Quotulatiousness

September 28, 2011

“Fairtrade locks many Africans into non-mechanised, back-breaking cheap labour”

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Food, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:14

The feel-good virtue implied in the Fairtrade label is actually a deal with the devil for the poor farmer, says Tim Black:

The purpose of the Fairtrade Foundation, we are told, is to guarantee that the producer gets a good deal. The Fairtrade-labelling system, then, is meant to assure us that, when we buy something with the Fairtrade logo, the producers get a better cut of the cash than they would do otherwise. So we effectively pay a little bit more — hence the price premium — to feel a whole lot better about our purchases. Or at least that’s the theory.

But as researchers pointed out earlier this year, the actuality of Fairtrade is not quite as easy on the self-regarding eye of ethical shoppers as the Fairtrade Foundation would have us believe. For a start, it has been suggested that only 25 per cent of the premium price paid for Fairtrade products reaches the producers. Not only that, already-poor farmers actually have to pay to join up to the Fairtrade scheme. And in doing so, they also have to ensure that their business meets certain requirements, whether it is in their long-term interests or not.

And here we come to the main problem. The Fairtrade Foundation demands certain things of the producers if they are to be accepted on to the scheme. For example, producers have to employ what the Fairtrade Foundation deems to be ‘environmentally sound agricultural practices’ and, to qualify as small producers, they have to ‘rely mainly on their own or their family’s labour’. It’s almost cruelly ironic: while champions of Fairtrade claim it is freeing producers from the exploitative relations of the market, it simultaneously ties them into the oppressive and exploitative moral relations of ‘us’ and ‘them’. They have to stick to the letter of ‘our’ vision of the world, in all its sustainable, anti-growth glory. That is, in exchange for a marginally better deal on the market, producers have to adhere to what the Fairtrade Foundation deems to be the right way of farming or harvesting.

This effectively condemns producers desperate for a bit more cash to a low level of material and economic development. In the Fairtrade vision of production, you can forget about the large-scale industrialised production of cocoa; you can forget about the crop-protecting usage of pesticides. What Fairtrade insists upon instead is small-scale cottage industry free of anything that looks too modern, let alone chemical. As Patrick Hayes noted on spiked a couple of years ago, citing a WORLDwrite film called The Bitter Aftertaste, Fairtrade locks many Africans into non-mechanised, back-breaking cheap labour ‘as they cull weeds by hand rather than being able to destroy them with chemicals’.

So while Fairtrade might make us feel good when shopping, it does nothing of the sort for those doing the producing. Which is something to bear in mind when enjoying a bag of non-Fairtrade Skittles.

September 7, 2011

Brendan O’Neill – The Riots: A Mob Made By The Welfare State?

Filed under: Britain, Government, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:14

August 9, 2011

We have a saying in Britain … we call it ‘shitting on your own doorstep’

Filed under: Britain, Government, Law — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:11

Brendan O’Neill refutes some of the theories on what underlying causes are motivating the London riots:

Many commentators are on a mission to contextualise the riots that have swept parts of urban London and other British cities. ‘It’s very naive to look at these riots without the context’, says one journalist, who says the reason the violence kicked off in the London suburb of Tottenham is because ‘that area is getting 75% cuts [in public services]’. Others have said that the political context for the rioting is youth unemployment or working-class anger at David Cameron’s cuts agenda. ‘There is a context to London’s riots that can’t be ignored’, said a writer for the Guardian, and it is the ‘backdrop of brutal cuts and enforced austerity measures’. The ‘mass unrest’ is a protest against unhinged capitalism, apparently.

These observers are right that there is a political context to the riots. They are right to argue that while the police shooting of young black man Mark Duggan may ostensibly have been the trigger for the street violence, there is a broader context to the disturbances. But they are wrong about what the political context is. Painting these riots as some kind of action replay of historic political streetfights against capitalist bosses or racist cops might allow armchair radicals to get their intellectual rocks off, as they lift their noses from dusty tomes about the Levellers or the Suffragettes and fantasise that a political upheaval of equal worth is now occurring outside their windows. But such shameless projection misses what is new and peculiar and deeply worrying about these riots. The political context is not the cuts agenda or racist policing — it is the welfare state, which, it is now clear, has nurtured a new generation that has absolutely no sense of community spirit or social solidarity.

What we have on the streets of London and elsewhere are welfare-state mobs. The youth who are ‘rising up’ — actually they are simply shattering their own communities — represent a generation that has been more suckled by the state than any generation before it. They live in those urban territories where the sharp-elbowed intrusion of the welfare state over the past 30 years has pushed aside older ideals of self-reliance and community spirit. The march of the welfare state into every aspect of less well-off urban people’s existences, from their financial wellbeing to their childrearing habits and even into their emotional lives, with the rise of therapeutic welfarism designed to ensure that the poor remain ‘mentally fit’, has helped to undermine such things as individual resourcefulness and social bonding. The anti-social youthful rioters look to me like the end product of such an anti-social system of state intervention.

July 21, 2011

The “food desert” theory of US obesity

Filed under: Food, Health, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:06

In short, it fails to explain the phenomenon:

Policymakers are scrambling to find a solution to our growing waistlines. Some are targeting America’s “food deserts” — areas lacking in grocery stores.

As first lady Michelle Obama explained last March, “families wind up buying their groceries at the local gas station or convenience store, places that offer few, if any, healthy options.”

[. . .]

The U.S. Department of Agriculture defines a food desert as a low-income census tract where a large number of residents are more than a mile from a grocery store.

By this definition, 13.5 million Americans are supposedly McVictimized by food deserts. That’s less than 4.5 percent of the U.S. population, yet roughly two-thirds of Americans are overweight or obese.

You don’t need a Ph.D. in mathematics to understand that food deserts are, at best, a very small aspect of a vast problem.

July 7, 2011

Cartoon history of the global warming panic

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Government, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:56

June 22, 2011

QotD: Who’s more smug than Bono? The “Bono Pay Up” protesters

Filed under: Africa, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:00

[T]he Bono Pay Up lobby, far from challenging Bono’s gobsmackingly paternalistic attitude towards Africa, is encouraging him to put his money where his mouth is. Its message is effectively: Stop talking about saving Africa and go out and actually save it! The campaign group claims that it is because of individuals like Bono, who export bits of their business overseas in order to avoid paying high taxes at home, that Africa is a mess. Some of that tax could be used for the foreign aid budget, you see. Not only is this a spectacularly naïve view of the massive structural problems facing underdeveloped nations in the Third World — as if their woes could be magically fixed by Bono and others stumping up a bit more tax — but it also suggests, explicitly, that it is up to rich white men to save downtrodden Africa.

According to Bono Pay Up, if Bono paid his taxes in a more “ethical” fashion, he could help to alleviate “suffering in the developing world”. Unless the protesters succeed in shifting Bono’s personal habits, “the poor will always be with us”, they claim. In short, all it takes for the poor to be lifted up from their empty-stomached, teary-eyed existences is for a few good men — white ones, naturally — to behave more ethically and caringly. It’s the White Tax Man’s Burden. In focusing on Bono’s alleged hypocrisy, the protesters are actually trying to bridge the gap between the Bono persona (saviour of Africa) and the Bono reality (he pays his taxes in a weird way). That is, they want him to become what he claims to be — the Moral Viceroy of Africa — and to show the Dark Continent how to reach the light. A plague on both their houses. If there are any African bands playing at Glastonbury I hope they lay into the Bono Pay Up lobby, and then use its silly placards to wallop Bono.

Brendan O’Neill, “The ‘Bono Pay Up’ protesters have achieved the remarkable feat of being even more smug than Bono”, The Telegraph, 2011-06-22

June 6, 2011

Oxfam’s latest report a Curate’s Egg

Filed under: Economics, Food, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:44

Tim Worstall points out the good bits first:

Oxfam’s latest campaign, “Grow”, seems so lovely and cuddly that to criticise it is almost like torturing puppies. What could be wrong with trying to feed the hungry and thus make the world a better place? Alas, if wishes were kings we could all be monarchs for the day and what’s wrong with the campaign is not the initial wish but the list of damn fool things it intends to do.

Praise first: Oxfam is quite right that there are several entirely stupid things that are being done about food currently. The first and most obvious is the biofuels nonsense: food should go into people, or at least animals we can eat, not into cars. But the European Union has insisted that 10 per cent (to rise to 15 per cent) of all petrol/diesel must be made from plants instead. Oxfam seems to think that this will reduce emissions: despite every scientist worthy of his slide rule pointing out that growing and processing the plants emits more than the oil being replaced.

Another policy we should stop yesterday is the subsidy of the rich world’s farmers. Can’t make a profit growing what people want to eat? Then stop and do something else. We say this to car makers, to buggy whip makers and there’s nothing about wading in cow shit that makes farming any different. New Zealand did it and farming profits went up.

Well, that’s about it for the good:

And then the report goes entirely doolally over commodities speculation, over futures and options. One of the points the report makes (in one of the good bits) is that price volatility is damaging both to producers and consumers. So we’d like to have some method of dampening such volatility. At which point it insists that this means we must lessen speculation in foodstuffs. But, umm, speculation in foodstuffs is what dampens price volatility in foodstuffs.

If any Oxfam type happens to read this by mischance, here’s why. To make money in commodities you have to buy low and sell high. When you buy low you prevent prices from falling further, in fact you raise them: maybe only a little depending on how much of the market you’re buying, but raise them you do. Good, so we’ve just reduced the slumping of prices which do so much damage to farmers. When you sell high you’re increasing the supply onto the market at a time of shortage. This reduces the price volatility at the high end which does such damage to consumers. So, our speculator making money reduces price volatility: it’s only the speculator who buys high and sells low who increases it and as he goes bust very quickly we don’t need to worry about him.

The term in the headline explained.

June 3, 2011

QotD: New York City, the capital city of Nanny State

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Food, Government, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:49

The lowest blow in City Hall’s war on wicked food is its recurring efforts to ban the buying of fizzy pop with food stamps. In an initiative that could easily be titled ‘No Coke for poor black folk’, the Bloombergers have sought federal permission to prevent welfare recipients from using government cash to purchase fizzy drinks. The killjoyism of this campaign, the Scrooge-infused miserabilism of it, is astounding. City Hall has launched an advertising campaign demonising sugary drinks as one of the great evils of our time, and its internal email correspondence about the campaign, which was leaked to the New York Times, shines a rather harsh light on the evidence-lite nastiness of the modern-day nudge-and-nanny industry. Scientific advisers emailed Thomas Farley, Bloomberg’s overactive health adviser, to say that the ad’s claim that drinking pop can make you gain 10 or 15 pounds is ‘simplistic’ and ‘exaggerated’. Overriding them, Farley responded: ‘I think what people fear is getting fat, so we need some statement about what is bad about consuming so many calories.’ Who needs evidence when you have fear? The ad shows human fat gurgling from the top of a can of soda. One City Hall employee could barely conceal his excitement: it is ‘deliciously disgusting’, he said in one of the emails that was leaked.

‘Deliciously disgusting’ — that just about sums up how New York’s new rulers view the huddled masses of this extravagant city. In a complete reversal of the traditional democratic relationship, Bloomberg and co don’t consider it their duty to mirror the desires and outlook of those who elected them. They want to remake New Yorkers as models of what they consider to be healthy citizenship. Much of this stuff comes from Thomas Farley, who is championed by both Bloomberg and the liberal media as an admirably thin jogging aficionado who believes in the power of the nudge to remould the citizenry. He is a ‘superman’, the New York Times recently gushed, who has ‘grasshopper-like legs’ (eurgh), a result of the fact that ‘he exercises seven days a week, loves his vegetables and has never smoked a cigarette’ (boring). This fanboy fluff piece was illustrated with a picture of Farley leading a workout of not-so-thin black New Yorkers, his grasshopper-like legs just as sure a sign of his superiority as his white skin would have been 100 years ago.

Brendan O’Neill, “The men who killed New York”, The Spectator, 2011-06-04

May 14, 2011

“Fair trade” coffee may make you feel virtuous, but it harms poor coffee producers

Filed under: Africa, Economics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:34

Lots of people are scrupulous about selecting coffee that boasts that it’s “Fair Trade”, implying that other coffee is less ethical and more damaging to third world economies. This may be a dangerous misconception:

Saturday, on World Fair Trade Day, we have something else to feel guilty about. That fair-trade cup of coffee we savour may not only fail to ease the lot of poor farmers, it may actually help to impoverish them, according to a study out recently from Germany’s University of Hohenheim.

The study, which followed hundreds of Nicaraguan coffee farmers over a decade, concluded that farmers producing for the fair-trade market “are more often found below the absolute poverty line than conventional producers.

“Over a period of 10 years, our analysis shows that organic and organic-fair trade farmers have become poorer relative to conventional producers.”

How could an organization devoted to producing better results for poor coffee producers make their situation worse?

For starters, it discriminates against the very poorest of the world’s coffee farmers, most of whom are African, by requiring them to pay high certification fees. These fees — one of the factors that the German study cites as contributing to the farmers’ impoverishment — are especially perverse, given that the majority of Third World farmers are not only too poor to pay the certification fees, they’re also too poor to pay for the fertilizers and the pesticides that would disqualify coffee as certified organic.

Even worse, there’s also imposition of conditions on the farmers which violates local customs:

Most merchants of certified coffees are aware of these contradictions, but most won’t be aware of other problems in the certification business. For Third World farmers to qualify as fair-trade producers, and thus obtain higher prices for their coffee, farmers must join co-operatives. In some Third World societies, farmers readily accept the compromises of communal enterprise. In others, they balk. In patriarchal African societies, for example, the small coffee farm is the family business, its management a source of pride to the male head of the household. Joining a co-operative, and being told when and what and how to plant entails loss of dignity.

The cultural imperialist isn’t dead — he’s merely changed organizations.

May 12, 2011

Goar: Here’s why the poor voted Conservative

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:43

In another dispatch from an alternate universe where the Toronto Star isn’t the house newsletter for the Liberal party, Carol Goar tells poverty activists why the people they agitate for voted for Conservatives in the last election:

After being sidelined twice in the past eight months, anti-poverty campaigners need to figure out how right-wing cost-cutters connect with voters — especially low-income voters.

My soundings are limited, but a few themes keep popping up:

• People in low-income neighbourhoods are the biggest victims of the drug dealers and violent young offenders Harper is promising to lock up. They want relief from the violence they can’t escape. They want to rid their communities of the gangs that lure their children into gun-and-gang culture. Crime crackdowns make sense to them.

• What Canadians struggling to make ends meet want most is a job; not government benefits, not abstract poverty-reduction plans, certainly not charity. Harper tapped into that yearning, promising to stabilize the economy and create employment. The New Democrats, aiming to beat him at his own game, said they would cut small business taxes.

• It angers low-income voters to see secure middle-class bureaucrats getting pay hikes. Those trapped in entry-level service jobs seethe when public employees who earn far more than they ever will are rewarded simply for showing up. Those living on public assistance — employment insurance, welfare, old age security — dislike being treated with contempt by government officials. In both cases, cutting the public payroll has a lot of appeal.

Of course, her message not only won’t be heeded, it’s going to mark her as an apostate to be spurned and ridiculed by all right-thinking intellectuals — especially those in the poverty activist ranks. She may never lunch in this town again.

H/T to Elizabeth for the link.

April 26, 2011

Archaeology as a form of collectivism

Filed under: Americas, History, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:19

L. Neil Smith was watching an old archaeology show on Netflix the other day:

What this otherwise interesting and enjoyable documentary on the early Mayans whined about — even more than Third World agricultural techniques — was the fact that descendants of these ancient people were venturing out in the thulies without government approval or, more importantly, academic sanction, finding pyramids and other structures abandoned by their ancestors before tenured treasure-hunters could, burrowing into them and laying claim to their inheritance, which they then used to supplement the crappy income that comes of subsistence farming.

These people were constantly referred to as “looters” by the documentary’s writers and the featured academics, who, unbelievably, begrudge them — and their hungry children — what Indiana Jones’ girlfriend Marian Ravenwood accurately called “little bits of junk”, a phrase that I firmly believe should be tattooed across every academic archaeologist’s torso simply to remind him of the proper priorities in life.

Backwards, so he can see it in the bathroom mirror.

Or upside-down, across his stomach.

Robert Bakker of hotblooded dinosaur fame has criticized proposed laws that make amateur paleontology a crime, pointing out that most good finds begin with non-professionals stumbling across interesting new materials. Unfortunately, many such laws are already in place for archaeology, with government, in effect, preclaiming everything under the topsoil before it’s discovered, a clear-cut case of underground Marxism.

You often hear supporters of such laws snort, “That ought to be in a museum!” when they spot some desirable something on a collector’s mantlepiece. But isn’t it infinitely better off there, than hidden in a museum basement where most “nationalized” artifacts and fossils end up? And given the miserable track record socialism has earned in every other field of human endeavor, isn’t it socialists who belong in a museum?

Believe me when I attest that archaeology is important to me for many reasons and has been since I was about five years old. Much like paleontology, it tells us where we are by showing us where we’ve been. Sometimes it explains how we got this way and warns us of mistakes we shouldn’t make again. And it’s just plain splendiferously mysterious and interesting — like an old adventure radio serial. My very lovely and talented wife is preparing herself even now for a second career in archaeology. She’d like to be curator of a private museum in the Southwest.

What fun we’re going to have!

But not only is there nothing under the ground worth depriving some poor farmer’s family of a meal, of arresting, jailing, possibly killing him over, there is yet another extremely important ethical consideration.

Or two.

What, precisely, is the moral distinction between a pot-hunting farmer, on the one hand, digging into a hill and extracting something for profit that will improve his life and the lives of his kids, and a college professor, on the other hand, from some faraway country, doing exactly the same thing for profit in the form of tenure and scientific prestige?

April 25, 2011

Grameen Bank cleared of “irregularities”, but Yunus will not be re-instated

Filed under: Asia, Economics, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:06

The Bangladeshi government has completed their investigation into financial irregularities at microfinance specialist Grameen Bank, but the founder, Muhammad Yunus, will not be brought back:

Yunus, 70, was dismissed by a central bank order — upheld by the high court and supreme court — on the grounds that he had overstayed in his position and refused requests to quit.

Yunus, winner of the 2006 Nobel peace prize, set up Grameen, which means village in Bengali, and had been the bank’s managing director since 2000.

Lauded at home and abroad by politicians and financiers as the “banker to the poor”, he has been under attack by the government since late last year, after a Norwegian documentary alleged the bank was dodging taxes.

Yunus denied any wrongdoing and a Norwegian government investigation later also cleared him of any malpractice.

April 5, 2011

Grameen bank founder loses final appeal

Filed under: Asia, Economics, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:09

The founder of the revolutionary micro-capital Grameen Bank has been removed from position of managing director:

Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus has lost his final appeal in Bangladesh’s Supreme Court against his sacking from the Grameen micro-finance bank he founded.

The court upheld the decision by the central bank to remove him from office.

The bank said Professor Yunus had been improperly appointed while past retirement age.

But Professor Yunus said the attempt to remove him from the bank had been politically motivated.

The Grameen Bank has pioneered micro-lending to the poor by giving small loans to millions of borrowers.

July 9, 2010

Matt Ridley on the onrush of DOOM!

Filed under: Environment, History, Media — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:15

Matt Ridley is about the same age as I am, and he clearly heard all the same warnings, predictions, and prophecies of doom that I heard when I was a teen:

When I was a student, in the 1970s, the world was coming to an end. The adults told me so. They said the population explosion was unstoppable, mass famine was imminent, a cancer epidemic caused by chemicals in the environment was beginning, the Sahara desert was advancing by a mile a year, the ice age was retuning, oil was running out, air pollution was choking us and nuclear winter would finish us off. There did not seem to be much point in planning for the future. I remember a fantasy I had — that I would make my way to the Hebrides, off the west coast of Scotland, and live off the land so I could survive these holocausts at least till the cancer got me.

I am not making this up. By the time I was 21 years old I realized that nobody had ever said anything optimistic to me — in a lecture, a television program or even a conversation in a bar — about the future of the planet and its people, at least not that I could recall. Doom was certain.

The next two decades were just as bad: acid rain was going to devastate forests, the loss of the ozone layer was going to fry us, gender-bending chemicals were going to decimate sperm counts, swine flu, bird flu and Ebola virus were going to wipe us all out. In 1992, the United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro opened its agenda for the twenty-first century with the words `Humanity stands at a defining moment in history. We are confronted with a perpetuation of disparities between and within nations, a worsening of poverty, hunger, ill health and illiteracy, and the continuing deterioration of the ecosystems on which we depend for our well-being.’

And as we all know, it all came true . . .

Ridley’s latest book is The Rational Optimist, which I thoroughly enjoyed reading. I didn’t always agree with it, but it was refreshing reading material. Recommended.

May 20, 2010

QotD: Recruiting protesters for the G20 in Toronto

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 17:07

Are you a woman, person of colour, indigenous person, poor person, queer, trans-gendered or disabled?

If so, the G8/G20 Toronto Community Mobilization team assumes you must sympathize with civic disruption, lawbreaking and maybe even a little good old fashioned terror. They want your help. They’re mobilizing to disrupt the gathering of democratically elected politicians who are meeting in Toronto next month and they assume — just because you’re a woman or a disabled person — that you must hate civilized society as much as they do.

That’s their logo, above.

The CN Tower, torn from its roots, used to stab the G20 like a knife in the heart. Gee, isn’t that inclusive, co-operative and non-violent. Hard to imagine anything more likely to attract widespread public support than an image like that. Hey, women and indiginous people, wanna stab some white guys? How about you, queers and indigenous people? Because we here at the Community Mobilization team take for granted that you must be as twisted, angry, vengeful and keening for violence as we are.

Kelly McParland, “Anti-G20 activists want your help in spreading the hate”, National Post, 2010-05-20

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress