A Bee C

Alberta
Beekeepers
get no
Compensation.

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.

Wild bee abundance and diversity in agroecosystems in southern Alberta

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.

Bees: More than just sweet

Besides honey, they play key role in food production

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Farmers Vote To Join Wheat Board

In Nebraska. Farmers vote to join the Wheat Board.

That runs counter to the propaganda of the Harpocrites that farmers want an open market. American farmers who suffer from Agribusiness domination of the market like Canadian farmers recognize that a Marketing Board is the better option. Because as we all know consolidation creates better market access in the capitalist market.

As Marx said; That production rests on the supreme rule of capital. The centralization of capital is essential to the existence of capital as an independent power.

The Nebraska Wheat Growers Association, formed in 1954 and based in Ogallala, plans to move its office to Lincoln, as part of a proposed merger with the Nebraska Wheat Board. "The proposal, under discussion for about a year now, is aimed at improving the efficiency of both groups and making promotion of wheat more effective," says Mike Sullivan, NAWG president and producer from Wallace. "It will also make lobbying efforts on behalf of wheat growers more effective with NAWG being based in Lincoln near the Legislature." The Nebraska Wheat Growers Association is a dues-paying, voluntary membership organization that represents the state's producers, including lobbying for them on state and national policy issues. It sets membership policy on such matters as the farm program, crop insurance, soil and water conservation, transportation, and environmental issues. The Wheat Board, on the other hand, consists of a seven-member board, appointed by the governor, that administers the 1-1/4-cent-per-bushel wheat checkoff fee paid by all Nebraska wheat growers. The checkoff was created under state law and as such the board is prohibited from lobbying on state issues, although it can do so on national issues. The board's responsibilities are allocating checkoff dollars for research, promotion, education and market development, says Royce Schaneman, executive director of the Wheat Board.

See:

Wheat Boom

Death of the Family Farm

Wheat Board

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Stelmach's Rats Desert

Alberta is the only rat free province in Canada. And we intend to keep it that way, thanks to the unelected and unpopular Eddie Stelmach.

The rats are deserting the sinking ship of state.

Clint Dunford Decides to Pack it In

Red Deer's Victor Doerksen Packs it In!

The only rat-free zones in the world are the Arctic, the Antarctic, some especially isolated islands, the province of Alberta in Canada, and certain conservation areas in New Zealand.

Alberta is unusual in that rat infestation was prevented by deliberate government action.

Although it is a major agricultural area and has a fairly high human population density, it is far from any seaport and only a portion of its eastern boundary with Saskatchewan provides a favorable entry route for rats. They cannot survive in the boreal forest to the north, the Rocky Mountains to the west, nor the semi-arid High Plains of Montana to the south.

The first rat did not reach Alberta until 1950, and in 1951 the province launched an extremely aggressive rat-control program that included shooting and poisoning rats, and bulldozing, burning down, and blowing up rat-infested buildings. In the first year of the program 64 tonnes of arsenic trioxide was spread in 8,000 buildings (8 kg/building) on 2,700 farms along the Saskatchewan border. Fortunately, in 1953 the much less toxic and more effective poison Warfarin was introduced, and since then the control program has consumed between 5 and 13 tonnes of Warfarin annually.

By 1960 the number of rat infestations in Alberta had dropped below 200 per year and has remained low ever since Any wild rat population is eliminated by the government Rat Patrol immediately after it is detected. The effort is aided by hundreds of pest control officers and thousands of local citizens, who will not tolerate the introduction of rats.

The laws regarding rats are draconian and firmly enforced. Only zoos, universities, and research institutes are allowed to own caged rats, and possession of an unlicensed rat (including pet rats) is punishable by a $5,000 fine or 60 days in jail. The adjacent and similarly landlocked province of Saskatchewan initiated a rat control program in 1963, and has managed to reduce the number of rats in the province substantially.

We are also facing the extinction of Ord's Kangaroo Rat, but it is not a rat, nor a kangaroo, nor is it a Tory.

But like other Albertans it too is suffering at the hands of the Tories and their Big Oil Pals.

Kangaroo rats feared hopping toward oblivion

The kangaroo rats of southern Saskatchewan and Alberta are disappearing along with the sand dunes they call home, researcher Darren Bender says.

The Ord's kangaroo rat, as the furry rodent is more formally known, most resembles a gerbil, but with larger hind legs and a longer tail. It hops around like a tiny kangaroo.

With fewer than 1,000 kangaroo rats left, it is a prime candidate for the country's endangered species list, said Bender, a biologist with the University of Calgary.

The sand dunes the animal needs to live are threatened by human development, such as resource exploration, as well as natural erosion, he told CBC News Wednesday.

Ord's Kangaroo Rat

Recovery Team Update (94.0K, PDF format)
Alberta Ord's Kangaroo Rat Recovery Plan 2005 (447 KB PDF format)

Like the poor Kangaroo Rat, Stelmach's Tories have become an endangered species.

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Rural Boots

Here is why Farmer Ed our unelected Premier is falling behind in support from his rural roots.

Albertans protest approval of seismic testing in Marie Lake

He can blame his competitor for the Premier, Ted Morton, for some of this.

Sustainable Resource Development Minister Ted Morton is right about one thing. The province has to reform the way it sells oil and gas leases if it wants to avoid more battles like the one over proposed oil extraction on Marie Lake.

Currently, the energy department sells a lease with no regard for environmental issues or community concerns. In fact, the department doesn't even have to notify landowners that a lease has been sold in their area.

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Conservatives Kill Beef Plant

Here is a case where our Conservative Federal government in Ottawa seems to have forgotten that they claim to speak for "farmers" in Alberta.

Balzac beef plant closes after 14 months

Rancher's Beef Ltd. has shuttered its $40-million state-of-the-art processing plant in Balzac and laid off employees, just 14 months after opening to serve global markets.

Loan guarantees promised by the federal government fell short about $10 million because of changes to the funding formula, he said, adding the missing millions had to be taken out of the plant's operating budget to complete construction.

"We would never have built this plant if the government did what they did (sooner)," he said.

The company, a partnership of about 50 ranchers, farmers and feedlot owners from Alberta and B.C., had no choice but to file for bankruptcy, Van Raay said.

The closure of the slaughterhouse is a blow to Canada's fragile beef industry that is still recovering from the 2003 BSE crisis, said Ted Haney, president of Canada Beef Exports.

Meanwhile that other Tory Farmers Government of Eddie Stelmach did not bail out the plant. Instead they have been mired in a water diversion controversy about providing taxpayer subsidized infrastructure to Balzac for a Horse Racing Track, Casino and mall.

The Tories know where their bread is buttered. It ain't farm processing plants, as we saw with their fire sale of the old Gainers plant. Nor is it farmers support, as we saw in the corporate bail out over BSE.

Nope they subsidize horse racing and promote gambling. The latter being where they make all their money, since oil royalties are a subsidy to the oil industry.

This is just another nail in the coffin of the family farm.

Kill and Chill: Restructuring Canada's Beef Commodity Chain

By Ian MacLachlan,

Both horrified and fascinated by a visit with his geography students to the Canada Packers Lethbridge plant, Ian MacLachlan searched for a book that would explain the main features of the Canadian meat packing industry. Finding very little available, he set about writing an account of the industry that is both an economic geography and economic history.Comprehensive in its treatment of the whole system surrounding the Canadian beef industry, Kill and Chill offers a history of the structural changes in Canada's cattle and beef commodity chain, beginning with calf production and cattle feeding on farms and feedlots. It goes on to describe the changes in cattle marketing, the historical development of meatpacking-in particular the emergence of Canada's 'Big Three' meatpacking firms-and the rise of meatpacking unionism. Carrying the story almost to the present with the takeover of Maple Leaf by the McCain family in the mid-1990s, the work concludes with a discussion of current trends in retail beef marketing.

SEE:

Alberta State Capitalism

Agribusiness Bad Boys

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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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Ban Me Too

Funny that the Federal Department of Agriculture is banning progressive bloggers, while a staff member at the Alberta Government Department of Agriculture was caught emailing nasty "you're all commie pinkos" comments to the Canadian Wheat Board.

Of course progressive bloggers have been defending the Wheat Board, and we wouldn't want our blogs subverting federal civil servants.




SEE:

Slap Upside The Head

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Petulant Child

Harper throws a temper tantrum, stamps his feet and pouts;

Harper vows to end CWB monopoly

See:

Slap Upside The Head

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Slap Upside The Head

Well the Federal Court has slapped down the Harper Government in its attempt to arbitrarily and autocratically dismantle the Wheat Board.

While claiming a populist mandate to change the Wheat Board, Harpers attempt to rig a plebiscite has been given its just demise. It never fails to amaze me that while claiming to represent the popular interest of farmers, the Conservatives are afraid of a fair fight over the Wheat Board. That is of course because the right wing farm lobby they represent is a minority of Prairie farmers, and is even a minority in Alberta and Saskatchewan, where it has its biggest base.

Fearing defeat at the hands of the real popular base of Western farmers, the Tories attempted to pull a fast one, and thanks to this ruling they have to go back to the drawing board.

For other coverage of this from fellow progressive bloggers see here.

See:

Wheat Board

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THE BRITISH DISTRIBUTIONISTS

Those who are regular readers will know that I have a passing interest in Distributionism and its impact on Canadian reformist populist politics of the Right and Left.

From the Canadian Anarchist Journal; Any Time Now. ATN #26 - Spring 2007
it includes a critique of Elizabeth May's mentor; Commander Coady.*

THE BRITISH DISTRIBUTIONISTS
review by
Kevin A. Carson
Race Matthews. Jobs of Our Own: Building a
StakeholderSociety--Alternatives to the Market & the State
(Australia and UK, 1999).

Matthews starts with the nineteenth century origins of
distributism: in the Catholic social teaching of Leo XIII's De
Rerum Novarum (heavily influenced by the proto-distributist
cardinal, Henry Manning, who in turn translated it into
English and added his own commentary), and the wider
tradition of Christian socialism; and in what Matthews calls
the "communitarian and associative" strand of the greater
socialist movement.

The distributist vision of a social order based on
widespread, small-scale ownership of property, and of
an economy where the means of production were
mainly owned by workers, dovetailed closely with the
principle of "subsidiarity" in Catholic social teaching:
that social functions should be carried out at the
smallest scale and the most local level of control
possible.

Distributism clearly also had strong roots in the socialist
revival of the 1880s, but was alienated from an increasingly
statist and collectivist socialist movement. In the terminology
of Chesterton and Belloc, distributists saw themselves in
opposition to both capitalism and socialism. But I get the
sense, from reading Matthews, that their position was less a
repudiation of socialism as such than a recognition that the
state socialists had permanently stolen the term for
themselves in the public mind.

Rather than a breach with socialism, it would perhaps be
more accurate to say they abandoned the term to their
enemies and adopted the name "distributism" for what
"socialism" used to mean. One contributor to the Distributist
Weekly, W.R. Titterton, commented that distributism would
have fit nicely with the kind of socialism that prevailed in
England back when William Morris was alive (and, I suspect,
would have fit in better yet with the earlier socialism of
Proudhon and the Owenites). "It was a fine time that, and
the vision which possessed us might at last have captured
England, too. If we had not met Sidney Webb!"
The Fabians, like other collectivists who have tried to
marginalize cooperativism within the socialist movement,
dismissed distributism as a "petty bourgeois" or "preindustrial"
movement relevant only to "artisan labor," and
inapplicable to large-scale industrial organization. Cecil
Chesterton, whose premature death dealt distributism a
serious blow, treated such arguments with the contempt
they deserved. "If Mr Shaw means... that it cannot distribute
the ownership of the works, it might be as well to inquire first
whether the ownership is distributed already.... I must
confess that I shall be surprised to learn that Armstrong's
works are today the property of a single man named
Armstrong.... I do not see why it should be harder to
distribute it among Armstrong's men than among a motley
crowd of country clergymen, retired Generals, Cabinet
ministers and maiden ladies such as provide the bulk of the
share-list in most industrial concerns."

Of the major intellectual figures of British distributism, Cecil was the most
aware of the central importance of producer organization.
The distributist movement of G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire
Belloc, unfortunately, was long on theory and short on
action. It made little or no attempt at common cause, for
example, with the Rochedale cooperative movement.
Although distributist intellectuals were strongly in favor of
cooperatives in principle, they seemed to have little
awareness that the wheel had already been invented!
Despite impulses toward practical organization in the
provincial chapters of the Distributist League, and Fr.
Vincent McNabb's support of agrarian colonies on vacant
land, such efforts were inhibited by the leadership vacuum
in London (whose main concern, apparently, was apparently
intellectual debate, soapbox oratory, drinking songs, and
public house bonhomie).

Antigonish

The first large-scale attempt to put distributism into practice
was the Antigonish movement of Frs. Jimmy Tompkins and
Moses Coady, among the Acadian French population of
Nova Scotia. Tompkins and Coady acted through adult
study circles, strongly geared toward spurring practical
action. One of the first outgrowths of their educational work
was a decision by lobstermen to build their own cooperative
canning factory. This quickly led to cooperative marketing
ventures, buying clubs for fishing supplies, and cooperative
outlets for household woven goods. The movement
continued to spread like wildfire throughout the Maritimes,
with over two thousand study clubs by the late '30s with
almost 20,000 members, and 342 credit unions and 162
other cooperatives. By keeping for themselves what formerly
went to middlemen, the working people of the Antagonish
movement achieved significant increases in their standard of
living.

Through it all, Coady and Tompkins were motivated by
the "Big Picture" of a cooperative counter-economy on a
comprehensive scale: cooperative retailers, buying from
cooperative wholesalers, supplied by cooperative factories
owned by the movement, and financed by cooperative
credit.

In practice, though, the main emphasis was on
consumption and credit rather than production. The
fundamental weakness of Antigonish, Matthew argues, was
that it relied mainly on consumer cooperation, on the
Rochedale model. Consumer cooperation, by itself, is
vulnerable to what Matthews calls the "Rochedale cul-desac,"
in which cooperatives have "gravitated from the hands
of their members to those of bureaucracies," and adopted a
business culture almost indistinguishable from that of
capitalist firms. Worse yet, cooperatives are sometimes
subject to hostile takeovers and demutualization.

The problem with the cooperative movement, idealized by Distributionists, Social Credit and even the CCF was it was limited as a producer's movement in opposition to existing capitalism. It was unable to produce a strong enough alternative economy and political force, whether from the right or left as the legacy of the UFA, Socreds and CCF show, to defeat existing capitalist relations.

When these producer based movements became political parties within a parliamentary system they literally sold their souls to the company store.
In building a broad based alliance between farmers, workers, and urban professionals, these movements pushed for real parliamentary reform calling for direct democracy; referendum, recall.

In becoming a political party especially one in power, whether in Alberta or Saskatchewan, or indeed in some American states, the ability to reform the parliamentary system was limited, and in fact a straight jacket around the realpolitik of the movements.

Ultimately such movements during the last century in Europe and in North America ended up as consumer cooperatives, rather than independent artisan or producer alternatives to the banks and ultimately the capitalist system of production and distribution.

As such they became cogs in the existing capitalist system, as they are today. One really cannot tell the difference between the CO-OP stores and Safeways, or the Credit Unions and the big Banks.

Since once you transform producers to wage slaves they ultimately become 'consumers' in capitalist culture. As such they are subjects of history, rather than class conscious objects; makers of history.

The advent of transforming producers into wage slaves and ultimately declasse consumers, was the ultimate key to the survival of post Depression, post WWII capitalism.

The secret to becoming a revolutionary class for and of itself, the object of history, is the proletariats realization of the need to once again become producers,and land owners, thus self-valorizing individuals.



* a cheeky reference to a ground breaking rockabilly group from the sixties; Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen.


SEE:

Corporatism

Shameless

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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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