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NAFTA and nativism
(Friday, Feb. 10, 2006 -- CropChoice news) -- 1. New report outlines agriculture's role in U.S. energy security 1. New report outlines agriculture’s role in U.S. energy security For Immediate Release Harvesting clean energy from America’s farms and fields can produce substantial
new energy, enhance the environment and help rural communities at the same
time. A new report recommends a series of federal and state policy changes that would
enable America’s rural landscape to provide a significant share of the nation’s
energy needs, help rescue a struggling rural economy and improve the
environment. All regions of the country could benefit by processing more
biofuels and by developing wind energy. The report, "The New Harvest: Biofuels and Wind Power for Rural
Revitalization and National Energy Security," projects that biofuels, including
ethanol from corn stover, wheat straw, grasses and other sources of cellulose,
could largely replace gasoline in the vast majority of light-duty vehicles by
2050 if policies are put into place now. Wind power, at costs competitive
with coal and natural gas electricity, could provide 10 percent of U.S. power
supplies by 2020. "These new sources of clean energy would increase our country’s energy security
at a time when rapidly growing Asian economies are competing with us for a
limited global supply of fossil fuels," says Bentham Paulos, project manager
for the Energy Foundation. "As farmers and rural communities look for value-
added products they can sell to increase
revenues, the $200 billion annual electricity market and the $300 billion motor
fuels markets start to look very attractive." For example, the ability to sell corn for ethanol can increase a farmer’s
income by $10 per acre. A single ethanol plant in a community can add $110
million to the local economic base. Similarly, using land to generate wind
power can increase a farmer’s income by thousands of dollars per year, create
construction and infrastructure jobs and generate millions in
property taxes for local institutions. At a time when global trade treaties are
changing the current system of subsidy payments to farmers, these new income
sources could sustain rural economies and tax-supported institutions. The report, funded by the Energy Foundation in partnership with the McKnight
Foundation, calls for a national partnership of agricultural and energy
interests and a bipartisan political strategy to unite and solidify a rapidly
growing Ag-Energy sector. The report answers questions that have been raised about renewable energy
questions about efficiency, the ability to grow food and fuel at the same time
and the amount of fossil fuel needed to produce ethanol. It concludes that new
technologies and new ethanol-compatible crops such as switchgrass can make Ag
Energy a win-win-win for America’s energy security, rural economy and the
environment if policies are put into place soon. The report is available at http://www.ef.org/biofuels . Also available is "The New Harvesters," profiles of rural energy entrepreneurs. 2. NAFTA and nativism By Harold Meyerson Everybody talks about globalization; nobody ever does
anything about it. The world labor market looms over
every horizon with its promise of cheaper goods and
lower pay. The public is skeptical, rightly, about the
benefits of globalization, but the process of
harnessing it, of writing enforceable rules that would
benefit not just investors but most of our citizens,
is hard to even conceive. And so globalization is
experienced by many Americans as a loss of control.
Manufacturing moves to China, engineering to India;
que sera, sera . Except on our borders. With the number of immigrants
illegally in the United States estimated at 11
million, the tensions between Americans and Mexicans
-- chiefly, working-class Americans and working-class
Mexicans -- are rising. And those are tensions that
congressional Republicans, who don't look to have a
lot of other issues they can run on this fall, are
eager to stoke. In December the House approved a bill by Judiciary
Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin
that would turn all those undocumented immigrants into
felons. It would supersede local ordinances that keep
police from inquiring into the status of people coming
forth to report crimes or help in investigations. It
would help create a permanent underground population
in our midst, with no hope of ever attaining legal
status. But the most striking aspect of the assault on
undocumented immigrants is that it has no theory of
causality. Over 40 percent of the Mexicans who have
come, legally and illegally, to the United States have
done so in the past 15 years. The boom in
undocumenteds is even more concentrated than that:
There were just 2.5 million such immigrants in the
United States in 1995; fully 8 million have arrived
since then. Why? It's not because we've let down our guard at the
border; to the contrary, the border is more
militarized now than it's ever been. The answer is
actually simpler than that. In large part, it's NAFTA. The North American Free Trade Agreement was sold, of
course, as a boon to the citizens of the United
States, Canada and Mexico -- guaranteed both to raise
incomes and lower prices, however improbably,
throughout the continent. Bipartisan elites promised
that it would stanch the flow of illegal immigrants,
too. "There will be less illegal immigration because
more Mexicans will be able to support their children
by staying home," said President Bill Clinton as he
was building support for the measure in the spring of
1993. But NAFTA, which took effect in 1994, could not have
been more precisely crafted to increase immigration --
chiefly because of its devastating effect on Mexican
agriculture. As liberal economist Jeff Faux points out
in "The Global Class War," his just-published
indictment of the actual workings of the new economy,
Mexico had been home to a poor agrarian sector for
generations, which the government helped sustain
through price supports on corn and beans. NAFTA,
though, put those farmers in direct competition with
incomparably more efficient U.S. agribusinesses. It
proved to be no contest: From 1993 through 2002, at
least 2 million Mexican farmers were driven off their
land. The experience of Mexican industrial workers under
NAFTA hasn't been a whole lot better. With the passage
of NAFTA, the maquiladoras on the border boomed. But
the raison d'etre for these factories was to produce
exports at the lowest wages possible, and with the
Mexican government determined to keep its workers from
unionizing, the NAFTA boom for Mexican workers never
materialized. In the pre-NAFTA days of 1975, Faux
documents, Mexican wages came to 23 percent of U.S.
wages; in 1993-94, just before NAFTA, they amounted to
15 percent; and by 2002 they had sunk to a mere 12
percent. The official Mexican poverty rate rose from 45.6
percent in 1994 to 50.3 percent in 2000. And that was
before competition from China began to shutter the
maquiladoras and reduce Mexican wages even more. So if Sensenbrenner wants to identify a responsible
party for the immigration he so deplores, he might
take a peek in the mirror. In the winter of '93, he
voted for NAFTA. He helped establish a system that
increased investment opportunities for major
corporations and diminished the rights, power and, in
many instances, living standards of workers on both
sides of the border. Now he and his Republican
colleagues are stirring the resentments of the same
American workers they placed in jeopardy by supporting
the corporate trade agenda. Walls on the border won't fix this problem, nor will
forcing cops to arrest entire barrios. So long as the
global economy is designed, as NAFTA was, to keep
workers powerless, Mexican desperation and American
anger will only grow. Forget the fence. We need a new
rulebook for the world. 3. Nebraska's nostalgia trap By RICHARD DOOLING On average, Nebraska's economy is doing just fine. But a man whose head is
in the oven and whose feet are in the freezer takes no comfort in knowing
that his average body temperature is perfectly normal. In the same vein, a
casual glance at a graph of Nebraska's population growth shows slow, steady
increases, going all the way back to 1900, and conceals the fact that 74 of
Nebraska's 93 counties are in extremis, with lower populations today than
they had in 1920. Over a third of the state's 1.7 million residents live in greater Omaha,
which is booming by many measures, including population growth. According to
Ernie Goss, an economist at Creighton University here, Omaha is growing
faster than Des Moines, Kansas City and St. Louis. What about the rest of Nebraska? Well, it's big: over 77,000 square miles
(about 10 percent bigger than the six New England states combined) and 450
miles wide, roughly the distance from Boston to the District of Columbia.
Most of the economic growth occurs along the thoroughfares that form what
local economists call "the fishhook": Highway 275 from Omaha to Norfolk
being the hook, and Interstate 80 from Omaha to Colorado being the stem. Outside of Omaha and the fishhook, large parts of Nebraska are arguably in
trouble. The dismal statistic that trends lower, year after year, for many
of these struggling counties, is population. Farms double in size with a regularity that rivals the seasons, while,
almost in tandem, the number of farming families falls by half. The costs
for schools, roads and police and fire departments remain relatively
constant, but the bodies paying taxes, buying goods and developing land keep
disappearing. County officials call it rural flight, brain drain or even
mass migration, but despite the alarums, nobody has found a way to stop the
excursions. States like Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma and
Wisconsin have tried to fight the trend by restricting the corporate
consolidation of farms: Keep the farmers on their land by stopping vast
corporations from buying 10 farms and consolidating them into one, which is
basically what keeps happening. In 1982, Nebraska went even farther and embedded a ban on corporations
owning and operating farms - Initiative 300 - in its Constitution. Last
December, a federal judge in Omaha ruled that the ban violates the Commerce
Clause of the United States Constitution and the Americans with Disabilities
Act (because the ban also requires that the person owning most of the
farmland also supply most of the daily labor). Some Nebraskans hope the
ruling will be overturned, but that seems unlikely. Opponents of these laws, which purport to protect family farmers, view them
as economic nostalgia - like trying to protect the local paper by banning
Internet news sites and mandating that the newspaper be delivered by a
towheaded kid on a bicycle. If rank protectionism is not the solution, then
what is? Doug German, executive director of Legal Aid of Nebraska, who lives in the
central part of the state, just off the fishhook, in Eustis (pop. 425), and
provides legal services to the casualties of the state's poorer counties,
agrees that rural Nebraska is at a "tipping point." The antidote to its
economic depopulation, he believes, does not lie in bringing Intel or Toyota
factories to the heartland, but in Nebraskans resolutely blooming where they
are planted and developing micro industries capable of flourishing anywhere,
with the help of computer and Internet technologies. I hope Mr. German is right, but I wonder what kind of micro industry will
save the likes of Arthur County (half the size of Rhode Island), where the
population peaked at 1,412 in 1920, was 442 in 2000, and 402 in 2004? In
these parts, during election season, the signs along the road say "Vote for
Helen, County Assessor," because there's only one Helen, and she's running
unopposed. Instead of micro industries, a cynical futurist might see mega-farms, owned
by global corporations, and farmed by armies of robot combines, controlled
by global positioning satellite technology from offices in Omaha. Richard Dooling is a screenwriter and the author, most recently, of "Bet
Your Life." 4. Corn Growers commend GM for support and commitment to energy independence NEWS FROM THE AMERICAN CORN GROWERS ASSOCIATION Anaheim, Calif., Feb. 4, 2006 -- The American Corn Growers Association (ACGA) commended General Motors today for their continued support of their organization as well as GM’s expanding commitment to the nation’s energy independence. "We are exceedingly pleased that once again GM has helped sponsor the ACGA annual convention," said Larry Mitchell, ACGA’s Chief Executive. "But more importantly we are very proud of the nation’s largest automobile maker for their longtime and expanding commitment to advancing ethanol use." Earlier this month, General Motors launched an unprecedented national advertising and marketing campaign to build awareness and market acceptance for ethanol/gasoline blended fuel (E85) vehicles. The campaign, "Live Green Go Yellow," will break during the Olympics in February and continue throughout the year with print, web and broadcast media components. The campaign is designed to make consumers, energy producers and policy makers aware of the E85 capability already found on more than 1.5 million GM vehicles in the market, and to pave the way for more E85 vehicles that will launch this year. The ads will also encourage consumers to actively promote E85 in their communities. In 2006, GM will offer nine E85 FlexFuel models, bringing an additional 400,000 E85 FlexFuel vehicles into its fleet. "Not only does GM share their enthusiasm and vision for the future with farmers, they share similar economic challenges," added Mitchell. "To put this in perspective, we know that GM recently announced a loss of about $8.6 billion last year. We have just calculated the loss by America’s corn farmers last year at $8.8 billion due to farm policy which allows the prices paid to farmers to fall well below their cost of production." Mitchell explained that using the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) data on prices received by farmers and their production (http://usda.mannlib.cornell.edu/usda/reports/waobr/wasde-bb/2006/wasde430.pdfreport) as well as USDA’s cost of production data (http://www.ers.usda.gov/Data/CostsAndReturns/data/Forecast/cop_forecast.xls), ACGA has determined that U.S. corn farmers sold their 2005 crop for about 80 cents per bushel less than what it cost them to raise. "If we review the losses due to poor prices paid to corn, cotton, wheat and soybean farmers combined, we find the loss for the 2005 crop at a staggering $16 billion almost twice that of GM," added Mitchell. "And that $16 billion loss does not include the losses for all of the other crops, nor does it include the losses due to hurricanes, drought and other natural disasters." "Further more, if farmers, who are the largest purchasers of pickups in the nation, were to have received that additional $16 billion and had, at best, a break-even year, then they would have helped GM avoid some of their losses as well by having the resources to purchase more of their products," said Mitchell. "The problem is failed farm policy. We must rethink U.S. agriculture policy and change course to ensure farmers’ livelihoods, as well as the livelihoods of the people building the nation’s cars and trucks. Part of that new course for farm policy involves more energy production on the farm a course long supported by General Motors." The American Corn Growers Association represents 14,000 members in 35 states. See www.acga.org . -30- 5. Organic farming could help reduce rural poverty: UN study http://www.infochangeindia.org/AgricultureItop.jsp?section_idv=10#4339 Organic food production could offer a way out of poverty for many small
farmers in developing countries. But only if they receive government support,
says a new study conducted in India and China. South Asian farmers who have switched over from using synthetic fertiliser
to more eco-friendly, traditional forms of organic farming have earned more
and achieved a higher standard of living, says a recent study by the United
Nations. However, small farmers are often excluded from supportive government
reform programmes that encourage organic farming, says the UN's International
Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD). "In China and India, organic production is growing steadily," says the
Italian-sponsored report, presented by the IFAD’s Phrang Roy and Caroline Heider
and senior Italian officials in Rome, on January 25. The study looked at the
role of organic agriculture in rural poverty reduction. Also, when and under
what conditions organic farming can be integrated into development programmes. "The value of Chinese exports grew from less than $ 1 million in the
mid-1990s to about $ 142 million in 2003, with more than 1,000 companies and farms
certified. In India, there has also been remarkable growth, with about 2.5
million hectares under organic farming and 332 new certifications issued during
2004," the report notes. In addition to bringing about higher prices for agricultural produce, lower
unemployment and less rural migration, "organic farming reduces the health
risks posed by the use of toxic chemicals, as well as the high costs of
chemical pesticides and fertilisers. (Also), the environment benefits from improved
soil management and less-polluting techniques," said the IFAD. However, the paradox is that Indian and Chinese farmers already producing
for export are the ones benefiting from this booming sector. Small farmers are
often denied government assistance in storing, processing, certifying and
exporting their produce, while domestic markets for organic produce are "very
limited in China and even scarcer in India". A large proportion of organic
products are sold informally without certification controls. The study points out that for small farmers to want to make the soil
improvements that organic farming requires they needed security of tenure, access to
family labour and support organisations to help them with training, loans
and collective marketing. In areas where conditions favour the adoption of organic agriculture by
small farmers, it could provide a long-term solution to poverty, while reducing
migration and improving the health conditions and environment for entire
communities. But, in order to hold out hope for the world's small farmers, organic
farming must grow sustainably and not lose its "added value", or prices and incomes
would drop, says the study. If organic agriculture expands too rapidly it
may lose its added value and prices and incomes could decrease considerably.
Organic agriculture should not, therefore, be considered a panacea that can be
used to reduce poverty in any environment, at any time, cautions the IFAD. Source: http://www.un.org/news , January 25, 2005
http://www.ifad.org , January 25, 2005 6. Ontario pushes for more wind power WindPower Monthly, December 2005 The Ontario government has passed a regulation allowing net metering for renewable energy installations up to 500 kW in size, part of its drive, says energy minister Donna Cansfield, to "promote a more diverse and sustainable supply of electricity" in the Canadian province. The regulation will allow small generators, like farmers, who generate power directly for their own use to also connect to the grid, enabling them to receive credit for any excess electricity they export to it. The property's metre keeps track of what is supplied to the grid and what is consumed from it - and the consumer is billed, or credited, monthly by the utility for the net difference. Credits are carried forward up to 12 months, after which any excess generation remaining falls to the distribution company free of charge. The credit is at the full retail rate, including any non-energy charges that are billed on a per-kWh basis. Until now, net metering in Ontario had been available only at the discretion of local energy distribution companies and usually only up to a ceiling of 50 kW. The program earned the praise of the president of the Ontario Federation of Agriculture, Ron Bonnett, who said it would "provide farmers with the opportunity to substantially cut their power bills." | |
