Quotulatiousness

July 17, 2012

Ending supply management

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Economics, Food, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:00

In the Globe and Mail Economy Lab, David Bond explores equitable ways to compensate farmers who will lose out if-and-when the federal government abandons the supply management system:

The quota was originally given out for free, therefore farmers or their direct successors still in the business would receive nothing for their original allocation and then 90 per cent of whatever they paid at the time they acquired additional amounts of quota.

Why only 90 per cent? Well having quota allowed the holders to earn returns on their investment well in excess of the returns that could have been earned in alternative forms of farming. Having enjoyed for more than 40 years these superior returns thanks to their ability to persuade government to protect them from competition it’s time they “enjoyed” some of the costs they foisted upon Canadian consumers.

While the potential beneficiaries of this compensation may complain of shoddy treatment they evidenced little sympathy on the costs they passed on to the consumers much less the harmful impact they had on potential exports of other agricultural and non-agricultural exports because government refused to modify supply management during trade negotiations.

July 16, 2012

Toronto edges cautiously toward allowing wider range of “street food”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Cancon, Food, Government, Health — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:14

Matt Gurney in the National Post on Toronto’s inch-by-glacial-inch move toward allowing a bit more variety in the foods street vendors can sell:

Last week, Toronto City Council approved hot dog vendors to sell an expanded variety of foods. The expanded list is still far from expansive. Veggie sticks, fruit salads and bagels with individually packaged butters are about the extent of the street food revolution in Toronto. Even these baby steps are progress, though — they follow the total failure of Toronto’s A La Cart program, which tried to expand the city’s food options to include more “ethnic” fare. The program, which should go down in history as the most botched effort the city has ever made, is Prosecution Exhibit A for those who believe that governments only exist to screw up things that really aren’t all that complicated.

But the city’s concern about street food, though overwrought and frankly embarrassing, at least comes from an honest place — concerns about spoiled food or improper preparation hurting public health. But Toronto has always missed the point. The public is protected when governments monitor outcomes and harshly punish failures, not seek to control process. Health inspections are an entirely reasonable part of the government’s job, with street food as much as any industry. And it seems that Toronto, while fretting about what food vendors might be doing wrong, hasn’t exactly been doing a bang-up job of its own responsibilities.

Hard though it is to imagine, other cities — even other Canadian cities — somehow manage to have all sorts of tasty treats for sale by food trucks, carts, and temporary kiosks without civilization crumbling.

July 13, 2012

A more accurate title would have been The Locavore Delusion

Filed under: Environment, Food, Health, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:58

Rob Lyons reviews the new book by Pierre Desrochers and Hiroko Shimizu:

The fundamental question underpinning both those earlier papers and The Locavore’s Dilemma is this: if local food is so great, why did a globalised food system develop at all? The answer, as Desrochers and Shimizu argue, is that the creation of a worldwide trade in food reduced prices, increased variety and improved security of supply. If there is a problem with this world market in food, they argue, it is that it is not open or far-reaching enough.

The online eco-magazine Grist ran an interview with Desrochers earlier this month. In a follow-up piece, readers came up with responses to the interview. One of these responses provides such a neat summary of the arguments in favour of local food that it is worth repeating in full.

‘I am a local-food advocate for many reasons: Taste: An heirloom tomato picked that morning runs circles around a hybridised tomato picked two weeks ago in Florida and gassed so it turns red en route; Quality: the better the soil and the farmer, the better the food; Nutrition: food sheds nutrients after it is picked. The longer it takes to get to market, the less nutritional value it has, comparatively; Transparency: I like knowing how my food is grown and harvested. I visit my meat producer; try that at a CAFO [concentrated animal feeding operation]; Environmental: A minimisation of the use of chemicals that wash into waterways, creating algae blooms, choking out life, or killing beneficial insects, including honey bees; Sane stewardship: I like to support farmers who create more naturally fertile soil, which is better able to resist pests, floods, and droughts; Pleasure: I buy local food at my farmers’ market because it’s more pleasant to do so than going into an air-conditioned grocery store. I see neighbours, chat with farmers, taste before I buy. Economic: I want my food dollars to support my local economy; Humanity: Animals and humans are treated better on the small farms I know than they are on the large ones; I value green open spaces: Supporting local farms with my money encourages those farmers to maintain those green open spaces rather than selling off to developers.’

As Desrochers and Shimizu explain, these ideas are either not necessarily true, are matters of personal taste or, more often, are completely wrong. Instead, the authors argue, ‘the available evidence convincingly demonstrates that long-distance trade and modern technologies have resulted in much greater food availability, lower prices, improved health and reduced environmental damage than if they had never materialised. Indeed, more trade and ever-improving technologies remain to this day the only proven ways to lift large numbers of people out of rural poverty and malnutrition.’

Let’s take those arguments for local food, one by one, using (though not exclusively) the arguments in The Locavore’s Dilemma.

July 5, 2012

Between loopholes and exemptions, Bloomberg’s soda rules fail to address real problem

Filed under: Food, Government, Health, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:35

Jacob Sullum has a modest proposal to fix NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s ineffectual soda rule:

At a Board of Health meeting last month, several members zeroed in on the most obvious problem with Mayor Bloomberg’s plan to shrink New Yorkers’ waistlines by shrinking their soft drink servings: It does not go far enough.

One member questioned the exception for milk-based beverages such as shakes, which “have monstrous amounts of calories.” Another noted that the carveout for convenience stores, supermarkets and vending machines (which are not regulated by the city’s Health Department) means 7-Eleven’s Big Gulp — the epitome of effervescent excess — will remain available. There also was murmuring about the continued legality of free refills, which will let people drink as much soda as they want, provided they do it 16 ounces at a time.

But one glaring gap in Bloomberg’s big beverage ban went unprobed: Why limit the limit to soft drinks? What about the hard stuff?

[. . .]

With all that in mind, think about eggnog, which is doubly exempt from Bloomberg’s drink order, since it is milk-based and alcoholic. This drink is a horror measured by calories alone, clocking in at 50 or so an ounce, more than four times the count for sugar-sweetened soda. Yet this lurking threat to thinness and sobriety is untouched by Bloomberg’s pitiful pint-size pop prescription.

Beer, also exempt from Bloomberg’s serving ceiling, can contain as many as 28 calories an ounce — more than twice as many as soda. Why do you think they call it stout?

Some sensible regulation in this area could head off many incipient beer bellies and lots of loutish behavior at Yankee games. Instead of the mayor’s arbitrary 16-ounce limit, why not simply decree that all beer orders from now on will be light beer orders? Taste is a small sacrifice to make for public health.

July 2, 2012

What value do speculators offer?

Filed under: Economics, Food, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:17

In most newspapers, you don’t need to wait long to read some journalist beating up on evil speculators for the “damage” they do and the claimed “uselessness” of their activities. Tim Worstall points out that speculators are actually essential to smooth operation of free markets:

What is it that the speculator in food manages to achieve? They move prices through time. At the moment, there’s a drought, and so we think there will be less corn available for consumption next year, so its price goes up.

What would we like to happen? Should prices stay stable? We would all carry on using the amount of corn that we originally thought we’d get. And we’d run out — there may even be a famine. People tend to die in famines.

So what we’d actually like to happen is for people to prepare by consuming a bit less corn this year.

Some of this should come from substitution: farmers will feed wheat to animals not corn. Consumers might move from grits to weetabix for breakfast. Perhaps the fools putting corn into cars will move over to sugar cane to make ethanol from.

We would also like a supply effect: those who are currently growing corn might add a bit more fertiliser, take more care in harvesting, make sure less gets spoiled or lost in transport.

Rising prices causes both of those pretty neatly. Put up the price and people will use less, while suppliers will make more. And what is it that the speculators on the futures markets have done in response to this report of drought? They have raised prices.

June 30, 2012

Thai farm workers arrested for “causing global warming”

Filed under: Asia, Environment, Food, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:29

A weird little story from Thailand:

PHETCHABUN – Early one Thursday morning, a gun was pointed at Ms. Kwanla Saikhumtung, a 34-year-old mother, because she was farming.

The man who pointed the gun was one of ten armed officers from Phu Pha Daeng, the local wildlife sanctuary in Lomsak district. After observing the villagers for three days, the officers finally informed Ms. Kwanla and twelve fellow villagers from Huay Kontha that they were trespassing on wildlife sanctuary land. They demanded that the villagers come to the police station to talk with them.

They refused. The villager that hired them paid taxes on the plot, leading the villagers to believe they had a right to work the land, and they worried about finishing their work.

[. . .]

This incident was the beginning of a seven-year-long legal battle, pitting Ms. Kwanla against the Thai government. She and the other twelve villagers — the youngest only sixteen at the time — were first charged with trespassing.

The real shock, however, came when they were slapped with a 470,000 baht fine for contributing to global warming under the charge of causing environmental damage.

[. . .]

The Royal Forestry Department (RFD) fined the villagers for cutting down trees and farming, drawing from the 1992 National Environmental Quality Act which forbids “destruction, loss, or damage to natural resources owned by the State.” Their fine was determined according to a formula used to calculate environmental damage. The formula measures the increase in temperature caused by cutting down trees. Any increase in the land temperature shows ‘global warming’. In essence, cutting down trees to farm corn leads to global warming.

The Huay Kontha villagers have a running joke, “Because we pick the corn, the world gets hotter.”

The charges that Ms. Kwanla and the other villagers face shed light on an emerging trend in Thailand. Land dispute issues are becoming increasingly common. According to Pramote Pholpinyo, coordinator of the Northeast Land Reform Network (LRN), there are currently 35-40 “global warming” cases against villagers in Thailand, with charges amounting to almost 33 million baht.

H/T to Anthony Watts for the link.

June 27, 2012

California primed to make bad decision for “good” reasons

Filed under: Environment, Food, Government, Health, Science, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:05

California’s already bad economic situation could be made even worse by mandating that genetically modified foods be labelled to call attention to themselves:

The American Medical Association resolved this week that “there is no scientific justification for special labeling of bioengineered foods.”

The association has long-held that nothing about the process of recombinant DNA makes genetically engineered (GE) crop plants inherently more dangerous to the environment or to human health than the traditional crop plants that have been deliberately but slowly bred for human purposes for millennia. It is a view shared by the National Academy of Sciences, the World Health Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N., the European Commission, and countless other national science academies and non-governmental organizations.

And yet Californians will consider on their November ballots a law that mandates cigarette-like labeling of food derived from GE plants. Proponents claim to promote opportunities for consumers to make informed choices about the foods they eat. But to build support for the measure, they have played on consumer fears about a promising technology that is nevertheless prone to “Frankenfoods” demagoguery. If successful, they may well imperil the ability of Californians, and consumers around the world, to choose a technology that scientists contend could end hunger and malnutrition, lift hundreds of millions from poverty, and reduce the environmental impact of feeding an evermore populous world.

June 23, 2012

Trade deals as mutual disarmament pacts

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Food — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:27

It’s a very sad commentary that the only way the current “pro-business” federal government can even consider scrapping our supply management monopolies is because “our trading partners forced us to”:

If the government were of a mind to get rid of supply management — it swears it is not — that is perhaps the only basis on which it could: our trading partners made us do it. Certainly it would not dream of doing so otherwise. Such is the power of the supply management lobby, especially dairy, that a suffocating consensus has settled over the issue, of a kind rarely seen in a democracy. Consensus is not even the word. Every party strives to outdo the others in the fulsomeness of its support. And not just every party: every member of every party, in every province and at every level of government. It’s quite creepy.

Yet virtually every economist or policy analyst of note agrees that supply management is a disgrace. The primary effect of the quotas — the intended effect — is to drive up the price of these foods, staples of most Canadians’ diets, to two and three times the market price. The burden of these extraordinary price differentials, of course, fall most heavily on the poor, a fact that ought to trouble self-styled “progressives” but evidently doesn’t.

But it isn’t only consumers who pay. Since the quotas are tradeable, the premium over market prices gets capitalized into the value of the quota. The right to a cow’s worth of milk production, for example, runs to about $28,000, meaning a farmer looking to get into the industry faces an initial outlay, for the typical 60-cow farm, in excess of $1.5-million — just for the quota, never mind the cows, the barn and the rest.

June 21, 2012

Even Mother Jones is coming around on genetically modified crops

Filed under: Environment, Food, Science, Technology — Tags: — Nicholas @ 10:11

Sarah Zhang points out that people who want less damage to the environment should support GM technology in farming:

Genetically modified Bt crops get a pretty bad rap. The pest-killing Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) bacteria protein these plants are bioengineered to make has been accused of harming monarch butterflies, honey bees, rats, and showing up in the blood of pregnant women.

Just one problem: None of that is true. (Click on any of those links to see a scientific refutation of each claim.) Seven independent experts in genetically modified crops I spoke to all confirmed that the science shows Bt crops to be safer than their alternative: noxious chemical insecticides.

[. . .]

But just as we do not blame a murder on, say, a knife, Bt technology is not to blame for the ills of industrial agriculture. After all, knives are pretty handy in the kitchen when we use them properly. Even critics will acknowledge that Bt crops have led to a sharp decrease in insecticide use, which is a huge net positive for the environment. Broad spectrum chemical insecticides kill often and kill widely, wiping out “natural enemies” that are helpful pest-eating critters like spiders. A massive 20-year study just published in the journal Nature found that using Bt cotton in China to control cotton bollworms closely tracked with a rebound in natural enemy populations, which in turn keep out secondary pests like aphids that usually proliferate when chemical insecticides kill the bollworms.

If that last sentence sounds complicated, it is. Integrated pest management is about recognizing the interconnected complexity of these ecosystems of plants and all the insects living on them. The Nature study found that pest control through Bt cotton even had spillover benefits to the non-Bt soybeans growing around them. Natural enemies like ladybugs, spiders, and lacewings keep pests unaffected by Bt at bay. “Maintaining the biological control agents we already have is one of the cornerstones of integrated pest management,” says William Hutchison, an entomologist at the University of Minnesota. In addition, a 2010 study by Hutchison in Science (PDF) showed that American farmers of non-Bt corn actually reaped two-thirds of the economic benefit (read: additional profit) from nearby Bt-related pest suppression.

June 17, 2012

Imaginary “planetary boundaries”

Filed under: Environment, Food, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:08

Matt Ridley on the shift in emphasis for the Rio+20 conference:

The Riocrats now have a new tack, which will dominate next week’s discussion: planetary boundaries. An influential paper in 2009 written by Johan Rockstrom of Stockholm University and 28 colleagues argued that there are nine thresholds, crossing any of which will trigger collapse of the Earth’s life support systems: land-use change, loss of biodiversity, nitrogen and phosphorus levels, water use, ocean acidification, climate change, ozone depletion, aerosol loading and chemical pollution.

The trouble with this approach, according to a new report by Linus Blomqvist, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger of the Breakthrough Institute in San Francisco, is that, for six of these measures, “there are no global tipping points beyond which these ecological processes will begin to function in fundamentally different ways. Hence the setting of boundaries for these mechanisms is an arbitrary exercise.”

A good example is land-use change. The Rockstrom paper suggested that if human beings convert 15% of the land surface of the Earth to cropland, the world will pass a tipping point, because as marginal land gets exhausted, a small increment in food demand would produce an accelerating increase in cultivation. Currently we cultivate about 11.7% of the land. Yet there is no evidence that anything special happens at 15%. In the words of Steve Bass of the International Institute for Environment and Development in London, “If anything, the opposite has probably been more true: Converting land for farming and for industry has clearly delivered a great deal of well-being.”

[. . .]

The “boundaries” approach needs to incorporate the possibility that, thanks to technology, fossil fuels and minerals, people are already living more lightly on the land than we did in the past.

June 15, 2012

The Never Seconds flap reveals highly selective anti-authoritarian reactions

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Food, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:52

Brendan O’Neill is happy that the petty authoritarians at the Argyll and Bute council have rescinded their ban on young Martha Payne’s school lunch blog, but points out that the Twitstorm that helped publicize her plight is remarkably selective in which kinds of official bullying they will oppose:

But what a shame that these decent folks’ opposition to council heavy-handedness in relation to school lunches is so spectacularly partial. What a shame, for example, that they haven’t offered solidarity to those millions of children who have been banned from bringing sweets and crisps into schools, which, as I once reported for the BBC, has given rise to a black market in junk food in school playgrounds. What a shame they didn’t speak out when councils, behaving like a Tuckshop Taliban, stormed into schools and shut down tuckshops and vending machines that sold chocolate or Coke. What a shame they didn’t have anything to say when mothers in Yorkshire who passed chips through the schoolgates to their children were slated in the media and depicted as Viz-style “Fat Slags” in The Sun. What a shame they didn’t complain when it was revealed that some schools are taking it upon themselves to raid children’s lunchboxes — made for them by their parents! — in order to confiscate anything “unhealthy”.

What a shame, in other words, that only one kind of authoritarianism in relation to school dinners is criticised — namely that which censors people from revealing how crap such dinners are — while other forms of authoritarianism, which control both what children can eat and even what their parents can provide them with, are tolerated. Like stern headmasters, it seems concerned hacks will only give their nod of approval to nice, polite, healthy schoolchildren, while withholding it from the rabble, from kids who eat chips and cake with the blessing of their stupid parents. Those kids, it seems, can be censored and censured and controlled as much as is necessary.

June 12, 2012

“It’s the slippery slope consciously deployed as a policy strategy”

Filed under: Food, Government, Health, Liberty, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:50

Shikha Dalmia on Bloomberg’s nanny complex and the underlying cause of it:

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s proposed ban on big sodas in the Big Apple is generating accusations that he is a Nanny Statist. But that’s not quite accurate. A nanny forces others to do things for their own good. Bloomberg is a moral narcissist forcing New Yorkers to do things that make him feel good.

Under his soda ban, street vendors and restaurants would be barred from selling pop in anything over 16-ounce containers on the theory that limiting access to sugary drinks will help combat the city’s obesity and diabetes “epidemics.” No one — not even Bloomberg himself — believes that the ban will actually work, not least because unlimited free refills will remain legal, as will oversized helpings of apple juice and other “natural” beverages with arguably even more sugar. But workability isn’t the point right now. It’s to get the public used to the idea of the government slurping around in your Slurpee, and then to ratchet up. It’s the slippery slope consciously deployed as a policy strategy.

Nor is this Bloomberg’s first foray into minding your own business. He has also cracked down on smoking, salt and trans fats. He has mandated that fast-food joints post calorie counts. He also tried (unsuccessfully) to bar food stamp recipients from buying sodas — one-upping fellow Republicans who want to urine-test welfare recipients to make sure they don’t use their government aid for drugs.

Petty paternalism, “nudging”, and the urge to human perfection

Filed under: Food, Government, Health, Liberty, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:15

The Economist looks at the dietary meddling of New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg and other forms of “we know what’s better for you” paternalism:

In defence of Michael Bloomberg’s controversial proposal to ban large servings of sugary drinks, Timothy Noah of the New Republic cuts to the chase and plumps for paternalism:

    The truth is that there’s nothing inherently wrong with paternalistic government or, in the harsher, feminized shorthand of its detractors, the “nanny state.” Parents and nannies can be good or bad. No adult likes to be told how to live his life, but most of us benefit from baby authoritarianism far more than we’d like to admit.

Mr Noah’s argument seems to be that there’s nothing wrong with paternalistic measures as long as they actually benefit us. Philosophers sometimes call the form of paternalism Mr Noah has in mind, concerned with bodily health and mental well-being, “welfare paternalism”. Of course, ideas about the human good routinely incorporate moral and theological suppositions, which can take paternalism well beyond concern for physical health and psychological welfare. For example, Torquemada, the infamous Spanish inquisitor, acted paternalistically in torturing individuals to confess their sins insofar as he did so intending to save them from damnation to eternal hellfire, which he believed to be infinitely worse than the pain of the rack. For Torquemada, the true nature of the interests of individuals had been revealed by religious texts and religious authorities, which he no doubt took to be at least as reliable as we take the Journal of the American Medical Association to be. I wonder if Mr Noah would agree that Torquemada did nothing inherently wrong by torturing heretics on the rack in order to elicit confessions and save their eternal souls from infinite suffering. As a matter of fact, the inquisitor’s conception of welfare is false, and so he caused a monstrous quantity of pointless suffering. But what if his facts about our moral and spiritual welfare had been right and that he succeeded in saving many souls? No problem?

June 9, 2012

The future of dining

Filed under: Food, Health, Humour, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:09

What’s the restaurant of choice for Michael Bloomberg and Michelle Obama? Watch what happens when Brian tries to order lunch at Nou Nou D’Enfer!

H/T to Nick Gillespie.

June 7, 2012

Reason.tv: Obesity in America

Filed under: Food, Government, Health, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:07

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