We don't pay what this food actually costs us, we just pay the artificial price created by industrial food companies and the U.S. Government; if we had to pay for what the food actually costs us, we would all be eating organic produce and grass-fed, pasture-raised meat.
...?
citation please. I can believe that organic food is healthier, but I am sceptical of the idea that it is cheaper as well.
We don't pay what this food actually costs us, we just pay the artificial price created by industrial food companies and the U.S. Government; if we had to pay for what the food actually costs us, we would all be eating organic produce and grass-fed, pasture-raised meat.
...?
citation please. I can believe that organic food is healthier, but I am sceptical of the idea that it is cheaper as well.
He's talking about externalities.
I would recommend Freakonomics or Naked Economics if you would want to know about economics more and stuff like externalities. They are fun reads and don't have math crunch.
We don't pay what this food actually costs us, we just pay the artificial price created by industrial food companies and the U.S. Government; if we had to pay for what the food actually costs us, we would all be eating organic produce and grass-fed, pasture-raised meat.
...?
citation please. I can believe that organic food is healthier, but I am sceptical of the idea that it is cheaper as well.
It's not cheaper if you buy it in a supermarket, but if you buy local, you don't need to build a $2 bln. factory, all you need is a $2 mil farm. Overall, it does cost less. A decent amount of the price you see in supermarkets is because of the costs of marketing and delivery.
Also (excuse the citations):
Agriculture in general imposes external costs upon society through pesticides, nutrient runoff, excessive water usage, and assorted other problems. As organic methods minimize some of these factors, organic farming is believed to impose fewer external costs upon society.[34] A 2000 assessment of agriculture in the UK determined total external costs costs for 1996 of 2343 million British pounds or 208 pounds per hectare.[35] A 2005 analysis of these costs in the USA concluded that cropland imposes approximately 5 to 16 billion dollars ($30 to $96 per hectare), while livestock production imposes 714 million dollars.[36] Both studies concluded that more should be done to internalize external costs, and neither included subsidies in their analysis, but noted that subsidies also influence the cost of agriculture to society. Both focused on purely fiscal impacts. The 2000 review included reported pesticide poisonings but did not include speculative chronic effects of pesticides, and the 2004 review relied on a 1992 estimate of the total impact of pesticides.
e: Bah, beated. But I brought citations!
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Tiger BurningDig if you will, the pictureRegistered User, SolidSaints Tuberegular
Industrial food production enables a quality of life that is across the board better than at any time in human history. The production of more food at lower cost has been synonymous with human progress since cave times, and we have not magically transcended the economics of it. You can probably afford to eat food less efficiently produced, but understand that it's a luxury you enjoy because you live in a rich country and get a share of the economic surplus provided by these methods. Straight up donating the same amount of economic surplus directly would have a greater impact.
It's also killing the ocean. I mean that literally; there is a growing dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, caused largely by the chemical fertilizer runoff from corn farmers in Iowa. I mean, there are times of year in Midwestern farm communities where you just can't drink the water at all (they have to buy bottled) because of the runoff.
It's also killing us. Our diets in the U.S. have become a monoculture; everything we eat and a whole fuckton of what we drink is corn. This is true of everything from beef and pork to chicken to bread to peanuts to soda to alcohol to milk. We've even started producing fish that eat nothing but corn. And this is fucking terrible for us, from a dietary standpoint, from a disease standpoint, from a bacterial standpoint, and from an environmental standpoint.
We don't pay what this food actually costs us, we just pay the artificial price created by industrial food companies and the U.S. Government; if we had to pay for what the food actually costs us, we would all be eating organic produce and grass-fed, pasture-raised meat.
Unlikely. Though I am generally against subsidies, lifestyle is to blame for the poor quality of health in the US. We consume too many calories for our activity levels. I suppose if you made food expensive enough then that might correct the problem, but that seems like an awfully drastic diet plan. The ubiquity of corn, per se, is not the problem. Our digestive system is incredibly adaptable, and aside from raw calories and some protein, we need only trace amounts of most nutrients.
The long term dynamics of oceanic dead zones and their effects are not well understood. Certainly externalities should be priced into all consumer goods, but we really do not know what that price is, and the dangers of over pricing are just as real and detrimental as under.
We don't pay what this food actually costs us, we just pay the artificial price created by industrial food companies and the U.S. Government; if we had to pay for what the food actually costs us, we would all be eating organic produce and grass-fed, pasture-raised meat.
...?
citation please. I can believe that organic food is healthier, but I am sceptical of the idea that it is cheaper as well.
It depends on what you would classify as a "cost." Ever been anywhere near an industrial pig farm? Within about three or four miles? You'd know if you had. You can smell the shit ponds from that far away. Because they're corn-fed, their shit isn't even useful as fertilizer; it comes out far too acidic. And we just let these giant shit-ponds sit around, reducing both quality of life and lifespan for anyone who lives anywhere near them. The same is true of industrial cow farming. What price do you put on that?
The amount of antibiotics we have to use to keep these animals healthy is fucking ridiculous. We're basically doing everything in our power to create a generation of super-bacteria that nothing works on. And why? When it comes to cows, it actually isn't entirely because of their proximity to each other; it's largely because of corn. You see, a cow's rumen isn't designed for digesting corn, and the microbes that normally live there and maintain a particular pH wipe out most bacteria; that is, when a cow is eating what it's designed to eat, grass. But when you breed a cow to eat corn, all of a sudden its rumen stops doing its job, and we start getting things like salmonella, botulism, and e-coli. So, what price tag do you put on that? What are the long-term costs of creating super-bacteria? What are the costs of people dying from these bacterial infections?
Further, the USDA grades beef on what we call "marbling." "Marbling" is the white stuff you see running through the ground beef at the supermarket. The more marbling a piece of beef has, the higher the grade it is. Do you know what "marbling" actually is? Saturated fat. Which is one of the primary causes of heart disease. Which is why our heart disease rates have been shooting up like crazy in this country. Do you know what causes marbling? Feeding cows corn. See, they eventually die from eating the corn (because it's so fantastically unhealthy for them), we just make a point of slaughtering them before that happens. So, skyrocketing heart disease and obesity rates: what's the price tag on that one?
You can't look at the cost of something in a purely short-term, monetary way; that's what the financial services industry has been doing for the past twenty or so years that got us where we are now. The food industry has been doing it for far longer, and eventually, their crash is going to be way worse.
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KalTorakOne way or another, they all end up inthe Undercity.Registered Userregular
edited June 2009
But Than, you can't put a price on how delicious marbling is either.
Unlikely. Though I am generally against subsidies, lifestyle is to blame for the poor quality of health in the US. We consume too many calories for our activity levels. I suppose if you made food expensive enough then that might correct the problem, but that seems like an awfully drastic diet plan. The ubiquity of corn, per se, is not the problem. Our digestive system is incredibly adaptable, and aside from raw calories and some protein, we need only trace amounts of most nutrients.
The long term dynamics of oceanic dead zones and their effects are not well understood. Certainly externalities should be priced into all consumer goods, but we really do not know what that price is, and the dangers of over pricing are just as real and detrimental as under.
You say this as if we've just all of a sudden started eating way more calories for no reason. As if there's something magical about our culture over the past twenty or thirty years that has just caused us to start eating a bunch more food.
The reason why we've started to eat all this food is because the food companies figured out that people will eat whatever is put in front of them, especially if it's the simple, non-filling calories you get from, say, corn. So, they increase portion size, and create food that doesn't give you as much of a "full" feeling on a per-calorie basis, so that you will eat more.
Why do they do this? Because from a natural perspective, their business model is unsustainable. The market expects a 7-8% annual growth rate from a company; the U.S. population growth rate isn't anywhere near that. So, in order to maintain their profit margins at a rate that will attract investors, they have to figure out a way to sell more food to the same number of people. Solution: create frankenfood, that makes them want to eat more.
Let me just say that I am not one of these hippie activists; I am not a vegetarian, and I certainly don't buy all of my food organic, free-range, etc. I shop at Safeway. About the only "organic" food I get is the cereal I buy from Trader Joe's. I love meat. I am as turned off by hippie bullshit as just about anyone you will meet. But once you actually start looking into this stuff, you start to realize that as retarded as they are, and as shittily as they put their message, in a lot of ways, the hippies are right. They're just doing everyone a huge disservice by massively overreacting, and acting like raging retards. When it comes to the industrial food industry, I think a more than fair comparison is the tobacco companies, and their manipulation of nicotine levels to keep people "hooked." And we fined the fucking shit out of them.
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KalTorakOne way or another, they all end up inthe Undercity.Registered Userregular
Let me just say that I am not one of these hippie activists; I am not a vegetarian, and I certainly don't buy all of my food organic, free-range, etc. I shop at Safeway. About the only "organic" food I get is the cereal I buy from Trader Joe's. I love meat. I am as turned off by hippie bullshit as just about anyone you will meet. But once you actually start looking into this stuff, you start to realize that as retarded as they are, and as shittily as they put their message, in a lot of ways, the hippies are right. They're just doing everyone a huge disservice by massively overreacting, and acting like raging retards.
Hopefully the film will help undo a little of that, if the director is true to his word about not wanting to make a "PETA-style" movie.
#1 Am I the only PAer from the third world in this thread?
#2 And also the only free-trader?
I do not understand your second question. And I highly doubt you are the only PAer from a third world country.
I certainly hope you're right, but the whole "omg buy local" attitude is eyebrow-raising.
Such a policy on our behalf would help the third world out tremendously.
Currently, we pay fucktons of money to farmers to massively overproduce a monoculture of corn, soy, and other commodities, which we then ship out and sell and massively reduced prices to the third world, making it so third-world farmers can't afford to actually grow anything but marijuana, coca, and opium poppies and turn a profit.
And don't get me wrong: I'm a free trade kind of guy. But what we have here isn't free trade; it's nowhere near free trade, and not liking it certainly doesn't make us commies.
Yeah, your domestic agricultural industry subsidy policy is messed up. Nonetheless, the costs fall primarily on your taxpayers, so believe me when I say that everyone else is just cheering along. Yes, it means that third-world farmers can't earn enough to grow corn, but everybody else gets cheap corn. It's horrendously painful in the short run (in other news, the world sucks), but the net long-term result is that people start moving to the cities en masse and everyone gets to trek the slow long road America itself walked over the past century. With food subsidized by America.
The effects are pretty predictable: countries with a lot of farmers, or with their own strong agricultural lobby, stir up a lot of anti-American sentiment and rage a lot. And, yes, US corporations with strong lobbies do shitty things right back to them via pressuring Congress (in other news, the world still sucks). But these right here are the problems placed on the third world - cheaper food is not the real problem. I mean, it's a problem for citizens of the US of A who have to pay for all those subsidies, and it's a problem for anyone elsewhere who happens to be a corn farmer, but that's it.
Yeah, your domestic agricultural industry subsidy policy is messed up. Nonetheless, the costs fall primarily on your taxpayers, so believe me when I say that everyone else is just cheering along. Yes, it means that third-world farmers can't earn enough to grow corn, but everybody else gets cheap corn. It's horrendously painful in the short run (in other news, the world sucks), but the net long-term result is that people start moving to the cities en masse and everyone gets to trek the slow long road America itself walked over the past century. With food subsidized by America.
The effects are pretty predictable: countries with a lot of farmers, or with their own strong agricultural lobby, stir up a lot of anti-American sentiment and rage a lot. And, yes, US corporations with strong lobbies do shitty things right back to them via pressuring Congress (in other news, the world still sucks). But these right here are the problems placed on the third world - cheaper food is not the real problem. I mean, it's a problem for citizens of the US of A who have to pay for all those subsidies, and it's a problem for anyone elsewhere who happens to be a corn farmer, but that's it.
Except for the fact that industrialization has been built on the back of agriculture. I'm not saying that's the only way to do it, but that's the way it has mostly been done. And the massive environmental costs of shipping all that food half a world away. And the massive amounts of crime all those drug farmers create with the black market, crime that frequently is completely unrelated to the drugs they're selling (terrorism, for instance). And the fact that this type of food is slowly killing us, and is terrible for us.
So, yes, as long as you ignore absolutely everything except the cheap food, this is great for the world. How's life in your vacuum?
Yeah, your domestic agricultural industry subsidy policy is messed up. Nonetheless, the costs fall primarily on your taxpayers, so believe me when I say that everyone else is just cheering along. Yes, it means that third-world farmers can't earn enough to grow corn, but everybody else gets cheap corn. It's horrendously painful in the short run (in other news, the world sucks), but the net long-term result is that people start moving to the cities en masse and everyone gets to trek the slow long road America itself walked over the past century. With food subsidized by America.
The effects are pretty predictable: countries with a lot of farmers, or with their own strong agricultural lobby, stir up a lot of anti-American sentiment and rage a lot. And, yes, US corporations with strong lobbies do shitty things right back to them via pressuring Congress (in other news, the world still sucks). But these right here are the problems placed on the third world - cheaper food is not the real problem. I mean, it's a problem for citizens of the US of A who have to pay for all those subsidies, and it's a problem for anyone elsewhere who happens to be a corn farmer, but that's it.
Except for the fact that industrialization has been built on the back of agriculture. I'm not saying that's the only way to do it, but that's the way it has mostly been done. And the massive environmental costs of shipping all that food half a world away. And the massive amounts of crime all those drug farmers create with the black market, crime that frequently is completely unrelated to the drugs they're selling (terrorism, for instance). And the fact that this type of food is slowly killing us, and is terrible for us.
So, yes, as long as you ignore absolutely everything except the cheap food, this is great for the world. How's life in your vacuum?
Pretty great, given that the particular developing nation I'm from decided to abandon the "building industrialization on the back of agriculture" idea forty years ago, and focused on selling industrial products to Europe and North America instead (this naturally entailed shutting down masses of farms and moving the population to factories. And importing food. I think all the corn I eat is American, but I got to check). This works out much better than trying to keep farming profitable enough so their farmers can buy domestic industry products, then slowly inch towards less agriculture, etc. etc., which I assume is the old substitution theory of growth you're referring to? I think history favors the export model.
edit: I'm not advocating the current state of affairs on the basis of helping the third world, mind you. I'm just saying that the third world isn't, on the whole, massively harmed by American agricultural industry subsidies, and we'd like you to keep buying whatever we do export, please. The Buy Local meme is what keeps your industry so powerful in Congress in the first place, I think; demographically it's incredibly minor.
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Tiger BurningDig if you will, the pictureRegistered User, SolidSaints Tuberegular
We don't pay what this food actually costs us, we just pay the artificial price created by industrial food companies and the U.S. Government; if we had to pay for what the food actually costs us, we would all be eating organic produce and grass-fed, pasture-raised meat.
...?
citation please. I can believe that organic food is healthier, but I am sceptical of the idea that it is cheaper as well.
It's not cheaper if you buy it in a supermarket, but if you buy local, you don't need to build a $2 bln. factory, all you need is a $2 mil farm. Overall, it does cost less. A decent amount of the price you see in supermarkets is because of the costs of marketing and delivery.
Also (excuse the citations):
Agriculture in general imposes external costs upon society through pesticides, nutrient runoff, excessive water usage, and assorted other problems. As organic methods minimize some of these factors, organic farming is believed to impose fewer external costs upon society.[34] A 2000 assessment of agriculture in the UK determined total external costs costs for 1996 of 2343 million British pounds or 208 pounds per hectare.[35] A 2005 analysis of these costs in the USA concluded that cropland imposes approximately 5 to 16 billion dollars ($30 to $96 per hectare), while livestock production imposes 714 million dollars.[36] Both studies concluded that more should be done to internalize external costs, and neither included subsidies in their analysis, but noted that subsidies also influence the cost of agriculture to society. Both focused on purely fiscal impacts. The 2000 review included reported pesticide poisonings but did not include speculative chronic effects of pesticides, and the 2004 review relied on a 1992 estimate of the total impact of pesticides.
Yeah, your domestic agricultural industry subsidy policy is messed up. Nonetheless, the costs fall primarily on your taxpayers, so believe me when I say that everyone else is just cheering along. Yes, it means that third-world farmers can't earn enough to grow corn, but everybody else gets cheap corn. It's horrendously painful in the short run (in other news, the world sucks), but the net long-term result is that people start moving to the cities en masse and everyone gets to trek the slow long road America itself walked over the past century. With food subsidized by America.
The effects are pretty predictable: countries with a lot of farmers, or with their own strong agricultural lobby, stir up a lot of anti-American sentiment and rage a lot. And, yes, US corporations with strong lobbies do shitty things right back to them via pressuring Congress (in other news, the world still sucks). But these right here are the problems placed on the third world - cheaper food is not the real problem. I mean, it's a problem for citizens of the US of A who have to pay for all those subsidies, and it's a problem for anyone elsewhere who happens to be a corn farmer, but that's it.
Except for the fact that industrialization has been built on the back of agriculture. I'm not saying that's the only way to do it, but that's the way it has mostly been done. And the massive environmental costs of shipping all that food half a world away. And the massive amounts of crime all those drug farmers create with the black market, crime that frequently is completely unrelated to the drugs they're selling (terrorism, for instance). And the fact that this type of food is slowly killing us, and is terrible for us.
So, yes, as long as you ignore absolutely everything except the cheap food, this is great for the world. How's life in your vacuum?
Pretty great, given that the particular developing nation I'm from decided to abandon the "building industrialization on the back of agriculture" idea forty years ago, and focused on selling industrial products to Europe and North America instead (this naturally entailed shutting down masses of farms and moving the population to factories. And importing food. I think all the corn I eat is American, but I got to check). This works out much better than trying to keep farming profitable enough so their farmers can buy domestic industry products, then slowly inch towards less agriculture, etc. etc., which I assume is the old substitution theory of growth you're referring to? I think history favors the export model.
Which again is great, if that's all you're looking at.
Personally, I'd like the Earth my grandchildren and great-grandchildren live on to be better than this one, and food is the single largest environmentally-damaging industry on the planet, by leaps and bounds. And it's not that I don't want the third world to be successful; it's that I don't want the third world to be successful at the cost of the world.
Let me just say that I am not one of these hippie activists; I am not a vegetarian, and I certainly don't buy all of my food organic, free-range, etc. I shop at Safeway. About the only "organic" food I get is the cereal I buy from Trader Joe's. I love meat. I am as turned off by hippie bullshit as just about anyone you will meet. But once you actually start looking into this stuff, you start to realize that as retarded as they are, and as shittily as they put their message, in a lot of ways, the hippies are right. They're just doing everyone a huge disservice by massively overreacting, and acting like raging retards. When it comes to the industrial food industry, I think a more than fair comparison is the tobacco companies, and their manipulation of nicotine levels to keep people "hooked." And we fined the fucking shit out of them.
Limed, and the film works from this standpoint as well. It's pragmatic and doesn't advocate any form of cultural revolution. It approaches the problems from an educational and systematic standpoint.
Yeah, your domestic agricultural industry subsidy policy is messed up. Nonetheless, the costs fall primarily on your taxpayers, so believe me when I say that everyone else is just cheering along. Yes, it means that third-world farmers can't earn enough to grow corn, but everybody else gets cheap corn. It's horrendously painful in the short run (in other news, the world sucks), but the net long-term result is that people start moving to the cities en masse and everyone gets to trek the slow long road America itself walked over the past century. With food subsidized by America.
The effects are pretty predictable: countries with a lot of farmers, or with their own strong agricultural lobby, stir up a lot of anti-American sentiment and rage a lot. And, yes, US corporations with strong lobbies do shitty things right back to them via pressuring Congress (in other news, the world still sucks). But these right here are the problems placed on the third world - cheaper food is not the real problem. I mean, it's a problem for citizens of the US of A who have to pay for all those subsidies, and it's a problem for anyone elsewhere who happens to be a corn farmer, but that's it.
Except for the fact that industrialization has been built on the back of agriculture. I'm not saying that's the only way to do it, but that's the way it has mostly been done. And the massive environmental costs of shipping all that food half a world away. And the massive amounts of crime all those drug farmers create with the black market, crime that frequently is completely unrelated to the drugs they're selling (terrorism, for instance). And the fact that this type of food is slowly killing us, and is terrible for us.
So, yes, as long as you ignore absolutely everything except the cheap food, this is great for the world. How's life in your vacuum?
Pretty great, given that the particular developing nation I'm from decided to abandon the "building industrialization on the back of agriculture" idea forty years ago, and focused on selling industrial products to Europe and North America instead (this naturally entailed shutting down masses of farms and moving the population to factories. And importing food. I think all the corn I eat is American, but I got to check). This works out much better than trying to keep farming profitable enough so their farmers can buy domestic industry products, then slowly inch towards less agriculture, etc. etc., which I assume is the old substitution theory of growth you're referring to? I think history favors the export model.
Which again is great, if that's all you're looking at.
Personally, I'd like the Earth my grandchildren and great-grandchildren live on to be better than this one, and food is the single largest environmentally-damaging industry on the planet, by leaps and bounds. And it's not that I don't want the third world to be successful; it's that I don't want the third world to be successful at the cost of the world.
Any better Earth will include cheap food. If you're right (and I suspect you aren't) that the cheap food we have is actually not cheap, then we had better find a way of making it cheap or the future will be unpleasant indeed. Going organic or local is no more a solution than bicycles are a solution to the energy crisis.
Which again is great, if that's all you're looking at.
Personally, I'd like the Earth my grandchildren and great-grandchildren live on to be better than this one, and food is the single largest environmentally-damaging industry on the planet, by leaps and bounds. And it's not that I don't want the third world to be successful; it's that I don't want the third world to be successful at the cost of the world.
Any better Earth will include cheap food. If you're right (and I suspect you aren't) that the cheap food we have is actually not cheap, then we had better find a way of making it cheap or the future will be unpleasant indeed. Going organic or local is no more a solution than bicycles are a solution to the energy crisis.
Yes, exactly. Going organic and local is a solution, just as bicycles are a solution to the energy crisis.
In either case, is it the solution? No. Can it be a significant part of "the" solution in both cases? Absolutely.
And I'd much rather have a world with slightly more expensive food than a world where the only fish we can eat anymore are raised in a tank and fed corn, because most of the ocean has been killed. Of course, at that point, with the death of so much algae, eating is going to be the least of our concerns.
Do you have any sort of source as to our cheap food actually being cheap? I mean, someone other than Monsanto et al and their various industry lobbying organizations? You know, the people who brought us this:
Any better Earth will include cheap food. If you're right (and I suspect you aren't) that the cheap food we have is actually not cheap, then we had better find a way of making it cheap or the future will be unpleasant indeed. Going organic or local is no more a solution than bicycles are a solution to the energy crisis.
No more a solution than solar power by itself is a solution to our energy problems, but it sure as Hell helps.
Yeah, your domestic agricultural industry subsidy policy is messed up. Nonetheless, the costs fall primarily on your taxpayers, so believe me when I say that everyone else is just cheering along. Yes, it means that third-world farmers can't earn enough to grow corn, but everybody else gets cheap corn. It's horrendously painful in the short run (in other news, the world sucks), but the net long-term result is that people start moving to the cities en masse and everyone gets to trek the slow long road America itself walked over the past century. With food subsidized by America.
The effects are pretty predictable: countries with a lot of farmers, or with their own strong agricultural lobby, stir up a lot of anti-American sentiment and rage a lot. And, yes, US corporations with strong lobbies do shitty things right back to them via pressuring Congress (in other news, the world still sucks). But these right here are the problems placed on the third world - cheaper food is not the real problem. I mean, it's a problem for citizens of the US of A who have to pay for all those subsidies, and it's a problem for anyone elsewhere who happens to be a corn farmer, but that's it.
Except for the fact that industrialization has been built on the back of agriculture. I'm not saying that's the only way to do it, but that's the way it has mostly been done. And the massive environmental costs of shipping all that food half a world away. And the massive amounts of crime all those drug farmers create with the black market, crime that frequently is completely unrelated to the drugs they're selling (terrorism, for instance). And the fact that this type of food is slowly killing us, and is terrible for us.
So, yes, as long as you ignore absolutely everything except the cheap food, this is great for the world. How's life in your vacuum?
Pretty great, given that the particular developing nation I'm from decided to abandon the "building industrialization on the back of agriculture" idea forty years ago, and focused on selling industrial products to Europe and North America instead (this naturally entailed shutting down masses of farms and moving the population to factories. And importing food. I think all the corn I eat is American, but I got to check). This works out much better than trying to keep farming profitable enough so their farmers can buy domestic industry products, then slowly inch towards less agriculture, etc. etc., which I assume is the old substitution theory of growth you're referring to? I think history favors the export model.
Which again is great, if that's all you're looking at.
Personally, I'd like the Earth my grandchildren and great-grandchildren live on to be better than this one, and food is the single largest environmentally-damaging industry on the planet, by leaps and bounds. And it's not that I don't want the third world to be successful; it's that I don't want the third world to be successful at the cost of the world.
Any better Earth will include cheap food. If you're right (and I suspect you aren't) that the cheap food we have is actually not cheap, then we had better find a way of making it cheap or the future will be unpleasant indeed. Going organic or local is no more a solution than bicycles are a solution to the energy crisis.
You know, I don't remember there being a massive food crisis in the 70's; and in the 70's a lot of the practices that were producing the worst consequences in the US weren't happening.
Yeah, your domestic agricultural industry subsidy policy is messed up. Nonetheless, the costs fall primarily on your taxpayers, so believe me when I say that everyone else is just cheering along. Yes, it means that third-world farmers can't earn enough to grow corn, but everybody else gets cheap corn. It's horrendously painful in the short run (in other news, the world sucks), but the net long-term result is that people start moving to the cities en masse and everyone gets to trek the slow long road America itself walked over the past century. With food subsidized by America.
The effects are pretty predictable: countries with a lot of farmers, or with their own strong agricultural lobby, stir up a lot of anti-American sentiment and rage a lot. And, yes, US corporations with strong lobbies do shitty things right back to them via pressuring Congress (in other news, the world still sucks). But these right here are the problems placed on the third world - cheaper food is not the real problem. I mean, it's a problem for citizens of the US of A who have to pay for all those subsidies, and it's a problem for anyone elsewhere who happens to be a corn farmer, but that's it.
Except for the fact that industrialization has been built on the back of agriculture. I'm not saying that's the only way to do it, but that's the way it has mostly been done. And the massive environmental costs of shipping all that food half a world away. And the massive amounts of crime all those drug farmers create with the black market, crime that frequently is completely unrelated to the drugs they're selling (terrorism, for instance). And the fact that this type of food is slowly killing us, and is terrible for us.
So, yes, as long as you ignore absolutely everything except the cheap food, this is great for the world. How's life in your vacuum?
Pretty great, given that the particular developing nation I'm from decided to abandon the "building industrialization on the back of agriculture" idea forty years ago, and focused on selling industrial products to Europe and North America instead (this naturally entailed shutting down masses of farms and moving the population to factories. And importing food. I think all the corn I eat is American, but I got to check). This works out much better than trying to keep farming profitable enough so their farmers can buy domestic industry products, then slowly inch towards less agriculture, etc. etc., which I assume is the old substitution theory of growth you're referring to? I think history favors the export model.
Which again is great, if that's all you're looking at.
Personally, I'd like the Earth my grandchildren and great-grandchildren live on to be better than this one, and food is the single largest environmentally-damaging industry on the planet, by leaps and bounds. And it's not that I don't want the third world to be successful; it's that I don't want the third world to be successful at the cost of the world.
By all means, tax the cost of transporting food across the planet appropriately. Carbon tax, sulphur tax, etc. I think we agree on that. And nullify existing US subsidies, if you like (I daresay you're American?). But I think we can agree that the world would still benefit from substantial agriculture export/import movement - less than current, but still substantial. Buy Local is a dangerous attitude to take on this issue - especially given that it is the idea upon which the US agricultural lobby draws much of its strength.
Unlikely. Though I am generally against subsidies, lifestyle is to blame for the poor quality of health in the US. We consume too many calories for our activity levels. I suppose if you made food expensive enough then that might correct the problem, but that seems like an awfully drastic diet plan. The ubiquity of corn, per se, is not the problem. Our digestive system is incredibly adaptable, and aside from raw calories and some protein, we need only trace amounts of most nutrients.
The long term dynamics of oceanic dead zones and their effects are not well understood. Certainly externalities should be priced into all consumer goods, but we really do not know what that price is, and the dangers of over pricing are just as real and detrimental as under.
You say this as if we've just all of a sudden started eating way more calories for no reason. As if there's something magical about our culture over the past twenty or thirty years that has just caused us to start eating a bunch more food.
The reason why we've started to eat all this food is because the food companies figured out that people will eat whatever is put in front of them, especially if it's the simple, non-filling calories you get from, say, corn. So, they increase portion size, and create food that doesn't give you as much of a "full" feeling on a per-calorie basis, so that you will eat more.
Why do they do this? Because from a natural perspective, their business model is unsustainable. The market expects a 7-8% annual growth rate from a company; the U.S. population growth rate isn't anywhere near that. So, in order to maintain their profit margins at a rate that will attract investors, they have to figure out a way to sell more food to the same number of people. Solution: create frankenfood, that makes them want to eat more.
Let me just say that I am not one of these hippie activists; I am not a vegetarian, and I certainly don't buy all of my food organic, free-range, etc. I shop at Safeway. About the only "organic" food I get is the cereal I buy from Trader Joe's. I love meat. I am as turned off by hippie bullshit as just about anyone you will meet. But once you actually start looking into this stuff, you start to realize that as retarded as they are, and as shittily as they put their message, in a lot of ways, the hippies are right. They're just doing everyone a huge disservice by massively overreacting, and acting like raging retards. When it comes to the industrial food industry, I think a more than fair comparison is the tobacco companies, and their manipulation of nicotine levels to keep people "hooked." And we fined the fucking shit out of them.
The hippies are to sustainable food practices as PETA is to animal rights, completely unhelpful. Try having a discussion with a hard-core militant vegan someday, and I promise no matter how much you sympathize or in fact practice and support sustainable agriculture you will find yourself wanting to go out and slaughter a baby cow with your own hands as a result of said conversation.
Which again is great, if that's all you're looking at.
Personally, I'd like the Earth my grandchildren and great-grandchildren live on to be better than this one, and food is the single largest environmentally-damaging industry on the planet, by leaps and bounds. And it's not that I don't want the third world to be successful; it's that I don't want the third world to be successful at the cost of the world.
Any better Earth will include cheap food. If you're right (and I suspect you aren't) that the cheap food we have is actually not cheap, then we had better find a way of making it cheap or the future will be unpleasant indeed. Going organic or local is no more a solution than bicycles are a solution to the energy crisis.
Yes, exactly. Going organic and local is a solution, just as bicycles are a solution to the energy crisis.
In either case, is it the solution? No. Can it be a significant part of "the" solution in both cases? Absolutely.
And I'd much rather have a world with slightly more expensive food than a world where the only fish we can eat anymore are raised in a tank and fed corn, because most of the ocean has been killed. Of course, at that point, with the death of so much algae, eating is going to be the least of our concerns.
Do you have any sort of source as to our cheap food actually being cheap? I mean, someone other than Monsanto et al and their various industry lobbying organizations? You know, the people who brought us this:
I have the price, which is a pretty good place to start. And the externalities asserted rely on either tenuous causation (cheap corn is what makes us fat) or unrealized potentialities (the ocean will die and cataclysm will ensue).
Now subsidies obviously make the price low, but I gather that you believe the price should be much higher than even the subsidies can account for.
Which again is great, if that's all you're looking at.
Personally, I'd like the Earth my grandchildren and great-grandchildren live on to be better than this one, and food is the single largest environmentally-damaging industry on the planet, by leaps and bounds. And it's not that I don't want the third world to be successful; it's that I don't want the third world to be successful at the cost of the world.
Any better Earth will include cheap food. If you're right (and I suspect you aren't) that the cheap food we have is actually not cheap, then we had better find a way of making it cheap or the future will be unpleasant indeed. Going organic or local is no more a solution than bicycles are a solution to the energy crisis.
Yes, exactly. Going organic and local is a solution, just as bicycles are a solution to the energy crisis.
In either case, is it the solution? No. Can it be a significant part of "the" solution in both cases? Absolutely.
And I'd much rather have a world with slightly more expensive food than a world where the only fish we can eat anymore are raised in a tank and fed corn, because most of the ocean has been killed. Of course, at that point, with the death of so much algae, eating is going to be the least of our concerns.
Do you have any sort of source as to our cheap food actually being cheap? I mean, someone other than Monsanto et al and their various industry lobbying organizations? You know, the people who brought us this:
I have the price, which is a pretty good place to start. And the externalities asserted rely on either tenuous causation (cheap corn is what makes us fat) or unrealized potentialities (the ocean will die and cataclysm will ensue).
Now subsidies obviously make the price low, but I gather that you believe the price should be much higher than even the subsidies can account for.
It's not just a matter of cutting those subsidies. It's a matter of subsidisizing the healthier stuff. Corn prices go up, grass fed beef prices go down.
You switch the economic situation to favor sources of food with fewer consequences.
Yeah, your domestic agricultural industry subsidy policy is messed up. Nonetheless, the costs fall primarily on your taxpayers, so believe me when I say that everyone else is just cheering along. Yes, it means that third-world farmers can't earn enough to grow corn, but everybody else gets cheap corn. It's horrendously painful in the short run (in other news, the world sucks), but the net long-term result is that people start moving to the cities en masse and everyone gets to trek the slow long road America itself walked over the past century. With food subsidized by America.
The effects are pretty predictable: countries with a lot of farmers, or with their own strong agricultural lobby, stir up a lot of anti-American sentiment and rage a lot. And, yes, US corporations with strong lobbies do shitty things right back to them via pressuring Congress (in other news, the world still sucks). But these right here are the problems placed on the third world - cheaper food is not the real problem. I mean, it's a problem for citizens of the US of A who have to pay for all those subsidies, and it's a problem for anyone elsewhere who happens to be a corn farmer, but that's it.
Except for the fact that industrialization has been built on the back of agriculture. I'm not saying that's the only way to do it, but that's the way it has mostly been done. And the massive environmental costs of shipping all that food half a world away. And the massive amounts of crime all those drug farmers create with the black market, crime that frequently is completely unrelated to the drugs they're selling (terrorism, for instance). And the fact that this type of food is slowly killing us, and is terrible for us.
So, yes, as long as you ignore absolutely everything except the cheap food, this is great for the world. How's life in your vacuum?
Pretty great, given that the particular developing nation I'm from decided to abandon the "building industrialization on the back of agriculture" idea forty years ago, and focused on selling industrial products to Europe and North America instead (this naturally entailed shutting down masses of farms and moving the population to factories. And importing food. I think all the corn I eat is American, but I got to check). This works out much better than trying to keep farming profitable enough so their farmers can buy domestic industry products, then slowly inch towards less agriculture, etc. etc., which I assume is the old substitution theory of growth you're referring to? I think history favors the export model.
Which again is great, if that's all you're looking at.
Personally, I'd like the Earth my grandchildren and great-grandchildren live on to be better than this one, and food is the single largest environmentally-damaging industry on the planet, by leaps and bounds. And it's not that I don't want the third world to be successful; it's that I don't want the third world to be successful at the cost of the world.
Any better Earth will include cheap food. If you're right (and I suspect you aren't) that the cheap food we have is actually not cheap, then we had better find a way of making it cheap or the future will be unpleasant indeed. Going organic or local is no more a solution than bicycles are a solution to the energy crisis.
You know, I don't remember there being a massive food crisis in the 70's; and in the 70's a lot of the practices that were producing the worst consequences in the US weren't happening.
Of which practices are you speaking? Fertilizer, pesticides, global food markets and agricultural subsidies have all, I believe, been with us since before the 70s.
Any better Earth will include cheap food. If you're right (and I suspect you aren't) that the cheap food we have is actually not cheap, then we had better find a way of making it cheap or the future will be unpleasant indeed. Going organic or local is no more a solution than bicycles are a solution to the energy crisis.
Yes, exactly. Going organic and local is a solution, just as bicycles are a solution to the energy crisis.
In either case, is it the solution? No. Can it be a significant part of "the" solution in both cases? Absolutely.
Which brings us back to the important point from the last page: is organic food actually cheaper? I'll reproduce your reply:
It depends on what you would classify as a "cost." Ever been anywhere near an industrial pig farm? Within about three or four miles? You'd know if you had. You can smell the shit ponds from that far away. Because they're corn-fed, their shit isn't even useful as fertilizer; it comes out far too acidic. And we just let these giant shit-ponds sit around, reducing both quality of life and lifespan for anyone who lives anywhere near them. The same is true of industrial cow farming. What price do you put on that?
The amount of antibiotics we have to use to keep these animals healthy is fucking ridiculous. We're basically doing everything in our power to create a generation of super-bacteria that nothing works on. And why? When it comes to cows, it actually isn't entirely because of their proximity to each other; it's largely because of corn. You see, a cow's rumen isn't designed for digesting corn, and the microbes that normally live there and maintain a particular pH wipe out most bacteria; that is, when a cow is eating what it's designed to eat, grass. But when you breed a cow to eat corn, all of a sudden its rumen stops doing its job, and we start getting things like salmonella, botulism, and e-coli. So, what price tag do you put on that? What are the long-term costs of creating super-bacteria? What are the costs of people dying from these bacterial infections?
Further, the USDA grades beef on what we call "marbling." "Marbling" is the white stuff you see running through the ground beef at the supermarket. The more marbling a piece of beef has, the higher the grade it is. Do you know what "marbling" actually is? Saturated fat. Which is one of the primary causes of heart disease. Which is why our heart disease rates have been shooting up like crazy in this country. Do you know what causes marbling? Feeding cows corn. See, they eventually die from eating the corn (because it's so fantastically unhealthy for them), we just make a point of slaughtering them before that happens. So, skyrocketing heart disease and obesity rates: what's the price tag on that one?
You can't look at the cost of something in a purely short-term, monetary way; that's what the financial services industry has been doing for the past twenty or so years that got us where we are now. The food industry has been doing it for far longer, and eventually, their crash is going to be way worse.
to which I have two questions:
#1 Why is the US corn lobby so incredibly strong?
#2 If the corn subsidies were removed, would the bulk of these problems go away? (i.e., is it the main problem, or are you just using it as an example?)
You know, I don't remember there being a massive food crisis in the 70's; and in the 70's a lot of the practices that were producing the worst consequences in the US weren't happening.
Of which practices are you speaking? Fertilizer, pesticides, global food markets and agricultural subsidies have all, I believe, been with us since before the 70s.
Yeah, your domestic agricultural industry subsidy policy is messed up. Nonetheless, the costs fall primarily on your taxpayers, so believe me when I say that everyone else is just cheering along. Yes, it means that third-world farmers can't earn enough to grow corn, but everybody else gets cheap corn. It's horrendously painful in the short run (in other news, the world sucks), but the net long-term result is that people start moving to the cities en masse and everyone gets to trek the slow long road America itself walked over the past century. With food subsidized by America.
The effects are pretty predictable: countries with a lot of farmers, or with their own strong agricultural lobby, stir up a lot of anti-American sentiment and rage a lot. And, yes, US corporations with strong lobbies do shitty things right back to them via pressuring Congress (in other news, the world still sucks). But these right here are the problems placed on the third world - cheaper food is not the real problem. I mean, it's a problem for citizens of the US of A who have to pay for all those subsidies, and it's a problem for anyone elsewhere who happens to be a corn farmer, but that's it.
Except for the fact that industrialization has been built on the back of agriculture. I'm not saying that's the only way to do it, but that's the way it has mostly been done. And the massive environmental costs of shipping all that food half a world away. And the massive amounts of crime all those drug farmers create with the black market, crime that frequently is completely unrelated to the drugs they're selling (terrorism, for instance). And the fact that this type of food is slowly killing us, and is terrible for us.
So, yes, as long as you ignore absolutely everything except the cheap food, this is great for the world. How's life in your vacuum?
Pretty great, given that the particular developing nation I'm from decided to abandon the "building industrialization on the back of agriculture" idea forty years ago, and focused on selling industrial products to Europe and North America instead (this naturally entailed shutting down masses of farms and moving the population to factories. And importing food. I think all the corn I eat is American, but I got to check). This works out much better than trying to keep farming profitable enough so their farmers can buy domestic industry products, then slowly inch towards less agriculture, etc. etc., which I assume is the old substitution theory of growth you're referring to? I think history favors the export model.
Which again is great, if that's all you're looking at.
Personally, I'd like the Earth my grandchildren and great-grandchildren live on to be better than this one, and food is the single largest environmentally-damaging industry on the planet, by leaps and bounds. And it's not that I don't want the third world to be successful; it's that I don't want the third world to be successful at the cost of the world.
Any better Earth will include cheap food. If you're right (and I suspect you aren't) that the cheap food we have is actually not cheap, then we had better find a way of making it cheap or the future will be unpleasant indeed. Going organic or local is no more a solution than bicycles are a solution to the energy crisis.
You know, I don't remember there being a massive food crisis in the 70's; and in the 70's a lot of the practices that were producing the worst consequences in the US weren't happening.
Of which practices are you speaking? Fertilizer, pesticides, global food markets and agricultural subsidies have all, I believe, been with us since before the 70s.
Mass conglomerate farming. In the 70's, the 4 major beef producers in the US controlled 25% of the farms, now they control something like %80+. People weren't buying all their chickens from Purdue and Tyson, who advocate ridiculous methods of farming (chicken rooms/factories). Runoff wasn't a big issue because things were far more spread out. Farmers had a much easier time maintaining their independence, etc.
You know, I don't remember there being a massive food crisis in the 70's; and in the 70's a lot of the practices that were producing the worst consequences in the US weren't happening.
Of which practices are you speaking? Fertilizer, pesticides, global food markets and agricultural subsidies have all, I believe, been with us since before the 70s.
A lot of this has to do with officials from the Clinton/Bush era. The film lists a ton of names of people who were heads of the FDA and other regulatory entities during that time who were also former employees/bigwigs at many major food or agriculture corporations.
Hell, Justice Clarence Thomas worked for Monsanto for 4 years, and he was on the Supreme Court (not to metioned was part of a major decision that ruled in their favor to allow them to maintain generic patent rights over Round Up resistant soybeans).
Any better Earth will include cheap food. If you're right (and I suspect you aren't) that the cheap food we have is actually not cheap, then we had better find a way of making it cheap or the future will be unpleasant indeed. Going organic or local is no more a solution than bicycles are a solution to the energy crisis.
Yes, exactly. Going organic and local is a solution, just as bicycles are a solution to the energy crisis.
In either case, is it the solution? No. Can it be a significant part of "the" solution in both cases? Absolutely.
Which brings us back to the important point from the last page: is organic food actually cheaper? I'll reproduce your reply:
It depends on what you would classify as a "cost." Ever been anywhere near an industrial pig farm? Within about three or four miles? You'd know if you had. You can smell the shit ponds from that far away. Because they're corn-fed, their shit isn't even useful as fertilizer; it comes out far too acidic. And we just let these giant shit-ponds sit around, reducing both quality of life and lifespan for anyone who lives anywhere near them. The same is true of industrial cow farming. What price do you put on that?
The amount of antibiotics we have to use to keep these animals healthy is fucking ridiculous. We're basically doing everything in our power to create a generation of super-bacteria that nothing works on. And why? When it comes to cows, it actually isn't entirely because of their proximity to each other; it's largely because of corn. You see, a cow's rumen isn't designed for digesting corn, and the microbes that normally live there and maintain a particular pH wipe out most bacteria; that is, when a cow is eating what it's designed to eat, grass. But when you breed a cow to eat corn, all of a sudden its rumen stops doing its job, and we start getting things like salmonella, botulism, and e-coli. So, what price tag do you put on that? What are the long-term costs of creating super-bacteria? What are the costs of people dying from these bacterial infections?
Further, the USDA grades beef on what we call "marbling." "Marbling" is the white stuff you see running through the ground beef at the supermarket. The more marbling a piece of beef has, the higher the grade it is. Do you know what "marbling" actually is? Saturated fat. Which is one of the primary causes of heart disease. Which is why our heart disease rates have been shooting up like crazy in this country. Do you know what causes marbling? Feeding cows corn. See, they eventually die from eating the corn (because it's so fantastically unhealthy for them), we just make a point of slaughtering them before that happens. So, skyrocketing heart disease and obesity rates: what's the price tag on that one?
You can't look at the cost of something in a purely short-term, monetary way; that's what the financial services industry has been doing for the past twenty or so years that got us where we are now. The food industry has been doing it for far longer, and eventually, their crash is going to be way worse.
to which I have two questions:
#1 Why is the US corn lobby so incredibly strong?
#2 If the corn subsidies were removed, would the bulk of these problems go away? (i.e., is it the main problem, or are you just using it as an example?)
I don't know about number 2, but 1 has a lot to do with how our primary system is set up. Iowa is the big corn state of the U.S. They also happen to be the first primary state in presidential elections. Which basically kills any sort of presidential movement against them. After that it's just a simple matter of buying off the right representatives.
Personally, I'd like the Earth my grandchildren and great-grandchildren live on to be better than this one, and food is the single largest environmentally-damaging industry on the planet, by leaps and bounds. And it's not that I don't want the third world to be successful; it's that I don't want the third world to be successful at the cost of the world.
Then organic farming is definitely not the answer:
In fact, most of the familiar candidates for alternative food would have trouble operating on the kind of scale necessary for a world of 6.7 billion people. Consider what it would take to make our farm system entirely organic. The only reason industrial organic agriculture can get away with replenishing its soils with manure or by planting nitrogen-fixing cover crops is that the industry is so tiny—making up less than 3 percent of the US food supply (and just 5.3 percent even in gung-ho green cultures like Austria's). If we wanted to rid the world of synthetic fertilizer use—and assuming dietary habits remain constant—the extra land we'd need for cover crops or forage (to feed the animals to make the manure) would more than double, possibly triple, the current area of farmland, according to Vaclav Smil, an environmental scientist at the University of Manitoba. Such an expansion, Smil notes, "would require complete elimination of all tropical rainforests, conversion of a large part of tropical and subtropical grasslands to cropland, and the return of a substantial share of the labor force to field farming—making this clearly only a theoretical notion."
You know, I don't remember there being a massive food crisis in the 70's; and in the 70's a lot of the practices that were producing the worst consequences in the US weren't happening.
Actually, a lot of this does go back to the 70's, when the Nixon administration sort of overreacted to a spike in food prices.
So it looks like we used about twice as much fertilizer in 1970 as in 1960, and about 25% more than that today. That's more, certainly.
Just FYI, the film doesn't mention fertilizer at all aside from saying that corn fed cows don't produce waste that can actually be used as good fertilizer.
Having worked for Monsanto for over 2 years, and being a rather lib'ruhl envirotron, it is amazing to see how many other people with similar beliefs work there.
I only met a few nutty people there, mostly from South County St. Louis, which is chockfull of McCain/Palin holdouts.
You know, I don't remember there being a massive food crisis in the 70's; and in the 70's a lot of the practices that were producing the worst consequences in the US weren't happening.
Actually, a lot of this does go back to the 70's, when the Nixon administration sort of overreacted to a spike in food prices.
The rules of classical economics just don't seem to operate very well on the farm. When prices fall, for example, it would make sense for farmers to cut back on production, shrinking the supply of food to drive up its price. But in reality, farmers do precisely the opposite, planting and harvesting more food to keep their total income from falling, a practice that of course depresses prices even further. What's rational for the individual farmer is disastrous for farmers as a group. Add to this logic the constant stream of improvements in agricultural technology, and you have a sure-fire recipe for overproduction -- another word for way too much food.
New Deal farm policy, quite unlike our own, set out to solve the problem of overproduction. It established a system of price supports, backed by a grain reserve, that worked to keep surplus grain off the market, thereby breaking the vicious cycle in which farmers have to produce more every year to stay even.
It is worth recalling how this system worked, since it suggests one possible path out of the current subsidy morass. Basically, the federal government set and supported a target price (based on the actual cost of production) for storable commodities like corn. When the market price dropped below the target, a farmer was given an option: rather than sell his harvest at the low price, he could take out what was called a ''nonrecourse loan,'' using his corn as collateral, for the full value of his crop. The farmer then stored his corn until the market improved, at which point he sold it and used the proceeds to repay the loan. If the market failed to improve that year, the farmer could discharge his debt simply by handing his corn over to the government, which would add it to something called, rather quaintly, the ''ever-normal granary.'' This was a grain reserve managed by the U.S.D.A., which would sell from it whenever prices spiked (during a bad harvest, say), thereby smoothing out the vicissitudes of the market and keeping the cost of food more or less steady -- or ''ever normal.''
This wasn't a perfect system by any means, but it did keep cheap grain from flooding the market and by doing so supported the prices farmers received. And it did this at a remarkably small cost to the government, since most of the loans were repaid. Even when they weren't, and the government was left holding the bag (i.e., all those bushels of collateral grain), the U.S.D.A. was eventually able to unload it, and often did so at a profit. The program actually made money in good years.
Compare that with the current subsidy regime, which costs American taxpayers about $19 billion a year and does virtually nothing to control production.
So why did we ever abandon this comparatively sane sort of farm policy? Politics, in a word. The shift from an agricultural-support system designed to discourage overproduction to one that encourages it dates to the early 1970's -- to the last time food prices in America climbed high enough to generate significant political heat. That happened after news of Nixon's 1972 grain deal with the Soviet Union broke, a disclosure that coincided with a spell of bad weather in the farm belt. Commodity prices soared, and before long so did supermarket prices for meat, milk, bread and other staple foods tied to the cost of grain. Angry consumers took to the streets to protest food prices and staged a nationwide meat boycott to protest the high cost of hamburger, that American birthright. Recognizing the political peril, Nixon ordered his secretary of agriculture, Earl (Rusty) Butz, to do whatever was necessary to drive down the price of food.
Butz implored America's farmers to plant their fields ''fence row to fence row'' and set about dismantling 40 years of farm policy designed to prevent overproduction. He shuttered the ever-normal granary, dropped the target price for grain and inaugurated a new subsidy system, which eventually replaced nonrecourse loans with direct payments to farmers. The distinction may sound technical, but in effect it was revolutionary. For instead of lending farmers money so they could keep their grain off the market, the government offered to simply cut them a check, freeing them to dump their harvests on the market no matter what the price.
Personally, I'd like the Earth my grandchildren and great-grandchildren live on to be better than this one, and food is the single largest environmentally-damaging industry on the planet, by leaps and bounds. And it's not that I don't want the third world to be successful; it's that I don't want the third world to be successful at the cost of the world.
Then organic farming is definitely not the answer:
In fact, most of the familiar candidates for alternative food would have trouble operating on the kind of scale necessary for a world of 6.7 billion people. Consider what it would take to make our farm system entirely organic. The only reason industrial organic agriculture can get away with replenishing its soils with manure or by planting nitrogen-fixing cover crops is that the industry is so tiny—making up less than 3 percent of the US food supply (and just 5.3 percent even in gung-ho green cultures like Austria's). If we wanted to rid the world of synthetic fertilizer use—and assuming dietary habits remain constant—the extra land we'd need for cover crops or forage (to feed the animals to make the manure) would more than double, possibly triple, the current area of farmland, according to Vaclav Smil, an environmental scientist at the University of Manitoba. Such an expansion, Smil notes, "would require complete elimination of all tropical rainforests, conversion of a large part of tropical and subtropical grasslands to cropland, and the return of a substantial share of the labor force to field farming—making this clearly only a theoretical notion."
So, assuming we'd eat the same amount of meat, assuming we'd consume the same amount of organic food as we do frankenfood--which I've just spent the past couple of pages explaining is specifically designed to make people eat more--it's not sustainable.
Also, "organic" is kind of a loaded term. It probably doesn't mean what you think it means.
Posts
He's talking about externalities.
I would recommend Freakonomics or Naked Economics if you would want to know about economics more and stuff like externalities. They are fun reads and don't have math crunch.
It's not cheaper if you buy it in a supermarket, but if you buy local, you don't need to build a $2 bln. factory, all you need is a $2 mil farm. Overall, it does cost less. A decent amount of the price you see in supermarkets is because of the costs of marketing and delivery.
Also (excuse the citations):
e: Bah, beated. But I brought citations!
Unlikely. Though I am generally against subsidies, lifestyle is to blame for the poor quality of health in the US. We consume too many calories for our activity levels. I suppose if you made food expensive enough then that might correct the problem, but that seems like an awfully drastic diet plan. The ubiquity of corn, per se, is not the problem. Our digestive system is incredibly adaptable, and aside from raw calories and some protein, we need only trace amounts of most nutrients.
The long term dynamics of oceanic dead zones and their effects are not well understood. Certainly externalities should be priced into all consumer goods, but we really do not know what that price is, and the dangers of over pricing are just as real and detrimental as under.
The amount of antibiotics we have to use to keep these animals healthy is fucking ridiculous. We're basically doing everything in our power to create a generation of super-bacteria that nothing works on. And why? When it comes to cows, it actually isn't entirely because of their proximity to each other; it's largely because of corn. You see, a cow's rumen isn't designed for digesting corn, and the microbes that normally live there and maintain a particular pH wipe out most bacteria; that is, when a cow is eating what it's designed to eat, grass. But when you breed a cow to eat corn, all of a sudden its rumen stops doing its job, and we start getting things like salmonella, botulism, and e-coli. So, what price tag do you put on that? What are the long-term costs of creating super-bacteria? What are the costs of people dying from these bacterial infections?
Further, the USDA grades beef on what we call "marbling." "Marbling" is the white stuff you see running through the ground beef at the supermarket. The more marbling a piece of beef has, the higher the grade it is. Do you know what "marbling" actually is? Saturated fat. Which is one of the primary causes of heart disease. Which is why our heart disease rates have been shooting up like crazy in this country. Do you know what causes marbling? Feeding cows corn. See, they eventually die from eating the corn (because it's so fantastically unhealthy for them), we just make a point of slaughtering them before that happens. So, skyrocketing heart disease and obesity rates: what's the price tag on that one?
You can't look at the cost of something in a purely short-term, monetary way; that's what the financial services industry has been doing for the past twenty or so years that got us where we are now. The food industry has been doing it for far longer, and eventually, their crash is going to be way worse.
(Actually you can, $25-50/steak)
https://twitter.com/Hooraydiation
The reason why we've started to eat all this food is because the food companies figured out that people will eat whatever is put in front of them, especially if it's the simple, non-filling calories you get from, say, corn. So, they increase portion size, and create food that doesn't give you as much of a "full" feeling on a per-calorie basis, so that you will eat more.
Why do they do this? Because from a natural perspective, their business model is unsustainable. The market expects a 7-8% annual growth rate from a company; the U.S. population growth rate isn't anywhere near that. So, in order to maintain their profit margins at a rate that will attract investors, they have to figure out a way to sell more food to the same number of people. Solution: create frankenfood, that makes them want to eat more.
Let me just say that I am not one of these hippie activists; I am not a vegetarian, and I certainly don't buy all of my food organic, free-range, etc. I shop at Safeway. About the only "organic" food I get is the cereal I buy from Trader Joe's. I love meat. I am as turned off by hippie bullshit as just about anyone you will meet. But once you actually start looking into this stuff, you start to realize that as retarded as they are, and as shittily as they put their message, in a lot of ways, the hippies are right. They're just doing everyone a huge disservice by massively overreacting, and acting like raging retards. When it comes to the industrial food industry, I think a more than fair comparison is the tobacco companies, and their manipulation of nicotine levels to keep people "hooked." And we fined the fucking shit out of them.
Hopefully the film will help undo a little of that, if the director is true to his word about not wanting to make a "PETA-style" movie.
Yeah, your domestic agricultural industry subsidy policy is messed up. Nonetheless, the costs fall primarily on your taxpayers, so believe me when I say that everyone else is just cheering along. Yes, it means that third-world farmers can't earn enough to grow corn, but everybody else gets cheap corn. It's horrendously painful in the short run (in other news, the world sucks), but the net long-term result is that people start moving to the cities en masse and everyone gets to trek the slow long road America itself walked over the past century. With food subsidized by America.
The effects are pretty predictable: countries with a lot of farmers, or with their own strong agricultural lobby, stir up a lot of anti-American sentiment and rage a lot. And, yes, US corporations with strong lobbies do shitty things right back to them via pressuring Congress (in other news, the world still sucks). But these right here are the problems placed on the third world - cheaper food is not the real problem. I mean, it's a problem for citizens of the US of A who have to pay for all those subsidies, and it's a problem for anyone elsewhere who happens to be a corn farmer, but that's it.
I second this query. I'd love to read something that would open up my eyes as to what is really going on food wise.
So, yes, as long as you ignore absolutely everything except the cheap food, this is great for the world. How's life in your vacuum?
Pretty great, given that the particular developing nation I'm from decided to abandon the "building industrialization on the back of agriculture" idea forty years ago, and focused on selling industrial products to Europe and North America instead (this naturally entailed shutting down masses of farms and moving the population to factories. And importing food. I think all the corn I eat is American, but I got to check). This works out much better than trying to keep farming profitable enough so their farmers can buy domestic industry products, then slowly inch towards less agriculture, etc. etc., which I assume is the old substitution theory of growth you're referring to? I think history favors the export model.
edit: I'm not advocating the current state of affairs on the basis of helping the third world, mind you. I'm just saying that the third world isn't, on the whole, massively harmed by American agricultural industry subsidies, and we'd like you to keep buying whatever we do export, please. The Buy Local meme is what keeps your industry so powerful in Congress in the first place, I think; demographically it's incredibly minor.
Except you didn't bring citations.
Personally, I'd like the Earth my grandchildren and great-grandchildren live on to be better than this one, and food is the single largest environmentally-damaging industry on the planet, by leaps and bounds. And it's not that I don't want the third world to be successful; it's that I don't want the third world to be successful at the cost of the world.
Limed, and the film works from this standpoint as well. It's pragmatic and doesn't advocate any form of cultural revolution. It approaches the problems from an educational and systematic standpoint.
Our first game is now available for free on Google Play: Frontier: Isle of the Seven Gods
Any better Earth will include cheap food. If you're right (and I suspect you aren't) that the cheap food we have is actually not cheap, then we had better find a way of making it cheap or the future will be unpleasant indeed. Going organic or local is no more a solution than bicycles are a solution to the energy crisis.
In either case, is it the solution? No. Can it be a significant part of "the" solution in both cases? Absolutely.
And I'd much rather have a world with slightly more expensive food than a world where the only fish we can eat anymore are raised in a tank and fed corn, because most of the ocean has been killed. Of course, at that point, with the death of so much algae, eating is going to be the least of our concerns.
Do you have any sort of source as to our cheap food actually being cheap? I mean, someone other than Monsanto et al and their various industry lobbying organizations? You know, the people who brought us this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEbRxTOyGf0
You know, I don't remember there being a massive food crisis in the 70's; and in the 70's a lot of the practices that were producing the worst consequences in the US weren't happening.
Our first game is now available for free on Google Play: Frontier: Isle of the Seven Gods
By all means, tax the cost of transporting food across the planet appropriately. Carbon tax, sulphur tax, etc. I think we agree on that. And nullify existing US subsidies, if you like (I daresay you're American?). But I think we can agree that the world would still benefit from substantial agriculture export/import movement - less than current, but still substantial. Buy Local is a dangerous attitude to take on this issue - especially given that it is the idea upon which the US agricultural lobby draws much of its strength.
The hippies are to sustainable food practices as PETA is to animal rights, completely unhelpful. Try having a discussion with a hard-core militant vegan someday, and I promise no matter how much you sympathize or in fact practice and support sustainable agriculture you will find yourself wanting to go out and slaughter a baby cow with your own hands as a result of said conversation.
Our first game is now available for free on Google Play: Frontier: Isle of the Seven Gods
I have the price, which is a pretty good place to start. And the externalities asserted rely on either tenuous causation (cheap corn is what makes us fat) or unrealized potentialities (the ocean will die and cataclysm will ensue).
Now subsidies obviously make the price low, but I gather that you believe the price should be much higher than even the subsidies can account for.
It's not just a matter of cutting those subsidies. It's a matter of subsidisizing the healthier stuff. Corn prices go up, grass fed beef prices go down.
You switch the economic situation to favor sources of food with fewer consequences.
Our first game is now available for free on Google Play: Frontier: Isle of the Seven Gods
Of which practices are you speaking? Fertilizer, pesticides, global food markets and agricultural subsidies have all, I believe, been with us since before the 70s.
Which brings us back to the important point from the last page: is organic food actually cheaper? I'll reproduce your reply:
to which I have two questions:
#1 Why is the US corn lobby so incredibly strong?
#2 If the corn subsidies were removed, would the bulk of these problems go away? (i.e., is it the main problem, or are you just using it as an example?)
Mass conglomerate farming. In the 70's, the 4 major beef producers in the US controlled 25% of the farms, now they control something like %80+. People weren't buying all their chickens from Purdue and Tyson, who advocate ridiculous methods of farming (chicken rooms/factories). Runoff wasn't a big issue because things were far more spread out. Farmers had a much easier time maintaining their independence, etc.
Our first game is now available for free on Google Play: Frontier: Isle of the Seven Gods
Says who?
A lot of this has to do with officials from the Clinton/Bush era. The film lists a ton of names of people who were heads of the FDA and other regulatory entities during that time who were also former employees/bigwigs at many major food or agriculture corporations.
Hell, Justice Clarence Thomas worked for Monsanto for 4 years, and he was on the Supreme Court (not to metioned was part of a major decision that ruled in their favor to allow them to maintain generic patent rights over Round Up resistant soybeans).
Our first game is now available for free on Google Play: Frontier: Isle of the Seven Gods
I don't know about number 2, but 1 has a lot to do with how our primary system is set up. Iowa is the big corn state of the U.S. They also happen to be the first primary state in presidential elections. Which basically kills any sort of presidential movement against them. After that it's just a simple matter of buying off the right representatives.
LoL: failboattootoot
Then organic farming is definitely not the answer:
Actually, a lot of this does go back to the 70's, when the Nixon administration sort of overreacted to a spike in food prices.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/12/magazine/12WWLN.html?pagewanted=1&8hpib
Just FYI, the film doesn't mention fertilizer at all aside from saying that corn fed cows don't produce waste that can actually be used as good fertilizer.
Our first game is now available for free on Google Play: Frontier: Isle of the Seven Gods
I only met a few nutty people there, mostly from South County St. Louis, which is chockfull of McCain/Palin holdouts.
That's a fascinating article:
Also, "organic" is kind of a loaded term. It probably doesn't mean what you think it means.