It was the first time I'd thought hard about how our food system works. It was the late 1960's and I heard an interview with a nutritionist (can't remember his name) who said why would anyone stop eating butter and replace it with something coming out of an industrial plant, ladled with artificial colour and flavour. Margarine was pretty crude back then. I still don't eat it today, but there's no denying that soft margarines do have many credible supporters:
From: http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/butter-vs-margarine/AN00835
"Margarine is made from vegetable oils, so it contains no cholesterol. Margarine is also higher in "good" fats — polyunsaturated and monounsaturated — than butter is. These types of fat help reduce low-density lipoprotein (LDL), or "bad," cholesterol, when substituted for saturated fat. Butter, on the other hand, is made from animal fat, so it contains cholesterol and high levels of saturated fat."
On the other hand, butter has many supporters too, and their number seem to be growing. One piece on butter's qualities, another on an effort by Denmark to tax people's desire for fat, and the unintended consequences of that tax in Sweden, and finally (totally off topic, but timely) because I always admire people who can link good jazz with anything, Paul Well's thoughts on Steve Jobs (that's the apple part).
http://besthealth.com.au/why-butter-is-better-than-margarine/
Why Butter is Better Than Margarine
•
Author: Stephen Byrnes, ND, RNCP
One of the most healthy whole foods you can include in your diet is butter. “What?” I can hear many of you saying, “Isn’t butter bad for you? I thought margarine and spreads were better because they’re low in saturated fat and cholesterol?”
Be not deceived folks!
Butter is truly better than margarine or other vegetable spreads. Despite unjustified warnings about saturated fat from well-meaning, but misinformed, nutritionists, the list of butter’s benefits is impressive indeed:
Vitamins
Butter is a rich source of easily absorbed vitamin A, needed for a wide range of functions in the body, from maintaining good vision, to keeping the endocrine system in top shape. Butter also contains all the other fat-soluble vitamins (E, K, and D).
Minerals
Butter is rich in trace minerals, especially selenium, a powerful antioxidant. Ounce for ounce, butter has more selenium per gram than either whole wheat or garlic. Butter also supplies iodine, needed by the thyroid gland (as well as vitamin A, also needed by the thyroid gland).
Fatty Acids
Butter has appreciable amounts of butyric acid, used by the colon as an energy source. This fatty acid is also a known anti-carcinogen. Lauric acid, a medium chain fatty acid, is a potent antimicrobial and antifungal substance. Butter also contains conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) which gives excellent protection against cancer. Range-fed cows produce especially high levels of CLA as opposed to “stall fed” cattle.
It pays, then, to get your butter from a cow that has been fed properly. Butter also has small, but equal, amounts of omega 3and 6 fatty acids, the so-called essential fatty acids.
Glycospingolipids
These are a special category of fatty acids that protect against gastrointestinal infections , especially in the very young and the elderly. Children, therefore, should not drink skim or low fat milk. Those that do have higher rates of diarrhea than those that drink whole milk.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/04/how-about-a-little-danish/?hp
October 4, 2011, 8:30 pm
How About a Little Danish?
By MARK BITTMAN
COPENHAGEN, Denmark — Well lookee here: the inevitable move toward taxing unhealthful foods to raise income and discourage damaging diets has begun. Last month, Hungary, almost unnoticed, began taxing foods with high levels of fat, salt and sugar. And earlier this week, with just a little more fanfare, Denmark instituted an excise tax on foods high in saturated fat.
By our standards, the Danes aren’t even that fat: their obesity rate is about nine percent (it could be all that bike-riding), well below the European average of 15 percent and less than a third the rate of Americans. More startling, perhaps, is that the tax was introduced by a center-right government that was simply looking for new revenues. Although it met resistance, its passage was never really in doubt, because it was supported by both the right and the left. The tax was approved in a vote that ran about 90 percent in favor, and instituted at a rate of 16 Kroner (just under $3) per kilo, which will mean a half-pound of butter will rise in cost by about 15 cents.
When the old government was booted out last month, its place was taken by a coalition led by the leftish Social Democrats and including, among others, the Socialist People’s Party (SF). Before it even took office, that alliance was talking about doubling the tax, which would truly test its health benefits.
As an outsider who spent three days trying to comprehend the dynamics behind this, my understanding is bound to be flawed. But I believe there are two or three reasons this tax is happening (other than the obvious, which is that it makes sense).
First, like its counterparts throughout Western Europe, the Danish government is struggling to find new income. And although there have been excise taxes on tobacco, sugar, alcohol and other “luxury” goods here for nearly 100 years, this one must have felt like peeking under a rock and finding a diamond.
Then there’s the idea that Danes — like many citizens of many countries, including our own — do not mind paying taxes as long as they’re put to good use, and here to a great extent they are. Denmark is far from ideal, yet it offers many benefits of a progressive tax structure that Americans could see if we only had the political will: real universal health care, free education to all through college or trade school, terrific child care and retirement benefits, and more.
Finally, “social engineering” (better term, anyone? “enforced attitude adjustment” doesn’t cut it) is standard in Denmark. “It’s simply not taboo here,” said Jesper Petersen, when I spoke with him over coffee in the Parliament’s cafeteria. Petersen, who is 30 years old and looks it, is a spokesperson on taxation for the SF and was mentioned to me several times as a likely minister of taxation when the new government sorts itself out. (He refused to comment.)
“For generations, when we believe something is bad for the population but not so bad that it should be outlawed, we tax it,” he said. Thus, not only alcohol and tobacco but pesticides are taxed, and the first step taken to reduce the use of antibiotics and growth promoters in animals was to tax them. (It wasn’t the last step, but I’ll report on Denmark’s relatively progressive animal agriculture at another time.)
This tax is not without problems. It’s limited to saturated fats, though other fats and empty carbohydrates from sugar to white bread are probably equally to blame for the obesity epidemic. Although the tax will be applied to imported goods as well, labeling and documentation from some neighboring countries are less than reliable. And, of course, since Denmark is a small country, people may just cross the border to score their fixes of butter, frozen pizza and ribeyes.
But Petersen believes that seeing the strategy as health-related rather than simply income-generating will allow government to both increase its rate and expand it to more unhealthy foods. Then, he says, the new revenues can be spent “on health care and prevention of lifestyle diseases” rather than on lowering income tax. And after admitting that it was complicated, he said, “If anyone can do this, we can. We have the labeling, we have an administration that can deal with complicated stuff, and we have companies that are used to making these kinds of adjustments.” (It’s worth noting that the use of trans fats is illegal in Denmark — as well as in Austria and Switzerland — and that this, too, happened without much fuss.)
I have been advocating for taxes similar to these for years, so talking to Petersen was fantasy-like. At the end of our interview he said, “These taxes will work, and they’ll become the trend. Health problems from lifestyle diseases are big in every European country — and even more in the United States — and everyone will be watching us. They’ll see that this can help us control health care expenses — which will help us control the economy — and make people more healthy and allow them to live longer and better lives. We’ll also pressure industry to create products that are healthier.
“All of this can be done.”
I think he’s right. We’ll see similar taxes implemented throughout Scandinavia, and countries as diverse as France and Romania are already considering them. When we can say the same of the States, which needs these taxes more than any country in the world, it’ll be time for a serious celebration. Perhaps a few rounds of Danish?
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/international-news/global-exchange/globe-correspondents/butter-shortage-has-swedes-churning/article2191753/
Butter shortage has Swedes churning
by naomi powell • Oct. 6, 2011 •
Danes looking to sneak butter over the Swedish border to escape a new fat tax may be out of luck. After years of lukewarm interest in butter and heavy cream, Swedes have developed a new passion for the stuff.
The demand is such that Sweden is now battling a national butter shortage. Supplies were low enough at one point that a local newspaper printed instructions on how to churn it at home.
The butter boom has been attributed to low-carb fad diets and a return to “natural cooking” that eschews processed spreads, sauces and other products. But the shortage has as much to do with the rapid decline of the country’s dairy industry as it does with renewed demand. Sweden is one of the few countries in Europe where milk production has consistently decreased -- a trend the industry is struggling to reverse.
“We have cheap land here and Swedish producers are paid similar prices as elsewhere,” said Lennart Holmstrom of the Swedish Dairy Association. “The conditions are the same and still our production falls while in Denmark and the Netherlands they increase production. We are working very hard to mobilize and retain the farmers we have left but it is a very difficult job.”
And so, in a country where eating locally produced food is a longstanding preference, milk production has plunged 15 per cent in the last 20 years. Meanwhile, demand for butter alone spiked 18.2 per cent in 2009, with the average Swede putting away 1.8 kilograms. That’s not much compared to other European nations -- the French consumed 7.9 kilograms per capita in 2009 -- but as the appetite for butter and cream continues to grow, it’s pushing dairy farms to their limit.
“We’ve had shortages before, but never this big or for this long,” said Claes Henriksson of dairy giant Arla. “The gap between milk production and demand for butter has been quite high but we didn’t expect demand for butter to rise so much that we’d be put in this situation.”
In order to free up Swedish cream for butter production, Arla -- which controls 45 per cent of the Sweden’s dairy market -- plans to import 150 tonnes of Danish cream per week to substitute into other products such as yogurt. Mr. Henriksson expects the butter supply to return to normal by the end of the month.
The Swedish Dairy Association wants to increase annual milk production by 18 per cent to 3.3 billion litres. If that fails, Swedes will likely face more shortages in the future, Mr. Holmstrom says.
http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/10/05/steve-jobs-this-american-life/
This American life
by Paul Wells on Wednesday, October 5, 2011
The question before the house now, or one of them, is whether Steve Jobs was an innovator. It’s easy to come up with perfectly fair definitions of the term that leave him offside. The mouse and the graphic user interface came from the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. Music downloading was huge before he ever did it, or at least it seemed huge before he changed the scale on which the word is understood. I remember taking my first iPod to a computer store where one of the geeks showed me how to pry the back off. The magic came off with it. Just a thin battery, a thin hard drive, and a circuit board. Anybody could do it. Many already had.
So if innovation means being the very first, count Jobs out. There’s actually a parallel argument in jazz music, if you can believe it, where people have spent 30 years debating whether Miles Davis innovated anything. The obvious answer is that, if innovating means being very first, he didn’t. Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie showed him how to play bebop. Lester Young was stripping ornament from his solo lines when Miles was in short pants. And so on. But Miles heard new currents, found ways to make them consistent with his own aesthetic, and presented them in ways a general audience could grasp and then love. And then he did it again and again. If an innovator is a conduit between an idea and all its possible audiences, then both of these guys were at the heart of that game.
Very early on, Apple got in the habit of producing products that weren’t particularly impressive in their technical specs but inspired loyalty with an appeal to intangibles. The Apple II+ wasn’t particularly a smarter or faster beast than the TRS-80 or the Commodore Pet or the other dinosaurs of the silicon swamps at the dawn of the 1980s. But it looked (a tad) more elegant, and its top was connected with nothing more than velcro strips so you could get at the crazy number of expansion slots — eight, I think — that made even that paleolithic machine open to easy, radical customization.
Those were key elements of the Jobs style: aesthetic grace and heaps of flexibility. A third element was apparent soon after: a deep urge to simplify, often beyond reason. The first Macintosh keyboard had no numerical keypad, even though keypads are actually pretty useful. The first iPod had fewer controls than it should have had. Jobs’s mouse had one button when the rest of the industry was using two or even three. Those extra mouse buttons were really handy. Almost always Jobs would un-simplify his products as he went along. But that urge to strip to the bone matched the intuition of millions of consumers, who were sure that if a machine is as smart as advertised, it should not need a human to do all the work.
Jobs screwed up a lot. He made dud products (Lisa, Newton) and dud applications (Hypercard, Mobile Me). He managed to get himself fired by the company he founded; there’s a movie, a Russian novel, in the way he schemed his way back in. If he hadn’t he’d be a footnote. His greatest triumphs came near the end of his life: the iPhone in 2007, the iPad in 2010 — together worth three-quarters of the whole company’s sales last quarter — the very late-breaking market-share growth of Apple laptops and desktops. In the last few months of Jobs’s life, his company became the biggest in the world. There’s been no comeback like it.
One more lesson from Miles Davis: there is no need to confuse effectiveness with virtue when taking the measure of a man. Jobs seems to have been a fine fellow, but it wasn’t virtue he was trying to spread, it was competence and ingenuity. Virtue was one of the things his customers could do with his stuff, if they liked. It came from them, not from him. Jobs didn’t lead so much as listen, refine, extend, echo, and repeat. He amplified human potential. Not a bad life’s work.
Thursday, 6 October 2011
Wednesday, 5 October 2011
Post PEI Election Tealeaves
The fact that Robert Ghiz's Liberals were reelected was no surprise, but there were some interesting developments.
The two cabinet ministers most responsible for the Liberal's Rural Action Plan were both defeated (Allan Campbell in Souris, Neil Leclair in Tignish). Both were facing strong Conservative candidates, and particular issues in their ridings, but if there were more tangible results from the Rural Action Plan (hardly even mentioned during the campaign) then the two would have been better positioned to fight back.
I don't think he would disagree if I said that Neil Leclair was not a great communicator. What worried farmers first, and then fishermen later on (talk about bad timing going into both portfolios) was that Leclair wasn't any more forceful around the cabinet table then he was in front of a microphone, that he would have been too easily handled by Ghiz and the fifth floor bunch.
Allan Campbell was just the opposite. He was seen as so capable on his feet, and with the media, that when it became clear that Richard Brown could no longer credibly handle the PNP file, it was Campbell picked to take over the thankless job. Having to defend the indefensible wouldn't have impressed anyone in Eastern Kings. A new school in the district was an accomplishment, but that had less to do with Campbell and more to do with good maneuvering by parents who argued we'll let some small schools close without a fight, if we get this in return. A padlocked gate at Souris's biggest employer Ocean Choice and a hospital ER that closed at night were seen as Campbell's responsibility. He actually did better in the election than I thought he would. I suspect it was his willingness to take on the difficult PNP file that had Robert Ghiz promising some kind of government job if he wasn't re-elected. If Campbell can get back to actually working on rural development issues, he could be helpful
Solving the huge financial catastrophes facing farmers and now fishermen (a mountain of debt not unlike what the province is facing) won't be easy. I think primary producers were looking for signs, beyond platitudes, that the Liberals really get it, and I don't think that happened. On a positive note, for me some of Robert Ghiz's best moments during the first mandate were when he announced a couple of years ago that he'd called senior executives with Sobeys and Loblaws to insist that they carry Maritime produced beef, and when he compared the collapse of the lobster fishery here to the collapse of the auto sector in Ontario. Both showed some understanding of the economic forces at play in the food business, and a willingness to use political capital to fight for primary producers.
There will be some stiff tests ahead: the future of the Atlantic Beef Plant after next March, what to do about the tens of millions of dollars of livestock loans the Federal Government wants paid back, stabilizing the lobster processing business, and proving once and for all if the tens of millions of dollars going into the "bio-commons" is money well spent, or a cheap location for start-ups who will go elsewhere if the research pans out.
The make-up of the new cabinet will be a sign of things to come. Alan McIsaac's presence at the cabinet table would indicate that Ghiz et all aren't afraid of strong knowledgeable rural voices. Buck Watts or Charlie McGeoghegan (if he survives a possible recount) would be good additions too.
The two cabinet ministers most responsible for the Liberal's Rural Action Plan were both defeated (Allan Campbell in Souris, Neil Leclair in Tignish). Both were facing strong Conservative candidates, and particular issues in their ridings, but if there were more tangible results from the Rural Action Plan (hardly even mentioned during the campaign) then the two would have been better positioned to fight back.
I don't think he would disagree if I said that Neil Leclair was not a great communicator. What worried farmers first, and then fishermen later on (talk about bad timing going into both portfolios) was that Leclair wasn't any more forceful around the cabinet table then he was in front of a microphone, that he would have been too easily handled by Ghiz and the fifth floor bunch.
Allan Campbell was just the opposite. He was seen as so capable on his feet, and with the media, that when it became clear that Richard Brown could no longer credibly handle the PNP file, it was Campbell picked to take over the thankless job. Having to defend the indefensible wouldn't have impressed anyone in Eastern Kings. A new school in the district was an accomplishment, but that had less to do with Campbell and more to do with good maneuvering by parents who argued we'll let some small schools close without a fight, if we get this in return. A padlocked gate at Souris's biggest employer Ocean Choice and a hospital ER that closed at night were seen as Campbell's responsibility. He actually did better in the election than I thought he would. I suspect it was his willingness to take on the difficult PNP file that had Robert Ghiz promising some kind of government job if he wasn't re-elected. If Campbell can get back to actually working on rural development issues, he could be helpful
Solving the huge financial catastrophes facing farmers and now fishermen (a mountain of debt not unlike what the province is facing) won't be easy. I think primary producers were looking for signs, beyond platitudes, that the Liberals really get it, and I don't think that happened. On a positive note, for me some of Robert Ghiz's best moments during the first mandate were when he announced a couple of years ago that he'd called senior executives with Sobeys and Loblaws to insist that they carry Maritime produced beef, and when he compared the collapse of the lobster fishery here to the collapse of the auto sector in Ontario. Both showed some understanding of the economic forces at play in the food business, and a willingness to use political capital to fight for primary producers.
There will be some stiff tests ahead: the future of the Atlantic Beef Plant after next March, what to do about the tens of millions of dollars of livestock loans the Federal Government wants paid back, stabilizing the lobster processing business, and proving once and for all if the tens of millions of dollars going into the "bio-commons" is money well spent, or a cheap location for start-ups who will go elsewhere if the research pans out.
The make-up of the new cabinet will be a sign of things to come. Alan McIsaac's presence at the cabinet table would indicate that Ghiz et all aren't afraid of strong knowledgeable rural voices. Buck Watts or Charlie McGeoghegan (if he survives a possible recount) would be good additions too.
Monday, 3 October 2011
What's the Real Tragedy?
All of us can think back to bits of information or ideas that stick with us for the rest of our lives. One that stays with me is an ecological concept called "The Tragedy of the Commons". At its heart is the environmental destruction caused by over exploitation of a resource, but it also speaks to human nature, economics, and ideology.
Aristotle captured the problem three hundred years BC: "For that which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it. Every one thinks chiefly of his own, hardly at all of the common interest; and only when he is himself concerned as an individual." An ecologist called Garret Hardin wrote an influential essay in Science Magazine in the late 1960's called "The Tragedy of the Commons" which popularized the idea. Hardin used a very concrete example: livestock herders all able to use a community pasture or commons, all wanting their sheep or cattle to eat as much of the common pasture as possible regardless of the impact this has on anyone else, or the damage to the pasture caused by overgrazing. Both Aristotle and Hardin argue that when something is "commonly" or publicly owned, everyone will want to exploit it, but no one will take responsibility for how it's used. Most ecologists, economists and politicians use the dilemma to argue for the importance of private property, that if someone owns the pasture he or she would make sure it wasn't overgrazed.
This isn't the best solution for everyone, particularly left-leaning folk who would argue that reasonable, ethical people can share a resource fairly and protect it, and if they won't then it's up to the government to bring in regulations to ensure the pasture isn't over exploited.
Some argue that medicare suffers from this problem, that because going to the doctor in Canada doesn't "cost" anything, many overuse the system adding unnecessary costs to other taxpayers. I'm not sure about that, but there's no question that the fishery is the best example of the difficulty of managing a public resource used by private interests who's livelihoods are linked to getting whatever they can of a limited amount of fish, and do it before someone else does.
There has been experimentation with ITQ's, or boat quotas. Each fisherman (sorry fisher is still a woodland creature for me) can count on catching a certain amount of fish, and do it when it suits him or her, rather than rushing out and glutting the market. Some worry whatever the rules are, ITQ's will eventually be controlled by monied interests like large processors, that that's the importance of maintaining the fishery as a "public" resource.
Others talk about something I think makes more sense, a sort of mid-way solution between private and public ownership: community quotas. Give fishing communities the ability to control how local stocks are exploited. There's no "private" ownership, but a clear interest in maintaining a fish stock for future generations. Right now fishermen see the regulators as pampered civil servants in Moncton or Ottawa and feel no compelling interest to pay attention to the rules, just a competitive drive to get their share of the stock. Answering to neighbours or community leaders is much more difficult.
In his essay Garrett Hardin tried to develop an understanding of how we use resources that we fill up rather than take from, like the air and water.
"In a reverse way, the tragedy of the commons reappears in problems of pollution. Here it is not a question of taking something out of the commons, but of putting something in--sewage, or chemical, radioactive, and heat wastes into water; noxious and dangerous fumes into the air, and distracting and unpleasant advertising signs into the line of sight. The calculations of utility are much the same as before. The rational man finds that his share of the cost of the wastes he discharges into the commons is less than the cost of purifying his wastes before releasing them. Since this is true for everyone, we are locked into a system of "fouling our own nest," so long as we behave only as independent, rational, free-enterprisers.
The tragedy of the commons as a food basket is averted by private property, or something formally like it. But the air and waters surrounding us cannot readily be fenced, and so the tragedy of the commons as a cesspool must be prevented by different means, by coercive laws or taxing devices that make it cheaper for the polluter to treat his pollutants than to discharge them untreated. We have not progressed as far with the solution of this problem as we have with the first. Indeed, our particular concept of private property, which deters us from exhausting the positive resources of the earth, favors pollution."
Don't forget that Hardin wrote this thirty-three years ago and that Aristotle understood the forces at play two thousand years ago. Our human nature hasn't changed much, we just have better tools and toys to get the job done.
Aristotle captured the problem three hundred years BC: "For that which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it. Every one thinks chiefly of his own, hardly at all of the common interest; and only when he is himself concerned as an individual." An ecologist called Garret Hardin wrote an influential essay in Science Magazine in the late 1960's called "The Tragedy of the Commons" which popularized the idea. Hardin used a very concrete example: livestock herders all able to use a community pasture or commons, all wanting their sheep or cattle to eat as much of the common pasture as possible regardless of the impact this has on anyone else, or the damage to the pasture caused by overgrazing. Both Aristotle and Hardin argue that when something is "commonly" or publicly owned, everyone will want to exploit it, but no one will take responsibility for how it's used. Most ecologists, economists and politicians use the dilemma to argue for the importance of private property, that if someone owns the pasture he or she would make sure it wasn't overgrazed.
This isn't the best solution for everyone, particularly left-leaning folk who would argue that reasonable, ethical people can share a resource fairly and protect it, and if they won't then it's up to the government to bring in regulations to ensure the pasture isn't over exploited.
Some argue that medicare suffers from this problem, that because going to the doctor in Canada doesn't "cost" anything, many overuse the system adding unnecessary costs to other taxpayers. I'm not sure about that, but there's no question that the fishery is the best example of the difficulty of managing a public resource used by private interests who's livelihoods are linked to getting whatever they can of a limited amount of fish, and do it before someone else does.
There has been experimentation with ITQ's, or boat quotas. Each fisherman (sorry fisher is still a woodland creature for me) can count on catching a certain amount of fish, and do it when it suits him or her, rather than rushing out and glutting the market. Some worry whatever the rules are, ITQ's will eventually be controlled by monied interests like large processors, that that's the importance of maintaining the fishery as a "public" resource.
Others talk about something I think makes more sense, a sort of mid-way solution between private and public ownership: community quotas. Give fishing communities the ability to control how local stocks are exploited. There's no "private" ownership, but a clear interest in maintaining a fish stock for future generations. Right now fishermen see the regulators as pampered civil servants in Moncton or Ottawa and feel no compelling interest to pay attention to the rules, just a competitive drive to get their share of the stock. Answering to neighbours or community leaders is much more difficult.
In his essay Garrett Hardin tried to develop an understanding of how we use resources that we fill up rather than take from, like the air and water.
"In a reverse way, the tragedy of the commons reappears in problems of pollution. Here it is not a question of taking something out of the commons, but of putting something in--sewage, or chemical, radioactive, and heat wastes into water; noxious and dangerous fumes into the air, and distracting and unpleasant advertising signs into the line of sight. The calculations of utility are much the same as before. The rational man finds that his share of the cost of the wastes he discharges into the commons is less than the cost of purifying his wastes before releasing them. Since this is true for everyone, we are locked into a system of "fouling our own nest," so long as we behave only as independent, rational, free-enterprisers.
The tragedy of the commons as a food basket is averted by private property, or something formally like it. But the air and waters surrounding us cannot readily be fenced, and so the tragedy of the commons as a cesspool must be prevented by different means, by coercive laws or taxing devices that make it cheaper for the polluter to treat his pollutants than to discharge them untreated. We have not progressed as far with the solution of this problem as we have with the first. Indeed, our particular concept of private property, which deters us from exhausting the positive resources of the earth, favors pollution."
Don't forget that Hardin wrote this thirty-three years ago and that Aristotle understood the forces at play two thousand years ago. Our human nature hasn't changed much, we just have better tools and toys to get the job done.
Friday, 30 September 2011
Are These the Farmers Who Need Supervision?
Anyone who decides to become a "certified" organic farmer makes a huge commitment in time, effort and money, and the payoff isn't always obvious.
This is how it was supposed to work: farmers with concerns about the environmental and health impacts of commercial fertilizers and synthetic pesticides would use more labour and smarts, more expensive natural pesticides derived from plants and bacteria, better land management, more humane treatment of livestock, to produce food. Consumers with similar concerns would pay a premium to get it. It's the consumer side of this bargain that really hasn't developed, and could be breaking down. In fact there are places like England where demand for organic food is falling, no doubt the result of the economic crisis.
Anyone who spends time with organic farmers know they are very very committed to what they're doing, it's almost a religious calling. At the same time, in order to justify the higher prices, they have to spend money to have their farms certified by an outside agency. I'm always left with the feeling that if there is one group of farmers who don't need this kind of supervision it's the farmers who can speak endlessly about organic matter, earthworms, and cover crops, and would see soil erosion as a mortal sin. I want more farmers like that, but unless the "marketplace" (and I'm talking about major food retailers not just farmers markets) send the right signals, we risk losing the very farmers we should want to keep in business. Months ago the big food retailer Sobeys ran commercials offering organic food at the same price as conventional food. It's hard to know whether this led to an increase in sales, but it certainly had a chilling effect on organic farmers at the time.
On PEI smart retailers like Barb MacLeod invested heavily in retailing organic food, but the store quickly closed. ADL, PEI's big dairy, made a serious effort to buy and market organic milk and cheese. The company discovered there just wasn't enough demand here to sustain paying farmers the higher price and reworking the production line to accommodate organic rules. The cheese is in storage and improving with age, and will be sold as markets develop, but farmers were sent a disappointing message that growing and sourcing organic feed, managing their herds a little differently, wasn't going to lead to the higher prices they were promised. And with economic anxiety high in Canada too, it's hard to see when demand will improve.
In the end it will be consumers who determine what happens. Farmers of all kinds are very entrepreneurial and will respond to the market signals they see. I don't believe that there is some kind of moral failing in farmers who continue to use fertilizer and pesticides (they need to be used properly, kept out of waterways, etc), just business people who look at the marketplace and see they're competing with South American and Chinese labour costs, government subsidies in the U.S., and a brutally competitive food wholesaling and retail business. Walmarts steady growth in food retailing in Canada will make it just that more difficult. It's the reason I don't think government regulations mandating organic farming makes any sense. Making sure that conventional farmers pay the full cost of what they do (carbon tax, environmental clean-up, etc), and that food imports meet the same standards, is much more important.
PEI consumers who do respect what certified organic farmers are doing get a chance to express that appreciation this weekend. The 8th annual Organic Harvest Festival will take place at the Farm Centre on University Avenue, Sunday October the 2nd, from 4 to 7 P.M.. More information here:
http://www.organicpei.com/ It will be an excellent chance to eat wonderful food, meet interesting farmers, hear some good music, and say thank you to farmers who are trying to do the right thing with very few rewards.
This is how it was supposed to work: farmers with concerns about the environmental and health impacts of commercial fertilizers and synthetic pesticides would use more labour and smarts, more expensive natural pesticides derived from plants and bacteria, better land management, more humane treatment of livestock, to produce food. Consumers with similar concerns would pay a premium to get it. It's the consumer side of this bargain that really hasn't developed, and could be breaking down. In fact there are places like England where demand for organic food is falling, no doubt the result of the economic crisis.
Anyone who spends time with organic farmers know they are very very committed to what they're doing, it's almost a religious calling. At the same time, in order to justify the higher prices, they have to spend money to have their farms certified by an outside agency. I'm always left with the feeling that if there is one group of farmers who don't need this kind of supervision it's the farmers who can speak endlessly about organic matter, earthworms, and cover crops, and would see soil erosion as a mortal sin. I want more farmers like that, but unless the "marketplace" (and I'm talking about major food retailers not just farmers markets) send the right signals, we risk losing the very farmers we should want to keep in business. Months ago the big food retailer Sobeys ran commercials offering organic food at the same price as conventional food. It's hard to know whether this led to an increase in sales, but it certainly had a chilling effect on organic farmers at the time.
On PEI smart retailers like Barb MacLeod invested heavily in retailing organic food, but the store quickly closed. ADL, PEI's big dairy, made a serious effort to buy and market organic milk and cheese. The company discovered there just wasn't enough demand here to sustain paying farmers the higher price and reworking the production line to accommodate organic rules. The cheese is in storage and improving with age, and will be sold as markets develop, but farmers were sent a disappointing message that growing and sourcing organic feed, managing their herds a little differently, wasn't going to lead to the higher prices they were promised. And with economic anxiety high in Canada too, it's hard to see when demand will improve.
In the end it will be consumers who determine what happens. Farmers of all kinds are very entrepreneurial and will respond to the market signals they see. I don't believe that there is some kind of moral failing in farmers who continue to use fertilizer and pesticides (they need to be used properly, kept out of waterways, etc), just business people who look at the marketplace and see they're competing with South American and Chinese labour costs, government subsidies in the U.S., and a brutally competitive food wholesaling and retail business. Walmarts steady growth in food retailing in Canada will make it just that more difficult. It's the reason I don't think government regulations mandating organic farming makes any sense. Making sure that conventional farmers pay the full cost of what they do (carbon tax, environmental clean-up, etc), and that food imports meet the same standards, is much more important.
PEI consumers who do respect what certified organic farmers are doing get a chance to express that appreciation this weekend. The 8th annual Organic Harvest Festival will take place at the Farm Centre on University Avenue, Sunday October the 2nd, from 4 to 7 P.M.. More information here:
http://www.organicpei.com/ It will be an excellent chance to eat wonderful food, meet interesting farmers, hear some good music, and say thank you to farmers who are trying to do the right thing with very few rewards.
Wind and Watersheds in the PEI Election
Yes healthcare, education, jobs remain the big issues in provincial elections across Canada, but here on PEI political parties pay some attention to the environment as well. As expected Green Party Leader Sharon Labchuck has made it central to all the party's promises and platforms. She's also running in an urban riding against the province's environment minister, so we should get a better sense of how interested Islanders really are in this issue. Richard Brown has a long history in that district and will be difficult to beat, and the NDP is running a strong candidate in Rita Jackson, so there will be some split in the protest vote which will help Brown. The Conservatives have an interesting candidate too in radio personality Myles Mackinnon. It will be a district worth watching Monday night.
I was critical of the current Liberal Government for limiting support of watershed groups and farmers taking additional steps to protect the environment to sales of pop and beer ( http://foodmatters-petrie.blogspot.com/2011/09/is-drinking-pop-best-way-to-support.html ) so will acknowledge a campaign promise made this week.
http://www.movingforwardpei.ca/uploads/pdfs/Lib-Backgrounder-Environment.pdf
"Watershed groups are among the most committed to environmental sustainability. The work they have
done over the past several years represents a true devotion to improving our Island. To support this work,
the Liberal Team is proposing to invest $4 million in watershed management over the next four years - and
further protect our water supply for the future."
This represents a 25% increase in support ($800 thousand to $ 1 million per year) and goes along with a promise to increase support in the ALUS program as well. If the Liberals are elected and keep their promise, this is definitely moving in the right direction.
I also wanted to point to one other major policy shift by the Liberals (if I were a real political journalist I'd call it a flip-flop). When Robert Ghiz was first elected he insisted that any new wind energy projects would be driven by the private sector. Years ago former Conservative energy minister Jamie Ballem had convinced then premier Pat Binns that there were a limited number of sites on the Island with wind regimes suitable for power production, and the public should own and develop them (remember those Energy Bonds we were encouraged to buy, and at a 5% return they look pretty good right now and you can see how screwy political ideology is here: Conservatives wanting public ownership, Liberals arguing strenuously that the government had no role in the wind power business). Now the Liberals have come to their senses and promised that the next big wind farm will again be built and owned by the public. If this project plays out like East Point and North Cape it will pay for itself, and actually make the province some money. Wind is the one energy source Islanders can tap into, it's good to see the benefits will stay here rather than disappearing into Ontario capital markets. The one exception in ownership here is the West Cape wind farm which is owned by the huge French energy company Suez. It ships most of its power to the United States.
I was critical of the current Liberal Government for limiting support of watershed groups and farmers taking additional steps to protect the environment to sales of pop and beer ( http://foodmatters-petrie.blogspot.com/2011/09/is-drinking-pop-best-way-to-support.html ) so will acknowledge a campaign promise made this week.
http://www.movingforwardpei.ca/uploads/pdfs/Lib-Backgrounder-Environment.pdf
"Watershed groups are among the most committed to environmental sustainability. The work they have
done over the past several years represents a true devotion to improving our Island. To support this work,
the Liberal Team is proposing to invest $4 million in watershed management over the next four years - and
further protect our water supply for the future."
This represents a 25% increase in support ($800 thousand to $ 1 million per year) and goes along with a promise to increase support in the ALUS program as well. If the Liberals are elected and keep their promise, this is definitely moving in the right direction.
I also wanted to point to one other major policy shift by the Liberals (if I were a real political journalist I'd call it a flip-flop). When Robert Ghiz was first elected he insisted that any new wind energy projects would be driven by the private sector. Years ago former Conservative energy minister Jamie Ballem had convinced then premier Pat Binns that there were a limited number of sites on the Island with wind regimes suitable for power production, and the public should own and develop them (remember those Energy Bonds we were encouraged to buy, and at a 5% return they look pretty good right now and you can see how screwy political ideology is here: Conservatives wanting public ownership, Liberals arguing strenuously that the government had no role in the wind power business). Now the Liberals have come to their senses and promised that the next big wind farm will again be built and owned by the public. If this project plays out like East Point and North Cape it will pay for itself, and actually make the province some money. Wind is the one energy source Islanders can tap into, it's good to see the benefits will stay here rather than disappearing into Ontario capital markets. The one exception in ownership here is the West Cape wind farm which is owned by the huge French energy company Suez. It ships most of its power to the United States.
Sunday, 25 September 2011
Not So Fast Food
This article is really comfort food rather than challenging for many, but given what else is going on in the world (I'm also including a powerful piece from K'Naan on Somalia just to remind us what a real poet sounds like), maybe that's OK. There is growing interest in once more teaching young people basic cooking skills, and here's an excellent reason to do that.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/25/opinion/sunday/is-junk-food-really-cheaper.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print
September 24, 2011
Is Junk Food Really Cheaper?
By MARK BITTMAN
THE “fact” that junk food is cheaper than real food has become a reflexive part of how we explain why so many Americans are overweight, particularly those with lower incomes. I frequently read confident statements like, “when a bag of chips is cheaper than a head of broccoli ...” or “it’s more affordable to feed a family of four at McDonald’s than to cook a healthy meal for them at home.”
This is just plain wrong. In fact it isn’t cheaper to eat highly processed food: a typical order for a family of four — for example, two Big Macs, a cheeseburger, six chicken McNuggets, two medium and two small fries, and two medium and two small sodas — costs, at the McDonald’s a hundred steps from where I write, about $28. (Judicious ordering of “Happy Meals” can reduce that to about $23 — and you get a few apple slices in addition to the fries!)
In general, despite extensive government subsidies, hyperprocessed food remains more expensive than food cooked at home. You can serve a roasted chicken with vegetables along with a simple salad and milk for about $14, and feed four or even six people. If that’s too much money, substitute a meal of rice and canned beans with bacon, green peppers and onions; it’s easily enough for four people and costs about $9. (Omitting the bacon, using dried beans, which are also lower in sodium, or substituting carrots for the peppers reduces the price further, of course.)
Another argument runs that junk food is cheaper when measured by the calorie, and that this makes fast food essential for the poor because they need cheap calories. But given that half of the people in this country (and a higher percentage of poor people) consume too many calories rather than too few, measuring food’s value by the calorie makes as much sense as measuring a drink’s value by its alcohol content. (Why not drink 95 percent neutral grain spirit, the cheapest way to get drunk?)
Besides, that argument, even if we all needed to gain weight, is not always true. A meal of real food cooked at home can easily contain more calories, most of them of the “healthy” variety. (Olive oil accounts for many of the calories in the roast chicken meal, for example.)In comparing prices of real food and junk food, I used supermarket ingredients, not the pricier organic or local food that many people would consider ideal. But food choices are not black and white; the alternative to fast food is not necessarily organic food, any more than the alternative to soda is Bordeaux.
The alternative to soda is water, and the alternative to junk food is not grass-fed beef and greens from a trendy farmers’ market, but anything other than junk food: rice, grains, pasta, beans, fresh vegetables, canned vegetables, frozen vegetables, meat, fish, poultry, dairy products, bread, peanut butter, a thousand other things cooked at home — in almost every case a far superior alternative.
“Anything that you do that’s not fast food is terrific; cooking once a week is far better than not cooking at all,” says Marion Nestle, professor of food studies at New York University and author of “What to Eat.” “It’s the same argument as exercise: more is better than less and some is a lot better than none.”
THE fact is that most people can afford real food. Even the nearly 50 million Americans who are enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly known as food stamps) receive about $5 per person per day, which is far from ideal but enough to survive. So we have to assume that money alone doesn’t guide decisions about what to eat. There are, of course, the so-called food deserts, places where it’s hard to find food: the Department of Agriculture says that more than two million Americans in low-income rural areas live 10 miles or more from a supermarket, and more than five million households without access to cars live more than a half mile from a supermarket.
Still, 93 percent of those with limited access to supermarkets do have access to vehicles, though it takes them 20 more minutes to travel to the store than the national average. And after a long day of work at one or even two jobs, 20 extra minutes — plus cooking time — must seem like an eternity.
Taking the long route to putting food on the table may not be easy, but for almost all Americans it remains a choice, and if you can drive to McDonald’s you can drive to Safeway. It’s cooking that’s the real challenge. (The real challenge is not “I’m too busy to cook.” In 2010 the average American, regardless of weekly earnings, watched no less than an hour and a half of television per day. The time is there.)
The core problem is that cooking is defined as work, and fast food is both a pleasure and a crutch. “People really are stressed out with all that they have to do, and they don’t want to cook,” says Julie Guthman, associate professor of community studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and author of the forthcoming “Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice and the Limits of Capitalism.” “Their reaction is, ‘Let me enjoy what I want to eat, and stop telling me what to do.’ And it’s one of the few things that less well-off people have: they don’t have to cook.”
It’s not just about choice, however, and rational arguments go only so far, because money and access and time and skill are not the only considerations. The ubiquity, convenience and habit-forming appeal of hyperprocessed foods have largely drowned out the alternatives: there are five fast-food restaurants for every supermarket in the United States; in recent decades the adjusted for inflation price of fresh produce has increased by 40 percent while the price of soda and processed food has decreased by as much as 30 percent; and nearly inconceivable resources go into encouraging consumption in restaurants: fast-food companies spent $4.2 billion on marketing in 2009.
Furthermore, the engineering behind hyperprocessed food makes it virtually addictive. A 2009 study by the Scripps Research Institute indicates that overconsumption of fast food “triggers addiction-like neuroaddictive responses” in the brain, making it harder to trigger the release of dopamine. In other words the more fast food we eat, the more we need to give us pleasure; thus the report suggests that the same mechanisms underlie drug addiction and obesity.
This addiction to processed food is the result of decades of vision and hard work by the industry. For 50 years, says David A. Kessler, former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration and author of “The End of Overeating,” companies strove to create food that was “energy-dense, highly stimulating, and went down easy. They put it on every street corner and made it mobile, and they made it socially acceptable to eat anytime and anyplace. They created a food carnival, and that’s where we live. And if you’re used to self-stimulation every 15 minutes, well, you can’t run into the kitchen to satisfy that urge.”
Real cultural changes are needed to turn this around. Somehow, no-nonsense cooking and eating — roasting a chicken, making a grilled cheese sandwich, scrambling an egg, tossing a salad — must become popular again, and valued not just by hipsters in Brooklyn or locavores in Berkeley. The smart campaign is not to get McDonald’s to serve better food but to get people to see cooking as a joy rather than a burden, or at least as part of a normal life.
As with any addictive behavior, this one is most easily countered by educating children about the better way. Children, after all, are born without bad habits. And yet it’s adults who must begin to tear down the food carnival.
The question is how? Efforts are everywhere. The People’s Grocery in Oakland secures affordable groceries for low-income people. Zoning laws in Los Angeles restrict the number of fast-food restaurants in high-obesity neighborhoods. There’s the Healthy Food Financing Initiative, a successful Pennsylvania program to build fresh food outlets in underserved areas, now being expanded nationally. FoodCorps and Cooking Matters teach young people how to farm and cook.
As Malik Yakini, executive director of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, says, “We’ve seen minor successes, but the food movement is still at the infant stage, and we need a massive social shift to convince people to consider healthier options.”
HOW do you change a culture? The answers, not surprisingly, are complex. “Once I look at what I’m eating,” says Dr. Kessler, “and realize it’s not food, and I ask ‘what am I doing here?’ that’s the start. It’s not about whether I think it’s good for me, it’s about changing how I feel. And we change how people feel by changing the environment.”
Obviously, in an atmosphere where any regulation is immediately labeled “nanny statism,” changing “the environment” is difficult. But we’ve done this before, with tobacco. The 1998 tobacco settlement limited cigarette marketing and forced manufacturers to finance anti-smoking campaigns — a negotiated change that led to an environmental one that in turn led to a cultural one, after which kids said to their parents, “I wish you didn’t smoke.” Smoking had to be converted from a cool habit into one practiced by pariahs.
A similar victory in the food world is symbolized by the stories parents tell me of their kids booing as they drive by McDonald’s.
To make changes like this more widespread we need action both cultural and political. The cultural lies in celebrating real food; raising our children in homes that don’t program them for fast-produced, eaten-on-the-run, high-calorie, low-nutrition junk; giving them the gift of appreciating the pleasures of nourishing one another and enjoying that nourishment together.
Political action would mean agitating to limit the marketing of junk; forcing its makers to pay the true costs of production; recognizing that advertising for fast food is not the exercise of free speech but behavior manipulation of addictive substances; and making certain that real food is affordable and available to everyone. The political challenge is the more difficult one, but it cannot be ignored.
What’s easier is to cook at every opportunity, to demonstrate to family and neighbors that the real way is the better way. And even the more fun way: kind of like a carnival.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/25/opinion/sunday/returning-to-somalia-after-20-years.html?ref=opinion
September 24, 2011
A Son Returns to the Agony of Somalia
By K’NAAN
K'Naan is a musician and poet.
MOGADISHU, Somalia
ONE has to be careful about stories. Especially true ones. When a story is told the first time, it can find a place in the listener’s heart. If the same story is told over and over, it becomes less like a presence in that chest and more like an X-ray of it.
The beating heart of my story is this: I was born in Mogadishu, Somalia. I had a brief but beautiful childhood filled with poetry from renowned relatives. Then came a bloody end to it, a lesson in life as a Somali: death approaching from the distance, walking into our lives in an experienced stroll.
At 12 years old, I lost three of the boys I grew up with in one burst of machine-gun fire — one pull from the misinformed finger of a boy probably not much older than we were.
But I was also unusually lucky. The bullets hit everyone but me.
Luck follows me through this story; so does my luckless homeland. A few harrowing months later, I found myself on the last commercial flight to leave Somalia before war closed in on the airport. And over the years, fortune turned me into Somalia’s loudest musical voice in the Western Hemisphere.
Meanwhile, my country festered, declining more and more. When I went on a tour of 86 countries last year, I could not perform in the one that mattered most to me. And when my song “Wavin’ Flag” became the theme song for the World Cup that year, the kids back home were not allowed to listen to it on the airwaves. Whatever melodious beauty I found, living in the spotlight, my country produced an opposing harmony in shadows, and the world hardly noticed. But I could still hear it.
And now this terrible year: The worst famine in decades pillages the flesh of the already wounded in Somalia. And the world’s collective humanitarian response has been a defeated shrug. If ever there was a best and worst time to return home, it was now.
So, 20 summers after I left as a child, I found myself on my way back to Somalia with some concerned friends and colleagues. I hoped that my presence would let me shine a light into this darkness. Maybe spare even one life, a life equal to mine, from indifferently wasting away. But I am no statesman, nor a soldier. Just a man made fortunate by the power of the spotlight. And to save someone’s life I am willing to spend some of that capricious currency called celebrity.
We had been told that Mogadishu was still among the most dangerous cities on the planet. So it was quiet on the 15-seat plane from Nairobi. We told nervous jokes at first, then looked to defuse the tension. The one book I had brought was Hemingway’s “A Moveable Feast.” I reached a chapter titled “Hunger Was Good Discipline” and stopped. That idea needed some contemplation. The very thing driving so many from their homes in Somalia was drawing me back there. I read on. Hemingway felt that paintings were more beautiful when he was “belly-empty, hollow-hungry.” But he was not speaking of the brutal and criminally organized hunger of East Africa. His hunger was beautiful. It made something of you. The one I was heading into only made ashes of you.
By now, the ride was bumpy. We were flying low, so I could see Baraawe and Merca, beauties of coastal towns that I had always dreamed of visiting. The pilot joked that he would try to fly low enough for my sightseeing, but high enough to avoid the rocket-propelled grenades.
FOR miles along that coast, all you see are paint-like blue water, beautiful sand dunes eroding, and an abandoned effort to cap them with concrete. Everything about Somalia feels like abandonment. The buildings, the peace initiatives, the hopes and dreams of greatness for a nation.
With the ocean to our backs, our wheels touch down in Mogadishu, at the airport I left 20 years before to the surround-sound of heavy artillery pounding the devil’s rhythm. Now there is an eerie calm. We clear immigration, passing citizens with AK-47’s slung over their shoulders.
It’s not a small task to be safe in Mogadishu. So we keep our arrival a secret until after we ride from the airport to the city, a ride on which they say life expectancy is about 17 minutes if you don’t have the kind of security that has been arranged for me.
Over breakfast at a “safe house,” I update my sense of taste with kidney and anjera (a bread), and a perfectly cooled grapefruit drink. Then we journey onto the city streets. It’s the most aesthetically contradictory place on earth — a paradise of paradox. The old Italian and locally inspired architecture is colored by American and Russian artillery paint. Everything stands proudly lopsided.
And then come the makeshift camps set up for the many hungering displaced Somalis. They are the reason I am here. If my voice was an instrument, then I needed it to be an amplifier this time. If my light was true, then I needed it to show its face here, where it counts. Nothing I have ever sung will matter much if I can’t be the mouth of the silenced. But will the world have ears for them, too?
I find the homeless Somalis’ arms open, waiting for the outside world and hoping for a second chance into its fenced heart. I meet a young woman watching over her dying mother, who has been struck by the bullet of famine. The daughter tells me about the journey to Mogadishu — a 200-mile trek across arid, parched land, with adults huddling around children to protect them first. This mother refused to eat her own food in order to feed abandoned children they had picked up along the way. And now she was dying because of that.
The final and most devastating stop for me was Banadir Hospital, where I was born. The doctors are like hostages of hopelessness, surrounded and outnumbered. Mothers hum lullabies holding the skeletal heads of their children. It seems eyes are the only ornament left of their beautiful faces; eyes like lanterns holding out a glimmer of faint hope. Volunteers are doing jobs they aren’t qualified for. The wards are over-crowded, mixing gun wound, malnutrition and cholera patients.
Death is in every corner of this place. It’s lying on the mattresses holding the tiny wrists of half-sleeping children. It’s near the exposed breasts of girls turned mothers too soon. It folds in the cots, all-knowing and silent; its mournful wind swells the black sheets. Here, each life ends sadly, too suddenly and casually to be memorialized.
In this somber and embittered forgotten place, at least they were happy to see I had come.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/25/opinion/sunday/is-junk-food-really-cheaper.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print
September 24, 2011
Is Junk Food Really Cheaper?
By MARK BITTMAN
THE “fact” that junk food is cheaper than real food has become a reflexive part of how we explain why so many Americans are overweight, particularly those with lower incomes. I frequently read confident statements like, “when a bag of chips is cheaper than a head of broccoli ...” or “it’s more affordable to feed a family of four at McDonald’s than to cook a healthy meal for them at home.”
This is just plain wrong. In fact it isn’t cheaper to eat highly processed food: a typical order for a family of four — for example, two Big Macs, a cheeseburger, six chicken McNuggets, two medium and two small fries, and two medium and two small sodas — costs, at the McDonald’s a hundred steps from where I write, about $28. (Judicious ordering of “Happy Meals” can reduce that to about $23 — and you get a few apple slices in addition to the fries!)
In general, despite extensive government subsidies, hyperprocessed food remains more expensive than food cooked at home. You can serve a roasted chicken with vegetables along with a simple salad and milk for about $14, and feed four or even six people. If that’s too much money, substitute a meal of rice and canned beans with bacon, green peppers and onions; it’s easily enough for four people and costs about $9. (Omitting the bacon, using dried beans, which are also lower in sodium, or substituting carrots for the peppers reduces the price further, of course.)
Another argument runs that junk food is cheaper when measured by the calorie, and that this makes fast food essential for the poor because they need cheap calories. But given that half of the people in this country (and a higher percentage of poor people) consume too many calories rather than too few, measuring food’s value by the calorie makes as much sense as measuring a drink’s value by its alcohol content. (Why not drink 95 percent neutral grain spirit, the cheapest way to get drunk?)
Besides, that argument, even if we all needed to gain weight, is not always true. A meal of real food cooked at home can easily contain more calories, most of them of the “healthy” variety. (Olive oil accounts for many of the calories in the roast chicken meal, for example.)In comparing prices of real food and junk food, I used supermarket ingredients, not the pricier organic or local food that many people would consider ideal. But food choices are not black and white; the alternative to fast food is not necessarily organic food, any more than the alternative to soda is Bordeaux.
The alternative to soda is water, and the alternative to junk food is not grass-fed beef and greens from a trendy farmers’ market, but anything other than junk food: rice, grains, pasta, beans, fresh vegetables, canned vegetables, frozen vegetables, meat, fish, poultry, dairy products, bread, peanut butter, a thousand other things cooked at home — in almost every case a far superior alternative.
“Anything that you do that’s not fast food is terrific; cooking once a week is far better than not cooking at all,” says Marion Nestle, professor of food studies at New York University and author of “What to Eat.” “It’s the same argument as exercise: more is better than less and some is a lot better than none.”
THE fact is that most people can afford real food. Even the nearly 50 million Americans who are enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly known as food stamps) receive about $5 per person per day, which is far from ideal but enough to survive. So we have to assume that money alone doesn’t guide decisions about what to eat. There are, of course, the so-called food deserts, places where it’s hard to find food: the Department of Agriculture says that more than two million Americans in low-income rural areas live 10 miles or more from a supermarket, and more than five million households without access to cars live more than a half mile from a supermarket.
Still, 93 percent of those with limited access to supermarkets do have access to vehicles, though it takes them 20 more minutes to travel to the store than the national average. And after a long day of work at one or even two jobs, 20 extra minutes — plus cooking time — must seem like an eternity.
Taking the long route to putting food on the table may not be easy, but for almost all Americans it remains a choice, and if you can drive to McDonald’s you can drive to Safeway. It’s cooking that’s the real challenge. (The real challenge is not “I’m too busy to cook.” In 2010 the average American, regardless of weekly earnings, watched no less than an hour and a half of television per day. The time is there.)
The core problem is that cooking is defined as work, and fast food is both a pleasure and a crutch. “People really are stressed out with all that they have to do, and they don’t want to cook,” says Julie Guthman, associate professor of community studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and author of the forthcoming “Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice and the Limits of Capitalism.” “Their reaction is, ‘Let me enjoy what I want to eat, and stop telling me what to do.’ And it’s one of the few things that less well-off people have: they don’t have to cook.”
It’s not just about choice, however, and rational arguments go only so far, because money and access and time and skill are not the only considerations. The ubiquity, convenience and habit-forming appeal of hyperprocessed foods have largely drowned out the alternatives: there are five fast-food restaurants for every supermarket in the United States; in recent decades the adjusted for inflation price of fresh produce has increased by 40 percent while the price of soda and processed food has decreased by as much as 30 percent; and nearly inconceivable resources go into encouraging consumption in restaurants: fast-food companies spent $4.2 billion on marketing in 2009.
Furthermore, the engineering behind hyperprocessed food makes it virtually addictive. A 2009 study by the Scripps Research Institute indicates that overconsumption of fast food “triggers addiction-like neuroaddictive responses” in the brain, making it harder to trigger the release of dopamine. In other words the more fast food we eat, the more we need to give us pleasure; thus the report suggests that the same mechanisms underlie drug addiction and obesity.
This addiction to processed food is the result of decades of vision and hard work by the industry. For 50 years, says David A. Kessler, former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration and author of “The End of Overeating,” companies strove to create food that was “energy-dense, highly stimulating, and went down easy. They put it on every street corner and made it mobile, and they made it socially acceptable to eat anytime and anyplace. They created a food carnival, and that’s where we live. And if you’re used to self-stimulation every 15 minutes, well, you can’t run into the kitchen to satisfy that urge.”
Real cultural changes are needed to turn this around. Somehow, no-nonsense cooking and eating — roasting a chicken, making a grilled cheese sandwich, scrambling an egg, tossing a salad — must become popular again, and valued not just by hipsters in Brooklyn or locavores in Berkeley. The smart campaign is not to get McDonald’s to serve better food but to get people to see cooking as a joy rather than a burden, or at least as part of a normal life.
As with any addictive behavior, this one is most easily countered by educating children about the better way. Children, after all, are born without bad habits. And yet it’s adults who must begin to tear down the food carnival.
The question is how? Efforts are everywhere. The People’s Grocery in Oakland secures affordable groceries for low-income people. Zoning laws in Los Angeles restrict the number of fast-food restaurants in high-obesity neighborhoods. There’s the Healthy Food Financing Initiative, a successful Pennsylvania program to build fresh food outlets in underserved areas, now being expanded nationally. FoodCorps and Cooking Matters teach young people how to farm and cook.
As Malik Yakini, executive director of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, says, “We’ve seen minor successes, but the food movement is still at the infant stage, and we need a massive social shift to convince people to consider healthier options.”
HOW do you change a culture? The answers, not surprisingly, are complex. “Once I look at what I’m eating,” says Dr. Kessler, “and realize it’s not food, and I ask ‘what am I doing here?’ that’s the start. It’s not about whether I think it’s good for me, it’s about changing how I feel. And we change how people feel by changing the environment.”
Obviously, in an atmosphere where any regulation is immediately labeled “nanny statism,” changing “the environment” is difficult. But we’ve done this before, with tobacco. The 1998 tobacco settlement limited cigarette marketing and forced manufacturers to finance anti-smoking campaigns — a negotiated change that led to an environmental one that in turn led to a cultural one, after which kids said to their parents, “I wish you didn’t smoke.” Smoking had to be converted from a cool habit into one practiced by pariahs.
A similar victory in the food world is symbolized by the stories parents tell me of their kids booing as they drive by McDonald’s.
To make changes like this more widespread we need action both cultural and political. The cultural lies in celebrating real food; raising our children in homes that don’t program them for fast-produced, eaten-on-the-run, high-calorie, low-nutrition junk; giving them the gift of appreciating the pleasures of nourishing one another and enjoying that nourishment together.
Political action would mean agitating to limit the marketing of junk; forcing its makers to pay the true costs of production; recognizing that advertising for fast food is not the exercise of free speech but behavior manipulation of addictive substances; and making certain that real food is affordable and available to everyone. The political challenge is the more difficult one, but it cannot be ignored.
What’s easier is to cook at every opportunity, to demonstrate to family and neighbors that the real way is the better way. And even the more fun way: kind of like a carnival.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/25/opinion/sunday/returning-to-somalia-after-20-years.html?ref=opinion
September 24, 2011
A Son Returns to the Agony of Somalia
By K’NAAN
K'Naan is a musician and poet.
MOGADISHU, Somalia
ONE has to be careful about stories. Especially true ones. When a story is told the first time, it can find a place in the listener’s heart. If the same story is told over and over, it becomes less like a presence in that chest and more like an X-ray of it.
The beating heart of my story is this: I was born in Mogadishu, Somalia. I had a brief but beautiful childhood filled with poetry from renowned relatives. Then came a bloody end to it, a lesson in life as a Somali: death approaching from the distance, walking into our lives in an experienced stroll.
At 12 years old, I lost three of the boys I grew up with in one burst of machine-gun fire — one pull from the misinformed finger of a boy probably not much older than we were.
But I was also unusually lucky. The bullets hit everyone but me.
Luck follows me through this story; so does my luckless homeland. A few harrowing months later, I found myself on the last commercial flight to leave Somalia before war closed in on the airport. And over the years, fortune turned me into Somalia’s loudest musical voice in the Western Hemisphere.
Meanwhile, my country festered, declining more and more. When I went on a tour of 86 countries last year, I could not perform in the one that mattered most to me. And when my song “Wavin’ Flag” became the theme song for the World Cup that year, the kids back home were not allowed to listen to it on the airwaves. Whatever melodious beauty I found, living in the spotlight, my country produced an opposing harmony in shadows, and the world hardly noticed. But I could still hear it.
And now this terrible year: The worst famine in decades pillages the flesh of the already wounded in Somalia. And the world’s collective humanitarian response has been a defeated shrug. If ever there was a best and worst time to return home, it was now.
So, 20 summers after I left as a child, I found myself on my way back to Somalia with some concerned friends and colleagues. I hoped that my presence would let me shine a light into this darkness. Maybe spare even one life, a life equal to mine, from indifferently wasting away. But I am no statesman, nor a soldier. Just a man made fortunate by the power of the spotlight. And to save someone’s life I am willing to spend some of that capricious currency called celebrity.
We had been told that Mogadishu was still among the most dangerous cities on the planet. So it was quiet on the 15-seat plane from Nairobi. We told nervous jokes at first, then looked to defuse the tension. The one book I had brought was Hemingway’s “A Moveable Feast.” I reached a chapter titled “Hunger Was Good Discipline” and stopped. That idea needed some contemplation. The very thing driving so many from their homes in Somalia was drawing me back there. I read on. Hemingway felt that paintings were more beautiful when he was “belly-empty, hollow-hungry.” But he was not speaking of the brutal and criminally organized hunger of East Africa. His hunger was beautiful. It made something of you. The one I was heading into only made ashes of you.
By now, the ride was bumpy. We were flying low, so I could see Baraawe and Merca, beauties of coastal towns that I had always dreamed of visiting. The pilot joked that he would try to fly low enough for my sightseeing, but high enough to avoid the rocket-propelled grenades.
FOR miles along that coast, all you see are paint-like blue water, beautiful sand dunes eroding, and an abandoned effort to cap them with concrete. Everything about Somalia feels like abandonment. The buildings, the peace initiatives, the hopes and dreams of greatness for a nation.
With the ocean to our backs, our wheels touch down in Mogadishu, at the airport I left 20 years before to the surround-sound of heavy artillery pounding the devil’s rhythm. Now there is an eerie calm. We clear immigration, passing citizens with AK-47’s slung over their shoulders.
It’s not a small task to be safe in Mogadishu. So we keep our arrival a secret until after we ride from the airport to the city, a ride on which they say life expectancy is about 17 minutes if you don’t have the kind of security that has been arranged for me.
Over breakfast at a “safe house,” I update my sense of taste with kidney and anjera (a bread), and a perfectly cooled grapefruit drink. Then we journey onto the city streets. It’s the most aesthetically contradictory place on earth — a paradise of paradox. The old Italian and locally inspired architecture is colored by American and Russian artillery paint. Everything stands proudly lopsided.
And then come the makeshift camps set up for the many hungering displaced Somalis. They are the reason I am here. If my voice was an instrument, then I needed it to be an amplifier this time. If my light was true, then I needed it to show its face here, where it counts. Nothing I have ever sung will matter much if I can’t be the mouth of the silenced. But will the world have ears for them, too?
I find the homeless Somalis’ arms open, waiting for the outside world and hoping for a second chance into its fenced heart. I meet a young woman watching over her dying mother, who has been struck by the bullet of famine. The daughter tells me about the journey to Mogadishu — a 200-mile trek across arid, parched land, with adults huddling around children to protect them first. This mother refused to eat her own food in order to feed abandoned children they had picked up along the way. And now she was dying because of that.
The final and most devastating stop for me was Banadir Hospital, where I was born. The doctors are like hostages of hopelessness, surrounded and outnumbered. Mothers hum lullabies holding the skeletal heads of their children. It seems eyes are the only ornament left of their beautiful faces; eyes like lanterns holding out a glimmer of faint hope. Volunteers are doing jobs they aren’t qualified for. The wards are over-crowded, mixing gun wound, malnutrition and cholera patients.
Death is in every corner of this place. It’s lying on the mattresses holding the tiny wrists of half-sleeping children. It’s near the exposed breasts of girls turned mothers too soon. It folds in the cots, all-knowing and silent; its mournful wind swells the black sheets. Here, each life ends sadly, too suddenly and casually to be memorialized.
In this somber and embittered forgotten place, at least they were happy to see I had come.
Saturday, 24 September 2011
Federal Conservatives Stick to Wheat Board Script
I was just waiting for Stephen Harper to say "marketing freedom", and he didn't disappoint. The surprise was that he responded at all to a question about the future of the Canadian Wheat Board on the opening day of the new parliamentary session. Apparently Prime Minister Harper doesn't normally answer questions on Mondays, and he certainly doesn't respond to questions from anyone other than the other party leaders.
The national media has started to pay attention to this story. (I've written about it here : http://foodmatters-petrie.blogspot.com/2011/06/canadian-wheat-board-and-free-markets.html ) Earlier this month Western Canadian grain farmers voted in a a plebiscite to keep the Wheat Board's monopoly to market wheat and barley, but the Conservatives say they don't need the permission of farmers to move ahead, and that's just what they plan to do. "In this so-called plebiscite, not only did a significant portion vote against the Wheat Board, it didn't include those tens of thousands of farmers who have walked away from that institution," Harper went on to say. "The Wheat Board gets to pick its own voters, and I guess if they could do that over there, the Liberal Party could even win an election in the West," he added. "The fact of the matter is, western farmers voted for marketing freedom, that's what they're going to get."
Apparently, according to Harper, farmers who decided that there was more opportunity growing canola, soybeans, bird seed, mustard, etc. did so so they wouldn't come under the heavy hand of the wheat board, not that they simply wanted to grow another crop. There might be farmers who did that (don't forget the dairy farmers who decided to produce pork instead when supply management was brought in in the 1970's), but in my mind that's the kind of "marketing freedom" farmers deserve and already have.
There were a couple of commentaries on the Wheat Board story that capture how heavy handed this is, even for "free marketers" who blame the government for ideological stubbornness (crime bill ring a bell), rather than business smarts. It will take another five years before westerners can "vote" again on this, and by that time private companies will have invested millions to take advantage of the changes, and the toothpaste will be long out of the tube (a genie implies something good has happened).
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/opinion/playing-the-wheat-board-card/article2163369/
Playing the Wheat Board card
The results of the Canadian Wheat Board’s plebiscite over the Conservative government’s plan to end the CWB’s single-desk-selling monopoly for wheat and barley isn’t likely to change things.
According to the CWB, a majority of farmers oppose dismantling the board. But Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz said earlier it’s full steam ahead no matter the vote.
While controversy will continue over whether Parliament has authority to change the Canadian Wheat Board Act without majority farmer approval, there are important international implications to be considered.
Under both the World Trade Organization Agreement and the North American Free Trade Agreement, the CWB is recognized as a “state enterprise.” Canada can legally maintain and operate it as such, provided it acts in a non-discriminatory manner when it buys and sells grain in the marketplace.
When the CWB’s operations were challenged by the Americans in the WTO a few years back, the case was thrown out. A dispute settlement panel and the WTO appellate body said the board was acting fully in accordance with Canada’s WTO obligations.
What happens if changes are made to the CWB’s powers so the market is opened up to other commercial players? Well, liberalizing trade is what the WTO (and its predecessor, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) is all about, so there’s no impediment to Canada’s unilaterally removing or reducing the board’s monopoly powers and freeing up the market for private operators.
The question is, why should Canada make these changes unilaterally, largely to the benefit of international grain companies and to the applause of U.S. politicians, without negotiating some quid pro quo with the Americans? Why voluntarily give up a valuable bargaining chip that can be used with the U.S. and other trading partners without securing something in return to benefit Canadian farmers?
The U.S. agriculture sector is so rife with internal government support and market-access barriers that there could be important gains in improving Canadian farmers’ and agri-food producers’ access to that market by skillfully playing the Wheat Board card. Whether this can be done under NAFTA without Mexico is a question, but some kind of reciprocal access arrangement should be possible.
As well, we’re in the middle of negotiating a major trade deal with the European Union. Rather than announcing in advance our intentions to unilaterally dismantle the Wheat Board, a clever strategy would have been to use the Wheat Board card as part of the negotiations to secure better Canadian agricultural access to the EU market.
There’s another issue to be faced down the road, should any future federal government decide to change direction and restore some of the CWB’s lost powers.
Under the WTO agreement, legal problems arise when governments try to re-establish monopoly powers of state enterprises that were previously given up. It’s simply not clear how much governments can add to or restore these kinds of powers once they’re relinquished.
As well, once foreign-based commercial operators enter the Canadian marketplace, they acquire investment protection rights, not just under NAFTA but under an array of Canada’s bilateral foreign investment protection agreements with other countries.
While this may not seem like a big deal now, any attempt by future governments to put Humpty Dumpty back on the wall will be faced with claims for substantial investor compensation under Canada’s treaty obligations. The dollars involved are significant. The CWB’s latest annual report shows $5.2-billion in export sales for the 2009-2010 crop year.
Because all of this involves significant changes and lots of money, dealing away the Wheat Board’s powers should be looked at through this prism. Nothing stops the Conservative government from proceeding down this road unilaterally. But any changes or modifications to this policy by future governments will face significant roadblocks.
There’s no question the Harper government’s policy is welcomed in Washington and by U.S. farm groups and large grain companies. But getting nothing in return from the Americans and from our major trading partners is an abandonment of our international negotiating leverage.
Lawrence Herman is a trade lawyer at Cassels Brock & Blackwell LLP in Toronto.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/opinion/in-the-west-dismantling-the-wheat-board-will-leave-mighty-grudges/article2176205/
In the West, dismantling the Wheat Board will leave mighty grudges
I’m an exiled city girl. For the past seven years, I’ve lived in a farm town. I don’t farm, curl, vote Conservative or attend church, which makes me a bit of an oddity.
I’m no Margaret Mead but, after long hours spent observing the local rituals from the fringes, I “get” sodbusters. It takes more than a Rider Pride truck flag and a Saskatchewan driver’s licence to gain admittance to the fold.
That’s why I’m so puzzled that Stephen Harper, a city boy who’s gained acceptance among Western Canadian farmers, would risk alienating this hard-won base. So which Tory MP had the bright idea to dismantle the monopolistic Canadian Wheat Board?
In the heartland, the gun registry debate is mere cocktail chatter compared to the CWB. Grain producers, currently overwhelmed with harvest, will soon be expected to play the salesman Herb Tarlek, too.
In a recent plebiscite, 62 per cent of farmers voted to retain the Wheat Board’s “single desk” structure. That’s far more popular support than Mr. Harper received in the last election (39.7 per cent). Like the contentious potash issue, watch for Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall to weigh in next. This populist politician, who will face his largely rural electorate on Nov. 7, will side with the producers or risk losing massive voter support.
Mr. Harper apparently feels secure enough to demolish a Canadian institution. But this is just more ideological claptrap from a rigid government that favours unbridled capitalism over “socialist” grain co-operatives.
Since 1935, the CWB has successfully matched up grain producers with global markets. Without CWB support, how will one individual farmer cope with that daunting task?
Rural Saskatchewan is not known for its marketing savvy. Primitive plywood signs line our bumpy highways. You have to crane your neck to read them from your vehicle because they’re mounted sideways. Motorists must slow down to decipher the tiny hand-scrawled signs that read: Rottweiler Puppies for Sale.
When I’m farm-gating for local food, I often find a harried producer at the other end of the phone, a person who doesn’t have an answering machine or even high-speed Internet. I’ve driven down many a bumpy road in search of fresh carrots or organic potatoes. But are large European grain buyers prepared to go looking for the family farmer?
The Harper government’s CWB decision will put many fragile family farms out of business. Only the massive corporate farms will have the necessary reach to sell their products to international markets.
Commodity analysts say prices will drop in a deregulated market. That’s the logical impact of thousands of farm operators flooding the marketplace with come-ons. As a freelance writer, I face stiff competition every day in a crowded and shifting marketplace, a factor that only drives rates down. Some editors even ask me to forgo payment. They tell me, “A byline is good for self-promotion.” “No thanks,” I reply, then quote Samuel Johnson: “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.”
Like me, grain and barley producers just want a fair price for their product. They shouldn’t have to go door to door like a knife salesman to get it.
Mr. Harper will pay dearly for this policy shift. Prairie people hold mighty grudges, and they have long memories. Take it from this ex-urbanite: Dismantle the Wheat Board at your peril. You’ll be shunned at the post office, at the local curling rink and, most noticeably, at the polls.
Patricia Dawn Robertson is a Saskatchewan freelance journalist.
The national media has started to pay attention to this story. (I've written about it here : http://foodmatters-petrie.blogspot.com/2011/06/canadian-wheat-board-and-free-markets.html ) Earlier this month Western Canadian grain farmers voted in a a plebiscite to keep the Wheat Board's monopoly to market wheat and barley, but the Conservatives say they don't need the permission of farmers to move ahead, and that's just what they plan to do. "In this so-called plebiscite, not only did a significant portion vote against the Wheat Board, it didn't include those tens of thousands of farmers who have walked away from that institution," Harper went on to say. "The Wheat Board gets to pick its own voters, and I guess if they could do that over there, the Liberal Party could even win an election in the West," he added. "The fact of the matter is, western farmers voted for marketing freedom, that's what they're going to get."
Apparently, according to Harper, farmers who decided that there was more opportunity growing canola, soybeans, bird seed, mustard, etc. did so so they wouldn't come under the heavy hand of the wheat board, not that they simply wanted to grow another crop. There might be farmers who did that (don't forget the dairy farmers who decided to produce pork instead when supply management was brought in in the 1970's), but in my mind that's the kind of "marketing freedom" farmers deserve and already have.
There were a couple of commentaries on the Wheat Board story that capture how heavy handed this is, even for "free marketers" who blame the government for ideological stubbornness (crime bill ring a bell), rather than business smarts. It will take another five years before westerners can "vote" again on this, and by that time private companies will have invested millions to take advantage of the changes, and the toothpaste will be long out of the tube (a genie implies something good has happened).
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/opinion/playing-the-wheat-board-card/article2163369/
Playing the Wheat Board card
The results of the Canadian Wheat Board’s plebiscite over the Conservative government’s plan to end the CWB’s single-desk-selling monopoly for wheat and barley isn’t likely to change things.
According to the CWB, a majority of farmers oppose dismantling the board. But Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz said earlier it’s full steam ahead no matter the vote.
While controversy will continue over whether Parliament has authority to change the Canadian Wheat Board Act without majority farmer approval, there are important international implications to be considered.
Under both the World Trade Organization Agreement and the North American Free Trade Agreement, the CWB is recognized as a “state enterprise.” Canada can legally maintain and operate it as such, provided it acts in a non-discriminatory manner when it buys and sells grain in the marketplace.
When the CWB’s operations were challenged by the Americans in the WTO a few years back, the case was thrown out. A dispute settlement panel and the WTO appellate body said the board was acting fully in accordance with Canada’s WTO obligations.
What happens if changes are made to the CWB’s powers so the market is opened up to other commercial players? Well, liberalizing trade is what the WTO (and its predecessor, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) is all about, so there’s no impediment to Canada’s unilaterally removing or reducing the board’s monopoly powers and freeing up the market for private operators.
The question is, why should Canada make these changes unilaterally, largely to the benefit of international grain companies and to the applause of U.S. politicians, without negotiating some quid pro quo with the Americans? Why voluntarily give up a valuable bargaining chip that can be used with the U.S. and other trading partners without securing something in return to benefit Canadian farmers?
The U.S. agriculture sector is so rife with internal government support and market-access barriers that there could be important gains in improving Canadian farmers’ and agri-food producers’ access to that market by skillfully playing the Wheat Board card. Whether this can be done under NAFTA without Mexico is a question, but some kind of reciprocal access arrangement should be possible.
As well, we’re in the middle of negotiating a major trade deal with the European Union. Rather than announcing in advance our intentions to unilaterally dismantle the Wheat Board, a clever strategy would have been to use the Wheat Board card as part of the negotiations to secure better Canadian agricultural access to the EU market.
There’s another issue to be faced down the road, should any future federal government decide to change direction and restore some of the CWB’s lost powers.
Under the WTO agreement, legal problems arise when governments try to re-establish monopoly powers of state enterprises that were previously given up. It’s simply not clear how much governments can add to or restore these kinds of powers once they’re relinquished.
As well, once foreign-based commercial operators enter the Canadian marketplace, they acquire investment protection rights, not just under NAFTA but under an array of Canada’s bilateral foreign investment protection agreements with other countries.
While this may not seem like a big deal now, any attempt by future governments to put Humpty Dumpty back on the wall will be faced with claims for substantial investor compensation under Canada’s treaty obligations. The dollars involved are significant. The CWB’s latest annual report shows $5.2-billion in export sales for the 2009-2010 crop year.
Because all of this involves significant changes and lots of money, dealing away the Wheat Board’s powers should be looked at through this prism. Nothing stops the Conservative government from proceeding down this road unilaterally. But any changes or modifications to this policy by future governments will face significant roadblocks.
There’s no question the Harper government’s policy is welcomed in Washington and by U.S. farm groups and large grain companies. But getting nothing in return from the Americans and from our major trading partners is an abandonment of our international negotiating leverage.
Lawrence Herman is a trade lawyer at Cassels Brock & Blackwell LLP in Toronto.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/opinion/in-the-west-dismantling-the-wheat-board-will-leave-mighty-grudges/article2176205/
In the West, dismantling the Wheat Board will leave mighty grudges
I’m an exiled city girl. For the past seven years, I’ve lived in a farm town. I don’t farm, curl, vote Conservative or attend church, which makes me a bit of an oddity.
I’m no Margaret Mead but, after long hours spent observing the local rituals from the fringes, I “get” sodbusters. It takes more than a Rider Pride truck flag and a Saskatchewan driver’s licence to gain admittance to the fold.
That’s why I’m so puzzled that Stephen Harper, a city boy who’s gained acceptance among Western Canadian farmers, would risk alienating this hard-won base. So which Tory MP had the bright idea to dismantle the monopolistic Canadian Wheat Board?
In the heartland, the gun registry debate is mere cocktail chatter compared to the CWB. Grain producers, currently overwhelmed with harvest, will soon be expected to play the salesman Herb Tarlek, too.
In a recent plebiscite, 62 per cent of farmers voted to retain the Wheat Board’s “single desk” structure. That’s far more popular support than Mr. Harper received in the last election (39.7 per cent). Like the contentious potash issue, watch for Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall to weigh in next. This populist politician, who will face his largely rural electorate on Nov. 7, will side with the producers or risk losing massive voter support.
Mr. Harper apparently feels secure enough to demolish a Canadian institution. But this is just more ideological claptrap from a rigid government that favours unbridled capitalism over “socialist” grain co-operatives.
Since 1935, the CWB has successfully matched up grain producers with global markets. Without CWB support, how will one individual farmer cope with that daunting task?
Rural Saskatchewan is not known for its marketing savvy. Primitive plywood signs line our bumpy highways. You have to crane your neck to read them from your vehicle because they’re mounted sideways. Motorists must slow down to decipher the tiny hand-scrawled signs that read: Rottweiler Puppies for Sale.
When I’m farm-gating for local food, I often find a harried producer at the other end of the phone, a person who doesn’t have an answering machine or even high-speed Internet. I’ve driven down many a bumpy road in search of fresh carrots or organic potatoes. But are large European grain buyers prepared to go looking for the family farmer?
The Harper government’s CWB decision will put many fragile family farms out of business. Only the massive corporate farms will have the necessary reach to sell their products to international markets.
Commodity analysts say prices will drop in a deregulated market. That’s the logical impact of thousands of farm operators flooding the marketplace with come-ons. As a freelance writer, I face stiff competition every day in a crowded and shifting marketplace, a factor that only drives rates down. Some editors even ask me to forgo payment. They tell me, “A byline is good for self-promotion.” “No thanks,” I reply, then quote Samuel Johnson: “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.”
Like me, grain and barley producers just want a fair price for their product. They shouldn’t have to go door to door like a knife salesman to get it.
Mr. Harper will pay dearly for this policy shift. Prairie people hold mighty grudges, and they have long memories. Take it from this ex-urbanite: Dismantle the Wheat Board at your peril. You’ll be shunned at the post office, at the local curling rink and, most noticeably, at the polls.
Patricia Dawn Robertson is a Saskatchewan freelance journalist.
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