corn, is it all bull?

I have a theory, about which i'll be brief. The simple explanation is that my grandfather "trained" my memory when i was still a small boy. The other comes from my "all-Irish" heritage. The Irish developed a quite complex society with a very refined degree of craftsmanship and artistic expression while still an illiterate community. To learn one's craft or art, and demonstrate it, one was required to memorize long, poetical passages which described what one needed to know about their trade. This suggests that those with good memories would have had an advantage in entering a trade, or living from art, and therefore, a better breeding opportunity. I think the Irish unwittingly selected for memory.

In fact, i feel that years of drug and alcohol abuse have badly eroded my memory.

I'd say yes. Japan and France are two prime examples of nations in which the level of agronomic sophistication has barely kept pace with population growth, leading to an historic tendancy on the part of both nations to subsidize agriculture, and to seek to conquer and dominate their neighbors so as to assure the food supply.

(Edit: OOoops, i mean, i'd say yes you are correct, no you are not indulging in an over-ambitious reading of history. Within the last few generations of historians, notice is finally being taken of agriculture and agricultural products and the crucial effects on national behavior.)

Yeah? Says you!

(Sorry, couldn't resist.) :wink:

Yes, as one of the more contrary types here, I'd say this has been a nice break from the partisanship.

I think Nimh's remarks about "first world" subsidies and the "third world" are noteworthy. Subsidies strangle the economies of "emerging" nations, and they are not necessary to the West. Particularly in America--we have simply never been in a situation in which we needed to worry about our food supply. In fact, during the War of 1812, thanks to the fecklessness of New England, for whom the war was started in the first place, we ended up feeding our army and the English. Agricultural subsidies have become political icons--the industrial west just doesn't need them.

That has been my experience, but the report roger linked to indicated that gasohol was generally more costly at the pump.

Nice point, Set.

I dunno, must admit I've never heard of that one before. Not in any current context, anyway.

I believe US agricultural subsidues are almost as extensive, without there being a similar background, so - yeh - I dunno about that one.

As a theory it sounds plausible, but then again, agricultural subsidies are primarily EU-funded, rather than affairs of the individual national states, so that would also plead against the theory.

Why do the EU countries stick so stubbornly to the subsidies though? In most countries they're not an overwhelmingly crucial voting block anymore ... current EU states are far beyond where Poland is still, with its masses of small peasants, though some countries (France) perhaps less so than others. Here, to name but one extreme example, only 3% of the population or so still works in agriculture.

And for consumers, an end to agricultural subsidies would be benefitial, if anything, wouldnt it? Prices would go down, Id gather, they'd have to pay less taxes ... So is it the agro-industry lobby?

Or is it - and this is where elements of nationalism do perhaps come in, and your theory does provide some context - because farmers are still venerated, kinda, have an "icon" status to do with concepts of "national pride" and "national dignity", that does derive from their original indispensibality in terms of national self-sufficiency?

Just to kick in a few thoughts, here, from a concerned individual who happens to live on a farm in a key corn-producing state, namely, me.

WARNING: The following is wholly my own, and is an op-ed piece. Your mileage may vary.

The energy cost to produce ethanol, and its relative-to-gasoline energy content, are but components of its cost/benefit ratio. Also to be factored is the lessening of hydrocarbon and other noxious emissions when used as a gasoline additive. Apart from energy cost, MTBE, itself a combination of methanol and other petroleum distilates, requires relatively sophisticated, expensive, dedicated production facillities and essentially is a single-application product, of use only as a gasoline additive. It costs more to make, volume-for-volume, than does ethanol, and involves relatively fewer workers, volume-for-volume, to produce than does ethanol. Ethanol production byproduct has market value in and of itself, inboth agribusiness and other industries, and ethanol is used in a broad spectrum of products an processes other than motor fuel. The "Engine Damage" claim is mooted by engine manufacturing techniques and materials in general use since the late 1970s, universal across production of consumer automobiles offered for sale within the US, regardless of country of manufacture. The flap over protecting the producers of MTBE from prosecution relating to the introduction of the substance into the environment is preposterous on its face. MTBE as a gasoline additive was federally approved, was mandated by various state and federal laws, encouraged by specific tax benefits, direct subsidies, and other governmental incentives, again, both state and federal. The producers of the product had nothing to do with the post-manufacture negligent, at times criminally so, mishandling of the product by transporters, storage, transfer, and retail dispensers of MTBE-treated gasoline, which is in fact the proximate cause of the product's introduction into the environment. They merely are guilty of having vastly deeper pockets. As I mentioned on another thread, suing the producers of MTBE is akin to suing the local water utility because the lid was left up and your cat drowned in your toilet.

I'm certainly never opposed to the drowning of cats, but that's a different party.

You might not be old enough to recall, Nimh, but in the "old days," Britain traded within its Commonwealth with all member nations having a "favored nation" status automatically. To some extent, this aided those particular nations to which a definition applied "get a leg" up on other "emerging" economies. It help Australia recover their war time expenditure; it helped Canada to continue the boom which resulted for them almost from the beginning of the war. Of course, by the 1960's, it all started to go to hell for African and Asian nations, as independence and growing prosperity went along with war and fragmentation.

France attempted the same within her "empire," but with less success, because it went to hell for them sooner. In the long run, however, she has maintained a good relationship with former African colonies, after the "loss" of Algeria--and it has been arguably more to the benefit of nations such as Senegal and Chad, while not necessarily a loss to France.

Britain found herself being strangled early in the second world war, and by the end of the war, had managed to rebuild the agricultural sector she herself had destroyed a century earlier. However, both Britain and Holland (from before the days of the United Provinces) have historically recognized that economic health and the benefits of shipping and the carrying trade could feed nations whose populatons quickly outstripped the relative primitive agricultures before 1900. France was always able to feed her population, although in bad times just barely, and distribution inequities kept peasant and middle class resentment simmering, until the hail storms of 1788 put paid the wheat crop in northern France, and the revolution eventually ensued (not inevitably, it did require some dedicated incompetence on the part of Louis XVI's regime). Whereas England has throughout her history been more likely to aid food middle-men (viz, the corn laws), she has been a dedicated free-trade nation for most of that same history, and less likely to indulge in farm subsidy. Holland has always encouraged high agricultural production, and made good money from North Sea fishing, but has had a more realistic attitude about the "unlikelyhood" of feeding her population from her own agricultural resources. In France, for reasons both economic and political, farm protection, and later farm subsidy have been political gospel since the Revolution.

For more than a thousand years, the Germans (as in modern Germany, Czech Republic and Austria) have enjoyed abundance, when war or politics did not intervene. She has shown herself less enamored of farm subsidy, although occassionally practicing it for nationalistic reaons. Both Italy and Spain seem not have had feeding the population as an issue, although there was not always necessarily abundance. Portugal seems to have sat somewhere between the pragmatic resignation of the Dutch, fishing and farming and importing food, and the nonchalance of Spain and Italy.

It would be absurd to try to suggest that all European nations have historically had the same policies, or that any one nation has unswervingly followed a certain policy. The contemporary EU subsidies seem, from where i sit, to be a compromise of all previous policies, with the weight toward subsidy, as a result of economic militancy.

I do think farmers become "icon," but to an extent and as a result of a nation's ongoing perception of how crucial the ability to feed the population is. It seems from my reading of history that the American "iconography" of agriculture as a bellweather of the nation's social and economic health does not have a European analogy. America was an agricultural, or agricultural product economy from the beginning (South Carolina raised rice for sale to slave owners in the West Indies, New England sold grain and livestock, and smuggled molasses to make rum for smuggling, and most states have been able to feed themselves from the ealiest times). Enormous resources of land combined with usually agriculturally experienced immigrants moving onto that land has generally given us a surplus for lucrative export--worry about feeding ourselves has never been more than transitory, and never deeply felt.

For Japan, the farmer is probably more of an icon than even in America. Through most of her history, even the highest levels of society have had to accept that most years would see little surplus of food, and many years no surplus or even shortage. This has made the ability to produce rice an obsession. France got fixated on the farmer because social oppression and agronomic ineptitude made for lean times all too often. Japan simply had insufficient arable land--agricultural sophistication was a survival tool, and even then did not guarantee fat peasants. Today, it would be ludicrous to suggest Japan's population could be adequately fed from their own agricultural resources, but although displaying the pragamatism of the Dutch and English about food imports, they continue the obsession, and revere an agricultural tradition with political clout out of all proportion to its true value.



Timber, thanks for some "deep" background on the ethanol issue.

Its a subject that gets kicked around quite a bit in these parts ... real coffeshop/barbershop/tavern stuff, if you understand. Bein' against the proposition won't get you beat up all by itself, but if you've got other faults to go along with that one, you could be in some trouble. Regardless your other qualifications, if you're city folk and voice opposition to The Energy Bill, you're pretty much a gonner.

so Timber I take it you think the current energy bill (now in limbo-land) is a good idea for the nation?

America also has the veneration of the "family farm" -- which benefits little from subsidies; how much you benefit from a subsidy is directly proportional to the size of your operation -- to contend with. I mean, three out of my four grandparents were farmers -- were good people and struggled -- so farmers must be good people who struggle, right?

Fewer than 2% of Americans are employed directly in farming. They do have clout well beyond their actual numbers, probably more than any other single-interest group. I happen to be rather unhappy that Agribusiness, in the form of the few megafirms that comprise its upper tier, piggyback on the respect and concern real farmers deserve.

I hate to open myself up to attack, but why do real farmers deserve respect and concern? (I mean, any more than any small family business?) And if that family farm is failing, why is that automatically assumed to be symptomatic of something other than mismanagement by the owners?

having been, most of my life, a small farmer, I dont expect any undue consideration. I do resent "agra-business" from getting immense "incentives."

If I may answer that from my point of view (which I don't necessarily expect to be the same as timber's) -- public support for farm subsidies is generally garnered with propaganda that says that the people who most benefit from these bills are the people whose farms will not otherwise survive. Now, I'm not sure why this should be a concern -- it would certainly foster economic inefficiency if it was -- but the truth is that most of the money for subsidies goes into pockets that are already very deep and very full.

Just watch, next time a farm bill goes 'round (and isn't there one coming up?) as proposals get made that subsidies be capped -- proposals which will never make it into the final version of the bill.

We have quite a bit in common there, pdog. And Scrat, I don't mean to imply that honest, hardworking farmers deserve any more or less respect than honest hardworking anybody else's. I resent deeply that "Upper-Case-A" Agribusiness is not only enabled but actually encouraged to expropriate and exploit that respect in the sole interest of generating capital by political means as opposed to legitimate business practice involving competition which entails productivity, efficiency, and market success of product, whether that product is an ear of corn or a 20,000 pound roll of stamping steel.

If you don't like it, move to New Zealand!

I think we are in agreement here. The answer is to get the federal government out of the business of propping up failing businesses, out of the business of price controls, out of the business of business.