"Not that the politics of oil aren't crucial to what's driving Washington these days, but the politics of edible oil also need recognition, along with an alternative world-saving economic and social strategy based on local and community food security."
[CFS = Community Food Security] Date: Wed, 05 Feb 2003 14:07:57 -0500 From: "Wayne Roberts" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: Community Food Security Coalition <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: A Canadian looks at Bush State of Union and need for CFS Bushfood By Wayne Roberts Toronto Food Policy Council U.S. President George Bush fixed one eye on Iraq and the Middle East during his State of the Union address, as everyone noticed, but another eye on the American Mid-West, which almost everyone missed. The Mid-West is the heartland of America, but also its feedlot, key source of grains and meat, as much staples of the U.S. economy as its diet. And feedlot politics are as central to the Bush style of "compassionate conservatism" on the home front as to his kickass conservatism in foreign policy. Praise the Lord, and pass the ammunition and bread. Since food is too mundane to figure in grand theories and punditry, it's rarely seen as central to either geopolitics or domestic politics. But every military superpower in history has had to do something special about food. Partly to keep the home crowds happy, as in Rome's bread and circuses or Hitler's guns and butter. Partly to organize the feeding of troops in faraway lands; it was Napoleon who figured out, way too late into his invasion of Russia, that "armies crawl on their bellies" and can't march without food. And partly to maintain some sort of balance of payments, when so much of the economy is based on imports of booty and exports of economically unproductive soldiers and munitions. It seems odd that food and agriculture command such huge government expenditures in U.S. budgets, second only to the military. And perhaps just as odd that two of the key politicians with their hands on the Bush-directed government deficit spree come from Iowa - Representative Jim Nussle, chair of the House budget committee and Senator Charles Grassley, chair of the Senate's finance committee. Doesn't seem to fit with any notion of the city slickers who run an advanced industrial, service and knowledge economy, until we figure out that a state that produces so much ham might epitomize both porkbarrel politics and a hogtied economy. The guy who introduced me to this way of thinking is Peter Rosset of Food First, a California-based organization founded by Frances Moore Lappe of Diet For A Small Planet fame. Shortly after George Bush passed his $190 billion Farm Bill, I bugged all the U.S. delegates I could buttonhole at a food conference to explain to me why an industrially advanced country like the U.S. was spending so much money to subsidize agriculture. Economics tells us that agriculture has low profit margins, and is a primitive phase that industrializing countries grow out of, so why spend $190 billion to subsidize grains and meat? It's pretty simple, Rosset said. Ever since the 1970s, when the U.S. started losing its manufacturing industries to the low-wage Third World, the U.S. has suffered from a terrible balance of payments problem because it imports so many, and exports so few, industrial goods. The fact that the backwater of Canada is the leading importer of U.S. goods tells the tale. Only a small portion of America's Gross Domestic Product, about ten per cent, comes from exports; food accounts for 12 per cent of those exports, and is the main sector with lots of room to grow. So U.S. economic strategy strives to counter-balance that outflow of money for industrial imports with an outflow of products based in sectors where the U.S. has a commanding lead - munitions and aerospace, information and entertainment, and food. Without agricultural exports, the whole Enronized house of economic cards risks collapse. Food accounts for 12 per cent of export earnings and is the main sector with lots of room to grow, since most of the Third World takes little U.S. food now. Who could possible match the U.S in food exports? There's topsoil that's only been farmed for a century or two, not millennia as in much of the Third World. There's expensive equipment that the lowest-waged Third World workers can't match for productivity. There are huge expanses of barely-populated land where chemicals can be loaded on and no-one sees or complains. And there are export subsidies that no Third World country, not even a Canada suited to grain and meat, can begin to match. The focus on agricultural exports leans U.S. foreign policy toward unilateralism, one of the hallmarks of the Bush presidency. It's not too much to say that the obsession driving for-export agriculture almost requires the U.S. to become what some call a "rogue state." The U.S. refuses to sign international treaties protecting nature's bio-diversity, because protecting nature's bio-diversity doesn't sit well with genetic engineering, which requires both patenting of seeds and indifference to the consequences of unloosing lab-made seeds into nature. The U.S. refuses to sign onto Kyoto measures to reduce the burning of fossil fuels. The U.S. uses a quarter of the world's fossil fuels. That's not just because of soccer moms and dweeb dads who like their SUVs. It's because export agriculture is fundamentally an edible oil product - oil and gas are key to fertilizers, pesticides, tractors, packages, the trucks that haul food an average of 1500 miles and the freezers that keep it from going bad. About a third of global warming emissions come from the food cycle, not that anyone would know it from the public debate around Kyoto, where food, as per usual, is ignored. And now, again for the sake of for-export agriculture, Bush will be leading the U.S. to violate the Montreal Protocol requiring urgent international action for drastic reductions in chemicals that deplete the ozone layer and allow the sun's ultra-violet rays to scorch our little planet. Alas, the planetary need for an ozone layer isn't in keeping with the agricultural industry's dependence on methyl bromide, used to fumigate foods for long-haul travel, without which food exports can't happen. The Bush administration is sitting on agri-industry requests to expand methyl bromide use by 26 million pounds over the standards set in the Montreal Protocol. Burn, baby, burn. The Bush administration also refuses to sign onto United Nations declarations on the right of all people to food. Indeed, representatives of the world's 850 million starving people, or of the 16000 children who die from starvation each day without any media fanfare, might not be stretching the truth too much by identifying the U.S. food export strategy as a weapon of mass destruction. As many as half of the world's starving are farmers or former farmers driven into bankruptcy as a result of their inability to compete with subsidized U.S. or European food imports. How does this fit with Bush's crusade for "compassionate conservatism," saving America's outcasts one soul at a time, a critical element of his State of the Union address. Building toward that event, Bush signed an executive order in December that unleashed what he called "armies of compassion," a militarist turn of phrase betraying a deeply troubled psyche. The executive order opens the door for faith organizations to receive government funding for their delivery of social services controlled by the ethos and personnel of a particular faith. Bush doesn't strike booksmart pundits as the sharpest pitchfork in the barn, but there's a lot of cunning behind compassionate conservatism's use of faith organizations as deliverers of major social and food programs. By granting coupons to people who will use church service funded by governments, Bush gets around the U.S constitutional prohibition against church-state ties. Coupons make the relationship voluntary, not state-coerced: a loophole the framers of the U.S constitution, staunch believers in religious liberty, didn't anticipate. The same sleight of hand evades prohibitions of the World Trade Organization, which doesn't look kindly on government support programs that exclusively subsidize local agriculture by buying up farm surpluses, as the U.S. school meal and food stamp programs already do, and as $100 million-a-year in government donations to foods banks for America's poor already do and as Bush's USAID policies will soon do on a world scale. When such programs are subcontracted to church organizations, they're better positioned to get through WTO rules. Supply management programs such as Canada's, designed to reduce the wastage of surpluses, are WTO-illegal, while programs to buy up the surplus are fine. . Keep the faith, baby: free market dogmatism for some, and subsidies for others. Not that the politics of oil aren't crucial to what's driving Washington these days, but the politics of edible oil also need recognition, along with an alternative world-saving economic and social strategy based on local and community food security. Biofuels at Journey to Forever http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Biofuel at WebConX http://webconx.green-trust.org/2000/biofuel/biofuel.htm List messages are archived at the Info-Archive at NNYTech: http://archive.nnytech.net/ To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
