Archives for the 'Farming' Category
Fresh! Local! Sustainable! Risible!
Daily Mail columnist John Carvel goes gaga over Hampshire, an English countryside village he claims is
well on the way to becoming the first in England to defy the power of the supermarkets by achieving communal self-sufficiency in food.
[...]
Nick Snelgar, who earns a living from growing herbs and shrubs near his home in Martin… organised a meeting in the village social club in 2003, and from it came the nucleus of enthusiasts who have organised the producer co-operative that is now feeding most of Martin’s residents.
What does the village’s self-sufficiency look like? Funny but it’s not a very self-sufficient self-sufficiency.
First, only “60% of the households in Martin use the co-op to supply at least some of their food.” (emphasis mine) 60% of people occasionally buying some items at a particular place is more a norm than a revolution.
Second, 126 of the village’s 164 households have paid five quid to join the co-op. That’s a pretty high percentage (76%), true, but it shows that even by a conservative estimate, 40% of the village’s households, and 21% of the co-op’s own members, don’t even shop there at all.
Third, and to Sneglar’s credit, even the co-op auteur doesn’t see the sense in getting rid of supermarkets.
I don’t want to kill off supermarkets. They should continue to do what they do best: provide toilet rolls and manufactured products that do not deteriorate when transported.
Like canned foods. And Triscuits. And frozen fish. You know, foods the supermarket carries.
A victory for food freedom
Some great news yesterday for Michael Schmidt, an Ontario raw milk dairy farmer who risked jail time challenging Canadian regulators. In a remarkable ruling, the court decided that his program by which customers by shares in cow ownership in exchange for the milk they produce is a legitimate enterprise not covered by existing law. In broader context, it seems an encouraging precedent for allowing consumers to opt out of restrictive safety regulations:
Although it is not illegal to consume raw milk in Canada, selling or distributing violates laws that require pasteurization of most commercial milk products.
The Schmidt case, which began when his farm was raided in 2006, has captivated food-rights academics and advocates in Canada, and around the world, who argue the court’s decision will ripple well beyond the raw-milk community. At its crux, they argue, the case is really about the extent to which consumers should be free to buy foods, however rarefied, and whether constitutional rights stretch as far as the grocery basket, farmer’s market and the people who own shares in – but do not live on – food-producing farms.
[Thanks to Kimberly Hartke for the tip. My article on raw milk for Reason is here, and a visit to a Virginia cow share program here.]
Famine naturally
Apparently stem rust has returned, and as usual the people most affected by such disasters are those who can least afford it: the subsistence farmers.
While his article is blessedly free of political angles–it mainly looks at fact and science and reports on what agronomists, most notably the great Norman Borluag still cracking away at 94, are doing to combat this threat–it’s only a matter of time however before the political angle becomes more prominent, and I wonder what the organic crowd will make of this. I am sure they will blame biotechnology, modern agricultural techniques, and globalization. Norman Borlaug would vehemently disagree.
(And now I have to tell my one second-hand Norman Borlaug story. A friend of mine, a strapping 6′2″ or so and in his 30s, picked Dr. Borlaug up at the airport to take him to a conference. Said friend met Dr. Borlaug at the gate and went with him to baggage claim. He ascertained which piece of luggage was Dr. Borlaug’s but as he prepared to pick it up, he heard a merry cry of “Look out, young man, that’s heavy!” Dr. Borlaug, then age 91, elbowed my friend out of the way, grabbed the bag, swung it off the conveyor, and then started trotting for the exit. And that, my friends, is how they breed ‘em in Iowa. )
End Farm Subsidies
Unfortunately, when many people hear they words “free market” they think “corporate apologist” or “in the tank for big business.”
But that’s not why I’m a libertarian. I’m a libertarian because I believe the free market is the best way–indeed the only way–to guarantee individual rights, economic freedom, and prosperity for everyone.
Editor Nick Gillespie and his colleagues at Reason.tv have put together a really nifty video calling for an end to farm subsidies that demonstrates this point.
While Gillespie and the farmers and economist he speaks with note that U.S. farm subsidies hurt not just Americans but, worse, the very, very poor in the developing world–countries like Mali, for example–that doesn’t stop some from erroneously defending farm subsidies as just the thing to help our “increasingly hungry world” eat.
