Hunger

Joined: 06 Jul 2003 Posts: 6742 Location: Central CA

Seems that there are a lot of misconceptions about the manner in which a food crop is handled between the time it comes out of the ground as harvest and it actually reaches our table as a usable commodity. Perhaps the saddest thing about that situation is that so many of those misconceptions are held and put forth as absolute fact/truth by people who don't have any idea what they're talking about, in particular the "mainstream media".

Right now, the local media has been in a major tizzy off and on - about hunger. Investigative reporters are suddenly finding out that people are having to choose between eating and feeding their kids, between medicine and food, or between utility bills and meals.

In my county, the consistently first or second most productive county in the country in terms of agricultural production, we also have the dubious distinction of being the 2nd or 3rd most impoverished county in California in terms of families with enough money to purchase the end products being produced from the crops we raise. More than half the kids in the county are on government-subsidized school lunches. That means they go hungry in the summer when school's out.

Many senior citizens, unlucky enough to live in rural areas or small communities without access to meal programs, likewise miss at least one meal a day. Many of them only HAVE one meal a day, due in large part to having to choose between meals and their energy and utility bills. Many, in fact MOST, of the workers in our county's largest INDUSTRY qualify for food stamps and other public assistance.

These are facts that the media outlets continue to hammer home on a daily basis with no shortage of theories and/or speculations as to why it might be so that those who are actually producing the things that we all eat are in large numbers doing without adequate amounts of those products.

So, what we have is a situation in which the attention is finally on hunger in the US. Not a new problem of course, but a new awareness. But what happens though, is that the operation of our farms is rarely mentioned. Instead, the focus of any discussion on hunger is... as is the focus of everything else unfortunately... money. Profit to be exact. Not just normal everyday profit, either. Uber profit.

OK, why are food prices so high then? Do we look at supply and demand here? If so, demand should be easy to anticipate... simply take the average daily required intake of calories and other essentials and multiply by 300,000,000. Then make sure we're raising enough food to feed that number. Even the lobbyists running the USDA these days ought to be able to handle that one.

Sadly however, when you're talking about food prices, things like supply and demand and the ever touted "free market forces" have little to do with it, certainly no more than they ever did.

We USED to store surplus commodities during the good years to offset the bad ones. That we, we had adequate supply to meet the demand most of the time. This worked fine for many years. But we don't do that anymore of course. Every grain, every seed, every scrap has to be sold or hoarded immediately to provide the maximum short term return to our food INDUSTRY. But supply and demand alone aren't the answer anyway. So what goes?

Is it the higher price of gasoline for shipping? Of course higher fuel prices will add to the burden of the farmer himself in terms of added costs for growing a particular crop and actually bring it to the first market level.
(Remember, we're talking about farming right now. We'll get to the add-ons like transportation through the middle tiers shortly.)

Some of the more simple minded among the pundits will tell you that all we need to do is give OPEC the slip to the point that we're no longer dependent on foreign energy sources and everything else will begin to fall in place. Not entirely true of course but again, we'll get to that shortly. Anyway, higher fuel prices alone aren't the answer either.

Is it corn going for biofuels? I honestly can't answer that but I do know that SPECULATION in commodities futures, which include corn futures of course, has played a part in driving the price of corn upward in recent months.

Corn is grown in large quantities here in my area to feed not only people but also the massive 10-20 thousand cows on the corporate dairies that have managed to absorb all of those dozens of small family dairies that used to be out there, doing it in much the same manner that WalMart destroys main streets all over the country. I suspect that EVERY INDUSTRY has its version of Walmart.

Now the oil companies are becoming involved through a rather shortsighted push for biofuels and futures and thespeculators have been pushing the price of corn (as well as other Ag commodities) up based in part on that. But again, this alone isn't the answer.

Is it the weather? Well, of course the weather has an effect, mainly on supply and demand which we've already discussed. How about the commodity traders? Yeah, sure, they have their effect but mainly in ways we've already discussed by affecting fuel and crop futures but no, neither of them provides an answer in themselves.

Seems the obvious conclusion is that there's enough blame to go around. Our system is geared to make money. Not for agricultural workers, not for small family farmers... our system is geared to make money for the agricultural INDUSTRY which does not include small farms, small farmers and workers.

Shipping to and from around the world, our system is built to take advantage of shortages, plain and simple. In areas where there are shortages of a particular Ag commodity, say due to flood or drought, demand for OUR commodities goes up which means that not only speculators but our Ag INDUSTRY itself can then base increases in the the price for the product on the demand for it in say Gondwanaland, even if nary a sack of it ever crosses the ocean. We here can then pay that price or do without. As we noted at the beginning of this essay, that's what a lot of people are doing. Going without.

On the west side of our central valley here we raise a lot of safflower, soybeans and other crops. Nobody eats safflower or soybeans or a lot of the other stuff but they can be stored for extended periods of time and eventually be ground up and used to produce something edible like cooking oil or margarine or whatever.

Of course they only actually reach the market when the price level desired by the INDUSTRY is reached. That's when they'll come out of the silos and warehouses and actually reach the market.

To make sense of this, visualize all the corn, beans, pork bellies and wheat, barley, citrus fruits... everything we've come to look at as agricultural commodities... going into a giant FUNNEL marked "INDUSTRY." Out of the funnel comes hot dogs, ice cream, orange juice, ranch dressing, canned chili, TV dinners and everything else you buy in packages at the store.

A couple of years ago we had an unseasonable freeze in the citrus raising areas in the foothills... the harvest was cut by about fifty percent. That smaller harvest, which meant less income for the citrus ranchers themselves, less work and therefore less income for those working to harvest and process the fruit... also meant that TRADERS could actually make MORE money by charging more to INDUSTRY because INDUSTRY couldl bid more for fruit to feed their juice machines. Higher inputs for INDUSTRY become higher prices at the checkout counter. The only clear winners are INDUSTRIAL traders and processors feeding the funnel.

Some people think that attempting to look beyond the standard simple minded excuses (OPEC, supply and demand, weather) and look at the overall picture somehow makes you a "socialist" or an "anti-capitalist" or worse, depending on the IQ of the person hanging the labels that day. Of course that's not the case but those are the labels you'll get hung on you.

I'm even tempted to say outright that I think that part of the solution for the high cost of food is to ban the traders from benefiting from shortages . You know, expose the Chicago Board of Trade as a high-price gambling casino that plays with the future of our food stuffs? Shut it right down. While I DO consider profiteering on such essential to life items as food and health care is immoral and unethical, I'm also a semi-realist at least.

When it comes to challenging business to cure hunger, our government isn't about to ban trading. And banning commodity trading won't improve our ability to get food from the fields to the consumers. This is because we NEED factory food as long as the "problem solvers" and the media continue to insist that it's not really "food" until it gets into a package with a corporate or company logo on it.

Now that the huge funnel is in your mind, picture the other end—a REVERSE funnel feeding billions of consumers—us. It's kind of like an hourglass. Many farmers feeding in, a narrow passage created by INDUSTRY, and packages coming out to feed all the consumers. Us.

Packaging is a fairly modern idea. Before packaging, moms baked brownies for school parties instead of buying cookies in cellophane bags. Grandmas made roasts or fried chicken on Sundays instead of warming dinners in a microwave. Sometimes, people even made their own ice cream for special occasions, of all things. And, they peeled their own carrots and ate them without ranch dip and used whole potatoes instead of buying buds or flakes. Trust me on all of those things folks... they really did happen.

But today we have hunger. Our newspapers report on it every week. Think tanks pretend to be concerned about it while it's actually in the news. The politicians try their very best to deny it's happening, referring to it instead with neutral euphemisms like "possible mild recession" and "temporary downturn". And in the meantime, our farmers are raising things we can't actually eat until it's been processed, packaged and a logo applied because that's what INDUSTRY demands that they raise.

So how can we fight this battle? Basically, we need to change the culture, start celebrating local production and local food. We need to distance ourselves from the packages and logos. We need to start growing actual FOOD on our farms again We need a huge cultural shift. Just make sure before you agree or disagree, you know what kind of a cultural shift I'm talking about.

Most of all, we need to start now. People are hungry.

Posted: Wed Jul 16, 2008 4:00 am Post subject:

Nofs wrote.

Joined: 06 Jul 2003 Posts: 6742 Location: Central CA

Posted: Wed Jul 16, 2008 8:05 pm Post subject:

Joined: 06 Jul 2003 Posts: 6742 Location: Central CA

I have no doubt whatsoever that gasoline made from my Frosted Flakes will cost just as much as gasoline refracted from crude oil as long as the same people are selling it.

It absolutely floors me that some people think all this crap is some kind of cosmic accident that will somehow magically "right" itself and that there's no need to make any changes in the way we we do business or run our economy.

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