapters ahead waiting to be written. Mr. Fudge is moving back to his roots as a hands-on hog farmer selling only his own animals to chefs who are willing to take a whole animal. As he said, “You may be able to knock me down but I am going to get up and dust myself off again and move on.”
Many of the fine chefs of the South will be looking forward to continuing their relationship with Mr. Fudge on a far smaller scale than in the past. It may be harder to find a true Henry Fudge hog but those who do will have something Henry put his heart into. A farmer’s pride is hard to beat.
So although I wonder about the subtleties of terminology, I have been clear on one fundamental issue all farmers face: there is nothing sustainable about losing money.
A couple of weeks ago, I heard through the grapevine that one of the South’s most noted pork purveyors, Fudge Family Farms5, was going out of business. On one hand it was a shock as Henry Fudge had created a fine reputation with many of the South’s most noted chefs. He had grown his operation from simply supplying the hogs he personally raised on his farm in Alabama, to aggregating the efforts of some 30 other family farms from six surrounding states. Not only did his closure affect 30 small family farms, it left many chefs in the South scrambling to find new sources of pork.
On the other hand, a farmer in financial difficulty is hardly breaking news. So what went wrong?
Henry Fudge is the sort of gentleman with whom any chef would want to do business. He is a preacher who has a soft voice and temperament that just barely veils the passion of a farmer with great pride in the livestock he produces. Any first conversation with Henry about his pigs is certain to become a lesson in genetics and the virtues of various heritage breeds. He has passion for farming, the breeding of animals great chefs admire, interest in old world feeding protocols of hogs, and he has a heart that wants to help others of like mind.
But business is not easy, and farming enterprises are even more challenging than most. Mr. Fudge is very open about what went wrong and why he had to close his doors - or least change course.
His lessons are fundamental and important to anyone considering the direct marketing of meat to restaurants.
1. There is nothing sustainable about losing money.
"Sustainable" agriculture has been all the vogue, but it is not just about how the land is cared for. A farmer must be able to pay the bills at the very least, and try to make a decent living. Providing protein to a restaurant and a great chef is no more noble a pursuit requiring charity than the chef feeding their patrons. It’s all business.
Small family farms are not able to compete with commodity protein on price or in delivery charges. Chefs who visit the farm where they are considering sourcing from understand that better than most.
How many lambs must my farm kill to buy a tractor? I need to kill and sell approximately 30 lambs in order to pay the annual audit fees for my be “certified organic.”
As a shepherd, I have decided the certification route is not how I wish to honor the lives of my lambs. I will use my lambs to buy a tractor, build a barn, purchase hay - all things that I believe advance the farm and life of our animals. That is my choice and that is how I wish to farm. Each farmer has their own unique set of values that guide their business decisions.
Some producers get caught up in who is buying their product and some of the “big names” simply don’t understand how to work with small family farms. They push the farmer to compete with commodity pricing. Many large restaurant groups provide incentives through cash bonuses to chefs to keep their food cost down, thereby discouraging the use of more expensive local products. Family farms do not need to feed everyone, or sell to every restaurant, but one of the hard lessons is figuring out who not to sell to – when it is best to just walk away and deal with a chef who "gets it."
Perhaps one of the most important lessons in growing a business is learning how to say “no” to a sale. No chef or restaurant is worth losing money for the small producer. Loss leaders and other such marketing approaches are a part of business for those who can afford it – generally not the small farm producer.
2. The farmer relies on a good abattoir and butcher.
Many have lamented the lack of USDA slaughter facilities, and indeed that is a challenge. However, the greater challenge is to find a slaughter facility where they can do quality custom butchery instead of commodity packing. Mr. Fudge was handcuffed by not being able to find a quality butcher who could cut the quality of hams that country curing required. That resulted in excess inventory of product that could not realize it true market potential.
3. Whole animal usage is essential.
In general, most livestock producers who are selling directly to chefs work on a margin that is so slim, it corresponds to essentially one cut of the animal. I must sell the entire animal, minus one of the prime parts simply to cover the cost of the animal and the slaughter and processing bill. If I keep any legs, racks or loins in inventory, my operating revenue is sitting in a walk-in cooler or freezer and not paying the bills.
Chefs who use whole animals are saviors to small family livestock producers. It is interesting to me to see how many of the most lauded Southern chefs - like my customers Sean Brock6, Linton Hopkins7, Bryan Voltaggio8 and Dan Guisti9 - are the ones who use whole animals.
What has made my growth possible, however, are the chefs who use only parts of the animals but have an appreciation for the use of the whole animal. As an example, Adam Sobel10 of Bourbon Steak in Washington, DC recently switched from using whole animals to parts. But he did it in way that was financially sustainable for me.
He wanted to use more lamb loins, which along with racks, are the hottest sellers in the lamb world. In order to kill more animals to provide the loins, I can easily sell the rest of the animal - except for the legs. He agreed to buy two legs of lamb for every lamb saddle/loin he purchased. This turned it into a win-win. He got the loins he wanted, it provided more racks, shanks, and necks for which I always have a high demand, and I was not left with any inventory.
Likewise, I have many chefs who are willing to purchase and use whatever cut of lamb I am accumulating to help maintain my whole animal usage and limit my inventory. The chef who is willing to be adaptive is every bit as important to my business as the whole animal chef.
4. Beware of wholesalers who do not purchase whole animals.
Mr. Fudge is honest about his successes and failures. One of the mistakes he admits to is growing through the use of a wholesaler who could sell all the prime cuts of his hogs but was not purchasing many of the “off cuts.” Although total revenue went up when he started working with a distributor, so did his inventory. His cash flow went south.
I have been approached by major distributors and I find their methods remarkably out of touch with the realities of farming. Every major protein distributor wants a piece of the "local" pie. As soon as they see a significant number of the customers ending their purchases of commodity protein in favor of locally-farmed meat, they want in - but only on their terms.
They want to purchase parts based on customer orders, not whole animals. As Mr. Fudge soon learned, that only hurts the local farmer. Anyone can sell racks of lamb, but each animal only has two, and that constitutes only about seven percent of the whole animal carcass.
I started my business by cold-calling chefs and knocking on doors. I sell to fewer than 100 chefs in ten states. Any of the big truck grocers call on more than 100 restaurants in any medium size city. If a farmer can sell whole animals by knocking on doors, surely a big truck grocer can make a commitment to a farmer to buy whole animals and find a way to sell all the parts.
The lesson for small family protein farmers is not to get caught up with wholesalers who don’t have a commitment to whole animal usage. And wholesalers, if you don’t have a sales force capable of moving all the parts of an animal and making a whole animal commitment to a farmer, then don’t try to entice farmers to work with you in the name of sustainability.
How many small farmers need to find the fate of Mr. Fudge before the importance of sustainable business is appreciated?
5. Use your own money.
Mr. Fudge and so many farmers have found their demise at the hands of creditors. To paraphrase John F. Kennedy, farming is the only profession where you buy everything at retail, sell everything at wholesale, and pay the the shipping costs both ways.
That is compounded by the dual realities that farms are perhaps second only to restaurants as credit risks, and small family farms must generally pay for everything in cash. I don’t know of a slaughterhouse that would not require the farmer to pay the slaughter and processing bill when they pick up the product. If farmers decide to sell directly, they must sell their product to restaurant groups on 30 day terms or worse.
It is also remarkable that essentially all of my whole animal customers also pay cash on delivery. They understand the reality of small farms and are willing to work with farmers.
Many who have decided to grow their direct protein sales have done so by buying other farmers' animals. On one hand, that is a noble gesture. If they are paying more than the auction price, it is helping more farmers in rural areas who most likely do not have the skills to sell directly to high-end consumers or chefs.
On the other hand, farmers want to get paid. So, if the farmer is paid when the animals are delivered, it creates a need for capital to handle the cash flow.
Mr. Fudge and others have done this with “investors” or friends who lend them money. The margins are simply not great enough to assume much risk. A butcher who does not cut a customers animal correctly, or a delivery truck that breaks down on the road, or a drought that reduces the hay crop and increases feed costs all can equal up to negative cash flow and negative margins. Debt is not a farmer’s friend.
Thus, Mr. Fudge’s recommendation to others is to sell what you can grow, grow what you can pay for, and pay for it all using your own money. If you can afford to do more, then please think of helping another family farmer by buying their animals, cash up front, for a fair price.
Most importantly, thank any chef who appreciates the work of a farmer enough to use a whole animal or will be adaptive to the whole animal needs of the farmer.
The story of Mr. Fudge and Fudge Family Farms continues as many good farmer stories do, and there are many chapters ahead waiting to be written. Mr. Fudge is moving back to his roots as a hands-on hog farmer selling only his own animals to chefs who are willing to take a whole animal. As he said, “You may be able to knock me down but I am going to get up and dust myself off again and move on.”
Many of the fine chefs of the South will be looking forward to continuing their relationship with Mr. Fudge on a far smaller scale than in the past. It may be harder to find a true Henry Fudge hog but those who do will have something Henry put his heart into. A farmer’s pride is hard to beat.
Thursday, 9 June 2011
The Canadian Wheat Board and "Free" Markets
With it's new majority government the Harper Conservatives will now move on many issues that are hardly secret: building new prisons, buying new fighter jets, ending the long-gun registry, killing the vote-subsidy for political parties, and essentially killing the Canadian Wheat Board. I don't think the majority of Canadians want all of this to happen, but people in Ontario, who did have a front row seat to the Mike Harris years (many of his principal ministers now on the front lines of the Harper Conservatives) decided this is the government they wanted, so here we are. (if it turns out badly, don't blame PEI).
Federal Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz visited the wheat board offices in Winnipeg last week, formally told officials the government's plans to drastically change the wheat board's role by the next crop year, and quickly left.
The wheat board is what's called a "single desk seller" of two of Western Canada's most important grains, barley and wheat. The board essentially buys all of the crop, and then markets it around the world. Farmers are assured they can sell their crop and the cheque won't bounce. The wheat board gains marketing leverage by being the only seller, and some reports say this alone generates about a billion dollars more a year.
Here's the rub though for the Conservatives and many farmers. It's a collective/cooperative model, all farmers share equally in the wheat board sales, and farmers are not allowed to make their own deals, even though there may be opportunities to get a higher price in certain spot markets, particularly for farmers living in the southern Prariries close to U.S. feedlots and mills. These are the farmers who have been most aggressive in calling for an end to the wheat board monopoly, and the ones the Conservatives have been listening too. Interestingly, Gerry Ritz has clearly stated that there won't be a farmer vote on the changes, something required in the wheat board legislation. Here are some comments from a Canadian Press report.
"While the law requires a vote when adding or subtracting commodities that the board handles, Ritz says changing the entire Wheat Board Act is at the discretion of Parliament.
Ritz says farmers endorsed an end to the monopoly when they voted in a majority Conservative government in last month's election."
Ritz says the the wheat board will live on, but on the same competitive footing as the handful of major grain trading companies that will vastly expand their business.
The Canadian Wheat Board won't go down without a fight. We can expect a strong campaign against these changes, and very likely a court challenge before the dust settles. This fight won't have a significant impact on the Maritimes, but symbolically it's important. Supply management in dairy, poultry and eggs has the same kind of historical resonance in Eastern Canada, as the wheat board does in the west. A collective, highly regulated marketing system that many love, but "free market" types hate. If the Conservatives can pull off the wheat board coup out West, don't think the free market fire breathers won't turn their attention on supply management. The fact that supply management in dairy is so important in Quebec would be the only reason it won't come under the gun.
I have enormous respect for the energy, determination, and risk taking of entrepreneurs and they should definitely benefit from their labours, but as you can tell I've always been a little suspicious of this notion of "free" markets. In Canada we have all kinds of rules and regulations that benefit some (banks and telecommunication companies for example), and these are still viewed as "free enterprise", but a farmer trying to get a reasonable return is being coddled.
There was an interesting take on all of this here:
http://www.truthout.org/there-no-such-thing-free-market/1307462405
There Is No Such Thing as a Free Market
From the book: "23 Things They Don't Tell you About Capitalism"
What They Tell You
Markets need to be free. When the government interferes to dictate what market participants can or cannot do, resources cannot flow to their most efficient use. If people cannot do the things that they find most profitable, they lose the incentive to invest and innovate. Thus, if the government puts a cap on house rents, landlords lose the incentive to maintain their properties or build new ones. Or, if the government restricts the kinds of financial products that can be sold, two contracting parties that may both have benefited from innovative transactions that fulfil their idiosyncratic needs cannot reap the potential gains of free contract. People must be left ‘free to choose’, as the title of free-market visionary Milton Friedman’s famous book goes.
What They Don’t Tell You
The free market doesn’t exist. Every market has some rules and boundaries that restrict freedom of choice. A market looks free only because we so unconditionally accept its underlying restrictions that we fail to see them. How ‘free’ a market is cannot be objectively defined. It is a political definition. The usual claim by free-market economists that they are trying to defend the market from politically motivated interference by the government is false. Government is always involved and those free-marketeers are as politically motivated as anyone. Overcoming the myth that there is such a thing as an objectively defined ‘free market’ is the first step towards understanding capitalism.
Labour Ought to Be Free
In 1819 new legislation to regulate child labour, the Cotton Facto- ries Regulation Act, was tabled in the British Parliament. The proposed regulation was incredibly ‘light touch’ by modern standards. It would ban the employment of young children – that is, those under the age of nine. Older children (aged between ten and sixteen) would still be allowed to work, but with their work- ing hours restricted to twelve per day (yes, they were really going soft on those kids). The new rules applied only to cotton factories, which were recognized to be exceptionally hazardous to workers’ health.
If you've ever wished for an arsenal of arguments to refute those who argue on behalf of the mythical “free market,” this is the book for you. To get this Truthout Progressive Pick of the Week for a minimum one-time donation of $30, or a monthly commitment of $5 or more to Truthout, click here.1
The proposal caused huge controversy. Opponents saw it as undermining the sanctity of freedom of contract and thus destroying the very foundation of the free market. In debating this legislation, some members of the House of Lords objected to it on the grounds that ‘labour ought to be free’. Their argument said: the children want (and need) to work, and the factory owners want to employ them; what is the problem?
Today, even the most ardent free-market proponents in Brit- ain or other rich countries would not think of bringing child labour back as part of the market liberalization package that they so want. However, until the late nineteenth or the early twentieth century, when the first serious child labour regulations were introduced in Europe and North America, many respectable people judged child labour regulation to be against the principles of the free market.
Thus seen, the ‘freedom’ of a market is, like beauty, in the eyes of the beholder. If you believe that the right of children not to have to work is more important than the right of factory owners to be able to hire whoever they find most profitable, you will not see a ban on child labour as an infringement on the freedom of the labour market. If you believe the opposite, you will see an ‘unfree’ market, shackled by a misguided government regulation.
We don’t have to go back two centuries to see regulations we take for granted (and accept as the ‘ambient noise’ within the free market) that were seriously challenged as undermining the free market, when first introduced. When environmental regulations (e.g., regulations on car and factory emissions) appeared a few decades ago, they were opposed by many as seri- ous infringements on our freedom to choose. Their opponents asked: if people want to drive in more polluting cars or if factories find more polluting production methods more profitable, why should the government prevent them from making such choices? Today, most people accept these regulations as ‘natural’. They believe that actions that harm others, however unintentionally (such as pollution), need to be restricted. They also understand that it is sensible to make careful use of our energy resources, when many of them are non-renewable. They may believe that reducing human impact on climate change makes sense too.
If the same market can be perceived to have varying degrees of freedom by different people, there is really no objective way to define how free that market is. In other words, the free market is an illusion. If some markets look free, it is only because we so totally accept the regulations that are propping them up that they become invisible.
Piano Wires and Kungfu Masters
Like many people, as a child I was fascinated by all those gravity- defying kungfu masters in Hong Kong movies.
Like many kids, Conditions of trade are specified too. One of the things that surprised me when I first moved to Britain in the mid 1980s was that one could demand a full refund for a product one didn’t like, even if it wasn’t faulty. At the time, you just couldn’t do that in Korea, except in the most exclusive department stores. In Britain, the consumer’s right to change her mind was considered more important than the right of the seller to avoid the cost involved in returning unwanted (yet functional) products to the manufacturer. There are many other rules regulating various aspects of the exchange process: product liability, failure in delivery, loan default, and so on. In many countries, there are also necessary permissions for the location of sales outlets – such as restrictions on street-vending or zoning laws that ban commercial activities in residential areas.
Then there are price regulations. I am not talking here just about those highly visible phenomena such as rent controls or minimum wages that free-market economists love to hate.
Wages in rich countries are determined more by immigration control than anything else, including any minimum wage legislation. How is the immigration maximum determined? Not by the ‘free’ labour market, which, if left alone, will end up replacing 80–90 per cent of native workers with cheaper, and often more productive, immigrants. Immigration is largely settled by politics. So, if you have any residual doubt about the massive role that the government plays in the economy’s free market, then pause to reflect that all our wages are, at root, politically deter- mined (see Thing 3).
Following the 2008 financial crisis, the prices of loans (if you can get one or if you already have a variable rate loan) have become a lot lower in many countries thanks to the continuous slashing of interest rates. Was that because suddenly people didn’t want loans and the banks needed to lower their prices to shift them? No, it was the result of political decisions to boost demand by cutting interest rates. Even in normal times, interest rates are set in most countries by the central bank, which means that political considerations creep in. In other words, interest rates are also determined by politics.
If wages and interest rates are (to a significant extent) politically determined, then all the other prices are politically determined, as they affect all other prices.
Is Free Trade Fair?
We see a regulation when we don’t endorse the moral values behind it. The nineteenth-century high-tariff restriction on free trade by the US federal government outraged slave-owners, who at the same time saw nothing wrong with trading people in a free market. To those who believed that people can be owned, banning trade in slaves was objectionable in the same way as restricting trade in manufactured goods. Korean shopkeepers of the 1980s would probably have thought the requirement for ‘unconditional return’ to be an unfairly burdensome government regulation restricting market freedom.
Busy schedule? Click here to keep up with Truthout with free email updates.2
This clash of values also lies behind the contemporary debate on free trade vs. fair trade. Many Americans believe that China is engaged in international trade that may be free but is not fair. In their view, by paying workers unacceptably low wages and making them work in inhumane conditions, China competes unfairly. The Chinese, in turn, can riposte that it is unacceptable that rich countries, while advocating free trade, try to impose artificial barriers to China’s exports by attempting to restrict the import of ‘sweatshop’ products. They find it unjust to be prevented from exploiting the only resource they have in greatest abundance – cheap labour.
Of course, the difficulty here is that there is no objective way to define ‘unacceptably low wages’ or ‘inhumane working conditions’. With the huge international gaps that exist in the level of economic development and living standards, it is natural that what is a starvation wage in the US is a handsome wage in China (the average being 10 per cent that of the US) and a fortune in India (the average being 2 per cent that of the US). Indeed, most fair-trade-minded Americans would not have bought things made by their own grandfathers, who worked extremely long hours under inhumane conditions. Until the beginning of the twenti- eth century, the average work week in the US was around sixty hours. At the time (in 1905, to be more precise), it was a country in which the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional a New York state law limiting the working days of bakers to ten hours, on the grounds that it ‘deprived the baker of the liberty of work- ing as long as he wished’.
Thus seen, the debate about fair trade is essentially about moral values and political decisions, and not economics in the usual sense. Even though it is about an economic issue, it is not some- thing economists with their technical tool kits are particularly well equipped to rule on.
All this does not mean that we need to take a relativist posi- tion and fail to criticize anyone because anything goes. We can (and I do) have a view on the acceptability of prevailing labour standards in China (or any other country, for that matter) and try to do something about it, without believing that those who have a different view are wrong in some absolute sense. Even though China cannot afford American wages or Swedish working conditions, it certainly can improve the wages and the working conditions of its workers. Indeed, many Chinese don’t accept the prevailing conditions and demand tougher regulations. But economic theory (at least free-market economics) cannot tell us what the ‘right’ wages and working conditions should be in China.
I Don't Think We Are in France Anymore
In July 2008, with the country’s financial system in meltdown, the US government poured $200 billion into Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage lenders, and nationalized them. On witnessing this, the Republican Senator Jim Bunning of Kentucky famously denounced the action as something that could only happen in a ‘socialist’ country like France.
France was bad enough, but on 19 September 2008, Senator Bunning’s beloved country was turned into the Evil Empire itself by his own party leader. According to the plan announced that day by President George W. Bush and subsequently named TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program), the US government was to use at least $700 billion of taxpayers’ money to buy up the ‘toxic assets’ choking up the financial system.
President Bush, however, did not see things quite that way. He argued that, rather than being ‘socialist’, the plan was simply a continuation of the American system of free enterprise, which ‘rests on the conviction that the federal government should interfere in the market place only when necessary’. Only that, in his view, nationalizing a huge chunk of the financial sector was just one of those necessary things.
Mr Bush’s statement is, of course, an ultimate example of political double-speak – one of the biggest state interventions in human history is dressed up as another workaday market process. However, through these words Mr Bush exposed the flimsy foundation on which the myth of the free market stands. As the statement so clearly reveals, what is a necessary state intervention consistent with free-market capitalism is really a matter of opinion. There is no scientifically defined boundary for free market.
If there is nothing sacred about any particular market boundaries that happen to exist, an attempt to change them is as legitimate as the attempt to defend them. Indeed, the history of capitalism has been a constant struggle over the boundaries of the market.
A lot of the things that are outside the market today have been removed by political decision, rather than the market process itself – human beings, government jobs, electoral votes, legal decisions, university places or uncertified medicines. There are still attempts to buy at least some of these things illegally (bribing government officials, judges or voters) or legally (using expensive lawyers to win a lawsuit, donations to political parties, etc.), but, even though there have been movements in both directions, the trend has been towards less marketization.
For goods that are still traded, more regulations have been introduced over time. Compared even to a few decades ago, now we have much more stringent regulations on who can produce what (e.g., certificates for organic or fair-trade producers), how they can be produced (e.g., restrictions on pollution or carbon emissions), and how they can be sold (e.g., rules on product label- ling and on refunds).
Furthermore, reflecting its political nature, the process of re-drawing the boundaries of the market has sometimes been marked by violent conflicts. The Americans fought a civil war over free trade in slaves (although free trade in goods – or the tariffs issue – was also an important issue).1 The British govern- ment fought the Opium War against China to realize a free trade in opium. Regulations on free market in child labour were implemented only because of the struggles by social reformers, as I discussed earlier. Making free markets in government jobs or votes illegal has been met with stiff resistance by political parties who bought votes and dished out government jobs to reward loyalists. These practices came to an end only through a combi- nation of political activism, electoral reforms and changes in the rules regarding government hiring.
Recognizing that the boundaries of the market are ambiguous and cannot be determined in an objective way lets us realize that economics is not a science like physics or chemistry, but a polit- ical exercise. Free-market economists may want you to believe that the correct boundaries of the market can be scientifically determined, but this is incorrect. If the boundaries of what you are studying cannot be scientifically determined, what you are doing is not a science.
Thus seen, opposing a new regulation is saying that the status quo, however unjust from some people’s point of view, should not be changed. Saying that an existing regulation should be abol- ished is saying that the domain of the market should be expanded, which means that those who have money should be given more power in that area, as the market is run on one-dollar-one-vote principle.
So, when free-market economists say that a certain regulation should not be introduced because it would restrict the ‘freedom’ of a certain market, they are merely expressing a political opinion that they reject the rights that are to be defended by the proposed law. Their ideological cloak is to pretend that their politics is not really political, but rather is an objective economic truth, while other people’s politics is political. However, they are as politically motivated as their opponents.
Breaking away from the illusion of market objectivity is the first step towards understanding capitalism.
Federal Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz visited the wheat board offices in Winnipeg last week, formally told officials the government's plans to drastically change the wheat board's role by the next crop year, and quickly left.
The wheat board is what's called a "single desk seller" of two of Western Canada's most important grains, barley and wheat. The board essentially buys all of the crop, and then markets it around the world. Farmers are assured they can sell their crop and the cheque won't bounce. The wheat board gains marketing leverage by being the only seller, and some reports say this alone generates about a billion dollars more a year.
Here's the rub though for the Conservatives and many farmers. It's a collective/cooperative model, all farmers share equally in the wheat board sales, and farmers are not allowed to make their own deals, even though there may be opportunities to get a higher price in certain spot markets, particularly for farmers living in the southern Prariries close to U.S. feedlots and mills. These are the farmers who have been most aggressive in calling for an end to the wheat board monopoly, and the ones the Conservatives have been listening too. Interestingly, Gerry Ritz has clearly stated that there won't be a farmer vote on the changes, something required in the wheat board legislation. Here are some comments from a Canadian Press report.
"While the law requires a vote when adding or subtracting commodities that the board handles, Ritz says changing the entire Wheat Board Act is at the discretion of Parliament.
Ritz says farmers endorsed an end to the monopoly when they voted in a majority Conservative government in last month's election."
Ritz says the the wheat board will live on, but on the same competitive footing as the handful of major grain trading companies that will vastly expand their business.
The Canadian Wheat Board won't go down without a fight. We can expect a strong campaign against these changes, and very likely a court challenge before the dust settles. This fight won't have a significant impact on the Maritimes, but symbolically it's important. Supply management in dairy, poultry and eggs has the same kind of historical resonance in Eastern Canada, as the wheat board does in the west. A collective, highly regulated marketing system that many love, but "free market" types hate. If the Conservatives can pull off the wheat board coup out West, don't think the free market fire breathers won't turn their attention on supply management. The fact that supply management in dairy is so important in Quebec would be the only reason it won't come under the gun.
I have enormous respect for the energy, determination, and risk taking of entrepreneurs and they should definitely benefit from their labours, but as you can tell I've always been a little suspicious of this notion of "free" markets. In Canada we have all kinds of rules and regulations that benefit some (banks and telecommunication companies for example), and these are still viewed as "free enterprise", but a farmer trying to get a reasonable return is being coddled.
There was an interesting take on all of this here:
http://www.truthout.org/there-no-such-thing-free-market/1307462405
There Is No Such Thing as a Free Market
by: Ha-Joon Chang, Bloomsbury Publishing
What They Tell You
Markets need to be free. When the government interferes to dictate what market participants can or cannot do, resources cannot flow to their most efficient use. If people cannot do the things that they find most profitable, they lose the incentive to invest and innovate. Thus, if the government puts a cap on house rents, landlords lose the incentive to maintain their properties or build new ones. Or, if the government restricts the kinds of financial products that can be sold, two contracting parties that may both have benefited from innovative transactions that fulfil their idiosyncratic needs cannot reap the potential gains of free contract. People must be left ‘free to choose’, as the title of free-market visionary Milton Friedman’s famous book goes.
What They Don’t Tell You
The free market doesn’t exist. Every market has some rules and boundaries that restrict freedom of choice. A market looks free only because we so unconditionally accept its underlying restrictions that we fail to see them. How ‘free’ a market is cannot be objectively defined. It is a political definition. The usual claim by free-market economists that they are trying to defend the market from politically motivated interference by the government is false. Government is always involved and those free-marketeers are as politically motivated as anyone. Overcoming the myth that there is such a thing as an objectively defined ‘free market’ is the first step towards understanding capitalism.
Labour Ought to Be Free
In 1819 new legislation to regulate child labour, the Cotton Facto- ries Regulation Act, was tabled in the British Parliament. The proposed regulation was incredibly ‘light touch’ by modern standards. It would ban the employment of young children – that is, those under the age of nine. Older children (aged between ten and sixteen) would still be allowed to work, but with their work- ing hours restricted to twelve per day (yes, they were really going soft on those kids). The new rules applied only to cotton factories, which were recognized to be exceptionally hazardous to workers’ health.
If you've ever wished for an arsenal of arguments to refute those who argue on behalf of the mythical “free market,” this is the book for you. To get this Truthout Progressive Pick of the Week for a minimum one-time donation of $30, or a monthly commitment of $5 or more to Truthout, click here.1
The proposal caused huge controversy. Opponents saw it as undermining the sanctity of freedom of contract and thus destroying the very foundation of the free market. In debating this legislation, some members of the House of Lords objected to it on the grounds that ‘labour ought to be free’. Their argument said: the children want (and need) to work, and the factory owners want to employ them; what is the problem?
Today, even the most ardent free-market proponents in Brit- ain or other rich countries would not think of bringing child labour back as part of the market liberalization package that they so want. However, until the late nineteenth or the early twentieth century, when the first serious child labour regulations were introduced in Europe and North America, many respectable people judged child labour regulation to be against the principles of the free market.
Thus seen, the ‘freedom’ of a market is, like beauty, in the eyes of the beholder. If you believe that the right of children not to have to work is more important than the right of factory owners to be able to hire whoever they find most profitable, you will not see a ban on child labour as an infringement on the freedom of the labour market. If you believe the opposite, you will see an ‘unfree’ market, shackled by a misguided government regulation.
We don’t have to go back two centuries to see regulations we take for granted (and accept as the ‘ambient noise’ within the free market) that were seriously challenged as undermining the free market, when first introduced. When environmental regulations (e.g., regulations on car and factory emissions) appeared a few decades ago, they were opposed by many as seri- ous infringements on our freedom to choose. Their opponents asked: if people want to drive in more polluting cars or if factories find more polluting production methods more profitable, why should the government prevent them from making such choices? Today, most people accept these regulations as ‘natural’. They believe that actions that harm others, however unintentionally (such as pollution), need to be restricted. They also understand that it is sensible to make careful use of our energy resources, when many of them are non-renewable. They may believe that reducing human impact on climate change makes sense too.
If the same market can be perceived to have varying degrees of freedom by different people, there is really no objective way to define how free that market is. In other words, the free market is an illusion. If some markets look free, it is only because we so totally accept the regulations that are propping them up that they become invisible.
Piano Wires and Kungfu Masters
Like many people, as a child I was fascinated by all those gravity- defying kungfu masters in Hong Kong movies.
Like many kids, Conditions of trade are specified too. One of the things that surprised me when I first moved to Britain in the mid 1980s was that one could demand a full refund for a product one didn’t like, even if it wasn’t faulty. At the time, you just couldn’t do that in Korea, except in the most exclusive department stores. In Britain, the consumer’s right to change her mind was considered more important than the right of the seller to avoid the cost involved in returning unwanted (yet functional) products to the manufacturer. There are many other rules regulating various aspects of the exchange process: product liability, failure in delivery, loan default, and so on. In many countries, there are also necessary permissions for the location of sales outlets – such as restrictions on street-vending or zoning laws that ban commercial activities in residential areas.
Then there are price regulations. I am not talking here just about those highly visible phenomena such as rent controls or minimum wages that free-market economists love to hate.
Wages in rich countries are determined more by immigration control than anything else, including any minimum wage legislation. How is the immigration maximum determined? Not by the ‘free’ labour market, which, if left alone, will end up replacing 80–90 per cent of native workers with cheaper, and often more productive, immigrants. Immigration is largely settled by politics. So, if you have any residual doubt about the massive role that the government plays in the economy’s free market, then pause to reflect that all our wages are, at root, politically deter- mined (see Thing 3).
Following the 2008 financial crisis, the prices of loans (if you can get one or if you already have a variable rate loan) have become a lot lower in many countries thanks to the continuous slashing of interest rates. Was that because suddenly people didn’t want loans and the banks needed to lower their prices to shift them? No, it was the result of political decisions to boost demand by cutting interest rates. Even in normal times, interest rates are set in most countries by the central bank, which means that political considerations creep in. In other words, interest rates are also determined by politics.
If wages and interest rates are (to a significant extent) politically determined, then all the other prices are politically determined, as they affect all other prices.
Is Free Trade Fair?
We see a regulation when we don’t endorse the moral values behind it. The nineteenth-century high-tariff restriction on free trade by the US federal government outraged slave-owners, who at the same time saw nothing wrong with trading people in a free market. To those who believed that people can be owned, banning trade in slaves was objectionable in the same way as restricting trade in manufactured goods. Korean shopkeepers of the 1980s would probably have thought the requirement for ‘unconditional return’ to be an unfairly burdensome government regulation restricting market freedom.
Busy schedule? Click here to keep up with Truthout with free email updates.2
This clash of values also lies behind the contemporary debate on free trade vs. fair trade. Many Americans believe that China is engaged in international trade that may be free but is not fair. In their view, by paying workers unacceptably low wages and making them work in inhumane conditions, China competes unfairly. The Chinese, in turn, can riposte that it is unacceptable that rich countries, while advocating free trade, try to impose artificial barriers to China’s exports by attempting to restrict the import of ‘sweatshop’ products. They find it unjust to be prevented from exploiting the only resource they have in greatest abundance – cheap labour.
Of course, the difficulty here is that there is no objective way to define ‘unacceptably low wages’ or ‘inhumane working conditions’. With the huge international gaps that exist in the level of economic development and living standards, it is natural that what is a starvation wage in the US is a handsome wage in China (the average being 10 per cent that of the US) and a fortune in India (the average being 2 per cent that of the US). Indeed, most fair-trade-minded Americans would not have bought things made by their own grandfathers, who worked extremely long hours under inhumane conditions. Until the beginning of the twenti- eth century, the average work week in the US was around sixty hours. At the time (in 1905, to be more precise), it was a country in which the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional a New York state law limiting the working days of bakers to ten hours, on the grounds that it ‘deprived the baker of the liberty of work- ing as long as he wished’.
Thus seen, the debate about fair trade is essentially about moral values and political decisions, and not economics in the usual sense. Even though it is about an economic issue, it is not some- thing economists with their technical tool kits are particularly well equipped to rule on.
All this does not mean that we need to take a relativist posi- tion and fail to criticize anyone because anything goes. We can (and I do) have a view on the acceptability of prevailing labour standards in China (or any other country, for that matter) and try to do something about it, without believing that those who have a different view are wrong in some absolute sense. Even though China cannot afford American wages or Swedish working conditions, it certainly can improve the wages and the working conditions of its workers. Indeed, many Chinese don’t accept the prevailing conditions and demand tougher regulations. But economic theory (at least free-market economics) cannot tell us what the ‘right’ wages and working conditions should be in China.
I Don't Think We Are in France Anymore
In July 2008, with the country’s financial system in meltdown, the US government poured $200 billion into Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage lenders, and nationalized them. On witnessing this, the Republican Senator Jim Bunning of Kentucky famously denounced the action as something that could only happen in a ‘socialist’ country like France.
France was bad enough, but on 19 September 2008, Senator Bunning’s beloved country was turned into the Evil Empire itself by his own party leader. According to the plan announced that day by President George W. Bush and subsequently named TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program), the US government was to use at least $700 billion of taxpayers’ money to buy up the ‘toxic assets’ choking up the financial system.
President Bush, however, did not see things quite that way. He argued that, rather than being ‘socialist’, the plan was simply a continuation of the American system of free enterprise, which ‘rests on the conviction that the federal government should interfere in the market place only when necessary’. Only that, in his view, nationalizing a huge chunk of the financial sector was just one of those necessary things.
Mr Bush’s statement is, of course, an ultimate example of political double-speak – one of the biggest state interventions in human history is dressed up as another workaday market process. However, through these words Mr Bush exposed the flimsy foundation on which the myth of the free market stands. As the statement so clearly reveals, what is a necessary state intervention consistent with free-market capitalism is really a matter of opinion. There is no scientifically defined boundary for free market.
If there is nothing sacred about any particular market boundaries that happen to exist, an attempt to change them is as legitimate as the attempt to defend them. Indeed, the history of capitalism has been a constant struggle over the boundaries of the market.
A lot of the things that are outside the market today have been removed by political decision, rather than the market process itself – human beings, government jobs, electoral votes, legal decisions, university places or uncertified medicines. There are still attempts to buy at least some of these things illegally (bribing government officials, judges or voters) or legally (using expensive lawyers to win a lawsuit, donations to political parties, etc.), but, even though there have been movements in both directions, the trend has been towards less marketization.
For goods that are still traded, more regulations have been introduced over time. Compared even to a few decades ago, now we have much more stringent regulations on who can produce what (e.g., certificates for organic or fair-trade producers), how they can be produced (e.g., restrictions on pollution or carbon emissions), and how they can be sold (e.g., rules on product label- ling and on refunds).
Furthermore, reflecting its political nature, the process of re-drawing the boundaries of the market has sometimes been marked by violent conflicts. The Americans fought a civil war over free trade in slaves (although free trade in goods – or the tariffs issue – was also an important issue).1 The British govern- ment fought the Opium War against China to realize a free trade in opium. Regulations on free market in child labour were implemented only because of the struggles by social reformers, as I discussed earlier. Making free markets in government jobs or votes illegal has been met with stiff resistance by political parties who bought votes and dished out government jobs to reward loyalists. These practices came to an end only through a combi- nation of political activism, electoral reforms and changes in the rules regarding government hiring.
Recognizing that the boundaries of the market are ambiguous and cannot be determined in an objective way lets us realize that economics is not a science like physics or chemistry, but a polit- ical exercise. Free-market economists may want you to believe that the correct boundaries of the market can be scientifically determined, but this is incorrect. If the boundaries of what you are studying cannot be scientifically determined, what you are doing is not a science.
Thus seen, opposing a new regulation is saying that the status quo, however unjust from some people’s point of view, should not be changed. Saying that an existing regulation should be abol- ished is saying that the domain of the market should be expanded, which means that those who have money should be given more power in that area, as the market is run on one-dollar-one-vote principle.
So, when free-market economists say that a certain regulation should not be introduced because it would restrict the ‘freedom’ of a certain market, they are merely expressing a political opinion that they reject the rights that are to be defended by the proposed law. Their ideological cloak is to pretend that their politics is not really political, but rather is an objective economic truth, while other people’s politics is political. However, they are as politically motivated as their opponents.
Breaking away from the illusion of market objectivity is the first step towards understanding capitalism.
Wednesday, 8 June 2011
The Elephant in the Room Has To Poop
Every Fall in rural PEI there are days when the "honey wagon" is out spraying liquid manure (pig shit) taken from the concrete holding lagoons next to most pig barns. I can't say I enjoy the smell, but I do find it comforting (let me explain before you think I've lost my mind).
Modern piggeries have slatted floors that allow manure and urine to be collected and pumped into holding lagoons. This can be dangerous. In concentrated pork production areas like North Dakota, there are many examples of lagoons with clay liners (rather than concrete) that have broken down releasing tons of pig shit into local waterways. Two problems: huge amounts of nitrates are added, leading to dead zones (the oxygen in the water is used to break down the waste which in turn kills water-life) and secondly the danger of pathogens like the deadly strains of e-coli we've been reading about lately. Think of it this way: in the same way that human waste goes through sewage treatment plants where oxygen is added to promote the growth of good "oxygen loving" or aerobic bacteria which begin the process of detoxifying waste, livestock manure has to go through similar stages. Take a look at the bags of manure you buy in the spring, it always says "composted". Again good aerobic bacteria have broken down the manure creating enough heat to kill any bad stuff.
So back to the honey wagon. When I smell it I think of several things: a livestock farmer is still in business, the manure has successfully been held in the concrete storage, and now it's on the land (rather than in the water) and has access to all the oxygen it needs to break down safely and add fertility to the soil for a crop the following summer. There are issues (there are always issues). Farmers need a big enough land base to properly utilize all of the pig waste, too much on the same land can create excess nitrates that end up in groundwater.
Cattle manure is just as important for soil fertility, and it's one of the big losses PEI faces as livestock farmers go out of business.
So the next time you smell that "eau de pig shit", don't wrinkle your nose, put a smile on your face.
And raw manure of course has been in the news because of the e-coli outbreak in Europe. Health officials are still looking for the source, and now say they may never know.A couple of stories, and one more about my favourite whipping boy: corn.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/07/e-coli-dont-blame-the-sprouts/?ref=opinion
E. Coli: Don’t Blame the Sprouts!
By MARK BITTMAN
One hundred thousand E. coli can dance on the head of a pin; it may only take 50 to make you sick enough to die. Benign E. coli are everywhere, even in your own pink gut right now, and all E. coli can live on (or in) things as different as sprouts, burgers and water. But if you were able to trace back far enough, their reservoir is mostly likely the gut of mammal: a goat, a sheep, a deer, even a majestic elk or a dog. They’re most often associated with cows.
The dangerous E. coli, the ones causing the horrorshow in Germany right now, are called STEC (Shiga-toxin-producing E. coli, for the name of their horrific poison, and pronounced ess-teck). And if you think it’s only a German problem, you’re so wrong.
STEC usually migrate to food through direct or indirect contact with the contents of the animal’s intestinal tract: dung, not to put too fine a point on it. Whether the growth or even origin of STEC — which have only been associated with human illness for 30 years — could have resulted in part from feeding cattle grain (as opposed to their natural grass), or was aided by industrial agriculture’s unnecessary reliance on prophylactic antibiotics (a shameful story, but one that must wait), may never be known.
What is known is that if you keep STEC out of beef you partially solve the problem, and if you keep manure off other foods you partially solve the problem, too. It isn’t easy, and it’s never going to be foolproof, but these are the steps to take. If you’re the cattle industry, you’d rather blame the whole thing on sprouts that were “somehow” contaminated. (Ban sprouts! No one really likes them anyway.) But blaming the sprouts is like blaming your nose for a virus-containing sneeze: That STEC came from somewhere, and in its history is an animal’s gut.
Because they’re grown in a warm, moist, gut-like environment, sprouts are an excellent vehicle for maintaining and maybe even reproducing STEC (indeed, so excellent that the Centers for Disease Control un-recommends them), but their involvement may never be proven.
Still, it’s likely that most of the thousands of people sickened in Germany ate a vegetable that was contaminated in its handling: manure got into the growing or rinsing water; or it was on the hands of a picker; or it got dropped on a veggie by a bird, or brushed onto it by a wandering animal; or it was in a truck that took the sprouts to the packager, or some other innocent accident, the kind we must do our best to prevent, the kind that’s magnified by combining huge lots of food from dozens of different sources and handling them all together. Remember, 50 STEC are enough to make you sick; one head of lettuce with a few hundred thousand bacteria, tossed together with a few tons of uncontaminated greens, then sold in thousands of packages, can mess up a lot of people.
Outbreaks of the deadly kinds of STEC — there are at least seven really toxic strains, including the German one — are common enough. But these outbreaks are the tip of the iceberg; there are tens of thousands of “sporadic” cases from STEC every year in the United States alone, most of them unreported but no less deadly for that.
Although the U.S. has a pretty good track record when it comes to identifying and fighting STEC — thanks to much struggle on the part of lawyers and public health officials, and sound thinking in the USDA and FDA — we’re falling way behind in preventing outbreaks like the current one, and we are even further behind in preventing the sporadic ones, those that get no headlines, remain unreported and probably comprise the majority of cases. As is so common these days, a lack of funding and political will is the root of the problem.
The STEC that caused the infamous Jack in the Box outbreak of 1993 is formally called E. coli O157:H7. The U.S. has zero tolerance for that STEC, because in 1994 — against the predictable protests of the meat industry — O157 was labeled an “adulterant,” which means that any food in which it’s discovered is recalled; happens all the time, though sometimes too late. There are, as I said, other STEC just as murderous, and we have a much more lenient policy about their presence in food: they’re unregulated. Their presence in food is, legally speaking, just fine.
In theory, if the German thing happened here and the culprit were O157, it might have been prevented. But if the German thing happened here and the culprit were a non-O157 STEC, as it was in Germany (for those of you keeping score at home, that one has been labeled O104:H4), we’d be in the same boat — er, hospital — as our Saxon cousins.
To slow the deadly effects of STEC, we need more and better basic and applied research to identify them and test for them. We also need more testing of water used for irrigation and washing; reduced animal intrusions; alert farmworkers (an aside: people tend to be more alert if they’re more valued and less overworked and underpaid); and increased testing before people get sick and better reporting when they do get sick. (Less cow manure would help, but that isn’t about to happen.) All of these steps take money.
Even more important, we need to immediately acknowledge that O157 is not the only deadly STEC out there (non-O157 STEC has been found in up to six percent of a random sampling of meat, and not just hamburger), an acknowledgment that — of course — the meat industry is unwilling to make. And we need to declare those other STEC as “adulterants” and get them out of the food supply to the best of our ability. The two agencies that can act on this are USDA and FDA, and both are hamstrung by budget policy (the FDA needs more money for inspection; the House wants to give it less) and, of course, by the meat lobby and its allies.
Public health — arguably among the most important reasons for society’s existence in the first place — has somehow become a “liberal” cause and therefore unfashionable. But if the origin of these illnesses were bio-terrorism, money would be no object and even politics might be shunted aside. The fact is that a huge and powerful lobby would rather see a few thousand annual underreported deaths and the occasional high-visibility outbreak than submit to further regulation and smaller profits. Especially if that outbreak is in Germany, a world away. But next time it might not be.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jun/07/e-coli-spain-france-farmers
Spain rejects €150m payout offer for farms hit by E coli fears
by Peter Walker • June 7, 2011 •
The European commission on Tuesday promised to pay more than €150m (£134m) to farmers hit by the E coli2 crisis, following robust lobbying by Spain3 and France.
The agriculture commissioner, Dacian Ciolos, proposed sharing out to farmers affected by falling sales amid the public health panic the sum of €150m, equating to payments worth about 30% of the average market price for the unsold crops.
But at the meeting of agriculture ministers in Luxembourg, representatives from several member states demanded more help.
Spain immediately warned the €150m would not be enough. Spain has suffered disproportionately from the economic impact of the outbreak, in part because it grows a significant share of Europe's salad produce but also because blame for the bacteria outbreak at first was attributed to its cucumber crop.
"No, Spain does not see €150m as sufficient," the country's agriculture minister, Rosa Aguilar, said. She was backed by her French counterpart, Bruno Le Maire.
Ciolos then said he would "come back tomorrow with an improved proposal", but warned that Spanish demands for compensation of 90% or even 100% of market price were unrealistic. "We have to bear in mind that this is public money, and we have to account for its use," he said.
The outbreak, of a newly identified and especially virulent strain of the E Coli bacterium has killed 23 people, all either in, or recently returned, from northern Germany, according to figures compiled by the European Centre for Disease Control.
More than 4,200 people have become ill, almost 700 of whom have developed haemolytic uraemic syndrome, a serious complication that affects the blood, kidneys and nervous system.
The rate of cases is now slowing. Cornelia Pruefer-Storcks, the health minister for Hamburg, the city thought to be at the centre of the outbreak, said medical staff believed the situation was gradually improving. "We are seeing the first patients discharged, others are getting much better, so the first glimmers of hope are on the horizon."
However, scientists appear to be no closer to establishing the source of the outbreak. After Spanish cucumbers were ruled out, German officials confidently named a bean-sprout farm in Lower Saxony as the likely culprit, only for bacteriological tests to come back negative.
German ministers had said there were "strong and clear indications" that bean sprouts from the Gärtenhof organic farm, 40 miles from Hamburg, had spread the E coli bacteria. However, more tests have failed to link the farm to the outbreak. The confusion has seen many Europeans stop buying a range of products, while Russia has banned all EU vegetable imports.
EU farming6 representatives said the sector's losses had exceeded €400m. Spain has been at the forefront of calls for Germany to pay the bulk of the compensation, a move ruled out by Ciolos, who said it would come from central budgets. At a press conference he refused to speculate on the total bill, saying only that it would be increased, the revised offer to be approved within the next few days.
The EU's health commissioner, John Dalli, has criticised Germany for its "premature conclusions" on the source of the outbreak. "I would like to stress it is crucial that national authorities do not rush to give information on the source of infection which is not proven by bacteriological analysis, as this spreads unjustified fears in the population all over Europe and creates problems for our food producers selling products," he said before the farm ministers' meeting.
He added: "While such intensive investigations are ongoing, we must be careful not to make premature conclusions."
He said the outbreak had been contained to a relatively small area. He told the European parliament: "I stress that the outbreak is limited geographically to the area surrounding the city of Hamburg, so there is no reason to take action on a European level. [EU-wide] measures against any product are disproportionate."
Scientists say the longer the wait for a definite source, the more likely it is that none will ever be identified. "If we don't know the likely culprit in a week's time, we may never know the cause," said Dr Guénaël Rodier, an infectious diseases expert at the UN's World Health Organisation.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/americas/corn-a-big-question-mark-in-global-food-stock-equation/article2051121/
Corn a big question mark in global food stock equation
by JESSICA LEEDER — GLOBAL FOOD REPORTER • June 8, 2011 •
The latest culprit under surveillance for its role in driving up global grain prices is U.S.-grown corn.
Wheat was the star of last year’s global food price run, set off by a drought in Russia that decimated a chunk of the country’s crop and prompted officials to slam the borders shut to exports; prices shot up by 50 per cent; food riots broke out in Africa and the Middle East; and France, as leader of this year’s G20 meetings, vowed to assemble agriculture ministers to tackle market volatility.
With two weeks to go before the ministers convene, markets are bracing for the release of an influential U.S. agriculture report on Thursday that is expected to shed light on the status of global food stocks and forecast supply and demand for the crucial growing months.
Analysts warn that if the outlook for U.S. corn, which feeds two-thirds of the global market, is anything less than glowing, traders’ reaction to the report could tip off a new period of market volatility.
The explanation for this starts with unusually wet weather in the U.S. corn belt that forced long delays in planting this spring. Although prices dropped this week after a U.S. Department of Agriculture report outlined progress in the field – at least 94 per cent of the world’s largest corn crop has been seeded –worries remain that the delays will translate into lower yields by the end of the season.
The timing is bad: Corn stocks this year have hovered around record lows, and demand for corn to make biofuels is keeping prices high. In April, the USDA said it expected corn stocks to shrink to 18 days’ worth of supply, the tightest spot in more than a decade. The announcement came at a time of a global hunger for more market certainty after last year’s frenzy.
“If we have problems with the corn crop … prices will go up. And that will spill over into wheat,” said Philip Abbott, an agricultural economist at Indiana’s Purdue University. “Wheat would not be as high as it is now were it not for the fact that corn is so high.”
Making matters worse is a drought in Britain, Germany and France – Europe’s largest wheat producers – that is threatening this year’s crop. Although world wheat stocks are in good shape and global production is on pace for a slight increase, “another year of poor production in wheat would certainly be problematic,” Mr. Abbott said.
Not everyone is convinced of the grim outlook. Errol Anderson, a grain and livestock analyst with ProMarket Wire in Calgary, believes corn and wheat are both hovering on the top end of their trading range now. Strong production forecasts for the year and predictions that crude oil prices will sink are bolstering his certainty.
“The world as we see it, because of the slowing economies, runs a risk of deflation by the end of the year,” he said.
However, Mr. Anderson represents a minority. The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization said on Tuesday that high and volatile prices are likely to prevail for the rest of the year and into 2012 despite a modest price drop in May.
While high prices are tough to stomach, particularly among the least developed countries, increasing volatility in food commodities has proven tougher for them to withstand over the past year as global food prices reached highs not seen since the infamous shocks of 2008.
The prospect of dampening that volatility set off a world-wide discussion on what, if any, measures should be implemented. G20 agriculture ministers are expected to tackle the subject later this month. The most controversial possibilities include actions to rein in speculative trading in commodity markets and the possible creation of an international agricultural information system to increase transparency around global production, supply and demand.
“Countries have to go through that market and, on a given day, buy their grain,” said Sophia Murphy, a B.C.-based senior adviser for the Institute for Agricultural Trade Policy. “There’s a lot of things affecting the prices they have to pay ... and many of them have little to do with whether there’s a real supply and demand issue,” she said.
Ms. Murphy said she’s encouraged by the prospect of the G20 discussions, but concerned that politics will get in the way of making a real dent in market volatility.
“If countries are being asked to rely on international markets for food security, they need to have some security that food is available,” she said. “All the mechanisms coming out of the G20 are about money. That’s all very well if there’s something to buy. But you can’t use money when the shelves are empty.”
U.S. corn crop
81 million
Approximate acres worth of corn harvested in the United States last year, the largest portion of which was used in livestock feed.
$66.7-billion
Total value of the U.S. crop in 2010.
Percentage of the crop that is exported.
50 million
Tonnes of corn the United States placed on the export market in the 2009-2010 fiscal year.
16 million
Tonnes of corn produced for the foreign market by Argentina, the next-largest exporter, in the same year.
15.9 million
Tonnes of the grain bought by Japan, the world’s largest importer.
Percentage of total corn grown in the world that U.S. production represents.
China, Brazil, Mexico
Other top producers.
More than 30
Percentage of the U.S. corn crop that is used for making ethanol.
Starch, cooking oil, flour, Bourbon whisky
Other products made with the grain.
Modern piggeries have slatted floors that allow manure and urine to be collected and pumped into holding lagoons. This can be dangerous. In concentrated pork production areas like North Dakota, there are many examples of lagoons with clay liners (rather than concrete) that have broken down releasing tons of pig shit into local waterways. Two problems: huge amounts of nitrates are added, leading to dead zones (the oxygen in the water is used to break down the waste which in turn kills water-life) and secondly the danger of pathogens like the deadly strains of e-coli we've been reading about lately. Think of it this way: in the same way that human waste goes through sewage treatment plants where oxygen is added to promote the growth of good "oxygen loving" or aerobic bacteria which begin the process of detoxifying waste, livestock manure has to go through similar stages. Take a look at the bags of manure you buy in the spring, it always says "composted". Again good aerobic bacteria have broken down the manure creating enough heat to kill any bad stuff.
So back to the honey wagon. When I smell it I think of several things: a livestock farmer is still in business, the manure has successfully been held in the concrete storage, and now it's on the land (rather than in the water) and has access to all the oxygen it needs to break down safely and add fertility to the soil for a crop the following summer. There are issues (there are always issues). Farmers need a big enough land base to properly utilize all of the pig waste, too much on the same land can create excess nitrates that end up in groundwater.
Cattle manure is just as important for soil fertility, and it's one of the big losses PEI faces as livestock farmers go out of business.
So the next time you smell that "eau de pig shit", don't wrinkle your nose, put a smile on your face.
And raw manure of course has been in the news because of the e-coli outbreak in Europe. Health officials are still looking for the source, and now say they may never know.A couple of stories, and one more about my favourite whipping boy: corn.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/07/e-coli-dont-blame-the-sprouts/?ref=opinion
E. Coli: Don’t Blame the Sprouts!
By MARK BITTMAN
One hundred thousand E. coli can dance on the head of a pin; it may only take 50 to make you sick enough to die. Benign E. coli are everywhere, even in your own pink gut right now, and all E. coli can live on (or in) things as different as sprouts, burgers and water. But if you were able to trace back far enough, their reservoir is mostly likely the gut of mammal: a goat, a sheep, a deer, even a majestic elk or a dog. They’re most often associated with cows.
The dangerous E. coli, the ones causing the horrorshow in Germany right now, are called STEC (Shiga-toxin-producing E. coli, for the name of their horrific poison, and pronounced ess-teck). And if you think it’s only a German problem, you’re so wrong.
STEC usually migrate to food through direct or indirect contact with the contents of the animal’s intestinal tract: dung, not to put too fine a point on it. Whether the growth or even origin of STEC — which have only been associated with human illness for 30 years — could have resulted in part from feeding cattle grain (as opposed to their natural grass), or was aided by industrial agriculture’s unnecessary reliance on prophylactic antibiotics (a shameful story, but one that must wait), may never be known.
What is known is that if you keep STEC out of beef you partially solve the problem, and if you keep manure off other foods you partially solve the problem, too. It isn’t easy, and it’s never going to be foolproof, but these are the steps to take. If you’re the cattle industry, you’d rather blame the whole thing on sprouts that were “somehow” contaminated. (Ban sprouts! No one really likes them anyway.) But blaming the sprouts is like blaming your nose for a virus-containing sneeze: That STEC came from somewhere, and in its history is an animal’s gut.
Because they’re grown in a warm, moist, gut-like environment, sprouts are an excellent vehicle for maintaining and maybe even reproducing STEC (indeed, so excellent that the Centers for Disease Control un-recommends them), but their involvement may never be proven.
Still, it’s likely that most of the thousands of people sickened in Germany ate a vegetable that was contaminated in its handling: manure got into the growing or rinsing water; or it was on the hands of a picker; or it got dropped on a veggie by a bird, or brushed onto it by a wandering animal; or it was in a truck that took the sprouts to the packager, or some other innocent accident, the kind we must do our best to prevent, the kind that’s magnified by combining huge lots of food from dozens of different sources and handling them all together. Remember, 50 STEC are enough to make you sick; one head of lettuce with a few hundred thousand bacteria, tossed together with a few tons of uncontaminated greens, then sold in thousands of packages, can mess up a lot of people.
Outbreaks of the deadly kinds of STEC — there are at least seven really toxic strains, including the German one — are common enough. But these outbreaks are the tip of the iceberg; there are tens of thousands of “sporadic” cases from STEC every year in the United States alone, most of them unreported but no less deadly for that.
Although the U.S. has a pretty good track record when it comes to identifying and fighting STEC — thanks to much struggle on the part of lawyers and public health officials, and sound thinking in the USDA and FDA — we’re falling way behind in preventing outbreaks like the current one, and we are even further behind in preventing the sporadic ones, those that get no headlines, remain unreported and probably comprise the majority of cases. As is so common these days, a lack of funding and political will is the root of the problem.
The STEC that caused the infamous Jack in the Box outbreak of 1993 is formally called E. coli O157:H7. The U.S. has zero tolerance for that STEC, because in 1994 — against the predictable protests of the meat industry — O157 was labeled an “adulterant,” which means that any food in which it’s discovered is recalled; happens all the time, though sometimes too late. There are, as I said, other STEC just as murderous, and we have a much more lenient policy about their presence in food: they’re unregulated. Their presence in food is, legally speaking, just fine.
In theory, if the German thing happened here and the culprit were O157, it might have been prevented. But if the German thing happened here and the culprit were a non-O157 STEC, as it was in Germany (for those of you keeping score at home, that one has been labeled O104:H4), we’d be in the same boat — er, hospital — as our Saxon cousins.
To slow the deadly effects of STEC, we need more and better basic and applied research to identify them and test for them. We also need more testing of water used for irrigation and washing; reduced animal intrusions; alert farmworkers (an aside: people tend to be more alert if they’re more valued and less overworked and underpaid); and increased testing before people get sick and better reporting when they do get sick. (Less cow manure would help, but that isn’t about to happen.) All of these steps take money.
Even more important, we need to immediately acknowledge that O157 is not the only deadly STEC out there (non-O157 STEC has been found in up to six percent of a random sampling of meat, and not just hamburger), an acknowledgment that — of course — the meat industry is unwilling to make. And we need to declare those other STEC as “adulterants” and get them out of the food supply to the best of our ability. The two agencies that can act on this are USDA and FDA, and both are hamstrung by budget policy (the FDA needs more money for inspection; the House wants to give it less) and, of course, by the meat lobby and its allies.
Public health — arguably among the most important reasons for society’s existence in the first place — has somehow become a “liberal” cause and therefore unfashionable. But if the origin of these illnesses were bio-terrorism, money would be no object and even politics might be shunted aside. The fact is that a huge and powerful lobby would rather see a few thousand annual underreported deaths and the occasional high-visibility outbreak than submit to further regulation and smaller profits. Especially if that outbreak is in Germany, a world away. But next time it might not be.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jun/07/e-coli-spain-france-farmers
Spain rejects €150m payout offer for farms hit by E coli fears
by Peter Walker • June 7, 2011 •
The European commission on Tuesday promised to pay more than €150m (£134m) to farmers hit by the E coli2 crisis, following robust lobbying by Spain3 and France.
The agriculture commissioner, Dacian Ciolos, proposed sharing out to farmers affected by falling sales amid the public health panic the sum of €150m, equating to payments worth about 30% of the average market price for the unsold crops.
But at the meeting of agriculture ministers in Luxembourg, representatives from several member states demanded more help.
Spain immediately warned the €150m would not be enough. Spain has suffered disproportionately from the economic impact of the outbreak, in part because it grows a significant share of Europe's salad produce but also because blame for the bacteria outbreak at first was attributed to its cucumber crop.
"No, Spain does not see €150m as sufficient," the country's agriculture minister, Rosa Aguilar, said. She was backed by her French counterpart, Bruno Le Maire.
Ciolos then said he would "come back tomorrow with an improved proposal", but warned that Spanish demands for compensation of 90% or even 100% of market price were unrealistic. "We have to bear in mind that this is public money, and we have to account for its use," he said.
The outbreak, of a newly identified and especially virulent strain of the E Coli bacterium has killed 23 people, all either in, or recently returned, from northern Germany, according to figures compiled by the European Centre for Disease Control.
More than 4,200 people have become ill, almost 700 of whom have developed haemolytic uraemic syndrome, a serious complication that affects the blood, kidneys and nervous system.
The rate of cases is now slowing. Cornelia Pruefer-Storcks, the health minister for Hamburg, the city thought to be at the centre of the outbreak, said medical staff believed the situation was gradually improving. "We are seeing the first patients discharged, others are getting much better, so the first glimmers of hope are on the horizon."
However, scientists appear to be no closer to establishing the source of the outbreak. After Spanish cucumbers were ruled out, German officials confidently named a bean-sprout farm in Lower Saxony as the likely culprit, only for bacteriological tests to come back negative.
German ministers had said there were "strong and clear indications" that bean sprouts from the Gärtenhof organic farm, 40 miles from Hamburg, had spread the E coli bacteria. However, more tests have failed to link the farm to the outbreak. The confusion has seen many Europeans stop buying a range of products, while Russia has banned all EU vegetable imports.
EU farming6 representatives said the sector's losses had exceeded €400m. Spain has been at the forefront of calls for Germany to pay the bulk of the compensation, a move ruled out by Ciolos, who said it would come from central budgets. At a press conference he refused to speculate on the total bill, saying only that it would be increased, the revised offer to be approved within the next few days.
The EU's health commissioner, John Dalli, has criticised Germany for its "premature conclusions" on the source of the outbreak. "I would like to stress it is crucial that national authorities do not rush to give information on the source of infection which is not proven by bacteriological analysis, as this spreads unjustified fears in the population all over Europe and creates problems for our food producers selling products," he said before the farm ministers' meeting.
He added: "While such intensive investigations are ongoing, we must be careful not to make premature conclusions."
He said the outbreak had been contained to a relatively small area. He told the European parliament: "I stress that the outbreak is limited geographically to the area surrounding the city of Hamburg, so there is no reason to take action on a European level. [EU-wide] measures against any product are disproportionate."
Scientists say the longer the wait for a definite source, the more likely it is that none will ever be identified. "If we don't know the likely culprit in a week's time, we may never know the cause," said Dr Guénaël Rodier, an infectious diseases expert at the UN's World Health Organisation.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/americas/corn-a-big-question-mark-in-global-food-stock-equation/article2051121/
Corn a big question mark in global food stock equation
by JESSICA LEEDER — GLOBAL FOOD REPORTER • June 8, 2011 •
The latest culprit under surveillance for its role in driving up global grain prices is U.S.-grown corn.
Wheat was the star of last year’s global food price run, set off by a drought in Russia that decimated a chunk of the country’s crop and prompted officials to slam the borders shut to exports; prices shot up by 50 per cent; food riots broke out in Africa and the Middle East; and France, as leader of this year’s G20 meetings, vowed to assemble agriculture ministers to tackle market volatility.
With two weeks to go before the ministers convene, markets are bracing for the release of an influential U.S. agriculture report on Thursday that is expected to shed light on the status of global food stocks and forecast supply and demand for the crucial growing months.
Analysts warn that if the outlook for U.S. corn, which feeds two-thirds of the global market, is anything less than glowing, traders’ reaction to the report could tip off a new period of market volatility.
The explanation for this starts with unusually wet weather in the U.S. corn belt that forced long delays in planting this spring. Although prices dropped this week after a U.S. Department of Agriculture report outlined progress in the field – at least 94 per cent of the world’s largest corn crop has been seeded –worries remain that the delays will translate into lower yields by the end of the season.
The timing is bad: Corn stocks this year have hovered around record lows, and demand for corn to make biofuels is keeping prices high. In April, the USDA said it expected corn stocks to shrink to 18 days’ worth of supply, the tightest spot in more than a decade. The announcement came at a time of a global hunger for more market certainty after last year’s frenzy.
“If we have problems with the corn crop … prices will go up. And that will spill over into wheat,” said Philip Abbott, an agricultural economist at Indiana’s Purdue University. “Wheat would not be as high as it is now were it not for the fact that corn is so high.”
Making matters worse is a drought in Britain, Germany and France – Europe’s largest wheat producers – that is threatening this year’s crop. Although world wheat stocks are in good shape and global production is on pace for a slight increase, “another year of poor production in wheat would certainly be problematic,” Mr. Abbott said.
Not everyone is convinced of the grim outlook. Errol Anderson, a grain and livestock analyst with ProMarket Wire in Calgary, believes corn and wheat are both hovering on the top end of their trading range now. Strong production forecasts for the year and predictions that crude oil prices will sink are bolstering his certainty.
“The world as we see it, because of the slowing economies, runs a risk of deflation by the end of the year,” he said.
However, Mr. Anderson represents a minority. The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization said on Tuesday that high and volatile prices are likely to prevail for the rest of the year and into 2012 despite a modest price drop in May.
While high prices are tough to stomach, particularly among the least developed countries, increasing volatility in food commodities has proven tougher for them to withstand over the past year as global food prices reached highs not seen since the infamous shocks of 2008.
The prospect of dampening that volatility set off a world-wide discussion on what, if any, measures should be implemented. G20 agriculture ministers are expected to tackle the subject later this month. The most controversial possibilities include actions to rein in speculative trading in commodity markets and the possible creation of an international agricultural information system to increase transparency around global production, supply and demand.
“Countries have to go through that market and, on a given day, buy their grain,” said Sophia Murphy, a B.C.-based senior adviser for the Institute for Agricultural Trade Policy. “There’s a lot of things affecting the prices they have to pay ... and many of them have little to do with whether there’s a real supply and demand issue,” she said.
Ms. Murphy said she’s encouraged by the prospect of the G20 discussions, but concerned that politics will get in the way of making a real dent in market volatility.
“If countries are being asked to rely on international markets for food security, they need to have some security that food is available,” she said. “All the mechanisms coming out of the G20 are about money. That’s all very well if there’s something to buy. But you can’t use money when the shelves are empty.”
U.S. corn crop
81 million
Approximate acres worth of corn harvested in the United States last year, the largest portion of which was used in livestock feed.
$66.7-billion
Total value of the U.S. crop in 2010.
Percentage of the crop that is exported.
50 million
Tonnes of corn the United States placed on the export market in the 2009-2010 fiscal year.
16 million
Tonnes of corn produced for the foreign market by Argentina, the next-largest exporter, in the same year.
15.9 million
Tonnes of the grain bought by Japan, the world’s largest importer.
Percentage of total corn grown in the world that U.S. production represents.
China, Brazil, Mexico
Other top producers.
More than 30
Percentage of the U.S. corn crop that is used for making ethanol.
Starch, cooking oil, flour, Bourbon whisky
Other products made with the grain.
Monday, 6 June 2011
To Sprout or Not to Sprout
It's hard to think of anything more natural than organic bean sprouts, but for the last two days sprouts produced at an organic farm about forty miles south of Hamburg were held up as the likely source of a new and aggressive strain of e-coli that has killed 22 people, and sickened more than two thousand more. Late today (Monday) officials started backing away from this conclusion as new testing failed to find the e-coli on the farm's produce. The owner of the organic farm says there is no manure used in the production of the sprouts, so doubts the farm could be the source, and it now looks like he could be right. Even so researchers say the supplier of the bean seeds sold to the farm needs to checked as well.
Deadly e-coli outbreaks, like the one in Walkerton, Ontario are almost always linked to raw manure from cattle. Cattle have complex digestive systems full of various types of bacteria needed to breakdown the high cellulose diet they consume (grass and stored hay). The bacteria don't affect the cattle or the milk and meat produced, but if raw manure is mis-handled, and gets into drinking water, or onto produce, it can be a serious health risk.
Sprouts have always been a favourite target of public health officials during outbreaks because of the way they're produced commercially. Many use "steam barrels" creating a warm (38 degree Celsius), moist environment that's good for germinating sprout seeds, but also a perfect environment for bacteria to grow quickly. The issue then becomes (like the current German situation) were the seeds used for sprouting clean or contaminated? Researchers are now saying the supplier of the bean seed is as likely a source as the farm itself..
It's now common for even organic producers of sprouts to bleach the seed before forcing it to germinate. The idea is that the bleach does not infiltrate the seed, but any bacteria or salmonella on the seed will be killed.
News reports out of Germany say the farm in question had delivered sprouts to virtually all the restaurants and stores linked to the outbreak, and given that sprouts have been a source of bacterial infections in the United States and elsewhere before, it seemed like a strong link. Health officials had earlier blamed produce coming from Spain. North Americans are just beginning to hear about the outbreak, even though the first cases were reported almost a month ago.
Here is a good backgrounder on e-coli.
http://www.healthzone.ca/health/illnessesissues/article/1001965--e-coli-a-friend-that-can-turn-lethal
E. coli, a friend that can turn lethal
June 02, 2011
Joseph Hall
Health Reporter
We are all full of E. coli. Wriggling microscopically by the billions in our bowels, multiple strains of the beneficial bacteria help us to digest food and to ward off illnesses.
But sometime around 1982, likely in the intestines of some western U.S. cattle, a version of the bacteria mutated.
It began to produce a poison – known as a shiga toxin -- that could be carried out of the animals in their manure, or saturate the meat they produced.
And for the first time, an E. coli organism, our constant companion though eons of evolution, was labeled as a health threat to humans.
Strains of that pathogenic version have since popped up in intermittent and usually isolated outbreaks around the world, like the one that killed some 18 people in Walkerton 11 years ago.
Now, another mutated E. coli strain is sickening people by the thousands in Germany.
But that E. coli germ, known as o104, is likely using the same mechanism to spread illness that all earlier pathogenic strains of the bacteria utilized, experts say.
“At some point, you had genes that produced toxins being shared between different organisms,” says Dr. Michael Gardam, head of infection control at Toronto’s University Health Network.
Gardam says the original pathogenic E. colis likely picked up a piece of DNA from a toxin producing bacteria known as shigella, a dysentery causing bug that killed off more troops than bullets did during World War 1.
And the new German version has surely done something similar, he says.
“It wouldn’t surprise me if you’ve got one producing a slightly different toxin,” Gardam says. “But I think the concept is exactly the same.”
These shiga-like toxins pose a double threat to humans.
First, they cause bloody and often explosive bouts of diarrhea. And for about 90 per cent of those infected, this unpleasantness will be the extent of it.
But for about 10 per cent, the toxin also attacks the blood’s red cells and platelets, and can lead to lethal conditions like kidney failure, Gardam says.
For these patients, he says, the body’s small blood vessels become inflamed, causing the red, oxygen carrying cells to “blow up” and the cut stemming platelets to run dry.
Shards of these wrecked cells can clog the blood cleansing kidneys, leading to renal failure, Gardam says.
But as in Walkerton, where a manure borne E. coli o157 strain made its way into improperly chlorinated town wells, the German outbreak is likely to be an isolated one.
Unlike viral pandemic pathogens, E. coli bacteria does not hitch rides within incubating airline passengers and jet it’s way around the world, says Tim Sly, a Ryerson University epidemiologist.
“You can be sitting next to someone with this particular disease in the subway, in the office…and you’re not going to get it from them,” Sly says.
The only way the disease can be transmitted, Sly says, is through ingestion, either of undercooked contaminated meat or actual fecal matter, usually lurking on the produce it helped fertilize.
Person to person transmission far more rare and often involves children who do not properly wash after using the washroom, says Marc Ouellette, head of infection and immunity with the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.
Sly does say, however, that a growing world trade in organic vegetables, which are grown exclusively with manure fertilizers, makes the chance that outbreaks could hit multiple regions from a common source more likely.
Deadly e-coli outbreaks, like the one in Walkerton, Ontario are almost always linked to raw manure from cattle. Cattle have complex digestive systems full of various types of bacteria needed to breakdown the high cellulose diet they consume (grass and stored hay). The bacteria don't affect the cattle or the milk and meat produced, but if raw manure is mis-handled, and gets into drinking water, or onto produce, it can be a serious health risk.
Sprouts have always been a favourite target of public health officials during outbreaks because of the way they're produced commercially. Many use "steam barrels" creating a warm (38 degree Celsius), moist environment that's good for germinating sprout seeds, but also a perfect environment for bacteria to grow quickly. The issue then becomes (like the current German situation) were the seeds used for sprouting clean or contaminated? Researchers are now saying the supplier of the bean seed is as likely a source as the farm itself..
It's now common for even organic producers of sprouts to bleach the seed before forcing it to germinate. The idea is that the bleach does not infiltrate the seed, but any bacteria or salmonella on the seed will be killed.
News reports out of Germany say the farm in question had delivered sprouts to virtually all the restaurants and stores linked to the outbreak, and given that sprouts have been a source of bacterial infections in the United States and elsewhere before, it seemed like a strong link. Health officials had earlier blamed produce coming from Spain. North Americans are just beginning to hear about the outbreak, even though the first cases were reported almost a month ago.
Here is a good backgrounder on e-coli.
http://www.healthzone.ca/health/illnessesissues/article/1001965--e-coli-a-friend-that-can-turn-lethal
E. coli, a friend that can turn lethal
June 02, 2011
Joseph Hall
Health Reporter
We are all full of E. coli. Wriggling microscopically by the billions in our bowels, multiple strains of the beneficial bacteria help us to digest food and to ward off illnesses.
But sometime around 1982, likely in the intestines of some western U.S. cattle, a version of the bacteria mutated.
It began to produce a poison – known as a shiga toxin -- that could be carried out of the animals in their manure, or saturate the meat they produced.
And for the first time, an E. coli organism, our constant companion though eons of evolution, was labeled as a health threat to humans.
Strains of that pathogenic version have since popped up in intermittent and usually isolated outbreaks around the world, like the one that killed some 18 people in Walkerton 11 years ago.
Now, another mutated E. coli strain is sickening people by the thousands in Germany.
But that E. coli germ, known as o104, is likely using the same mechanism to spread illness that all earlier pathogenic strains of the bacteria utilized, experts say.
“At some point, you had genes that produced toxins being shared between different organisms,” says Dr. Michael Gardam, head of infection control at Toronto’s University Health Network.
Gardam says the original pathogenic E. colis likely picked up a piece of DNA from a toxin producing bacteria known as shigella, a dysentery causing bug that killed off more troops than bullets did during World War 1.
And the new German version has surely done something similar, he says.
“It wouldn’t surprise me if you’ve got one producing a slightly different toxin,” Gardam says. “But I think the concept is exactly the same.”
These shiga-like toxins pose a double threat to humans.
First, they cause bloody and often explosive bouts of diarrhea. And for about 90 per cent of those infected, this unpleasantness will be the extent of it.
But for about 10 per cent, the toxin also attacks the blood’s red cells and platelets, and can lead to lethal conditions like kidney failure, Gardam says.
For these patients, he says, the body’s small blood vessels become inflamed, causing the red, oxygen carrying cells to “blow up” and the cut stemming platelets to run dry.
Shards of these wrecked cells can clog the blood cleansing kidneys, leading to renal failure, Gardam says.
But as in Walkerton, where a manure borne E. coli o157 strain made its way into improperly chlorinated town wells, the German outbreak is likely to be an isolated one.
Unlike viral pandemic pathogens, E. coli bacteria does not hitch rides within incubating airline passengers and jet it’s way around the world, says Tim Sly, a Ryerson University epidemiologist.
“You can be sitting next to someone with this particular disease in the subway, in the office…and you’re not going to get it from them,” Sly says.
The only way the disease can be transmitted, Sly says, is through ingestion, either of undercooked contaminated meat or actual fecal matter, usually lurking on the produce it helped fertilize.
Person to person transmission far more rare and often involves children who do not properly wash after using the washroom, says Marc Ouellette, head of infection and immunity with the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.
Sly does say, however, that a growing world trade in organic vegetables, which are grown exclusively with manure fertilizers, makes the chance that outbreaks could hit multiple regions from a common source more likely.
Friday, 3 June 2011
More on Speculators
I've always found the idea of "futures" markets a little surreal. Investors risking millions of dollars everyday on pieces of paper, bets really, about what the price of commodities will be three weeks, or three months from now, but that's how the price of livestock, grains, corn, etc that Maritime farmers grow is determined, and what consumers end up paying at the checkout. An excellent piece today in the British based Guardian on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and the role speculators are playing in driving up food prices.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/jun/02/global-food-cricis-commodities-speculation/
Global food crisis: the speculators playing with our daily bread
As food prices reach record highs, how much is the speculation in agricultural commodites to blame?
* Felicity Lawrence in Chicago
With food prices reaching record highs again this year, what goes on inside a 650ft Chicago skyscraper topped by a statue of the goddess Ceres is coming under intense scrutiny.
It is here that the world's oldest futures and options exchange, the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT), was established in 1848 to serve the great grain belt that had opened up in the American midwest. And it is here that the international price of agricultural commodities is set to this day.
"There's a lot of weather in the market, the northern growing season has been traumatic, with drought in Europe and China and tornadoes and floods in the US. No one is panicked yet, but any additional crop loss, say in Russia, will quickly bring new worry to the market and that could quickly turn to panic. We may be one more event away from panic," Dan Basse, president of AgResource, one of Chicago's most respected commodity analyst companies, warned as we watched the opening of a day's trading last month.
G20 agriculture ministers will meet in Paris on 22 June to discuss food security and prices. Speculative activity and how to contain it is high on their agenda.
Debate has been raging since 2008, when price rises provoked riots around the world, about whether or not the new money that has flooded into the commodities markets since 2003 is the cause of the problem – and if so, how to regulate it.
In Chicago, before the financial day begins, teams of traders pump themselves up outside on chain-smoked cigarettes and outsize McDonald's coffees. The coloured blazers they use to make themselves easily identifiable on the trading floor have been reduced to bright jackets with string-vest backs to counter the heat generated by a day's speculation. They keep on their toes in training shoes.
Inside, when the bell announces the start, there is a frenzy of noise. Traders yell at one another and wave their arms in violent gesticulation, palms out to signal sell, palms in to signal buy. There are "scalpers" who buy and sell within seconds, "floor brokers" hedging for corporate accounts, and hundreds of runners rushing orders to the recorders.
At the end of May, the price of corn was up again – most traders and analysts expected it to continue rising along with other commodities.
Basse is one of those who thinks underlying fundamentals – a serious mismatch between supply and rapidly growing global demand – are behind this year's price rises.
"Speculation is the easy thing to point the finger at and it's easy to fix. Back in 2008, when prices were up and there was lots of money pouring in, that may have pushed prices up, but today we don't see that as having a significant effect," Basse said.
"Look at growth in world livestock demand and in biofuels demand, and you can see what's been driving the agricultural bull market."
He painted a troubling picture of what is likely to come. He estimates the world needs to bring around 10.3m hectares of new land a year into food production "just to keep stocks steady", but he says that will be increasingly hard to do as the land that remains available is reduced to what is environmentally fragile.
A "weekend" farmer of GM crops himself, Basse admits the promise that biotech seeds would deliver big increases in yields has turned out to be illusory. He also fears that "superweeds are coming on so fast with GM that US farmers are going to have to go back to more traditional cultivation methods [as opposed to the practice with GM seeds of not tilling the soil and simply spraying to control pests] – but they don't have the capacity to do that."
Europe, Basse said, will soon have no choice but to lift its ban on imports of GM crops for animal feed. With its own crops suffering drought, it will have to turn to Brazil, the only major supplier of non-GM imports. However, the Chinese have already bought up large chunks of the Brazilian crop. The policies in the US and the EU of promoting biofuels will be unsustainable.
The company that owns CBOT, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange group (CME), also rejects the notion that the enormous rise in speculation in agricultural commodities in recent years has caused food price rises.
Farmers and processors of physical goods have long used commodities exchanges such as Chicago's to hedge against risks such as bad harvests. Speculators willing to take the risk perform a useful role in providing liquidity. But much of the recent growth in speculation has been through new "structured" products invented by banks and sold to investors.
After intense lobbying, banks won deregulation of commodities markets in the US in 2000, allowing them to develop these new products. Goldman Sachs pioneered commodity index funds, which offer investors a chance to track changes in a spread of commodity prices including key agricultural commodities.
Between 2003 and 2008, investment in commodity index funds rose from $13bn to $317bn (£193bn). But the CME's associate director of product development, Fred Seamon, said: "There is no credible evidence that suggests index funds or any group of traders are a cause for high prices or increased volatility. There may be a correlation, but that's a completely different thing."
CME argues that the volume of speculation is not a problem, because the overall composition of the agricultural commodities market has not changed; the increase in activity by index funds has been matched by an increase in trading by those who are commercial participants, that is those who have a direct interest in the physical goods.
"That's an indefensible position," Chicago–based hedge fund manager Mark Newell of Quiddity retorted. He and another hedge fund manager, Mike Masters, prepared testimony to the US Senate when it was looking into the effect of speculation on food prices in 2008.
"When billions of dollars of capital is put to work in small markets like agricultural commodities, it inevitably increases volatility and amplifies prices – and if financial flows amplify prices of food stuffs and energy, it's not like real estate and stocks. When food prices double, people starve ," Masters said.
The UN rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier de Schutter, added his weight to Masters' side of the debate at the end of last year when he concluded a speculative bubble was responsible for a significant part of the food price rises.
An OECD study, however, did not find a link. Aid agencies such as Oxfam and Christian Aid are calling for reregulation.
In the US, the regulator – the Commodities Futures Trading Commission – has until July to produce a new framework for the commodities markets for Congress. It has been looking at imposing limits on the size of positions that traders can take, and at regulating the commodity index fund trades that are currently unregulated because they take place "over the counter"; that is, between investors and banks. But the financial industry has proved resistant to reforms. G20 ministers will have to decide their own position soon, too.
Newell, meanwhile, remains convinced that without action prices will continue to go up, partly because of underlying fundamentals, but also because, just like in 2008, "the game's afoot again".
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/jun/02/global-food-cricis-commodities-speculation/
Global food crisis: the speculators playing with our daily bread
As food prices reach record highs, how much is the speculation in agricultural commodites to blame?
* Felicity Lawrence in Chicago
With food prices reaching record highs again this year, what goes on inside a 650ft Chicago skyscraper topped by a statue of the goddess Ceres is coming under intense scrutiny.
It is here that the world's oldest futures and options exchange, the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT), was established in 1848 to serve the great grain belt that had opened up in the American midwest. And it is here that the international price of agricultural commodities is set to this day.
"There's a lot of weather in the market, the northern growing season has been traumatic, with drought in Europe and China and tornadoes and floods in the US. No one is panicked yet, but any additional crop loss, say in Russia, will quickly bring new worry to the market and that could quickly turn to panic. We may be one more event away from panic," Dan Basse, president of AgResource, one of Chicago's most respected commodity analyst companies, warned as we watched the opening of a day's trading last month.
G20 agriculture ministers will meet in Paris on 22 June to discuss food security and prices. Speculative activity and how to contain it is high on their agenda.
Debate has been raging since 2008, when price rises provoked riots around the world, about whether or not the new money that has flooded into the commodities markets since 2003 is the cause of the problem – and if so, how to regulate it.
In Chicago, before the financial day begins, teams of traders pump themselves up outside on chain-smoked cigarettes and outsize McDonald's coffees. The coloured blazers they use to make themselves easily identifiable on the trading floor have been reduced to bright jackets with string-vest backs to counter the heat generated by a day's speculation. They keep on their toes in training shoes.
Inside, when the bell announces the start, there is a frenzy of noise. Traders yell at one another and wave their arms in violent gesticulation, palms out to signal sell, palms in to signal buy. There are "scalpers" who buy and sell within seconds, "floor brokers" hedging for corporate accounts, and hundreds of runners rushing orders to the recorders.
At the end of May, the price of corn was up again – most traders and analysts expected it to continue rising along with other commodities.
Basse is one of those who thinks underlying fundamentals – a serious mismatch between supply and rapidly growing global demand – are behind this year's price rises.
"Speculation is the easy thing to point the finger at and it's easy to fix. Back in 2008, when prices were up and there was lots of money pouring in, that may have pushed prices up, but today we don't see that as having a significant effect," Basse said.
"Look at growth in world livestock demand and in biofuels demand, and you can see what's been driving the agricultural bull market."
He painted a troubling picture of what is likely to come. He estimates the world needs to bring around 10.3m hectares of new land a year into food production "just to keep stocks steady", but he says that will be increasingly hard to do as the land that remains available is reduced to what is environmentally fragile.
A "weekend" farmer of GM crops himself, Basse admits the promise that biotech seeds would deliver big increases in yields has turned out to be illusory. He also fears that "superweeds are coming on so fast with GM that US farmers are going to have to go back to more traditional cultivation methods [as opposed to the practice with GM seeds of not tilling the soil and simply spraying to control pests] – but they don't have the capacity to do that."
Europe, Basse said, will soon have no choice but to lift its ban on imports of GM crops for animal feed. With its own crops suffering drought, it will have to turn to Brazil, the only major supplier of non-GM imports. However, the Chinese have already bought up large chunks of the Brazilian crop. The policies in the US and the EU of promoting biofuels will be unsustainable.
The company that owns CBOT, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange group (CME), also rejects the notion that the enormous rise in speculation in agricultural commodities in recent years has caused food price rises.
Farmers and processors of physical goods have long used commodities exchanges such as Chicago's to hedge against risks such as bad harvests. Speculators willing to take the risk perform a useful role in providing liquidity. But much of the recent growth in speculation has been through new "structured" products invented by banks and sold to investors.
After intense lobbying, banks won deregulation of commodities markets in the US in 2000, allowing them to develop these new products. Goldman Sachs pioneered commodity index funds, which offer investors a chance to track changes in a spread of commodity prices including key agricultural commodities.
Between 2003 and 2008, investment in commodity index funds rose from $13bn to $317bn (£193bn). But the CME's associate director of product development, Fred Seamon, said: "There is no credible evidence that suggests index funds or any group of traders are a cause for high prices or increased volatility. There may be a correlation, but that's a completely different thing."
CME argues that the volume of speculation is not a problem, because the overall composition of the agricultural commodities market has not changed; the increase in activity by index funds has been matched by an increase in trading by those who are commercial participants, that is those who have a direct interest in the physical goods.
"That's an indefensible position," Chicago–based hedge fund manager Mark Newell of Quiddity retorted. He and another hedge fund manager, Mike Masters, prepared testimony to the US Senate when it was looking into the effect of speculation on food prices in 2008.
"When billions of dollars of capital is put to work in small markets like agricultural commodities, it inevitably increases volatility and amplifies prices – and if financial flows amplify prices of food stuffs and energy, it's not like real estate and stocks. When food prices double, people starve ," Masters said.
The UN rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier de Schutter, added his weight to Masters' side of the debate at the end of last year when he concluded a speculative bubble was responsible for a significant part of the food price rises.
An OECD study, however, did not find a link. Aid agencies such as Oxfam and Christian Aid are calling for reregulation.
In the US, the regulator – the Commodities Futures Trading Commission – has until July to produce a new framework for the commodities markets for Congress. It has been looking at imposing limits on the size of positions that traders can take, and at regulating the commodity index fund trades that are currently unregulated because they take place "over the counter"; that is, between investors and banks. But the financial industry has proved resistant to reforms. G20 ministers will have to decide their own position soon, too.
Newell, meanwhile, remains convinced that without action prices will continue to go up, partly because of underlying fundamentals, but also because, just like in 2008, "the game's afoot again".
Thursday, 2 June 2011
Thinking About Meat
Thinking about anything these days isn't easy. There's a tidal wave of information out there, and the skillful marketing types directing our attention to what they want, or away from what they want us to ignore.
On complex questions (eating meat is easy, thinking about the environmental and ethical issues is way harder), I first try to get back to basics. Most of what we throw on the BBQ are what's called herbivores. They eat grasses, plants, shrubs, even parts of trees. They generally have complex digestive systems (several stomachs in cows for example), which allows this carbon-rich material to be broken down, something our stomachs couldn't do (just as we can't photosynthesize like plants). So for our pioneering ancestors cattle, sheep, goats etc could graze on poor, sloping land that couldn't grow crops, but produce protein rich food necessary for survival.
Our current "feedlot" system began after the second world war. It was shown to be much more cost effective to concentrate cattle. for example, in huge numbers close to where the feed was being grown. Feed would then come to the cattle, rather than cattle moving onto grazing land. There were and continue to be huge health and environmental consequences to this. Diseases can spread quickly when large numbers of animals are packed closely together, so the non-therapeutic use of antibiotics has become widespread. And for reasons scientists don't quite understand these low doses of antibiotics help cattle to gain weight more quickly. Medical doctors worry this widespread use of antibiotics cause bacteria to evolve, making the antibiotics less effective, or useless. Then of course there's the huge concentration of manure and waste that risks groundwater, and waterways. This is a long way from the "natural" role livestock played on farms a century ago(eating what we can't eat), fertilizing pastures on their own, but the meat now sure is cheap and widely available.
Then of course there's the killing. In my early twenties I decided if I was going to eat meat, I should raise and kill the animal myself. I've done that, and I would never say it was anything but unsettling. My only rule, don't do it unless it can be done quickly and with confidence, it's the only way to avoid (lessen) the suffering of the animal. According to books I've read, in ancient cultures no one was supposed to be responsible for killing animals all the time, it should be a difficult thing to do if you haven't lost your soul. The kind of specialization we have now started with the industrialization of the meat business late in the 1800's. Now it's done well out of sight in a handful of huge packing plants killing thousands of cattle a day (not the beef plant in Bordon, it's a tiny operation which is one of the reasons the economics are so tough). Most consumers first see the slaughtered steer wrapped in cellophane on a white styrofoam sheet.
My current rule is to buy meat produced as close to natural as possible here in the Maritimes. The feedlots in this region are considerably smaller than ones in Ontario and Western Canada, and they play an important role in crop rotations, providing a market for hay and grain.
This region has lost a lot of livestock production over the last 5 years (because of depressed prices). There was a report last week from Statistics Canada that on the surface looked positive, but really wasn't. Cattle and pig prices have been going up, and the Stats Canada report said revenue from livestock sales had taken a big jump, but farm officials warn this is mainly because cattle producers have been waiting for better prices to sell of their herds, to help repay the huge amount of debt they took on getting through the lean years. It's not a pretty sight.
Three stories, one a little strange, on raising and eating meat.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/green-living-blog/2011/may/27/mark-zuckerberg-kill-animals-meat
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg only eats meat he kills himself
by Leo Hickman •
I have yet to see The Social Network1, the film about the founding of Facebook2, but, from what I gather, Mark Zuckerberg3 is portrayed as being, shall we say, a little intense.
This perception of Facebook's multi-billionaire, 27-year-old founder and CEO has been magnified over the past 24 hours by his admission that he is currently only eating meat from animals he has personally killed himself.
Earlier this month, he surprised his 847 friends on his private Facebook page4 when he posted: "I just killed a pig and a goat."
According to Fortune, the idea came from a chef called Jesse Cool who runs a restaurant called Flea Street Café6, close to Zuckerberg's home in Palo Alto, California. She introduced him to some local farmers who showed him how best to kill his first chicken, pig and goat. "He cut the throat of the goat with a knife, which is the most kind way to do it," says Cool.
Zuckerberg has subsequently explained, via an email to Fortune7, that his new-found predilection for slaughtering animals is just his latest annual challenge. Last year, he challenged himself to learn Mandarin. The year before, it was to wear a tie every day. (Given this sense of escalation, we now await next year's challenge with some interest.) He said:
This year, my personal challenge is around being thankful for the food I have to eat. I think many people forget that a living being has to die for you to eat meat, so my goal revolves around not letting myself forget that and being thankful for what I have. This year I've basically become a vegetarian since the only meat I'm eating is from animals I've killed myself. So far, this has been a good experience. I'm eating a lot healthier foods and I've learned a lot about sustainable farming and raising of animals.
I started thinking about this last year when I had a pig roast at my house. A bunch of people told me that even though they loved eating pork, they really didn't want to think about the fact that the pig used to be alive. That just seemed irresponsible to me. I don't have an issue with anything people choose to eat, but I do think they should take responsibility and be thankful for what they eat rather than trying to ignore where it came from.
I imagine some vegetarians might want to argue with him on the point of whether he can described himself as "basically a vegetarian" just because he slaughters his own dinner, but it is certainly a far more thought-provoking challenge than wearing a tie each day. In fact, I would go further and repeat the sentiment of Michael Pollan8, the author of The Omnivore's Dilemma9, who tweeted10 earlier today: "Good for him."
Anything that helps to show meat-eaters - of which I am one - the full, often harrowing process involved in getting that lump of dead animal to their plate should be encouraged. It is often noted that most meat-eaters are ignorant - and wish to remain so - about the mechanics of how an animal is reared, slaughtered, butchered and packaged for human consumption. Hopefully, Zuckerberg's high profile will ignite interest and debate around this sensitive subject.
http://www.betterfarming.com/online-news/farm-income-increase-cloaks-danger-signals-4236
Farm income increase cloaks danger signals
•
by PAT CURRIE
Despite a muscular boom in farm income in 2010 accompanied by a sharp drop in expenses, the farm picture "isn’t as rosy as it seems," Canadian Federation of Agriculture Ron Bonnett said last week. Ontario Federation of Agriculture general manager Neil Currie described prices as "volatile" with "wild swings" threatening stability.
After studying two end-of-May reports from Statistics Canada, Bonnett said rising prices and a recovery in the livestock industry "look like good news" but the reality is that farmers sold off inventory – "stuff they had in storage" – and input costs dropped last year "because a lot of crop was never planted, especially in Western Canada, so it didn’t need fertilizer" and the price of fertilizer also fell.
"What’s of great concern is that the farm debt-load also increased and a spike in interest rates will threaten the viability of many farm operations," Bonnett said.
On Tuesday, the Bank of Canada announced it was maintaining its overnight rate target at one per cent but warned in a news release that “some of the considerable monetary policy stimulus currently in place will be eventually withdrawn, consistent with achieving the two per cent inflation target.”
On May 25, StatsCan reported that realized net farm income in 2010 soared to $4.5 billion (46.1 per cent) and the upward trend continued into the first quarter of 2011, hitting a record high of $12.1 billion, an increase of 8.8 per cent over the first quarter of 2010.
At the same time the price of fertilizer dropped abruptly (30.9 per cent in Ontario, 22.2 per cent nationally) after rising sharply in 2007-2009.
Noting that StatsCan’s revised 2009 income report "shows a net loss of about $1.5 million while the 2010 forecast was reduced to a positive net income of $627 million," Currie said: "Income volatility such as this cannot be managed by farmers themselves. These wild swings reinforce the need for pragmatic and bankable risk management programs that work for farmers across commodities.
"We anticipate continued volatility in the coming years due to significant weather impact and market reactions," Currie added.
StatsCan said realized net farm income (the difference between a farmer's cash receipts and operating expenses, minus depreciation plus income in kind) rose in every province except Alberta and New Brunswick. The increase in 2010 followed a 16.6 per cent drop in 2009.
The slight drop in farm cash receipts for the first quarter of 2011 follows a 7.5 per cent decline between the first quarters of 2009 and 2010.
For 2010, farm cash receipts, which include crop and livestock revenues plus program payments, increased in every province except Manitoba (-4.0 per cent) and British Columbia (-2.2 per cent). Ontario, Quebec and Prince Edward Island all recorded double-digit increases in receipts, StatsCan reported.
Market receipts from the sale of crops and livestock this year amounted to $11.3 billion, up 8.6 per cent from 2010. Crop receipts rose 9.7 per cent to $6.4 billion, while livestock receipts were up 7.3 per cent to $5.0 billion.
Firm grain prices are expected after the International Grains Council reported that
global carryover grain stocks are set to fall to their lowest level in three years. In addition, estimates for oilseed stocks tightened, fuelled by growing demand from emerging economies and for biofuels.
Cattle and calf receipts rose in the first quarter of 2011 by 9.5 per cent to $1.6 billion, while hog receipts increased 10.8 per cent to $926 million. In the supply-managed sector (dairy, poultry and eggs), farm cash receipts from the first quarter rose 4.3 per cent over the same period in 2010.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/31/meat-why-bother/?ref=opinion
Hooked on Meat
By MARK BITTMAN
KAS,, TURKEY — I sit on this peaceful peninsula marveling at how long it’s been since Odysseus sailed the eastern Mediterranean. Then I realize that those millennia are nothing compared with how long our species might take to adapt to the inexorable spread of the American diet.
Once, we had to combine hunting skills and luck to eat meat, which could supply then-rare nutrients in large quantities. This progressed — or at least moved on — to a stage where a family could raise an annual pig and maybe keep a cow and some chickens. Quite suddenly (this development is no more than 50 years old, even in America), we can drive to our nearest burger shop and scarf down a patty — or two! — at will.
Because evolution is a slow process, this revolutionary change has had zero impact on the primal urge that screams, “Listen, dummy, if you can find meat you’d better eat it, because who knows when you’ll eat it again!” At some point our bodies may adapt to consuming unlimited quantities of meat or — a better alternative — our minds will crave less. Right now, primal urge and modern availability form a deadly combo.
We’re crack addicts with a steady supply. Beyond instinct and availability, there’s a third factor: marketing. When you add “It’s what’s for dinner” to the equation, you have a powerful combination: biology, economics and propaganda all pushing us in the same direction.
Those who were born in mid-to-late 20th century America take this for granted; I grew up eating meat seven days a week, usually for lunch and dinner, sometimes for breakfast, too. But the phenomenon is global: there’s more than twice as much meat available per person than there was in 1950. Citizens of most developed nations have gone down the same path, and as the poor become less so, they buy more meat, too.
Now, some European countries appear to be leading the way out of the abyss, not only with the food they call “biologically” produced (a term roughly equivalent to “organic”) but in saner ways of eating, which start with cutting back on some animal products; Germans’ per capita consumption of meat is down about 20 percent since 1990. (American meat consumption has dropped ever so slightly in recent years, most likely the result of a decline in income and an increase in both population and exports, which reduced supply and increased prices. Maybe conscious eating gets some credit also.)
As better-educated citizens of wealthier nations change direction, however, those whose opportunities and privileges have been delayed until now have every intention of catching up, not only by buying cars and TVs but by “enriching” their diet. Remember, it’s our nature.
Instinct, availability and marketing leave us addicted to meat.
The extreme example is China, whose soaring meat consumption is dramatically affecting the global markets for corn, soy, poultry and pork. But even here in Turkey, which is hardly an economic miracle, the diet is rocketing into the 20th century, moving away from the traditional and toward the inevitable.
Turkey’s diet was classic Mediterranean, of course, high in all kinds of plants, olive oil, some dairy (yogurt and feta, mostly) and a bit of fish, lamb or goat. Now it’s a jumble: a rural grocery store I visited displayed American-style breakfast cereal and plenty of soda front and center, along with (good) local vegetables, industrially produced dairy, and a small supply of expensive, stylishly packaged legumes and grains. There was no fish, lamb or goat, but there were at least 10 cuts of beef and lots of chicken. (Chicken consumption has nearly tripled here in the last 20 years.)
As in much of the world, the local fish is mostly gone. A fish store had wild sea bass, a half-dozen farm-raised species, and a freezer full of commodity fish from elsewhere. A restaurant in Istanbul that had blown my mind 10 years ago with its local variety was offering wild turbot (decidedly not local) and swordfish, along with a few fish that the waiter kindly un-pushed: “These are from the farm,” he said, “so why bother?”
As much as we like eating animals, naturally crave them and are encouraged by misinformation (often a better word than “marketing”), the waiter’s advice — “why bother?” — holds true for at least 90 percent of the animal products we’re offered, no matter what their form. They’re produced badly, they cause immeasurable damage to both our bodies and the earth, and — compared with the real thing — they don’t taste that good.
In limited quantities, meat is just fine, especially sustainably raised meat (and wild game), locally and ethically produced dairy and eggs, the remaining wild or decently cultivated fish.
No matter where we live, if we focused on those — none of which are in abundant supply, which is exactly the point — and used them to augment the kind of diet we’re made to eat, one based on plants as a staple, with these other things as treats, we’d all be better off. We can’t afford to wait to evolve.
On complex questions (eating meat is easy, thinking about the environmental and ethical issues is way harder), I first try to get back to basics. Most of what we throw on the BBQ are what's called herbivores. They eat grasses, plants, shrubs, even parts of trees. They generally have complex digestive systems (several stomachs in cows for example), which allows this carbon-rich material to be broken down, something our stomachs couldn't do (just as we can't photosynthesize like plants). So for our pioneering ancestors cattle, sheep, goats etc could graze on poor, sloping land that couldn't grow crops, but produce protein rich food necessary for survival.
Our current "feedlot" system began after the second world war. It was shown to be much more cost effective to concentrate cattle. for example, in huge numbers close to where the feed was being grown. Feed would then come to the cattle, rather than cattle moving onto grazing land. There were and continue to be huge health and environmental consequences to this. Diseases can spread quickly when large numbers of animals are packed closely together, so the non-therapeutic use of antibiotics has become widespread. And for reasons scientists don't quite understand these low doses of antibiotics help cattle to gain weight more quickly. Medical doctors worry this widespread use of antibiotics cause bacteria to evolve, making the antibiotics less effective, or useless. Then of course there's the huge concentration of manure and waste that risks groundwater, and waterways. This is a long way from the "natural" role livestock played on farms a century ago(eating what we can't eat), fertilizing pastures on their own, but the meat now sure is cheap and widely available.
Then of course there's the killing. In my early twenties I decided if I was going to eat meat, I should raise and kill the animal myself. I've done that, and I would never say it was anything but unsettling. My only rule, don't do it unless it can be done quickly and with confidence, it's the only way to avoid (lessen) the suffering of the animal. According to books I've read, in ancient cultures no one was supposed to be responsible for killing animals all the time, it should be a difficult thing to do if you haven't lost your soul. The kind of specialization we have now started with the industrialization of the meat business late in the 1800's. Now it's done well out of sight in a handful of huge packing plants killing thousands of cattle a day (not the beef plant in Bordon, it's a tiny operation which is one of the reasons the economics are so tough). Most consumers first see the slaughtered steer wrapped in cellophane on a white styrofoam sheet.
My current rule is to buy meat produced as close to natural as possible here in the Maritimes. The feedlots in this region are considerably smaller than ones in Ontario and Western Canada, and they play an important role in crop rotations, providing a market for hay and grain.
This region has lost a lot of livestock production over the last 5 years (because of depressed prices). There was a report last week from Statistics Canada that on the surface looked positive, but really wasn't. Cattle and pig prices have been going up, and the Stats Canada report said revenue from livestock sales had taken a big jump, but farm officials warn this is mainly because cattle producers have been waiting for better prices to sell of their herds, to help repay the huge amount of debt they took on getting through the lean years. It's not a pretty sight.
Three stories, one a little strange, on raising and eating meat.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/green-living-blog/2011/may/27/mark-zuckerberg-kill-animals-meat
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg only eats meat he kills himself
by Leo Hickman •
I have yet to see The Social Network1, the film about the founding of Facebook2, but, from what I gather, Mark Zuckerberg3 is portrayed as being, shall we say, a little intense.
This perception of Facebook's multi-billionaire, 27-year-old founder and CEO has been magnified over the past 24 hours by his admission that he is currently only eating meat from animals he has personally killed himself.
Earlier this month, he surprised his 847 friends on his private Facebook page4 when he posted: "I just killed a pig and a goat."
According to Fortune, the idea came from a chef called Jesse Cool who runs a restaurant called Flea Street Café6, close to Zuckerberg's home in Palo Alto, California. She introduced him to some local farmers who showed him how best to kill his first chicken, pig and goat. "He cut the throat of the goat with a knife, which is the most kind way to do it," says Cool.
Zuckerberg has subsequently explained, via an email to Fortune7, that his new-found predilection for slaughtering animals is just his latest annual challenge. Last year, he challenged himself to learn Mandarin. The year before, it was to wear a tie every day. (Given this sense of escalation, we now await next year's challenge with some interest.) He said:
This year, my personal challenge is around being thankful for the food I have to eat. I think many people forget that a living being has to die for you to eat meat, so my goal revolves around not letting myself forget that and being thankful for what I have. This year I've basically become a vegetarian since the only meat I'm eating is from animals I've killed myself. So far, this has been a good experience. I'm eating a lot healthier foods and I've learned a lot about sustainable farming and raising of animals.
I started thinking about this last year when I had a pig roast at my house. A bunch of people told me that even though they loved eating pork, they really didn't want to think about the fact that the pig used to be alive. That just seemed irresponsible to me. I don't have an issue with anything people choose to eat, but I do think they should take responsibility and be thankful for what they eat rather than trying to ignore where it came from.
I imagine some vegetarians might want to argue with him on the point of whether he can described himself as "basically a vegetarian" just because he slaughters his own dinner, but it is certainly a far more thought-provoking challenge than wearing a tie each day. In fact, I would go further and repeat the sentiment of Michael Pollan8, the author of The Omnivore's Dilemma9, who tweeted10 earlier today: "Good for him."
Anything that helps to show meat-eaters - of which I am one - the full, often harrowing process involved in getting that lump of dead animal to their plate should be encouraged. It is often noted that most meat-eaters are ignorant - and wish to remain so - about the mechanics of how an animal is reared, slaughtered, butchered and packaged for human consumption. Hopefully, Zuckerberg's high profile will ignite interest and debate around this sensitive subject.
http://www.betterfarming.com/online-news/farm-income-increase-cloaks-danger-signals-4236
Farm income increase cloaks danger signals
•
by PAT CURRIE
Despite a muscular boom in farm income in 2010 accompanied by a sharp drop in expenses, the farm picture "isn’t as rosy as it seems," Canadian Federation of Agriculture Ron Bonnett said last week. Ontario Federation of Agriculture general manager Neil Currie described prices as "volatile" with "wild swings" threatening stability.
After studying two end-of-May reports from Statistics Canada, Bonnett said rising prices and a recovery in the livestock industry "look like good news" but the reality is that farmers sold off inventory – "stuff they had in storage" – and input costs dropped last year "because a lot of crop was never planted, especially in Western Canada, so it didn’t need fertilizer" and the price of fertilizer also fell.
"What’s of great concern is that the farm debt-load also increased and a spike in interest rates will threaten the viability of many farm operations," Bonnett said.
On Tuesday, the Bank of Canada announced it was maintaining its overnight rate target at one per cent but warned in a news release that “some of the considerable monetary policy stimulus currently in place will be eventually withdrawn, consistent with achieving the two per cent inflation target.”
On May 25, StatsCan reported that realized net farm income in 2010 soared to $4.5 billion (46.1 per cent) and the upward trend continued into the first quarter of 2011, hitting a record high of $12.1 billion, an increase of 8.8 per cent over the first quarter of 2010.
At the same time the price of fertilizer dropped abruptly (30.9 per cent in Ontario, 22.2 per cent nationally) after rising sharply in 2007-2009.
Noting that StatsCan’s revised 2009 income report "shows a net loss of about $1.5 million while the 2010 forecast was reduced to a positive net income of $627 million," Currie said: "Income volatility such as this cannot be managed by farmers themselves. These wild swings reinforce the need for pragmatic and bankable risk management programs that work for farmers across commodities.
"We anticipate continued volatility in the coming years due to significant weather impact and market reactions," Currie added.
StatsCan said realized net farm income (the difference between a farmer's cash receipts and operating expenses, minus depreciation plus income in kind) rose in every province except Alberta and New Brunswick. The increase in 2010 followed a 16.6 per cent drop in 2009.
The slight drop in farm cash receipts for the first quarter of 2011 follows a 7.5 per cent decline between the first quarters of 2009 and 2010.
For 2010, farm cash receipts, which include crop and livestock revenues plus program payments, increased in every province except Manitoba (-4.0 per cent) and British Columbia (-2.2 per cent). Ontario, Quebec and Prince Edward Island all recorded double-digit increases in receipts, StatsCan reported.
Market receipts from the sale of crops and livestock this year amounted to $11.3 billion, up 8.6 per cent from 2010. Crop receipts rose 9.7 per cent to $6.4 billion, while livestock receipts were up 7.3 per cent to $5.0 billion.
Firm grain prices are expected after the International Grains Council reported that
global carryover grain stocks are set to fall to their lowest level in three years. In addition, estimates for oilseed stocks tightened, fuelled by growing demand from emerging economies and for biofuels.
Cattle and calf receipts rose in the first quarter of 2011 by 9.5 per cent to $1.6 billion, while hog receipts increased 10.8 per cent to $926 million. In the supply-managed sector (dairy, poultry and eggs), farm cash receipts from the first quarter rose 4.3 per cent over the same period in 2010.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/31/meat-why-bother/?ref=opinion
Hooked on Meat
By MARK BITTMAN
KAS,, TURKEY — I sit on this peaceful peninsula marveling at how long it’s been since Odysseus sailed the eastern Mediterranean. Then I realize that those millennia are nothing compared with how long our species might take to adapt to the inexorable spread of the American diet.
Once, we had to combine hunting skills and luck to eat meat, which could supply then-rare nutrients in large quantities. This progressed — or at least moved on — to a stage where a family could raise an annual pig and maybe keep a cow and some chickens. Quite suddenly (this development is no more than 50 years old, even in America), we can drive to our nearest burger shop and scarf down a patty — or two! — at will.
Because evolution is a slow process, this revolutionary change has had zero impact on the primal urge that screams, “Listen, dummy, if you can find meat you’d better eat it, because who knows when you’ll eat it again!” At some point our bodies may adapt to consuming unlimited quantities of meat or — a better alternative — our minds will crave less. Right now, primal urge and modern availability form a deadly combo.
We’re crack addicts with a steady supply. Beyond instinct and availability, there’s a third factor: marketing. When you add “It’s what’s for dinner” to the equation, you have a powerful combination: biology, economics and propaganda all pushing us in the same direction.
Those who were born in mid-to-late 20th century America take this for granted; I grew up eating meat seven days a week, usually for lunch and dinner, sometimes for breakfast, too. But the phenomenon is global: there’s more than twice as much meat available per person than there was in 1950. Citizens of most developed nations have gone down the same path, and as the poor become less so, they buy more meat, too.
Now, some European countries appear to be leading the way out of the abyss, not only with the food they call “biologically” produced (a term roughly equivalent to “organic”) but in saner ways of eating, which start with cutting back on some animal products; Germans’ per capita consumption of meat is down about 20 percent since 1990. (American meat consumption has dropped ever so slightly in recent years, most likely the result of a decline in income and an increase in both population and exports, which reduced supply and increased prices. Maybe conscious eating gets some credit also.)
As better-educated citizens of wealthier nations change direction, however, those whose opportunities and privileges have been delayed until now have every intention of catching up, not only by buying cars and TVs but by “enriching” their diet. Remember, it’s our nature.
Instinct, availability and marketing leave us addicted to meat.
The extreme example is China, whose soaring meat consumption is dramatically affecting the global markets for corn, soy, poultry and pork. But even here in Turkey, which is hardly an economic miracle, the diet is rocketing into the 20th century, moving away from the traditional and toward the inevitable.
Turkey’s diet was classic Mediterranean, of course, high in all kinds of plants, olive oil, some dairy (yogurt and feta, mostly) and a bit of fish, lamb or goat. Now it’s a jumble: a rural grocery store I visited displayed American-style breakfast cereal and plenty of soda front and center, along with (good) local vegetables, industrially produced dairy, and a small supply of expensive, stylishly packaged legumes and grains. There was no fish, lamb or goat, but there were at least 10 cuts of beef and lots of chicken. (Chicken consumption has nearly tripled here in the last 20 years.)
As in much of the world, the local fish is mostly gone. A fish store had wild sea bass, a half-dozen farm-raised species, and a freezer full of commodity fish from elsewhere. A restaurant in Istanbul that had blown my mind 10 years ago with its local variety was offering wild turbot (decidedly not local) and swordfish, along with a few fish that the waiter kindly un-pushed: “These are from the farm,” he said, “so why bother?”
As much as we like eating animals, naturally crave them and are encouraged by misinformation (often a better word than “marketing”), the waiter’s advice — “why bother?” — holds true for at least 90 percent of the animal products we’re offered, no matter what their form. They’re produced badly, they cause immeasurable damage to both our bodies and the earth, and — compared with the real thing — they don’t taste that good.
In limited quantities, meat is just fine, especially sustainably raised meat (and wild game), locally and ethically produced dairy and eggs, the remaining wild or decently cultivated fish.
No matter where we live, if we focused on those — none of which are in abundant supply, which is exactly the point — and used them to augment the kind of diet we’re made to eat, one based on plants as a staple, with these other things as treats, we’d all be better off. We can’t afford to wait to evolve.
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