Local Food or Global Eater?

The local food advocates say we should eat locally, save on food-miles that create carbon dioxide to add to global warming. I wonder, which is better, to import winter fruits and vegetables from Chile, for example, or to export oneself to Chile in order to eat there?

Rising Organic Food Prices

According to NYTimes, the organic food industry is being hit and hurt by rising prices, particularly the dairy and meat people who have to pay higher prices for organic grain.

(I really need to get off this kick, but I find it interesting observing the theories of the organic/locavore community and seeing whether they're borne out when the economic facts change.)

Earmarks, the Good and the Bad

Kevin Drum notes that "earmarks", which Sen. McCain (and the Dems) have vowed to attack, includes stuff like aid to Israel and military housing.

He has some sane comments as well.

As for me, I'm bitter about what I'll call the policy/legislative earmarks in appropriations (like one provision in many ag appropriations bills prohibiting USDA from releasing data publicly before they give it to Congress). The dollar earmarks are an invitation to corruption, as may have occurred with the highway interchange in Florida, put in by Alaska's representative's staff. (I like the idea of Alaska earmarking for Florida.) But, with some transparency, some earmarking gives a good way to bypass the bureaucracy, which does need to be bypassed occasionally.

Obama Shows His Youth

Here's a post with video of Gumbel interviewing Obama (from ESPN, ? maybe?). It's interesting, but Obama says he took up basketball as a youth partly because it was a "black" game. (He seems pretty good in the pickup game later.) But when I was a youth, 20 years earlier it was a "white" game--blacks were just the comic relief aka Harlem Globetrotters. Bob Pettit and that bald white guard were big scorers, along with Bob Cousy and Bill Sharman with Boston. Of course, then they got Russell and the Joneses and we were in a different era.

A Sense of Humor at Farmgate

Farmgate summarizes weather, planting and crop conditions, state by state. (Most of Midwest had 1 hr to do fieldwork--too much rain. Conditions not much better elsewhere. The last two states in the list:

WISCONSIN: Soils are wet in Wisconsin with 48% having surplus moisture and the rest has adequate moisture, but no fieldwork was underway last week due to continued snow, rain, and muddy conditions. A few oats are in the ground, but not enough to reach 1% for the state.

HAWAII: (Just for comparison purposes) There were 7 days available for fieldwork, soil moisture is adequate, and all crops are in perfect condition, but field work will be coming to a halt due to volcanic emissions and smoke that have necessitated evacuation.

Environmental Working Group--Pioneer in Transparency

Having been there when ASCS was responding to the initial EWG FOIA request, I was struck by this comment (from an article mostly focused on Arkansas rice):

The group’s farm-subsidy database has played a pivotal role in the policy debates surrounding U. S. agricultural policy, said Sallie James, a trade-policy analyst with the Washington-based Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.

“I’m lobbying for [Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group ] to get a public service medal,” James said. “I can’t think of anything that’s been done in the public policy arena in the last 20 years that has had as much of an impact as this seemingly simple Freedom of Information request.”

It's true enough, but you have to add in the Internet as a vital enabler.

Impact of High Costs

I'll bypass the links and just comment on a series of recent articles, all discussing the impact of higher food costs.

• Pizza parlors are having trouble. Flour and cheese costs are up, as is fuel for delivery. And what's worse, they have few means to fight back, compared to...
• Fast food places, which are going to "value" menus, like McD's "dollar" menu.
• Sit down restaurants are fighting back by exploring ways to serve less food, but make it look bigger. Presentation, presentation... They can't have food costs of more than 30 percent and still make a profit.
• School lunch programs are cutting corners wherever they can, including being less tolerant of nutritious but less popular choices.

And of course, as I seem to remember in the 70's, we now have truckers striking, because they're severely hurt by higher fuel costs.

Old Codgers and Bad Memories:G. Will and Me

George Will (who's, if I remember correctly, just a tad younger than I) displays a bad memory in his piece on Obama. He ends with this paragraph, after noting that Obama apologized in Munice, IN:

"In 1929 and 1937, Robert and Helen Lynd published two seminal books of American sociology. They were sympathetic studies of a medium-size manufacturing city they called "Middletown," coping -- reasonably successfully, optimistically and harmoniously -- with life's vicissitudes. "Middletown" was in fact Muncie, Ind".

Well, not quite. From Wikipedia:

"The Lynds did not study the African-American population of Middletown. They justified this because this group only composed 5 percent of the total population. However, modern critics argue that this was a racial oversight conditioned by the era in which the study took place. A similar argument applies to the fact that they didn't study Jews who lived in the city.

Although the Lynds attempted to avoid ideology, theory, or political statements, the focus of their initial study can be construed as an endorsement (however faint) of Progressive Era politics. Also, the study is sometimes accused of being elitist and old-fashioned, as it seems to bemoan the rise of "popular culture" such as films and the fall of farm culture.

Because the study took an anthropological/scientific approach to Middletown society, and because at the time it was the first large-scale attempt to describe a modern town in this manner, some critics claimed that it was inherently condescending and degrading to the town's citizens. First, by treating humans as objects of study, they argued that it was immoral and degrading. Seccondly, they argues the study implied that its denizens were no more advanced than a primitive tribe. The study's approach to religion was specially singled out on this count. For example, in the introduction to the first edition of Middletown in Transition, the Lynds recounted an incident where town leaders placed a copy of the first book in the cornerstone of a building. Several pastors from the town's more fundamentalist congregations angrily argued that the book deserved to be burned rather than praised because of how it described (and, from their perspective, insulted) the town's religious activities.

The second study, in contrast to the first, is extremely political in tone and openly critical of American culture in general. Also, the Lynds made predictions (i.e., on the possibility of a future American dictatorship) that never came to pass.

Furthermore, the second study is accused of "begging the question." Despite its title, there really was no real "conflict" within Middletown during the Great Depression. However, in reading the language of the authors, it becomes increasingly clear that they believed that there should have been class conflict. This is expressed in the frustration employed by the authors - they apparently hoped and expected that such a conflict would break out, and began the study with this preconception. However, this preconception was incorrect.

I think the lesson is it's very easy to come across as elitist when you take an analytic approach to someone/something. The Lynds did this, Obama did this, and so does George Will. Why Will? Because the Middletown books depict a city governed by the old WASP elite, all male, all white, all comfortable--all harmonious because the others were on the outside. It's Reagan's America (Will and Reagan both hail from small city Illinois). Mr. Wills has fond and pleasant memories of this America, so he think's the Lynd's description must also have been rosy. Am I being condescending to him? Yes, of course, perhaps somewhat mitigated by our shared age, race, and sex.

Food Prices and Free Trade

The locavore movement should endorse tariffs--they keep out competing cheaper produce from outside (as in the criticism of NAFTA--Mexican corn farmers are suffering from US corn and FL tomato growers worried about Mexican tomatoes). Now, via Farm Policy, comes a report that many nations are reducing agricultural tariffs as a measure to fight the rise in food costs.

It's all sort of reminiscent of the 70's. Speaking of which, Tom Philpott is reading Dan Morgan's Merchants of Grain, which was written in 1979, providing an excerpt mentioning the buying of American farmland by foreign investors, the expansion of irrigation, and the conversion of old soil bank land back to crops.

Of course, one remembers the 1980's as well, when a conservative Republican President did the biggest land diversion program ever (in 1983).

The Last Farm Bill?

Keith Good posts a Dan Morgan article on the farm, discussing the misfit between the current economic outlook for farmers and the programs of the past. He passes along this speculation:

The impasse has led some to suggest the unthinkable: This could be the last farm bill of its kind, and perhaps even the last farm bill.

That possibility was advanced privately last week by several serious policy analysts and former senior government officials attending Informa Economics, Inc.’s annual conference on food and agriculture policy in Arlington, Va.

Imagine, they suggested, that the current high prices are not just a blip but a permanent new condition, much like high oil prices. In that case, the commodity title of the farm bill will look increasingly irrelevant. Government price guarantees will no longer be operative at their current levels, and the billions of dollars in direct payments to farmers will become politically unsupportable.

I'm not convinced by the premise. Sure, the rapid rise of people from poverty to middle class tastes in Asia and elsewhere creates more markets for more food and more meat. The growing acceptance of global warming and the promotion of biofuel creates new markets for stuff that grows. The growth of locavore and slow food and organic creates new niches to absorb the products of the land.

But, it will take a while, but this too is a bubble like others we've seen. $20 wheat is growing to seriously focus the minds of growers everywhere. $20 wheat will pay for equipment and fertilizer and buying up land and putting under management that can grow. (Note: "$20 wheat" is just a symbol of the prices.) U.S. farmers need to make hay while the sun shines, because the one thing that's sure is that rain will follow sun.