Last week, I wrote about high crop prices that were inspiring people to make all manner of dubious land-use decisions, like plowing up environmentally sensitive land to plant environmentally destructive corn.
Then I came across an interesting bit from Merchants of Grain: The Power and Profits of the Five Giant Companies at the Center of the World's Food Supply, by veteran Washington Post reporter Dan Morgan. I've just started the book, which first came out in 1979. It's riveting.
After laying out the great boom in grain prices of the early 1970s, which arose after massive, secretive grain sales to the Soviet Union, Morgan writes:
The land itself exhibited the scars of ... the grain economy. Along the North Carolina coast, Italian and Japanese investors bought tens of thousands of acres of marshy wetlands, cleared the trees with bulldozers and Caterpillar tractors, installed drainage ditches, and announced plans for "superfarms." The incentives were corn at $3.00 a bushel and soybeans at $6.50; the world needed more food. But environmentalists in the state expressed concern about the effect of the runoff of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides on the fish and wildlife in the coastal waterways. Investors also purchased marginal farmland in the western edge of the corn belt in Nebraska and ordered fragile grasslands to the plow. Groves of trees, planted under federal programs in the 1930s to prevent soil erosion, were bulldozed so that spindly irrigation systems that wheeled around a central well in 160-acre circles could move unhindered. The land irrigated by these watering systems was plowed, disked, and planted to corn. After the corn was harvested, the thin layer of topsoil blew away in many places, leaving gashes of dunelike sand in the fields of Nebraska.
Do diesel-based farmers dream of electric tractors?
Ask Umbra on ditching dirty things
Comments
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bharshaw Posted 1:10 am
15 Apr 2008
In 1983 a conservative Republican President stretched the law to its limits to approve the largest land diversion program in our history. (The 1983 payment-in-kind program.)
Boom and bust is feature of agriculture. We may have $20 wheat today, but not tomorrow.
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Pompey Road Posted 10:47 pm
15 Apr 2008
Our current president is the one who practices trickle down economics. He says economy is fine and based on sound principles with a sound economic foundation, as he pee's on your leg and tells you it's just raining.
The eons of time and nature was good to us down here. It was not until we become civilized that destroying our habitat become fathomable or fashionable.
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caniscandida Posted 11:30 pm
15 Apr 2008
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2008/04/15/the-pleasures- ...
Thanks to Karen Dawn of DawnWatch for the notice.
Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.
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Biodiversivist Posted 1:44 am
16 Apr 2008
Put in perspective how fast biofuels burn grain. Extrapolating that 100 million tons fed to cars (that use about 2% biofuel) to cars using 100% biofuel, you would get about 5 trillion tons to cars, verses 760 million to livestock.
Or, if all of the people who eat meat also drove cars using 100% biofuel, you would need 50 trillion tons of grain.
But here is the key. About 6 billion people "want" to eat meat. Very few "want" to burn biofuel, especially when they realize it costs more, is worse for global warming, and destroys biodiversity. Governments don't force people to eat meat and dairy.
Some quotes from the Monbiot article:
The production of biofuels this year will consume almost 100m tonnes(7), which suggests that they are directly responsible for the current crisis.
In the midst of a global humanitarian crisis, we have just become legally obliged to use food as fuel. It is a crime against humanity in which every driver in this country has been forced to participate.
I know a few healthy-looking vegans and I admire them immensely. But after almost every talk I give, I am pestered by swarms of vegans demanding that I adopt their lifestyle. I cannot help noticing that in most cases their skin has turned a fascinating pearl grey.
He smacked the hornet's nest and ran away chuckling with that last quip.
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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caniscandida Posted 3:25 am
16 Apr 2008
We are not all like that, you know.
FYI, I am flexi-vegan, allowing now and again some dairy products and eggs, and very very rarely some fish -- not of my own choosing. And, FWIW, I maintain my ancestral oliveness, flushing to walnutness when somebody cute smiles at me. No pearl grey here, save in my hair.
Also, BioD, I am agnostic on whether environmentalists should be commanded to go vegetarian, as being obviously the very best thing that one can do to save the world. I leave that sort of calculation up to you and your number-crunching colleagues -- not failing to notice, though, that the least suggestion that eating less meat, as an environmental benefit, seems knee-jerkedly to send you flying into a tizzy. : )
On the other hand, I am deeply set in my belief that being kind to animals is a good thing for ourselves and for our world.
Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.
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Biodiversivist Posted 12:40 am
17 Apr 2008
I often suggest we eat less meat, like Monbiot. It's the insistence that we eat no animal products that sends me (and obviously Monbiot) into a tizzy.
Between veganism and burning biofuels, the best (and easiest) thing one can do is refuse to burn biofuels because they do more damage on a per person basis.
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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