Locavores Take a Hit

From Brownfield Network:

The biggest and most successful tomato grower in the northeastern United States has decided not to plant tomatoes this year because he’s afraid there won’t be enough labor available to plant and harvest his crop. Keith Eckle told Brownfield, because Congress hasn’t reformed current immigration law, he simply can’t risk planting a crop that could end up rotting in the fields.

"Our investment in those tomatoes is about $1.5 million," Eckle explained. "We cannot afford to plant that crop, put that much money out, and not know that we can harvest that crop."

Instead, Eckle will plant grain corn on his acres that normally go to tomatoes, pumpkins and sweet corn. But because produce is of such greater value, even with high commodity prices, Eckle said he’ll probably only make a third of the profit he enjoys in a typical year.

Later he points out that he's within 6 hours of the whole Northeast (located in PA, apparently--article doesn't specify).

To me the logic of the local food/slow food movement is that each region becomes more self-sufficient (that's their logic, not something I endorse). But this shows the interdependencies which exist--you can have local tomatoes only if you're willing to import foreign labor. Or you can keep out foreign labor but only if you're willing to import foreign tomatoes. (As Robert Heinlein wrote, there's no such thing as a free lunch.) Note we aren't talking "organic" here--the devotees of that cause can scare up enough young native idealists to do that labor.

More on Privacy

MSNBC's Red Tape says looking at other's data goes on all the time while Government Executive finds someone to comment more generally on privacy and the problems in government agencies.

Meanwhile, innovators are ripping away the mask of privacy from government employees--the NYTimes reports on a website where you can post evaluations of police officers you encounter. (The president of the California police association isn't happy.) It's not unlike the site for rating your professor, which is now matched by a site for professors to respond, or your neighbor.

Soon everyone will rate everyone.

Where Are the Fashion Police?

Watched the movie "Election" the other night, then the director's commentary. (I liked the movie, not great, but good.) Mathew Broderick ("Wargames") is playing a high school social studies teacher, who ends up trying to manipulate the election for president of the student body to prevent Reese Witherspoon from winning. (To any right-thinking Republican, Reese is a clone of Hillary Clinton. To any Dem, she's Karl Rove in drag.)

Anyhow, what offends me and raises my dander is how the director mocked the Broderick character's short sleeve dress shirts. It was terrible. You'd think it was a crime against fashion to wear such shirts. I wore these shirts for all of my government career, at least during the hot months.

The director should know that fine stores such as Hechts or Sears would refuse to sell such shirts if they constituted a crime against fashion. You don't see them selling pot or crack, do you?

Perspectives

Shankar Vedantam in today's Post has an article on the different perspectives blacks and whites bring to race in the U.S.--whites assume a perspective of comparing the present to the past, and seeing how far we've come; blacks assume a perspective of comparing the ideal future to the present, and seeing how far we have to go. Research shows if your question sets the perspective for the respondent and doesn't let them assume the two groups tend to give similar assessments.

Fruit and Vegetable

From Congressional Research Service report to Congress on WTO status
includes the status of the fruit and vegetable limitation (which I blogged about here).

The claim that the United States has exceeded its total spending limits hinges
largely on a previous ruling from the U.S.-Brazil cotton case in which a WTO panel
found that U.S. payments made under the Production Flexibility Contract (PFC) and
Direct Payment (DP) programs do not qualify for the WTO’s green box exemption
category because of their prohibition on planting fruits, vegetables, and wild rice on
covered program acreage. However, the panel did not make the extension that PFC and DP payments should therefore be counted as amber box programs, but instead was mute on this point. In its WTO notifications, the United States has notified its PFC payments as fully decoupled and green box compliant.21 This is an important distinction because the green box contains only non-distorting program payments and is not subject to any limit. Canada and Brazil argue that, because of the previous panel ruling, PFC and DP payments do not conform with WTO green-box rules and should be included with U.S. amber box payments.

The report suggests the issue is moot--because projections for high commodity prices into the future will keep the U.S. from violating the WTO limits.

Snooping in Passport Files

Read somewhere that smart op-ed writers polish up their piece independent of the news, then wait for some event to happen that they can piggyback on, tweaking the piece slightly. As I said, smart.

But I'm not that smart, so the flap over passport files leaves me wishing I was.

From what little I know and have watched, it seems that the cable channels are misstating the facts when they mention "flags"--the State Department system was set up to flag when the files of certain persons were accessed, but it wasn't smart enough to know whether the access was inappropriate. I'm glad we've advanced that far, but sorry we haven't taken another step--set up the system to email the passport holder when someone accesses it. (That's one of my hobbyhorses.)

As for the immediate flap, I'd guess the instances are cases of curiosity gone astray. And it surprises me not at all that the accesses weren't reported up the line. It's just not the way things work. When State put in the system that would show accesses, I bet no one did a trial run to establish how the flags would be handled. At best, the high muckety-mucks were told--hey, remember that flap over Clinton's files in 92, well now we've got a new improved automated system that will flag such accesses. And the HMM's said: "great job", and went on to something more seemingly important.

Rules on Blogging, Per the Times [Updated]

I was raised to view the NYTimes as the authority, so I may adopt the philosophy in their article today on blogging:

Just post it already! The hurdle that stops many would-be bloggers is fear of clicking the “Publish” button. Xeni Jardin, who juggles blogging at the quirky alternative-news site BoingBoing.net with a career as a freelance journalist for NPR, Wired magazine and others, resists the urge to polish her blog prose the way she would a radio script. “Don’t bottle up your ideas forever believing you have to hit the same kind of mature, complete, perfect point as you would with a magazine or newspaper article,” she says. “Blogs are always in progress.” Boing Boing’s bloggers are known for going back to posts to update them, adding new information and striking out factual errors.

E-Government Isn't Gaining Support

This article says the USDA home page gets low satisfaction marks, compared to other government sites, which also are declining in their evaluation.

I'm not surprised, although the page has certainly improved over the years. I don't know all the problems. Partially, I suspect it's because USDA and its customers had a 100+ year history of how to relate and the Internet is very different. Or, more accurately, each USDA agency has its own customers and its own history and its own pattern for dealing with the customers. In some cases the dealing is partially mediated by state agencies (consider nutrition programs) or by private companies (consider crop insurance).

I'd bet (something, but not a lot) that USDA and most other government agencies don't have much feedback on what's working for them and what's not, at least not compared to sites that rely on advertising for finances.

And no one knows what potential uses are ignored. For example, look at what's available on-line for school lunch authorization. FNS seems to have just put their document package on-line. Is there a missed opportunity to have the forms fillable on line? (That's available from other agencies.) But how many school lunch recipients would really fill it in on-line--probably not many. But I'd guess the Secretary of Agriculture has no one looking at statistics to identify the best places to put his Internet assets.

I Find the Nation's Ehrenreich To Be Nutty

To undermine my liberal credentials, I find this Nation article by Barbara Ehrenreich to be deeply nutty--to wit, Hillary Clinton is part of a secretive conservative "Family" of religious people, almost a "cult" that has been and continues to be fascinated by Adolf Hitler. Ehrenbach ends:

" Obama has given a beautiful speech on race and his affiliation with the Trinity United Church of Christ. Now it's up to Clinton to explain--or, better yet, renounce--her long-standing connection with the fascist-leaning Family."

I hasten to admit that I've no facts with which to counter the article. It sounds similar to the conspiracy theories woven around Opus Dei. Call me naive, but I believe in no conspiracies, of either right or left.

Playing Games Again

I'm not expert, but I think the Congressional Budget Office just released their "scoring" of the farm bill. Here's the paragraph in which they delineate the major changes.

This estimate assumes H.R. 2419 would be modified to: have an effective date
of October 1, 2008, for most changes to nutrition programs (title IV),
authorize Value-Added Marketing Grants (section 6027) for five years instead
of six, make federal purchases of bio-based products (section 9002)
mandatory, require the target ratio of crop insurance premiums to indemnities
to equal 1.0 (title X), and apply the specified change in the percentage for
corporate estimated payments (section 13003) to the new, current-law
percentage.

I don't understand some of them, but clearly the first item says that nutrition (i.e., food stamp enhancements wouldn't take effect in FY 2008) and it pulls a "Bush" by cutting the authorization of grants by 1 year. (I say a "Bush" because that's how the Reps got a tax cut bill scored--make the tax cuts effective for 9 of the 10 year scoring period and "assume" that Congress would allow the tax law to revert back in the 10th. In this case "assume" does mean--make an "ass" of "u" and "me".)