Corn Growers Fight Back on Ethanol

Amidst the tides of public opinion, which wash back and forth over the landscape, why do the Iowa corn growers remind me of King Canute? According to Brownfield, they've upped their assessment in order to fight for corn-based ethanol.

First Tomatoes

Okay, with that title you expect a paean to the pleasures of eating the first-home grown tomatoes of the year. Consider it done.

Farm Workers, from ERS

A summary paragraph from the new ERS publication on farmworkers:

What Did the Study Find?
• In 2006, an average 1.01 million hired farmworkers made up a third of the estimated 3 million people employed in agriculture. The other 2.05 million included self-employed farmers and their unpaid family members.
• Productivity gains have gradually reduced the total agricultural labor force and the number of hired farmworkers within it.
• Expanding nonfarm economic opportunities for farmers and their family members have increased farmers’ reliance on hired farm labor.
• Despite new patterns of Hispanic population settlement in rural areas, the geographic distribution of farmworkers has not changed significantly in the past decade. California, Florida, Texas, Washington, Oregon, and North Carolina account for half of all hired and contracted farmworkers.
• Hired farmworkers are disadvantaged in the labor market relative to most other U.S. wage and salary workers. On average, hired farmworkers are younger, less educated, more likely to be foreign-born, less likely to speak English, and less likely to be U.S. citizens or to have a legally authorized work permit.
• According to the National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS), which offers the most precise data available on farmworker legal status, half of all hired crop farmworkers lack legal authorization to work in the United States.

Bio Fuels

On the one hand, USDA is being pressured to release the Conservation Reserve Program acreage for growing annual crops, on another there's pressure to roll back the ethanol mandates/subsidy, and on a third there's discussion of converting to cellulosic ethanol. But, as this Slate article says, there's tradeoffs. Every acre of land on the face of the earth has a current use. If you want to change the use, you trade off one thing for another: it may be food for fuel, it may be greenhouse gases versus carbon traps, it may be wilderness versus cultivation, but there's always trade offs.

FSA's Mood

The head of the Iowa FSA office says FSA is under pressure, because Iowa farmers are under extreme pressure. (I remember the PIK days of 1983 when farmers were going bust because the bubble of the 70's had burst and ASCS was trying to run a new program as a bailout measure.)

NAIS and Veggies

From a Post editorial in reference to the salmonella problem:

"Ms. DeGette points out that the technology exists to trace food and produce from the farm to the dinner table. It's time that Congress put that technology to work to protect the food supply."

In that context, it's hard for those who oppose the NAIS to gain traction.

As a followup, Nextstep cautions Congress on trying to mandate technological fixes.

More on ACRE

The ACRE program really makes me shudder, and this from farmgate doesn't help. Why? Because FSA had, and I think still has, a general "misaction/misinformation" provision. The idea being if a bureaucrat tells you something wrong and you act on it, or if the bureaucrat does something wrong which harms you, FSA should make you whole.

From a philosophical standpoint, it's interesting. (There's a certain parallel to the FISA debate going on--the bill that just passed the Senate which Obama and Clinton differed on holds the telecoms harmless/gives them immunity from suits for past acts taken in accord with instructions from the executive. To my mind it's much the same philosophy as misaction/misinformation.) Looked at one way, shouldn't the government expect its citizens to be knowledgeable and to look after their own interests? If so, if a bureaucrat misinforms you, why shouldn't we expect you to know better? To be pejorative, should the government be encouraging its citizens to rely on it? (Conservatives/libertarians can do a great riff on this.)

The political reality is that we have the misaction/misinformation law--write your Congressperson with a grievance and one of the first questions the FSA person who handles the correspondence is going to ask is, was there misaction or misinformation? And, in my experience, the agency will often lean towards saying "yes". If the farmer goes out the door confused, it was the FSA person who confused him. (All farmers are smart, just as all children are above average.)

So, under a brand-new program like ACRE we're particularly likely to have confusion both within FSA and in the agricultural community. We're also particularly likely to see people regretting their choice after a year or two and that's when the claim of "you misinformed me" is likely to be made.

Who Says Bureaucrats Don't Listen

The Director of the Congressional Budget Office listens to David Brooks, and has poetry in his soul, or at least footnote 47 of his testimony.

I Was Wrong, Perhaps [Updated]

I've commented at both Marginal Revolution and John Phipps on posts reporting the existence of a World Bank report that blames biofuel initiatives in Europe and US for 75 percent of a 140 percent increase in food costs over the last 6 years. My comments boil down to: not credible as reported

But the devil's in the details. And people fall into traps of snap judgments. So I might well be wrong for the following reasons:

• the definition of "food". It can mean the costs to the consumer of articles in the supermarket in the U.S. Or it could mean the prices of basic commodities: rice, wheat, corn, etc. averaged over 6.7 billion people. The impact using the first definition is much less than the second, and there could obviously be variations and permutations of the definition.
• the definition of cause--which straw broke the camel's back? If you start with 2002 and look at all the changes in production and demand since, there are many things which impact price.
  

I need to remember the basic economics of agriculture, demand is inelastic and supply is inelastic--changes in supply can cause big changes in price. But so can changes in demand. So a change like biofuels which is new can cause big price hikes. And a new demand is going to seem more significant than a change in old parameters, like the levels of imports by India and China.

Having said all the above, and knowing we still haven't seen the actual study, I still expect the World Bank study to end up at one extreme of the argument, but I can't dismiss it as cavalierly as I did before.

[Update: See here for an update. Via Farm Policy.com]

True Sentence

"If members of Congress could get away with never voting on anything, they'd probably do it."

Kevin Drum, on a new War Powers Act