Comments sideshow1979 has made

  • Well, I think that Obama probably doesn't spend too much time thinking about agriculture policy and isn't going to risk and serious political fights over the issue. Appointments like this are always viewed as throwing a bone to one interest group or another. Merrigan is a win for sustainable agriculture; this guy Beachy is a win for conventional agriculture. The really interesting part will be seeing where the 106 million for sustainable research actually ends up. If done right, it has enormous promise to reshape large parts of of the land grant university research landscape, encouraging more researchers to look at critical sustainability concerns. Once you start getting grad students doing that research, they'll stay on that path for the next 50 years. Keep up the good reporting.On Another Monsanto man in a key USDA post? Obama's ag policy's giving me whiplash posted 2 months ago 20 Responses

  • We'll see if the nutrition lobby takes this up.  I doubt it.  They've never supported anything that might piss off big corporate ag in the past, and they certainly didn't get behind Obama's budget plan to limit farm payments and put the savings in nutrition programs.  Second Harvest (or whatever they've renamed themselves) sold their soul a long time ago.

    On Is ethanol's Congressional free ride coming to an end? posted 7 months, 2 weeks ago 2 Responses

  • No offense to Dave Murphy, but he's just getting his information from the people who know the most about sustainable agriculture policy in the country, the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition.  Reading their Weekly Update (which you can sign up for on their website) is the best source for sustainable ag policy news, period.

    As for Obama, his main problem is and will continue to be the hypocrital Democratic Senators  who sell out their constituencies as the slightest hint of coporate protest.  Conrad, Pryor, Lincoln, Nelson to name a few.  They're the problem on farm subsidy reform, climate change, health care, card check, etc. 

    The New Deal supply management never effectively managed supply.  Yield increases always outpaced those policy efforts, which were pretty much half-hearted after the first few years anyway.  Supply management and a grain reserve also only supported the commodity crops that everyone deplores today.

    Federal commodity programs, in their current and past forms, are fatally flawed and should be destroyed, if only for the money savings.  Multifunctionality (anathema to just about anyone on the agriculture committees) is the only true way to structure farm programs in a way that benefits society and farmers.  But even that has issues, as the European experience demonstrates.  I have become ever more inclined to think all farm programs should just disappear, and farmers, small towns, and the rest of the country would be better for it.

    On Did Obama screw up ag subsidy reform? posted 7 months, 2 weeks ago 2 Responses

  • Oh yeah

    And that meat will come to the US, for sure.  The industry salivates at the prospect of growing grain in Brazil and shipping it to the Brazilian coast where they will build enormous CAFOs and packinghouses, which will no doubt be USDA inspected.  Tyson's already trying to pay USDA to put inspectors in Chinese poultry plants.  Then you can ship cut meat to the US, Mexico, etc.

    All they really need to do is improve Brazil's infrastructure to get grain from the interior regions to the coast.  I wouldn't be surprised to see Tyson et al get involved in financing road construction.On Don Tyson details plans to export the U.S. meat model to global south posted 1 year ago 5 Responses

  • Huh?

    Quote:
    "Do agribusinesses win big under the current farm bill proposal? Yep. Would they win even bigger if we got a veto? It's entirely possible."

    Would it be more appropriate to ask this question:

    "Do family farms/sustainable ag win big under the current farm bill proposal?"  No.  Would they win if we got a veto?  Maybe".

    Calling for a farm bill veto on the basis of insufficient reform does nothing to advance a pro-WTO agenda.  And agreeing with Bush that a veto should occur is not in any way the same as supporting his reasons for a veto.  And besides, if Bush wants to predicate his opposition in a way that supports WTO, exactly how can those opposing the farm bill on other grounds do anything about that?

    And this farm bill does nothing- and I mean nothing- to slow down the WTO train. Possible exceptions are cotton storage payments and a sugar to ethanol program, both of which are designed to support very small numbers of very rich people.  If the overriding concern is getting the WTO out of agriculture, I don't see how you could possibly support this bill and remain true to your principles.  

    Quote:
    "For now: Even if you believe that subsidy reform would bring about substantial change in the food system, Bush's support for the veto has nothing to do with this goal. As my former boss might put it, he's got darker aspirations."

    How is Bush's support for a veto different from the support for the bill from various politicians and groups that have supported policy to screw family farmers for decades?  Somehow, I don't think the American Farm Bureau, Cotton Council, Saxby Chambliss, Thad Cochrane, Steve King, Collin Peterson, Kent Conrad, the National Corngrowers, and the US Rice Producers Association are the erstwhile allies sustainable ag and family farms need, and they sure as hell aren't going to fight for progressive reforms down the road- just like Bush isn't.  So what's the difference?On Why a Bush veto of the farm bill is bad for the food movement (and the world) posted 1 year, 6 months ago 3 Responses

  • I agree

    There really isn't a whole lot of disagreement here.  I think everybody here is making slightly different points but they're all in agreement.

    The broad point I would make that as long as farm programs are subsidizing certain crops only, those crops have an advantage.  And while direct payments are the only ones being paid, there is still a safety net below those that are bound to influence planting decisions now and especially if prices ever fall again, which is inevitable.

    Perhaps even more broadly, after decades of farm programs subsidizing a short list of crops, in many places the infrastructure for growing any other crop has disappeared.  Pollan makes that point, and Tom Philpott has written about it as well in some great posts.On How Congress is shortchanging our health and sweetening things for the food industry posted 1 year, 7 months ago 10 Responses

  • All true, but there's always more to the story

    Some random comments:
    While current policies incentivize corn production, so did the supply management policies of the past.  I agree that the emphasis moved production over price in the 70s (for whatever reason).  But as long as farm programs have existed, corn (and other eligible commodities) have received an economic subsidy.  The amount of that subsidy is worth discussing, but it has been there since the 30s.  I get tired of the view that somehow farm programs before the 80s created some sort of farmer and consumer paradise.

    There are three main types of farm programs- directs, countercyclicals, and marketing loans (LDPs).  The current target price is $2.63 (though the farmer does not get a countercyclical payment until the price falls to $2.35, because the direct payment is subtracted from the countercyclical target price).  Usually, the USDA does not get to keep the money that is not spent as a result of high prices; that money is taken out of the budget baseline for the next farm bill, though the budget forecasts are occasionally behind the times.

    The ethanol tax credit is 51 cents per gallon.  A little under 3 bushels of corn make a gallon of ethanol.  Therefore one could argue that the ethanol tax credit adds $1.50 to the price of corn, but that credit is for the blender (ie oil company) so it doesn't all pass through.  The RFS standard is another discussion.On How Congress is shortchanging our health and sweetening things for the food industry posted 1 year, 7 months ago 10 Responses

  • Thanks

    Great, great post.  Monopsony is indeed a huge problem, and I would argue that it harms consumers as well.  Consumers never even have the opportunity to purchase many types of goods as a result of monopsony practices.  The concentration of retail power has diminished consumer choice, thus skewing the benefits of markets away from innovators and toward monopsony firms.   Sky-high capital and distribution costs prevent small-scale producers of almost any good from entering supply chains.  In agriculture, this is one reason why government investment in local foods processing and distribution capacity is so crucial.  If innovation never reaches the consumer due to monopsony practices, markets will eventually destroy themselves.On Why the FTC is right to block Whole Foods' buyout of Wild Oats posted 2 years, 4 months ago 28 Responses

  • Supply Management

    While I completely agree with the goal of maintaining farmers, I have serious doubts that a supply management strategy is feasible.  And I agree that ADM and Cargill would prefer the most WTO friendly farm bill possible, but let's not forget the mass market livestock industry that loves the current setup, and the big commodity groups who somehow have gotten to the point where they advocate for plants rather than the farmers who grow them.

    As you mention, supply management is not going to happen.  That argument was lost a couple of decades ago and we're not going back.  But there is a determined groups of advocates still pushing supply management, and the subject is worth taking a look at.  The most complete supply management policy today is being offered by the National Family Farm Coalition (www.nffc.net), George Naylor is a big gun with them.  I have one enormous issue with their plan, and the gist of it is captured in this quote from their position paper:

    Prosperity for U.S. farmers must not come at the expense of farmers and peasants in other
    nations. The United States must take the lead in promoting international commodity
    agreements aimed at setting floor prices and equitable sharing of responsibility for
    international reserves and supply management, thus eliminating the destructive practice
    of dumping.

    Not only do we have to reverse decades of US ag policy, we must convince the rest of the world to buy into supply management as well.  Because if you don't, eventually those giant multinationals will just be buying their grain from Brazil, Central Asia, etc.  But getting other countries to adopt supply management is NOT going to happen.  In fact, that is so much NOT going to happen that I question why people are still pushing for it.  The other large grain producers- primarily Brazil- already believe they can produce grain for cheaper than the US, and they can.  They would rather have more of a free market and let comparative advantage go to work.  They're not going to buy into a plan that reduces the amount they produce.  They're locking up 10 and 20 year contracts with China for soybeans already.

    Second, I'm not a huge fan of WTO by any means, but I think the logic of creating international supply management agreements to replace pro-trade international agreements is a least a little flawed.  How is this going to work?  Are we going to create an international supply management organization?  Wait a minute, doesn't that violate the food sovereignty we're trying to promote? And you know that each country involved will try to set the rules so it can make the most money, usually at some other country's expense.  The only way I see this working is if we have some sort of international supply management czar or council that decrees how much corn, etc. can be produced in each country each year.  Not likely to happen, and probably wouldn't be all that great anyway.

    Last, I love Michael Pollan's book and the parts with George Naylor are the best parts of that book.  One of the devastating criticisms is that we are subsidizing a plant that makes us unhealthy- corn.  George Naylor's plan to solve the farm income problem- supply management- still subsidizes corn.  In fact, it subsidizes pretty much the exact same crops we're subsidizing today.  Sure, we might have a little less of them, but we're still going to be spending money to ensure that feedlots have enough corn to feed their cattle.  If we want to move to a new mode of food production, or back to the small, diversified family farms we have had in the past, we need to stop subsidizing the same old system.  And who, exactly, is going to determine what the cost of production plus a reasonable profit is?  Is that for organic farmers?  Industrial farmers who buy enormous amounts of input at a discount?  Smaller, nonorganic farmers who don't get those discounts? Conventional farmers with a certain amount of conservation practices?  Do you include the cost of tech fees on GM crops in the cost of production?

    A friend of mine once said that George Naylor wants to grow 400 acres of corn and soybeans for the rest of his life and have the government guarantee him  enough of a profit to live on. No other sector of the economy gets that kind of guarantee, and it kills innovation. It also allows crappy farmers to stay in business while punishing farmers who are really talented.  Today, it doesn't take a whole lot of brains to grow 160 bushel an acre corn, that's for sure.  But there is an appropriate role of government in agriculture, and Philpott could not be more correct about the need for local processing facilities and a competition title in this farm bill.  We also need to figure out ways to stabilize the farm economy while simultaneously promoting innovation, crop diversity, and a type of farming that is protected from the harmful laws of ag economics while giving an advantage to the methods of production that are truly sustainable- and profitable.
    On Time to kick it old school on the farm bill. posted 2 years, 5 months ago 22 Responses