Surprising Factoid of the Week--Chinese Govt Worries About Customer Service

Al Gore, before he was elected President, worried a lot about the government and customer service. Apparently the Chinese (mainland, not Taiwan) do too, because Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution reports:

At the Beijing airport as the customs official questions you, you get to rate them - there is an electronic box, hidden from their view, that asks for your rating of service.

The idea of the Chinese government getting feedback from their customers boggles the mind.

Wetlands and Oil Drilling

Steven Pearlstein has a take on offshore drilling in the Post. To sum up:

The frustrating thing about this standoff is that both sides have it half-right. Republicans are right that we need more oil and gas drilling, more refineries and a revival of nuclear power. And Democrats are right in demanding that we finally get serious about conservation, crack down on speculation and market manipulation, and recycle windfall profits into alternative energy sources.

Unfortunately, they're both so thoroughly captured by their interest groups, and so determined to defeat the other's policies, that they haven't noticed we're now so deep in the hole that we have no choice but to do it all: Gas drilling off the coast of Florida and wind farms off the coast of New England. Curbs on speculation and curbs on CO2 emissions. Tax hikes for oil companies and tax breaks for solar.

I often like "a curse on both your houses" thinking (was that Shakespeare?). I don't like NIMBYism, which accounts for much of the opposition to offshore drilling. But I've also a knee-jerk reaction, a sort of romantic feeling that progress is steamrolling everything and wondering why we can't keep some things forever. I guess, contra Pearlstein, Dems are more right because drilling means tapping an expendable resource. If we don't drill now, nothing happens to the oil and gas. Our descendants can someday drill if they think it advisable. While the Democratic proposals are permanent--once we do solar, we can keep doing solar forever.

I would suggest, though, the possibility of "mitigation". The law permits farmers to drain one wetland by mitigating the damage by recreating another wetland. In other words, the law says we're going to always have X million acres of wetland, but it may not always be in the same place. I wonder whether it's possible to take the same approach to drilling. If an oil company exhausts one field, make it clean up its mess and then allow it to drill the same number of acres somewhere else. That approach might provide some flexibility for business and reassure people like me that drilling doesn't mean a permanent, forever, loss of the environment.

Farming and Bananas

I'm always interested in farming, I found this bit on bananas in the Philippines at Freakonomics in the comments (general post on bananas):

I’m from the Philippines and we do grow a lot of bananas. Most of the banana plantations are in Mindanao because of the stable climate conditions and fertile soil. The crops from from these plantations are only for export, and they only grow Cavendish there. The bananas they pick are still unripe when harvested to keep them firm durig transportation.

About the condition of the employees. Right now, employees of large companies like Dole and Del Monte experience fair labor practices. Most of the land of the plantations were under Agrarian reform, so the farmers own the land, which they rent to the companies to plant. The farmers are hired as employees, so aside from rent from land, they also get wages, and they have a stable job. These gives them incentives to be more productive, and hence higher manufacturing efficiency.

But this was not the case 30 years ago, before land reform. Farmers were tenants, and they were planting the land which were owned by really rich families. They had no security of tenure. They were overworked and underpaid, and yes, there were no healthcare benefits. there was also child labor: children of farmers would rather skip school and help in planting to increase family income. Also sometimes, there were unjust land owners. They have control over the farmers and their families because they feared being thrown away from from the farms, their only livelihood and their homes. [Is the land reform significant--wish I could find a study of the land tenure arrangements across the world. I'm speaking as a descendant of someone who was a renter in Ireland but owned a large estate (by Irish standards) in Illinois by the time he died.]

And in the Philippines, bananas are staple foods, specially in the really poor provinces where rice and corn are very expensive.

Surprising Factoid of the Day--the French Export Food [Updated]

From the CAP Health Check (the blog on EU ag policy):

The UK runs a large trade deficit in food and agricultural products, at around 22 billion euros or 13 per cent of GDP (see table below). This makes global food price increases especially damaging for reasons that I’ll explain below. By contrast, France runs a trade surplus in food of almost 5 per cent of GDP.

I'm too lazy to check, but I doubt the U.S. surplus is that big.

[Updated: Turns out the French export more wine than we do soybeans or corn and the Brits export more beer/ale. (2004 figures). And our 2008 exports are only $91 billion (record high value) but that's tiny compared to GDP/GNP of $14 trillion. That differential explains why the French do more for their farmers than we do for ours--the agricultural sector is much more important.)

Veal

Via Down to Earth, this post on a project for organic, humane veal shows some of the problems of these efforts in mass society:

So, ironically, even though the chefs love the flavor and the Azuluna story and that the flavor and texture is excellent regardless of the size, many of them will stop buying it or complain to the distributor that it lacks consistency in size. This is a problem for the high end cuts only - as the chefs are fearful of serving chops of differing sizes and charging the same price. The solution to this problem is to get more producers raising the veal and to expand the market into NYC. This would balance out the size problem, as cuts could be grouped by the distributors according to size. However, in order to recruit more producers, I need to promise them a market.

So, we consumers want consistency--no surprises, please. But that implies production practices and a scale of operation that's difficult to develop. In a way, we want what we had years and years ago, but destroyed because our preferences valued consistency, uniformity, etc.

(This subject rings a small bell for me--we sold our bull calves at about a week or 10 days. The old quip goes that the dairy is the most feminist place around.)

Eating Your Own Dog Food, Or Something

There's phenomena among the chattering classes, I believe on all sides of the political spectrum, of eating their own dogfood. That is, when they have an argument to make, their citations tend to be to the secondary, or tertiary, literature, not to primary source material. What it means is there's a tendency to talk in an echo chamber, to repeat the same urban myths, and to ignore facts or alternatives.

There's an example here:

"The last time food prices shot up, in the 1970s, the U.S. response was to put more land into agricultural production. This was the infamous "fencerow-to-fencerow" policy of Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz that Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma, has linked to the glut of corn -- and corn syrup -- that has so profoundly affected global diets. "

The whole piece discusses how North Korea was and is a canary warning the world of imminent catastrophe.

FSA's Problems with the New Farm Bill

Are implied in the discussion at the University of Illinois extension farmgate site.

Different members of Congress had different takes on the Average Crop Revenue Election Program, so the odds are that FSA will come up with an interpretation that someone disagrees with, and that someone may have enough clout to change the law on them. (I think it's true that a flood-caused spike in corn prices in 2008 makes the program more problematic in the long run, since it raises the likelihood of a fall in prices in the out years, and the revenue guarantee is based on history. In the old days for yields we used the "Olympic average", dropping high and low years which recognized that farming can be very variable. Something to consider.)

On Why We Need Health Insurance

See this post of Erin's.

Obviously, healthy ranchers in Montana don't need health insurance, right?

Improving Flow in the Oldest Profession

There's a piece in the Times today on something I'd never heard of--prostitution reviews. Apparently this guy has a website where Johns can rate their satisfaction with their prostitutes. Apparently it's just part of the impact of the Internet on the oldest profession--prostitutes are using it to connect with a higher class of customer (maybe even the former governor of NY).

Economists have written on the imbalances of information, as between the seller and buyer of a used car; here's another case where technology comes to the rescue of mismatched customers and buyers, improving the net happiness of the world. (I guess.)

Whose Property?

Shankar Vedantam in the Post wrote about property yesterday and Tyler Cowen and Ross Hanson links to it. Research seems to show that those people who decorate their cars with bumper stickers, regardless of the sentiment, are more aggressive drivers than those milquetoasts like me who have an unadorned car (almost put a Gore sticker on in 2000, but didn't) and who just fume inside when someone cuts me off or tailgates or whatever.

The researchers' explanation is people have difference senses of "property"--our sense of possession of our bedroom is "private", whereas walking down a city street is "public". So the theory is people who decorate their cars consider them to be private, or privatish, and take more offense when their property is impinged on. (Reminds me of a cartoon I saw yesterday, although I can't get the punch line right: it was someone in a sort of vehicle, explaining to the bystander it wasn't their new SUV, it was their new house.)

I was struck by the sense of property idea. One thing I've noticed, living in a townhouse cluster where one's yard extends about 3-6 feet from the house and the rest is common, my sense of property doesn't match my neighbors, or rather, it took a good while for me to adjust. In the country our farm was a bit isolated, so anyone appearing on one's land was sort of automatically an intruder, suspicious, perhaps a hunter, perhaps a city person, definitely someone whose business you'd want to know. (Didn't want hunters mistaking cows for deer or city folks scaring the cows and cutting their milk production.) This might fit with the imperialistic image of farmers, who don't want anything except the land next to theirs. And, of course, reinforced by the need for fences. Anyhow, it's a different sense of property than I see in Reston. There's no property markers evident.

I thought of that yesterday, but got interrupted from posting it. Then this morning I got reminded of how we are just animals, after all. Petting our older cat, whose mother was feral and who still retains a bit of edge, everything was fine until she decided to jump into her cardboard box and bulge over its sides and I continued to pet her. Wrong! For her, when she's in a box or a paper bag, that's her property and she defends it, even when the hand approaching the box or bag harbors only good intentions.

Bottom line: Cats own property too.