Quotulatiousness

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

June 5, 2012

Signs of hope in Mozambique

Filed under: Africa, Economics, Food, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:36

An article in the Guardian has some good news about the struggle against malnutrition, but it’s wrapped in misleading language:

All the women belong to the Wapsala Association, a 33-strong agricultural collective created to boost local smallholders, ensure a steady, year-round, supply of high-nutrition foodstuffs in an area prone to chronic shortages, and help end the curse of malnutrition that affects about 44% of all Mozambican children under five.

The Wapsala project is seen by some Mozambican nutrition experts as a paradigm to be emulated in similarly disadvantaged areas of the country and other parts of southern Africa.

The collective’s approach, rooted in public and international funding, contrasts sharply with the prioritisation of private-sector investment, as proposed at the recent G8 summit.

Instead of perpetuating the western focus on food security, the farmers of Wapsala provide a working alternative — what Graciela Romero, the international programmes director of War on Want, calls food sovereignty: a move to promote agrarian reform that favours small producers and the landless, and emphasises local markets and self-sufficiency.

As Tim Worstall points out, the way this initiative is being described is rather at odds with its actual goals:

OK, so we’ve got all the buzz words. Cooperatives, self sufficiency, food sovereignty, local markets and it’s very much anti private-sector investment.

And what is it that they actually want to do?

    “We would like to process other people’s cassava but we have no capacity,” he said. “The South Africans want dried cassava and cassava leaves. Market demand is high but we cannot supply it. We are also expanding our nursery business with trees and other plants — they expand our fruit production. But we are limited due to lack of water. It costs a lot to dig a borehole. The nearest is two kilometres away.”

They, err, want investment so they can export. You know, undermine someone else’s food sovereignty?

So, leaving aside the cant what they’re actually doing it trying to create a community of yeomen farmers who trade in local and regional markets. Not a bad idea at all but entirely different from that cant being spouted.

“We do not know if low salt diets improve or worsen health outcomes”

Filed under: Food, Government, Health, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:14

You’ve undoubtedly heard lots of recommendations to reduce the salt in your diet, right? The western diet — especially the North American variant — has “too much salt”, and it’s killing us. At least, that’s what has been drummed into our heads for the last twenty years or more. The problem is that is may not actually be true, and in fact may create other health issues:

Although researchers quietly acknowledged that the data were “inconclusive and contradictory” or “inconsistent and contradictory” — two quotes from the cardiologist Jeremiah Stamler, a leading proponent of the eat-less-salt campaign, in 1967 and 1981 — publicly, the link between salt and blood pressure was upgraded from hypothesis to fact.

[. . .]

When researchers have looked at all the relevant trials and tried to make sense of them, they’ve continued to support Dr. Stamler’s “inconsistent and contradictory” assessment. Last year, two such “meta-analyses” were published by the Cochrane Collaboration, an international nonprofit organization founded to conduct unbiased reviews of medical evidence. The first of the two reviews concluded that cutting back “the amount of salt eaten reduces blood pressure, but there is insufficient evidence to confirm the predicted reductions in people dying prematurely or suffering cardiovascular disease.” The second concluded that “we do not know if low salt diets improve or worsen health outcomes.”

The idea that eating less salt can worsen health outcomes may sound bizarre, but it also has biological plausibility and is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, too. A 1972 paper in The New England Journal of Medicine reported that the less salt people ate, the higher their levels of a substance secreted by the kidneys, called renin, which set off a physiological cascade of events that seemed to end with an increased risk of heart disease. In this scenario: eat less salt, secrete more renin, get heart disease, die prematurely.

With nearly everyone focused on the supposed benefits of salt restriction, little research was done to look at the potential dangers. But four years ago, Italian researchers began publishing the results from a series of clinical trials, all of which reported that, among patients with heart failure, reducing salt consumption increased the risk of death.

June 1, 2012

Bloomberg’s latest “nudge” experiment

Filed under: Food, Government, Health, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:28

In his Maclean’s column, Colby Cosh explains the problem with New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg’s attempt to solve the obesity problem 32 ounces at a time:

Stopping people from exercising preferences is harm. You say Internet Commentator X doesn’t think having a Big Gulp is an important freedom? Does he not see Commentators Y through Upsilon standing right behind him, making the same case against marijuana and hijabs and labour unions and skiing?

This innate prejudice against social engineering for its own sake, which ought to be strong in liberals but is utterly absent in Bloomberg, is paired with an empirical prejudice against social engineering because of the near-inevitable consequences — chief among them being that the institutions created to enforce a for-your-own-good law wander very quickly from anyone’s good but that of the enforcers. I stacked the deck a little by mentioning the Eighteenth Amendment, because it shouldn’t form part of the justification for anything: it took literally six years [for] the U.S.A. to go from “Let’s roust these poor addicted creatures out of the saloon” to “Let’s deliberately poison thousands of Americans to death, that the majesty of the law may be respected”. But the Eighteenth Amendment is worth mentioning, because modern-day prohibitionists never feel the need to accept its lessons or even acknowledge its existence.

When Bloomberg and his deputy mayor for health are ridiculed and their volumetric crusade is ignored, whom do you suppose will end up crucified by bureaucrats in defence of their “nudge’? The logic requires it. If soft drinks really are prematurely killing thousands, and a ban on large containers is the magic answer, how far will be too far when it comes to encouraging compliance? When it comes to “nudges”, we have to recognize a distinction between what is being enforced and the means of enforcement; the mildness and restraint of the former does not guarantee that of the latter.

He also links to this wonderful piece at Hit and Run by Jacob Sullum saying “The mayor’s own pretext for the program had logical holes that Reason‘s Jacob Sullum quickly drove five tanker trucks of frappuccino through.”

May 28, 2012

QotD: Don’t read this before lunch

Filed under: Europe, Food, France, History, Media, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:01

In the kitchen the dirt was worse. It is not a figure of speech, it is a mere statement of fact to say that a French cook will spit in the soup — that is, if he is not going to drink it himself. He is an artist, but his art is not cleanliness. To a certain extent he is even dirty because he is an artist, for food, to look smart, needs dirty treatment. When a steak, for instance, is brought up for the head cook’s inspection, he does not handle it with a fork. He picks it up in his fingers and slaps it down, runs his thumb round the dish and licks it to taste the gravy, runs it round and licks again, then steps back and contemplates the piece of meat like an artist judging a picture, then presses it lovingly into place with his fat, pink fingers, every one of which he has licked a hundred times that morning. When he is satisfied, he takes a cloth and wipes his fingerprints from the dish, and hands it to the waiter. And the waiter, of course, dips his fingers into the gravy — his nasty, greasy fingers which he is for ever running through his brilliantined hair. Whenever one pays more than, say, ten francs for a dish of meat in Paris, one may be certain that it has been fingered in this manner. In very cheap restaurants it is different; there, the same trouble is not taken over the food, and it is just forked out of the pan and flung on to a plate, without handling. Roughly speaking, the more one pays for food, the more sweat and spittle one is obliged to eat with it.

Dirtiness is inherent in hotels and restaurants, because sound food is sacrificed to punctuality and smartness. The hotel employee is too busy getting food ready to remember that it is meant to be eaten. A meal is simply ‘une commande‘ to him, just as a man dying of cancer is simply ‘a case’ to the doctor. A customer orders, for example, a piece of toast. Somebody, pressed with work in a cellar deep underground, has to prepare it. How can he stop and say to himself, ‘This toast is to be eaten — I must make it eatable’? All he knows is that it must look right and must be ready in three minutes. Some large drops of sweat fall from his forehead on to the toast. Why should he worry? Presently the toast falls among the filthy sawdust on the floor. Why trouble to make a new piece? It is much quicker to wipe the sawdust off. On the way upstairs the toast falls again, butter side down. Another wipe is all it needs. And so with everything. The only food at the Hotel X which was ever prepared cleanly was the staff’s, and the patron’s. The maxim, repeated by everyone, was: ‘Look out for the patron, and as for the clients, s’en fout pas mal!’ Everywhere in the service quarters dirt festered — a secret vein of dirt, running through the great garish hotel like the intestines through a man’s body.
George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London, 1933.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress