Showing posts with label Agribusiness. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Agribusiness. Show all posts

Sunday, March 13, 2011

Food Crisis Behind Revolts

The rapidly rising cost of food is leading to revolts around the world and not just the Middle East.

The cost of food while making profits for Big Agri-Business cartels and those infamous Hedge Funds and Bankers, is impoverishing people.

The global food crisis which began at the end of 2010 mirrors the one in 2008 and the usual reaction to recourse to growing outputs in the hope that prices will go down is insufficient and short-sighted, said De Schutter at a press briefing yesterday.

The “real reason people are hungry” is poverty, he said, because “we have impoverished” small-scale farmers. Policies have favoured a small number of large producers, and now is the time to stray away from an unbalanced agricultural system that maintains poverty, leads to pollution and is heavily dependent on fossil fuels, he said.


And food revolts, which resulted in creating most of the historic revolutions since the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution and even the Iranian Revolution, may be coming to developed advanced Capitalist countries including Canada.

While there are those who blame natural disasters for the problem the real issue is capitalism treats food as a commodity, and trades it on the futures market.

The Food and Agriculture Organization under the United Nations issued a rare alert last month that the drought in north China could put at risk wheat production and also put pressure on wheat prices.

Further, wheat futures in Chicago have soared more than 60 percent in the past year and last month jumped to the highest level since 2008. Corn and soybean prices have also witnessed steep increase.

Food prices are soaring to record levels, threatening many developing countries with mass hunger and political instability. Finance ministers of the Group of 20 leading economies discussed the problem at a meeting in Paris last week, but for all of their expressed concern, most are already breaking their promises to help.

After the last sharp price spike in 2008, the G-20 promised to invest $22 billion over three years to help vulnerable countries boost food production. To date, the World Bank fund that is supposed to administer this money has received less than $400 million.

Food prices are now higher than their 2008 peak, driven by rising demand in developing countries and volatile weather, including drought in Russia and Ukraine and a dry spell in North China that threatens the crop of the world’s largest wheat producer. The World Bank says the spike has pushed 44 million people into extreme poverty just since June.


A senior economist at HSBC has warned that Britain could experience riots if food prices continue to soar in line with the cost of crude oil.

Karen Ward told Sky News that amid "very low" wage growth in the developed world, failing to compensate workers for recent rises in food and energy prices could provoke social unrest in the U.K.

Energy markets -- where prices are near their highest levels since 2008 as battles rage in oil-rich Libya -- are "a significant contributor" to higher food prices, Ward told Sky Tuesday.

Food price inflation has helped spark the uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East that toppled longstanding rulers in Tunisia and Egypt.

Last week, the United Nations said food costs are at their highest point since the agency began tracking them 20 years ago.

"The Great Food Crisis of 2011" is here. That's what the highly respected magazine Foreign Policy is calling the rampant food inflation that is causing problems worldwide.

The British government just completed a two-year study involving 400 experts from 35 countries to assess the global food situation. The results are scary. Here's what the report said:

By 2050 global food supplies will not be sufficient to feed an expanding population. The UN estimates that food production must rise by 70 percent to feed a world population of more than nine billion in 2050. [But] rising demand and surging global population coupled with increasing resource conflicts over land, water, and energy will hamper food production.

And the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) states that the "double whammy of high food prices and the global economic slump pushed an additional 115 million people into poverty and hunger." Over 1 billion people go hungry every day and it's rising.

2008 was also a bubble year for many commodities as U.S. food prices were up 5.5%. But 2011 isn't as simple as a bubble -- supply-and-demand economics suggest long-term imbalances. We have a real crisis when we combine the dismal long-term outlook with short-term supply shocks caused by the forces of Mother Nature and, arguably, climate change. It is time to be prepared.

The ongoing popular uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East poses the question if other developing countries, including Ghana, may experience similar or other forms of uprisings in the light of the imminent global food crisis of 2011.

In order to answer this question one needs to look at the underlying drivers for the uprisings in both 2008 and now.

In 2008 riots from Haiti to Bangladesh to Egypt over the soaring costs of basic foods have brought the issue to a boiling point and catapulted it to the forefront of the world's attention.

Although food prices eased by the end of 2008, the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) convened a World Summit on Food Security at its headquarters in Rome in November 2009, noting that food prices remain high in developing countries and that the global food security situation has worsened.

In January 2011 it became clear that the world was experiencing a second food crisis and that prices have risen to levels close to or above those prevalent in 2008.

The rice wall

In broad terms, food prices today are at the highest level ever recorded by the UN.

Wheat has risen by 58 per cent in the past 12 months, while corn has soared 87 per cent. Raw sugar prices are up 37 per cent.

Overall the UN food price index climbed by over one-third in the past year, with all food goods advancing.

So why aren't we as bad off as we were in 2008? For one reason only: the key staple of more than half the world's population has not taken off along with the others. Rice.

It has gained only a modest 6.5 per cent in the past 12 months.

"I've never loved rice more than now," gushed Abdolreza Abbassian, a senior economist at the Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome. "Probably rice is the commodity separating us from a food crisis."

In the aftermath of 2008, some Asian countries began stockpiling rice more effectively. But we still need to be hyper-vigilant as today's rising oil prices, combined with some weak harvests, are starting to affect local prices.

Bangladesh, Indonesia and China, for example just announced rice increases of over 20 per cent.

If that seems like dull reading, just pause for a moment to contemplate what the current unrest in the world would be like if Asia were also to boil over should rice shortages become an issue.

At one point in 2008, Britain's MI6 foreign intelligence unit warned that as many as 70 countries might be unhinged by food costs.

Since then intelligence agencies have been keeping a close watch on rising food prices because of two events that tend to follow in their wake: widespread political unrest and mass financial devastation.

The milk rally that sent prices up 49 percent this year, more than any agricultural commodity, may be ending as farmers respond with record production and the costliest cheese in a quarter century curbs demand.

Output in the U.S., the world’s second-largest producer, may rise 1.7 percent to 196 billion pounds in 2011, enough to fill about 34,500 Olympic-sized pools, the Department of Agriculture estimates. Demand will weaken as restaurants cut promotions and grocers raise prices, said INTL FCStone Inc., a New York-based broker. Futures may drop 14 percent to $16.86 per 100 pounds by Dec. 31, a Bloomberg survey of 10 analysts showed.

Dairies are missing out on profits from milk’s biggest rally since at least 1996 as the surge in grain that drove world food prices to a record, contributing to protests in northern Africa and the Middle East, also boosted the cost of feeding cows. While income for grain and cotton growers will rise more than 20 percent this year, earnings at dairies may drop 13 percent, the government estimates.

“Grain farmers are having some of the best years they’ve had in a long time profit-wise, but you couldn’t say that for dairy,” said Bob Cropp, an economist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison who has been studying the industry since 1966. “Dairy facilities are running at the maximum. With a little softening in demand, prices are going to come down.”

Milk futures on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange closed on March 11 at $19.65, a 32-month high. Prices are up 54 percent from a year earlier as importers from Mexico to China increased buying and the rebounding U.S. economy bolstered domestic demand.

Commodities Rally

Milk’s 2011 rally has exceeded those of all agricultural futures traded in New York and Chicago including cotton, which surged 42 percent and reached a record last week. The Standard & Poor’s GSCI Index of 24 commodities advanced 11 percent, and the S&P 500 Index of stocks rose 3.7 percent. As of March 10, Treasuries gained 0.1 percent this year, a Bank of America Merrill Lynch index shows.



MARK COLVIN: We've heard plenty about how the uprisings in the Middle East and north Africa may affect the price of oil, much less about how the price of wheat may have caused them.

Fred Kaufman is a contributing editor at Harper's Magazine, who's published a number of long articles about what he calls the "food bubble".

He points out that when food prices peaked in 2008, there were riots in more than 60 countries. Prices have now gone past that peak again.

I asked him on the line from New York if that was a contributing factor to the revolts in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and elsewhere.

FRED KAUFMAN: Well I would say so. I mean the food sector inflation rate in Egypt for the two months previous to the revolution was 17 per cent each month.

And of course we know that revolutions are traditionally led by middle class, angry people and in this case what you have is a situation where the price of wheat goes up, all of a sudden, the price of vegetables goes up and milk and if you no longer can feed your kids milk and fresh meat you're going to get very angry if you're a middle class person.

MARK COLVIN: The obvious parallel I suppose is the French Revolution where the price of bread just went up and up and up until people could take it no longer.

FRED KAUFMAN: Or even look at 1848 when the entire content of Europe goes into revolution and this is directly related to tremendous amounts of famine across the continent. Now I'm not saying there's famine, because now the situation with food has changed, which is that people aren't really going hungry because there isn't enough food. One thing we have to realise is that there is more than enough food; there's more than enough food to feed double the world's population.

The issue is not enough food; the issue is can you afford the food? And of course this leads directly into what I've been talking about for the past year and a half, which is speculation in global wheat and food markets.

MARK COLVIN: You call it the food bubble I think. What does that mean?

FRED KAUFMAN: Well, what it means is that there are exterior forces at work forcing up the price of wheat, forcing up the price of global wheat. Because remember that the last food bubble we had in 2008, when all was said and done, the wheat harvest of 2008 was the greatest the world had ever seen and in fact as the statistics are coming in from Russia and as the out, you know, we're seeing what's probably going to happen now that rain and snow has hit China it's looking as though we're going to see quite a good wheat harvest for this year too.

So that there's something else going on and what I discovered was actually there's a tremendous and a new kind of speculation going on by the largest banks in the world, who now perceive food as one of the last bastions of real value on Earth.

MARK COLVIN: Who's driving it then; which banks?

FRED KAUFMAN: They are the usual suspects. I mean of course Goldman Sachs was the first one who came up with this particular sort of food derivative in 1991, but of course as soon as Goldman had figured this thing out and it became very lucrative for them, they were followed by everybody; by JP Morgan, Chase, Deutsche and Barkleys and of course Lehman and AIG in America, which were part of the great financial debacle.

These financial products, what I call food derivatives, really hijacked the global wheat markets, because what they did is they put a tremendous demand pressure on wheat and on wheat futures that was exterior to any supply and demand natural pressure and these products were made, these are what are called long-only products, in other words they were made only to buy wheat futures. There's no mechanism in these products ever to sell and so of course when there's five times the year there's a tremendous demand of hundreds of billions of dollars to buy; this is of course going to have an effect on the global price.

MARK COLVIN: That's extraordinary; a product that you can buy but not sell?

FRED KAUFMAN: Yeah they're called the long only commodity index. And as I say Goldman masterminded this product in 1991 but of course the markets were not completely deregulated throughout the 1990s these are the American futures markets, and so what happened by the end of the 1990s is that the markets were deregulated and so large banking institutions were suddenly allowed to take huge stakes in food futures, which they had not been allowed to do since really before the Great Depression, since the financial regulations had been in place since then.

And after those position limits were given exemptions for these banks they went whole hog and then of course what happened was a perfect storm after 2005, with all the other derivatives and mortgage backed securities and stock markets and currencies tanking, where was a safe haven, where was a refuge? Well it was in commodities.

MARK COLVIN: Are these though like the derivatives that none of us understood before the global financial crisis but which led to it?

FRED KAUFMAN: Well you know what's so interesting is that actually a wheat future is the world's first financial derivative. So derivatives have been around for a long time and in fact these financial derivatives are not all bad in the sense that they help people who actually buy and sell wheat, the farmers and the processors, they help them manage their risks.

The problem with derivatives is when they subvert the market. In other words when they're no longer being used by what are called the bona fide hedgers, the people who actually have a stake in the markets, and this is what the banks have done. They realised, there's a way that we can eke money out of this mathematically and they eked out tremendous profits.

The current crop of deposed heads of state may have Wall Street to thank for their forced retirement. While the causes of helter-skelter commodity prices are complex -- natural disasters such as floods and droughts can play a big role, as can interest-rate shifts engineered by central bankers around the globe -- rapid-fire trading and speculation on the Street can magnify the problem.

In an era when vast pools of capital shift in and out of markets for basics like food and oil with the a few computer keystrokes, trading can cause prices to see-saw in ways that are sometimes harrowing and hard to control.

And this wouldn't be the first time. Less than three years ago, another food crisis was marked by rampant financial speculation that helped cause prices to skyrocket and prompted regulators to examine whether traders were also gaming oil prices. At the time, governments were also flush with enough cash to boost food subsidies and calm protesters. This time around, governments ravaged by the crisis lack the financial wherewithal to tamp down prices with subsidies.

Wall Street says that trading keeps food and energy markets liquid, allowing farmers to plan ahead when planting their crops or helping oil producers to know how much crude they can ship. Often, of course, that's true. But there also can be a more brutal calculus at work: big price spikes are good for traders holding onto wheat or oil contracts, allowing them to stuff more money into their wallets while families struggling to make ends meet thousands of miles away suddenly find that it's become too expensive to feed themselves.

The top lobby group for the derivatives industry, the International Swaps and Derivatives Association, says it supports financial regulatory reform, but resists blame for pricing problems. "Although speculation is often blamed for causing problems in markets, the economic evidence shows that it is in fact a necessary activity that makes markets more liquid and efficient," ISDA Head of Research David Mengle wrote in a September memo.

Meanwhile, derivatives trading remains a largely under-regulated affair, even though such gambling was a major cause of the financial crisis in the United States and broadened the severity of the entire debacle.

It is now widely accepted that speculation helped fueled the price hikes of 2008: Economists at Princeton University, World Bank, the European Commission, the Peterson Institute for International Economics, the International Monetary Fund, Rice University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Texas A&M University Agricultural and Food Policy Center have all published studies indicating that speculation played a role in 2008's commodity-price swings.

"Look, you have no market without speculators, so I like speculators," CFTC Commissioner Bart Chilton told HuffPost. "But it's more like a casino right now than anything else."

Friday, September 07, 2007

Farmer John's Robot


Not quite Robbie the Robot but automation to replace migrant workers.

With authorities promising tighter borders, some farmers who rely on immigrant labor are eyeing an emerging generation of fruit-picking robots and high-tech tractors to do everything from pluck premium wine grapes to clean and core lettuce.

Such machines, now in various stages of development, could become essential for harvesting delicate fruits and vegetables that are still picked by hand.

"If we want to maintain our current agriculture here in California, that's where mechanization comes in," said Jack King, national affairs manager for the California Farm Bureau.

More than half of all farm workers in the country are illegal immigrants, according to U.S. Department of Labor statistics.

As I wrote in Gothic Capitalism; "the term Robot first appears in the Czechoslovakian science fiction novel/play; R U R (1920) aka Rossum's Universal Robots by Karl Capek. Robot is shortened form of the Russian word for worker, robotnichki, it also refers to work or drudgery."

Like that done by migrant workers.

Because of the immigration issue, migrant workers are becoming a difficult entity to find," Maconachy said. "If growers have a crop that needs to be harvested and there aren't the people to do it, they'll need to find a mechanized way to do it."

Philip Martin, an agricultural economist at the University of California, Davis, said it was still unclear if heightened immigration enforcement would drive away enough workers to justify huge expenditures by growers on new machinery.

And the number of variables involved makes it difficult to determine how much, if anything, growers could save by switching to automated systems.

Regardless of mechanization, there will always be the need for workers. Mechanization of farming was the origin of capitalism, transforming self sufficient peasant's into wage slaves in the growing industrial metropol's.
“If the whole class of the wage-laborer were to be annihilated by machinery, how terrible that would be for capital, which, without wage-labor, ceases to be capital."

Karl Marx


SEE:

Thanks Lou and Tom

Farmer John Exploits Mexican Workers

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A Bee C

Alberta
B
eekeepers
get no
C
ompensation.

Despite his recent capitulation to public protests, Farmer Ed Stelmach still has not heard the buzzing of Alberta apiarists.

Canada's largest commercial apiary industry, gets no attention from the farmers in the Stelmach government, cause they all raise beef.

Bee Keepers across North America are facing a crisis no different from BSE yet the response in oil rich Alberta to the case of the disappearing Bee's is indifference.


Billions were given to the commercial agribusiness interests and large scale processing houses, the secondary and tertiary business, and spare change given to beef farmers after the discovery of one dead BSE infected cow. During this crisis of Alberta's disappearing bee's nary a word from agribusiness interests or the government.

Drops in honey production, combined with low prices, could financially sting beekeepers.

"It's going to be a real struggle for some operations across the province," Kevin Nixon, central director of the Alberta Beekeepers Association.

"Another year of low production combined with lower prices ... could really damage things within the industry."

Lee Townsend of Stony Plain said he thinks he will get about 81 kilograms of honey for each of his 1,600 hives compared with his normal yearly harvest of 122 kilograms per hive. About 30 per cent of his bees died this year.

"It was just one of those years when everybody was hit with high losses ... . You could talk to anyone in the province right now and they would say the same thing," Townsend said.

A mysterious bee epidemic in the United States is alarming commercial beekeepers in Canada, but the government isn’t moving fast enough to provide money and support for research and surveillance programs, says the Alberta Beekeepers Association.

Although the border was closed between the US and Canadian bee industries in 1987, it is impossible to halt all bee migration between the countries. According to Kevin Nixon, Central Director of the Alberta Beekeepers Association, “any pest or disease that affects bees in the U.S. is usually seen here four or five years later.”

Nixon is worried that colony collapse disorder, or CCD, could prove devastating for Alberta’s $350 pollination industry if it moves north. CCD is a disorder which has killed between 50-90% of some bee colonies in 24 US states.

The Alberta Beekeepers Association has given Alberta Agriculture and Food a list of demands that includes the hiring of an additional provincial apiculturist and numerous full-time bee inspectors. Nixon would also like to see more funding for research programs.

“The cattle and grain farmers are getting allotted large amounts of money here in the province. It’s extremely frustrating to see this money being given to other commodities. The government doesn’t seem to understand the importance of what’s going on in the US.”


In Ontario the government has already addressed this issue, with compensation. The federal government gave a stingy supplement to Ontario Bee Keepers and once again nothing for Alberta beekeepers. Consider how many billions were given for BSE.

Beekeepers Eligible for Compensation

Ontario Beekeepers can now apply for compensation for lost hives over the winter.

As many as 22 thousand hives are thought to have been wiped out over the winter -- but no one really knows why.

The province has earmarked 2.4 million dollars for direct compensation.

The Ontario Beekeepers Association is also getting some money.

They'll get 600 thousand dollars that will go toward research and Ontario honey promotions.

Danny Walker, president of the Ontario Beekeepers Association, also applauded Dombrowsky's response.

"They're the first government I know of that stepped up and put up money for farmers," Walker said.

But beekeepers were asking for $6 million to help them recover, he said. They're now waiting on Ottawa to ante up the difference.

The federal government chipped in nearly $137,000 this spring for research to determine what has been killing bees.

Stephen Page, spokesman for Agriculture Canada, replied in an e-mail bees and beekeeping are a provincial responsibility, but the federal government is working closely with the Canadian Honey Council and provincial apiarists to monitor threats to the health of Canada's managed bee colonies.

Added to the low price of honey and the imports of Chinese and Argentinian honey marketed as Canadian honey, the return for the producer is less than the cost of production. "The price of honey is the biggest problem we face," Vichos states.

If the current situation continues, Vichos sees "a real demise in the industry. We’ve been able to struggle through and get our numbers up, but you can’t go on like this year after year.

You can only do this for so long and then you have to walk away.

"Had this been the poultry or dairy or any other agricultural industry, all hell would have broken loose," says Vichos. "People don’t understand the importance of the industry, which isn’t due to honey or wax, but pollination. This problem has brought a bit of light and people have started to see. For every dollar that honey produces, there’s hundreds of dollars in pollination that the bees have accomplished."

"It’s not enough money and it’s not a small problem," says Jeff Benson, a beekeeper supplier in Metcalfe. "The government has to realize that pollination is the most important aspect of this, and that without pollination, there’s not going to be any crops."



And its not like this was not known about for years though it became news months ago alarms were raised two years ago.



DISAPPEARING DISEASE 1. EFFECTS OF CERTAIN PROTEIN SOURCES GIVEN TO HONEY BEE COLONIES IN FLORIDA USA.

Source: American-Bee-Journal. 1982; 122 (3): 189-191.
Publication Year: 1982

Abstract: A commercial beekeeper's report of disappearing disease stimulated an investigation utilizing the diseased colonies. The effects on population growth and honey storage, of giving 1 comb of pollen, of feeding Fumidil-B and of feeding soybean flour with yeast and soybean flour alone were observed in an experiment involving 36 colonies of bees. Addition of 1 comb of pollen led to a significant gain in bees and the production of more honey. Fumidil-B had no effect. Feeding of expeller processed soybean flour, from a supply 3 or 4 yr old, especially without yeast, hindered population growth. Inadequate amounts of natural pollen along with feeding an inferior pollen substitute were 2 causes of this beekeeper's losses.
Update Code: 1983



DISAPPEARING DISEASE 1. EFFECTS OF CERTAIN PROTEIN SOURCES GIVEN TO HONEY BEE COLONIES IN FLORIDA USA", the next study, demonstrates:
  1. That shortage of pollen can cause dwindling.

  2. Fumigillan did not help, so we can assume that nosema was not a prime contributor to decline.

  3. Old soy flour, fed alone, made matters worse.

  4. Bad pollen supplement was worse than nothing

  5. Adding yeast helped

  6. Feeding combs of pollen had a good effect

This study raises questions that are not answered, but seems to indicate that old soy flour can be worse than nothing. Nothing is learned here about fresh soy flour, and we are not told the age of the yeast or pollen.

Why it is happening is another question.

Agriculture Department scientists are mobilizing to fight the puzzling and potentially catastrophic collapse of the nation’s honey bee colonies.

Citing a “perfect storm for beekeepers,” alarmed officials admitted Friday that they don’t know why bees are dying in large numbers in more than 22 states. But pushed by Congress and farmers alike, the scientists will be devoting new resources to protecting the diligent pollinators

Virus Implicated In Colony Collapse Disorder In Bees



The issue is the of the impact of industrialization on this ancient form of farming.

Huge monocrop farming systems and specialisations, and the spread of suburbia across natural habitat, are removing natural diversity. Bees have been lumped together in the millions, in a factory farm type environment not so unlike that of our chickens and other livestock animals. Many of these bees are transported across several states to perform pollinations in orchards and farms around the country. Today they are in contact with substances they shouldn’t have to deal with - pesticides, herbicides, antibiotics, and pollen from genetically modified crops. Researchers are scrambling to find answers, and as the spring season is upon us, time is running out.

By 1994, an estimated 98 percent of the wild, free-range honeybees in the United States were gone.
The number of managed colonies—those maintained by beekeepers—dropped by half.

The honeybees may have been especially vulnerable to the varroa epidemic. When the honeybee genome was sequenced a few years ago, researchers discovered fewer immune-system genes than you'd find in other insects. This despite the fact that the honeybee lives in tenementlike conditions, anywhere between 15,000 and 30,000 of them crammed into a hive the size of a filing cabinet. To make matters worse, a weakened hive often becomes the target of honey-raiders from healthier colonies, which only helps the parasites to spread.

It's possible that if the American honeybees had been left to their own devices, they would have died off in epic numbers and then evolved natural defenses against varroa (like more effective grooming), as they did in Asia. But crops had to be pollinated and no one had the time to sit around and wait.

Beekeepers opted to keep their colonies on life support with selective breeding, and by sprinkling them with medicine and insecticides aimed at the invading mites. This was no longer a hobby for amateurs. The only honeybees left—i.e., the ones that started disappearing in October—had become the cows of the insect world: virtually extinct in the wild, hopped up on antibiotics, and more likely to reproduce via artificial insemination than by their own recognizance.


The cause of colony collapse disorder is unknown, although poor nutrition, mites, diseases and pesticides have all been suspect. There is also concern that some genetically modified crops may be producing pollen or nectar that is problematic for the bees, says Mr. Brandi.

"Lesser known is the fact that some pesticides can also kill or deform immature bees, adversely affect queen and drone viability or may cause bees to lose their memory, which prevents them from flying back to their hive," he says.


It’s frightening to note as well that research in Britain indicates that birds near mobile phone base stations or towers don’t breed well.
The sparrows have disappeared completely from cities at least four years ago in England as mobile phones grew in popularity. A recent article in The Independent suggests that both birds and bees are impacted negatively by phone waves.

Wild bees and flowers both declining, survey finds

But we do know that the honey bee population in Alberta, and across Canada, is integrated with the U.S. where it became apparent last fall that there was a problem. And they too are addressing it, unlike Alberta's farmers government.


Bees are important pollinators for agroecosystems. Due to a decline in the availability of honey bees, many growers are now looking to wild bees to pollinate their crops. However due to land clearance and intense agricultural practices, potential wild bee habitat is disappearing. To quantify these effects, we assessed wild bee abundance and diversity in canola fields adjacent to either tilled fields or semi-natural pastureland in southern Alberta, Canada. Habitats were assessed within 800m immediately surrounding fields and their impact on bee diversity and abundance was determined.
How Honey Bee Genomics explains the Demise of the Bees.


And while commercial Apiaries are suffering so will secondary and tertiary industries, since Alberta produces high quality commercial and export grade honey, and byproducts.

The intoxicating nectar is mead, an archaic drink made by fermenting honey with yeast and water. The elixir was reputedly the booze of choice for Zeus and other Olympians.

The drink fell out of favour in most of Europe more than 500 years ago. But today in North America, mead is enjoying a renaissance. In Canada, almost two dozen meaderies have opened in the past decade, and connoisseurs are quaffing the ancient libation.

Not all mead makers have their own beehives, though.

Alley Kat Brewing in Edmonton became Alberta's first commercial mead maker when it introduced a spiced variety last Christmas, using honey supplied by local beekeepers. The sparkling mead sold out in liquor stores within days, says Alley Kat owner Neil Herbst.


Honeybees play a role in pollinating a number of Canadian fruits, vegetables and crops, particularly cucumbers, melons, blueberries and cranberries and canola, according to the Canadian Honey Council.

A 1998 study by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada estimated the value of the bees to pollination at $732 million, a value the council now says has climbed to more than $1 billion.

There are about 10,000 beekeepers in Canada, operating a total of 600,000 honeybee colonies, according to the CHC.

Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba produce about 80 per cent of Canada's 154 million kilograms of honey annually.


Besides honey, they play key role in food production



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Tuesday, August 07, 2007

Death of the Family Farm


As I have written here before, the push to end the Wheat Board comes not from Johnny and Janey Canuck the family farmer who goes to work in order to keep their farm afloat, but from the corporate millionaire farmer the modern face of agri-business.

His neighbours are not fellow farmers, they are competition he would like to eliminate.

"Nearly all large scale-farmers would say take away the monopoly," says Gary Pike, a Calgary-based agricultural consultant whose clients include many of the country's most successful growers. "There's a fundamental belief [among the public] that the board is bringing a big premium for farmers, but full-time farmers can pick off opportunities much better than the wheat board," he said. "They can take their marketing into their own hands."

Mr. Doerksen is a good example of what he's talking about. Something of a rarity today, Mr. Doerksen is a prosperous farmer. At a time when more than half of prairie farmers are either losing money or barely breaking even, the 32-year-old university graduate has annual revenues in excess of $1-million and takes three holidays a year. Last winter, he took his family to Costa Rica.

He has a degree in agriculture and regards his farm as a business as opposed to a livelihood. He's at home in the arcane world of agricultural futures, and he's equally adept at building relationships with customers. He recently bought a fleet of trucks as a way to provide better service to the food companies that buy his lentils and other non-wheat board crops.


The corporatization of farming in Canada continues supported by the Harper government.

Long-term farming decline continues

Thousands more farms and farmers disappeared through the first half of this decade, continuing a steady long-term decline that began six decades ago.

But thanks to increases in efficiency, the size of farms and government support, the value of their produce has increased, and increased more than their costs.

Those are among the key findings of Statistics Canada's "Snapshot of Canadian Agriculture" from its 2006 census, released Wednesday, that also revealed there are more "million dollar" farms than when the previous census was conducted in 2001 but also more farmers working off the farm to supplement their farm incomes, especially in the economically booming Western provinces.

Farms, meanwhile, got bigger, with the average size increasing eight per cent to 295 hectares from 273, leaving the amount of land devoted to farming in Canada virtually unchanged at just over 67.6 million hectares.

While Canadians often think of Canada as a major agricultural nation, Statistics Canada noted that a comparison with seven other countries that have conducted a farm census over the past decade revealed that Canada "despite its size has by far the smallest proportion of total land that is agricultural at only 7.3 per cent, mainly because of soil quality and the nature of the Canadian climate and terrain."

And Canada had the third-smallest amount of land devoted to farming of the eight, which included the U.S., Britain, France, China, Brazil, Australlia, and Argentina.

Still, Canada's farmland was increasingly productive.

Meanwhile, the proportion of farms with inflation adjusted gross receipts of $1 million or more increased to 2.6 per cent of all farms in 2006 from 1.8 per cent, and those "million-dollar" farms accounted for more than a third of all farm receipts.

Hog farms were the most likely to be "million dollar" farms, with 18 per cent of them falling into that category, followed by poultry and egg farms. In contrast, only two per cent of field crop farms, which are the most common in Canada, were.

Two-thirds of farms, or most, had gross receipts of between $250,000 and $1 million.

However, just 55.8 per cent of farms earned enough to cover their costs.

"Million dollar" farms were the most likely to cover their costs - 86 per cent did. However, more than one quarter of the smallest, with receipts of less than $25,000, also did, mostly fruit and vegetable farms, or greenhouse, nursery and floriculture operations, and many of them located in urban areas.

Still, nearly half of all farm operators also worked other jobs or businesses, up from just under 45 per cent in 2001, with 20.2 per cent working more than 40 hours in other jobs. Slightly fewer were working full time on the farm - 46.7 down from 47.7.

Report highlights

LIVESTOCK
- Hog farming accounts for only 2.6 per cent of all farm operations but 18 per cent of hog farms report gross receipts of more than $1 million.
- The number of beef farms declined even though the number of head of cattle increased. BSE knocked many farms out of business while surviving farms had to keep cows longer since they could not be exported.
- Fewer chickens are laying more eggs to meet consumer demand.
- Turkey farming increased and birds are getting bigger.

CROPS
- The census found a shift from annual crops like wheat and barley to perennial crops such as alfalfa.
- Wheat, hay and canola are the top three crops grown in Canada.
- Blueberries beat out apples as the biggest fruit crop for the second consecutive census.
- Grape production for use by wineries grew by almost 15 per cent
- The area used for vegetable production decreased nearly 7 per cent.
- Sweet corn is the most popular vegetable, grown in almost one quarter of the total vegetable area.
- For the first time, maple sap was produced west of Ontario.

ORGANIC FARMING
- The census counted both organic farms and for the first time farms transitioning to organic, which is why the numbers jumped from 2,230 to 15,511 farms or 6.8 per cent of all farms.
- Field crops are the dominant organic product.


See:

Global Farmers Fight Back

Farmers Reject Phony Plebiscite

Farmer John Exploits Mexican Workers

Corn Crisis


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Friday, July 06, 2007

Bio-Fuel B.S.

Another excellent post on the real story behind bio-fuels.

Biofuels: The Five Myths of the Agro-fuels Transition

The agro-fuel transition closes a 200-year chapter in the relation between agriculture and industry that began with the Industrial Revolution. Then, the invention of the steam engine promised an end to drudgery. However, industry’s take-off lagged until governments privatized common lands, driving the poorest peasants out of agriculture and into urban factories. Peasant agriculture effectively subsidized industry with both cheap food and cheap labor. Over the next 100 years, as industry grew, so did the urban percentage of the world’s population: from 3% to 13%. Cheap oil and petroleum-based fertilizers opened up agriculture itself to industrial capital. Mechanization intensified production, keeping food prices low and industry booming. The next hundred years saw a three-fold global shift to urban living. Today, the world has as many people living in cities as in the countryside. [10] The massive transfer of wealth from agriculture to industry, the industrialization of agriculture, and the rural-urban shift are all part of the “Agrarian Transition,” the lesser-known twin of the Industrial Revolution. The Agrarian/Industrial twins transformed most of the world’s fuel and food systems and established non-renewable petroleum as the foundation of today’s multi-trillion dollar agri-foods complex.

The pillars of the agri-foods industry are the great grain corporations, e.g., ADM, Cargill and Bunge. They are surrounded by an equally formidable phalanx of food processors, distributors, and supermarket chains on one hand, and agro-chemical, seed, and machinery companies on the other. Together, these industries consume four of every five food dollars. For some time, the production side of the agri-foods complex has suffered from agricultural “involution” in which increasing rates of investment (chemical inputs, genetic engineering, and machinery) have not increased the rates of agricultural productivity—the agri-foods complex is paying more and reaping less.

Agro-fuels are the perfect answer to involution because they’re subsidized, grow as oil shrinks, and facilitate the concentration of market power in the hands of the most powerful players in the food and fuel industries. Like the original Agrarian Transition, the present Agro-fuels Transition will “enclose the commons” by industrializing the remaining forests and prairies of the world. It will drive the planet’s remaining smallholders, family farmers, and indigenous peoples to the cities. It will funnel rural resources to urban centers in the form of fuel, and will generate massive amounts of industrial wealth.

See

Real Costs of Bio-Fuels

Conrad Black and ADM

Bio Fuels = Eco Disaster

GMO News Roundup

Lost and Found

Boreno is Burning

Agribusiness

Desertification

BioFuel and The Wheat Board

The Ethanol Scam: ADM and Brian Mulroney

ADM

Wheat Board

Farmers



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Thursday, May 10, 2007

Global Farmers Fight Back


My comrades who are Free Market Libertarians and mutualists who oppose capitalism in favour of a cooperative marketplace, will find much to praise in this new farmers movement. It poses a real alternative to capitalist globalization and corporatist free trade. None other than creation of a new movement for a cooperative commonwealth.

The latest attempt to destroy the Wheat Board in Canada is an example of the attack by the State on small farmers in favour of the Agribusiness cartels in the developed world. The Green Revolution, the push for GMO crops and patents on crops as well as using arable land for production for export; palm oil, are examples of non sustainable agribusiness versus the sustainable production of local farmers.

The recent Fraser Institute report by Preston Manning and Mike Harris calling for the end of supply management, the Wheat Board , and subsidies in the market place for farmers, does nothing but open up the farm marketplace to the agribusiness oligopolies. Ironic since Manning's daddy ran a party; Social Credit, made up of farmers that saw these same oligopolies as enemies of a producer run economy.


The fact is that the majority of farmers in the world are family farmers, not far removed from their peasant roots. It is the peasantry that provides the basis for the survival of the food economy. But with the advent of capitalist globalization the peasantry has become a new force in the world economy as Warren Bellow points out.

It is agricultural reform, the privatization of the inherent collectivism of peasant farming, the enclosure of common lands that led to the creation of capitalism in Britain. Forced off the land the peasants move to the cities to look for work becoming the proletariat.

But not all have done so, since it is the farmers who support the cities with their food production. And forced by globalization to collectivize farmers are reforming cooperatives to deal with the new demands of the marketplace.

Thai pig farmers protest at CPF headquarters

S. Korea may allow farmers to export locally grown rice: gov't source

Farmers Cooperative Extends Rollout Of SOA Tool

Connecting Coffee Growers and Drinkers

Cameroon: Coffee - Reasons Behind Poor Performance

Phoenixville Farmer's Market returns to town for sixth season

Innovations in rural financial system inPunjab


What began in England over 400 hundred years ago is now writ wide across the globe. It is not Free Trade nor Free Markets but the concentration of capital and its power to monopolize the market. It is the transformation of agriculture from sustainable economics to the economics of unrestrained growth. Thus the land, people and environment suffer as we see in Indonesia as the islands there burn for the sake of the agribusiness palm oil industry.

Whereas export crops like organic and fair trade coffee have become a basis for sustainable export farming, which can support sustainable agriculture as well as meet the farmers need to be part of a global market place.


Free Trade vs. Small Farmers

Walden Bello is Executive Director of Focus on the Global South, a Bangkok-based research and advocacy institute, and a Professor of Sociology at the University of the Philippines at Diliman.

The main battle cry of Via Campesina, whose coordinating center is located in Indonesia, is “WTO Out of Agriculture” and its alternative program is food sovereignty. Food sovereignty means first and foremost the immediate adoption of policies that favor small producers. This would include, according to Indonesian farmer Henry Saragih, Via's coordinator, and Ahmad Ya'kub, Deputy for Policy Studies of the Indonesian Peasant Union Federation (FSPI), “the protection of the domestic market from low-priced imports, remunerative prices for all farmers and fishers, abolition of all direct and indirect export subsidies, and the phasing out of domestic subsidies that promote unsustainable agriculture.”

Via's program, however, goes beyond the adoption of pro-smallholder trade policies. It also calls for an end to the Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights regime, which allows corporations to patent plant seeds, thus appropriating for private profit what has evolved through the creative interaction of the natural world with human communities over eons. Seeds and all other plant genetic resources should be considered part of the common heritage of humanity, the group believes, and not be subject to privatization.

Agrarian reform, long avoided by landed elites in countries like the Philippines, is a central element in Via's platform, as is sustainable, ecologically sensitive organic or biodynamic farming by small peasant producers. The organization has set itself apart from both the First Green Revolution based on chemical-intensive agriculture and the Second Green Revolution driven by genetic engineering (GE). The disastrous environmental side effects of the first are well known, says Via, which means all the more that the precautionary principle must be rigorously applied to the second, to avoid negative health and environmental outcomes.

The opposition to GE-based agriculture has created a powerful link between farmers and consumers who are angry at corporations for marketing genetically modified commodities without proper labeling, thus denying consumers a choice. In the European Union, a solid alliance of farmers, consumers, and environmentalists prevented the import of GE-modified products from the United States for several years. Although the EU has cautiously allowed in a few GE imports since 2004, 54% of European consumers continue to think GE food is ”dangerous.” Opposition to other harmful processes such as food irradiation has also contributed to the tightening of ties between farmers and consumers, large numbers of whom now think that public health and environmental impact should be more important determinants of consumer behavior than price.

More and more people are beginning to realize that local production and culinary traditions are intimately related, and that this relationship is threatened by corporate control of food production, processing, marketing, and consumption. This is why Jose Bove's justification for dismantling a MacDonald's resonated widely in Asia: “When we said we would protest by dismantling the half-built McDonald's in our town, everybody understood why -- the symbolism was so strong. It was for proper food against malbouffe [awful standardized food], agricultural workers against multinationals. The extreme right and other nationalists tried to make out it was anti-Americanism, but the vast majority knew it was no such thing. It was a protest against a form of production that wants to dominate the world.”

Many economists, technocrats, policymakers, and urban intellectuals have long viewed small farmers as a doomed class. Once regarded as passive objects to be manipulated by elites, they are now resisting the capitalist, socialist, and developmentalist paradigms that would consign them to ruin. They have become what Karl Marx described as a politically conscious “class-for-itself.” And even as peasants refuse to “go gently into that good night,” to borrow a line from Dylan Thomas, developments in the 21st century are revealing traditional pro-development visions to be deeply flawed. The escalating protests of peasant groups such as Via Campesina, are not a return to the past. As environmental crises multiply and the social dysfunctions of urban-industrial life pile up, the farmers' movement has relevance not only to peasants but to everyone who is threatened by the catastrophic consequences of obsolete modernist paradigms for organizing production, community, and life.

Farmers hungry for change


At this week's intergovernmental meeting in Rome to assess progress towards the pledge to halve hunger by 2015, the mood was sombre. Figures from the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) show not a reduction but an increase of more than 25 million chronically undernourished people since 1996. The figure, now at more than 850 million, is testament to how current global policies are consigning the hungry to stay hungry.

So what is going wrong? In 2002, when the UN World Food Summit pledge was last reviewed, the parallel Forum for Food Sovereignty, organised by non-governmental groups representing small farmers and those who feel the sharp end of hunger directly, concluded that the problem was not a lack of political will, as the FAO asserted, but the opposite. Trade liberalisation, industrial agriculture, genetic engineering and military dominance, it said, were now the main causes of hunger.

The farmers, from 30 countries, who participated in the conference were eloquent about how farming for small producers is more than just a food production system. Edgar Gonzales Castro, from Peru, said his vision of the future was "traditional" agriculture aimed at satisfying the needs of farmers, rather than generating profit. "What matters is that, on the family plot of land, farmers and their families have a range of crops to fill the cooking pot," he said.

"When governments decide to hold public consultations to help guide their decisions, policy experts as well as representatives of large farmers and agrifood corporations are usually centre stage, not small-scale producers, consumers and their organisations," says Pimbert.

The message of the report is that small-scale farmers - the majority of growers in the world - want radically different policies from those being promoted by their governments. The call is for policies to start from the perspectives of food producers and consumers rather than the demand for profit.

If "one-planet farming" means that western governments will only support farming practices that provide healthy, local food, maintain livelihoods for local producers and conserve resilient landscapes, then there is common ground with small-scale farmers. But if it means a uniform system for all, this will accelerate the hunt to source food globally and as cheaply as possible.

This will result in a continuing decline in food quality, with ever higher social and environmental costs, and be lorded over by fewer and fewer transnational agribusinesses. It would lead both to greater obesity and greater starvation, and see the eradication of more farmers and further loss of farmland.

Farmers' Views on the Future of Food and Small Scale Producers is at http://www.iied.org/pubs/pdf/full/14503IIED.pdf

Friends of African Farmers & Fishermen

Friends of African Farmers & Fishermen is a Non Profit local community organisation formed by local women and men who are farmers and fishermen. Due to increasing poverty in the area, the local people formed this organisation of Volunteers to help themselves. Due to lack of money and machinery for farming and fishing, wish to appeal for donations of Farm Machinery ie, tractors, irrigation equipment etc. Donations for our Agricultural and development projects in Volta Region of Ghana. To help women and children to have food to eat.Train the young women and youth to acquire the needed skills. To also help farmers with farming machinery and fishing equipment. This would generate income for the local people.Non Profit Organisation.

SEE:

Free Trade Not Aid

Free Trade and Africa

The War For Chocolate

IWD Economic Freedom for Women

Water War

Development Versus Population Growth


WTO: Privatization of Water

Is There a Silver Lining to the WTO Talks? No





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