turanga leela’s Recent Comments

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  Aha--you've called me out of the socialist closet. ;)

  According to the conservative view of economics, the government acts in the best interest of its people by ensuring the health of industry--making jobs available for all, so that everyone who wants to work has the opportunity to do so. But according to this view, government should not intrude unduly on competition, because the marketplace is the best decider of what industries and individual economic entities succeed or fail. It's kind of like social Darwinism, actually. But from a humanist perspective, the result of classical conservatism has been that the laissez-faire approach has allowed industry to game the system, tilting everything in their favor at the expense of workers. The result? Longer working hours, fewer jobs, a high unemployment rate, captains of industry making huge profits while the masses struggle to get by. This is not merely rhetoric, especially when magazines like The Economist have been following these social trends for some time. And the other result is the tragedy of the commons--nobody is responsible for what happens to externalities--soil, air, water quality, resource depletion.

  Enter the Farm Bill. From a basic Enlightenment era view of human existence, on which this country was founded, there are such things as basic human rights. And food is a basic human right. To a certain extent the US government has modernised and agrees with this statement. The Farm Bill is actually a holdover to the era when our country courted socialism--the 30s and 40s. This thinking is therefore a strange fit for our government's generally conservative approach to economics (which holds that we should ensure jobs so that people can buy food). But food is an area where we run up against our favorite national myth--American exceptionalism. Not everyone can work, after all, because not everyone in a family is a wage-earner (children, for example, and the disabled and the elderly). And there are even a lot of people who do work but can still barely afford to feed themselves because they earn so little. And if we allowed some of our own people to starve, meaning the ones who can't work or whose wages are too low for them to adequately feed themselves, we would not be exceptional. Thus we subsidize the production of food.

  Imagine what would happen now if we dismantled the Farm Bill entirely. It would still be built on a commodity system, because the commodity system pre-dates the Farm Bill. It's more similar, in fact, to the cash-cropping system we started with as slave-owning colonists. But now we have the ability through technology to treat farming like any other business--that is, maximize profits in the short term while minimizing concern for externalities like soil and water in the long term--to strip the soil dry of nutrients and pollute our own waterways, with no oversight at all. People would continue to grow commodity crops--getting the biggest return for the smallest amount of input--only now there would be no incentive to place any limits on what they grow or how it's grown. You could say goodbye to all conservation lands in the Midwestern agricultural landscape. There would be no incentives to consider nutritional needs whatsoever, or any ecological considerations, which are also now mandated by the Farm Bill. It is for all of these social and ecological reasons that food production cannot be dealt with in the same way as aluminum siding production, if we want to do right by society and the rural landscape.

  As to your final point, as I understand it, the critique coming from developing nations who are members of the WTO is that the US and Europe produce food too cheaply because we subsidize our farmers, so that there is no market for food commodities coming from those developing nations, which lack both economies of scale and the ability to subsidize their farmers, because their GDPs are too low. (Of course, some of these nations are also corrupt and allow the upper classes to embezzle their tax revenues, but that's another matter...)

  On The EPA holds corn ethanol accountable ... sort of posted 6 months ago 18 Responses

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  The farming industry is like a lot of other industries--there are a small number of huge and highly profitable operations that still manage to get fat government paychecks in addition to the paychecks they're already getting. But it's unfair to assume that all farmers are getting money they don't need just because there's a few who are. That said, the subsidy system is horribly inefficient and horribly structured. What sense does it make to pay farmers to grow crops that nobody really wants, like GMO corn? A lot of smaller scale farmers do need help--or they go bankrupt. But what they should be getting is income support, not price support. Income support would free them up to grow whatever they want, and I know a lot of people who grew up in farming towns who are friends with people who are still farming who would like to grow organic vegetables and whatnot but feel that making the switch is too risky. The conservative, ideological ones prefer price support because income support feels too much like welfare to them. But the pragmatists realize that income support would be far more efficient and would not allow debacles like highly profitable and huge operations getting government checks on top of their earnings to happen. But those highly profitable operations are also well connected in the Farm Bureau, which is well connected in DC, and is going to lobby like hell to make sure a switch from price support to income support never happens. The thing to do, as I see it, would be to organize all the Farmers Unions, which are usually made up of the smaller and more progressive operations, to lobby for income support. That might have some effect on the next Farm Bill.

  As a side note, it is just as unfair to characterize Midwestern agriculture as run by greedy agribusiness profiteers as it is to portay a romanticized, 19th century pastoralist enterprise. Neither is true. There are lots and lots of farmers who produce commodities that are then purchased by ADM. ADM is not a farmer. They purchase commodities that are grown by farmers. That's why every small Midwestern farming town has a grain elevator and silos in the middle, so that the farmers can bring their corn in at the end of the season and sell it to ADM. But these small farming operations use big diesel tractors, ammonia fertilizer, and all the other stuff that is harmful to the rural landscape as a whole. So it's not a monolithic, evil agribusiness system versus the noble small scale organic farmer. It's one mindset versus another, perpetuated by a broken government funding system. Farmers both organic and non will tell you this themselves.

  On The EPA holds corn ethanol accountable ... sort of posted 6 months ago 18 Responses

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  BioD-

  
  I tried to reply yesterday but I had technical difficulties with my browser.

  You are right. There are no LCA models that have "zero" as a number for indirect land use change, and the biofuels industry is going to pay some kind of GHG penalty for it, as other industries already do (such as the carbon offsetting/afforestation/reforestation industry, which pays for ILUC, or as they call it, "leakage"). You are also right that I was perhaps overly snarky with my "corn toadies" comment. I have been called that, but not here on Grist, simply because I don't see the value in environmentalists going out of their way to be verbally insulting and frightening to farmers, as though farmers were their enemies. It's important to speak politely to the people who grow your food, and if you want to suggest that they grow it differently, then make those suggestions as gentle and pleasant-sounding as possible. ;)

  I know lots of life cycle modelers, and they all say that Searchinger's conclusions were a bit "out there," simply because they placed too much language of certainty on what is still uncertain. He worked with a team of researchers at the Center for Agriculture and Rural Development (CARD) at the University of Iowa for the commodity-value portion of the model, and there was a lot of internal strife there about whether or not the report was ready for prime time. They don't think he's too far off the mark, but generally it's considered bad form to present inconclusive findings as conclusive--precisely because people can come back and challenge you on them later on, which is exactly what happened. Just know that you don't endear yourself to life cycle modelers, or to the biofuel industry, when you cite Searchinger. If you want to build bridges and get a good national climate policy package passed sometime this century, cite CARD or FAPRI. The ag industry getting behind a climate policy in general is going to be the tipping point--and they've got lots of incentive to do something about climate change, being that their industry is the one that is the most dependent on the availability of rainfall, and the latest climate projections for 2100 out of NOAA are enough to give the director of the National Farm Bureau nightmares.

  On The EPA holds corn ethanol accountable ... sort of posted 6 months ago 18 Responses

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  Racje- Don't forget there are radically different economic and social realities between the US and the developing world--a night and day difference. In the US it's true that the rich are more likely to go to health food stores and the poor to McDonald's, but the poor in this country are like the rich in other countries. The poor in developing nations are starving less now than they were a few years ago, but according to the big development programmes the #1 problem for them now is malnutrition. And don't forget about economies of scale--when you have 4 billion people, eating just one additional meal with meat and dairy per week is going to have a huge impact. But unfortunately it's not enough to just say "reduce the surplus population" because population growth is exponential, and humans (ideally) live past their teenage years, so something has to be done to feed the population we have until the birth rates have been lower than the death rates for long enough to have made a difference in the overall population. This is part of why people are so incensed about using food for fuel, because the population is growing so much. However, it is also true that the GMO foodstuffs we have become experts at making in this country are woefully inadequate in terms of total nutrition. Nutritious food--that is, organic food enriched with natural fertilizer--requires a much larger land area to grow than do agribusiness food crops, which have been bred for maximum yield, but not for maximum nutrition. So it seemed like a good idea to use up that GMO stuff for cars. But tying the food commodities market to the fuel market made foodstuffs more valuable for investors, which radically raised the price of food faster than real wages were going up. Of course there were other things going on in the marketplace, like commodities being a safe bet for investors when other markets like housing were more volatile, and in the end it may take a while to understand and separate how much of an effect each factor had. What we do know is that the biofuels boom played its part in the food price explosion, and that combination is too dangerous for anyone to any longer consider biofuels made from food as a long term solution for reducing fossil fuel use. This is why government incentives for corn ethanol and whatnot are being frozen where they are right now--not as much because of GHGs. And the risk of volatile market response is enough of a reason why we can't grow our way out of society's needs for, as the industry says, "food, feed, and fuel"--because it isn't a volume issue, it's a market issue.

  You say, "Farmers will continue to work hard and earn little." That is true for most farmers. And that is why farmers have to be incorporated in some way that is beneficial to them in our society's plans to reduce society's GHGs. The trouble is, how to include them. My understanding of farmers is that whatever can increase their earning power will be seen by them as a good thing, so it shouldn't matter whether they're selling corn for ethanol or carbon offsets or biogas or cellulosic biomass or whatever, so long as they get some kind of economic boost for doing the right thing. But it's imperative now that we are setting a 50+ year plan in motion for those of us who are writing policy to think about how to make sure farmers who are struggling get an income boost from a low carbon economy instead of additional financial woes, but do so in a way that actually solves the problem of global warming rather than a way that does nothing to reduce GHGs, or worse, exacerbates the problem, because it's not their job to be experts about what are truly effective GHG-reducing policies--it's ours.

  On The EPA holds corn ethanol accountable ... sort of posted 6 months ago 18 Responses

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  I ♥ wonkery. Bring it!

  On Energy efficiency vs. neoliberal economics posted 6 months ago 28 Responses