Commodity Corner
Views on commodities and energy
Michael Pollan: “What’s in the beef?”
Where does your burger come from? Journalist and food writer Michael Pollan has traced back the source of much of what we eat, and says that the ultimate answer is oil. Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, argues that it takes massive amounts of petroleum-derived fertilizers and pesticides to run industrial farms and feed lots, with dire consequences for human health and the Earth’s climate.
Check out Pollan’s multimedia presentation below, from the Poptech conference in Camden, Maine last month.
[Editor's note: After some Reuters fact-checking, Pollan withdrew his Poptech assertion that "A vegan in a Hummer has a smaller carbon footprint than a meat-eater in a Prius," and his statement has been edited out of the video. The erroneous meme has nevertheless continued to spread on Twitter]
A food czar could bring sexy back to agriculture
It seems if you got a problem in Washington today, you need a Czar to take care of it. And now some powerful U.S. senators believe the agriculture sector should get one to sharpen efforts to feed the world’s poor. Former Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman told lawmakers on Tuesday that too often agriculture takes a back seat to other “sexier” issues in policymaking, but it must be a priority if the country hopes to address global hunger and malnutrition. “It is not a secondary factor,” Glickman said before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Senator Dick Lugar, the Republican leader of the committee, supported appointing a White House food coordinator to take on raising agriculture and food aid’s prominence. This “food czar” would be tasked with coordinating efforts between the U.S. Agency for International Development, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and other agencies involved in food aid and agriculture production. The need for a food czar doesn’t seem as far stretched when considering recent events that have nudged agriculture over into the realm of a national security issue. Soaring food prices last year sparked food riots and led to political instability in some parts of the world. The threat of violence and coups continues as the recession makes it increasingly difficult for even more people to buy food. A food czar could possibly mitigate future riots by improving the United States’ role in making other nations self-sufficient in agricultural production, an area some say the country has failed in. In fact, U.S. efforts to address the long-term challenge of persistant malnutrition earn an ‘F,’ according to political science professor and author Robert Paarlberg. He said U.S. agriculture assistance to Africa has plummeted 85 percent since the 1980s. “So as things have been getting steadily worse in Africa, the United States goverment has curiously been doing steadily less,” Paarlberg said. A food czar, Lugar said, would have the difficult job of addressing this conundrum.
Photo Credit: Reuters/Luc Gnago (Farmers in Cote d’Ivoire work on a rice field); Reuters/Alberto Lowe (Riot police clash with Panamanians over food prices in Panama City); Reuters/Margaret Aguirre (A child in Ethiopia is severely malnourished due to widespread starvation brought on by drought and soaring food prices)
Farm fight gives Argentine newspapers plenty to chew on
Argentine farmers’ decision to resume their anti-government protests dominated Sunday’s newspaper editorials, with some commentators saying the seemingly never-ending conflict over soy taxes risked spilling into political turmoil and even violence (Joaquin Morales Sola in right-leaning La Nacion).
Most agreed the conflict’s resurgence was down to last week’s surprise announcement by President Cristina Fernandez to share the soy tax revenue with the provinces, which critics see as an election ploy ahead of a mid-term vote due in June. Farmers took as proof she is unwilling to lower the levy.
Some columnists criticized the government for erratic policies that have stoked the conflict at a delicate time for the country (Eduardo van der Kooy, in top-selling daily Clarin), saying Fernandez needed to change tack to reflect the changed economic reality (Miguel Bonasso in Critica).
Argentine media are increasingly critical of the government and few defended the president’s handling of the standoff. Leftist daily Pagina 12, which generally supports Fernandez, echoed her own defense of the soy taxes as a vital tool to encourage more diversity in crops and redistribute wealth among the poor.
Here are some key extracts from the leading newspapers’ best-known columnists:
Joaquin Morales Sola, right-leaning, pro-countryside La Nacion:
The Perpetual war of the Pampas
It all looks very familiar. Argentina’s rebellious farmers are threatening to go back to their highway protests, the government is refusing to cut export taxes on soybeans and another showdown in Congress is on the horizon.
If ruling party lawmakers’ continue to refuse to take their seats and allow a vote on an opposition-led bill to cut the taxes, farmers will have a good excuse to resume road protests and a freeze on grains sales to starve the state of revenue.
President Cristina Fernandez will be loath to see another showdown on soy taxes after last year’s crushing defeat when her own vice president cast the deciding vote against her in the Senate, forcing the government to roll back the sliding-scale system that set off months of political turmoil.
Rather than risk another spectacular defeat, especially as she tries to move up mid-term elections to June, Fernandez could try to take the steam out of the opposition drive by lowering the taxes herself — and local media speculated this week that she was mulling such a move.
But government officials have ruled out that possibility.
Even if Fernandez were to offer a concession on the soy tax, it would likely be a small one because she would not want to lose too much face or too much income in an election year.
But a small reduction is unlikely to satisfy the farmers, making any resolution seem more distant than ever.
The answer is 99,439. Pass it on.
During his first week on the job, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said no one knows for sure how many people work at the Agriculture Department. Speaking to USDA employees and later to reporters, he used that startling anomaly as an argument to update USDA’s computer equipment.
Like the admonition against saying “never” or “always” during an argument, there could be a corollary: Never say “no one knows” in a bureaucracy.
A USDA employee quickly provided an answer for Reuters: 99,439 fulltime, part-time and temporary federal employees as of Monday based on figures from the payroll agency.
There were some qualifiers in Vilsack’s statement. He said he asked the Obama transition team and “I was told no one knows for sure how many people work at (USDA). They could tell me how many checks are issued, but not how many people actually work here.”
A former USDA official snorted at the idea of an uncountable workforce. ”That may be almost an urban myth,” he said. “It’s not a simple answer” but is within reach.
There are some complexities. For example, USDA employment rises to include Forest Service “smoke jumpers” and wildfire crews during the summer and shrinks during the winter.
Then there’s the roughly 9,400 people in the county offices who are part of the Farm Service Agency. They perform federal tasks but are hired by locally elected committees.
Obamamania missing in farm country
Many U.S. farmers don’t have confidence in President-elect Barack Obama, with many fearing the new administration will not be receptive to the needs of American farmers and ranchers.
A Reuters straw poll of more than 800 farmers at the American Farm Bureau Federation’s annual meeting in San Antonio found 72 percent of the respondents did not believe Obama would have the best interest of the farmer in mind.
Instead of helping U.S. sectors that produce goods for the country, such as farmers, several mentioned Obama would focus on programs that work to even out income and help those that are seeking something from the government.
U.S. farmers, who tend to be social and fiscal conservatives, have traditionally supported Republicans. One Illinois farmer said he was “not necessarily a Republican beating a drum here but… I just don’t have the confidence in him that I probably should have.”
The Farm Bureau, the nation’s largest farm group, representing growers and ranchers, has adopted a more optimistic tone. Bob Stallman, president of the group, said Obama made several positive comments toward agriculture during the campaign and has expressed a need to have a healthy farm economy.
– Christopher Doering
Photo: President-elect Barack Obama tastes some peaches during a campaign stop at a farmers market in Greensboro, North Carolina, on August 20, 2008. REUTERS/Jim Young
The american farmer has been left out, I’m talking about the mom and pop small farmers. The large ag farmers reap many thousands of dollars of subsidies while the small farm family’s loose money because they cannot afford fuel, fertilizer,seed or insurance!
The cost of keeping up equipment, replacing older equipment, have driven the small producers into bankruptsy as these cost have quad drippled in the last 10 years.
The small independent farms simply can’t afford to buy new equipment. The needs that come from govt laws, to be able to comply need to be overhauled!
The small family farms are loosing the younger generation, to leave the farming business for jobs in the bigger cities as they can’t make a living on the family farm! As we loose these young farmers the farms are sold to developers for more homes for people that want to get away from the cities, yet be able to commute to jobs that are found in the industrial cities.
We are losing the land and the people that feed the world!
Pollan writes books for affluent Americans who don’t have real problems and need something to get worked up about.