And there are people out there who want to wreck it for them.
Annette Desmerais is associate professor justice studies at the University of Regina, Jim Handy a professor of history at the University of Saskatchewan. For the Western Producer (behind subscriber wall).
It is this neoliberal, industrial and corporate-driven model of agriculture that has been globalized over the past 30 years. This is a model that treats food like any other commodity, presents agriculture exclusively as a profit-making venture, concentrates productive resources into the hands of agro-industry and places food in commodities futures markets.
Here profit-hungry speculators, investors and hedge funds scoop up millions of dollars through frenzied bidding and betting on price changes and predictions of scarcities. Agriculture has moved away from its primary function, that of feeding humans.
Today, less than half of the world’s grains are eaten by humans, Instead, grains are used primarily to feed animals, and recently these grains are now being converted into agrofuel to feed cars. This is manufactured scarcity par excellence.
[…]
National polices such as price controls, tariffs and marketing boards, designed to ensure the viability of small-scale farmers and an adequate supply of culturally appropriate and nutritious food through support for domestic agriculture, have been replaced by the voracious demands of the market.
[…]
La Via Campesina, an international farm movement representing 149 organizations from 56 countries, argues that the global food crisis demonstartes the desperate need to build a fundamentally new model of agriculture — one based on food sovereignty.
[… They argue] that this crisis can be resolved only if governments support peasant and small-scale production, rebuild their national food economies and regulate international markets and if the international community respects and protects and fulfills human rights, especially the right to food.
A Saskatchewan grain producer of 50 years replies. You know him here as “Spike1”;
“Adequate food is simple justice” reads the headline.
Well, well well, a professor of justice and a professor of history, chiding the growers, traders and distributors of food for treating food as a commodity – blaming profit hungry traders, speculators, and hedge funds for the high price of food. This drivel from professors that earn a scandalous return on investment, (with tenure, by the way), by being paid tens of thosuands of dollars with not one nickle invested, makes me respond to the tripe.
A professor of history that ignores the great famines of the past in Russia, China and elsewhere under the communists, the famines of the present in North Korea and Africa that have nothing to do with traders and speculators, but with despots willing to starve their own people.
A professor of justice ignoring the tariffs and other governmenbt restrictions on the movement of food. A professor of justice that thinks that others should be responsible for feeding him and others.
Professors that distain the feeding of feed grains and ethanol by-products to livestock, thus converting waste products into concentrated protein for human consumption. Professors that live in a city where not one in a thousand, including themselves, are self sufficient in food.
La Via Campesina wants a return to the “back to the land” movement – as happened in China when millions starved and the government controlled the availability of food.
Professors that advocate a cheap food policy for the world’s poor, but support marketing boards that restrict the production of food to maintain the artificially high price for commodities (with the resulting quota bidding) better remember which side they are on.
Professors that seem to be ignorant of the need for animals for motive power and agriculture in all countries. Cattle and sheep that harvest the grass in dry and mountainous regions, thus converting it to protein for human consumption. Yaks that till the rice fields, horses, oxen, and other animals that haul farm produce to markets, cows that graze at will and supply milk and fuel in India, the list goes on.
The Canadian government isntituted a cheap food policy in the Trudeau years, and the result was the decimation of the farm population. Maybe it’s time for a cheap university education policy – not with subsidies, but with the slashing of income for professors, like the cheap food policy did for farmers.
The mansions built in University Park weren’t built by traders and speculators in food.
OOOooohh! That left a mark.
Nail on head.
Just for a moment, imagine if we had a Barter system of trade again – where we all traded, swaped our goods and services.
How might the value/demand ranking of all our different goods and services look like ?
roof over your head
flour
academic study on piece of paper
home heating fuel
transportation
spin by political hack
strawberries
broken arm fix
eye sight care
garbage pick up
post surgery care
tooth ache
cult services
tax collector
political advice
auto mechanic
Which ones would be easier to trade ? The food items, a surgery OR some political spin, an academic reaserch paper ??
Every hour of every day we are bartering, trading our efforts in life. The currency system has clouded the relative worth. Lucky for some.
Funny how stupid professors can be as the sit in nice comfy offices on isolated-from-reality university campuses, working a few hours a week, having their summers off, all of them with their lips locked firmly on the taxpayers teat, with their “my god I AM smart” attitude and their complete dislocation from economic reality.
Let’s change the tenure rules, let’s throw in a little Mao style socialist realism and make they have to actually go out to the fields and toil at hard manual labor for a few months every year.
If they aren’t willing to be good little socialist wannbe’s, if they want to remain as latte liberals, then they can all just STFU.
They are as useless as a fart in a prairie windstorm.
…you know, when I read somewhere about a loaf of bread costing a day’s wage, I thought, ‘no way’, but now, one wonders if the day is fast approaching.
Revelation 6:6, “a quart of wheat for a denarious.” A denarious was a roman silver coin which was the wages paid for a 12-hour workday back in the days when Jesus was on earth.
Who ever thought they would see a loaf of bread for more than $3? Or a gallon of gas for almost $4?
http://www.lifeandtimesofutica.com/site/news.cfm?BRD=2681&dept_id=543948&newsid=19388455&PAG=461&rfi=9
Well written response.
Academics are exactly that – academic. Whether musing or promoting on the latest (sic) communist fad of nationalization, or other market distorting laundry list of ensuring ‘social justice’, these types are inured from the results of their suggestions.
Food riots? Constitutionality of property confiscation? Mass starvation? Denial of income to producers?
Whatever the outcome of their models in the real – and fluid – world, they will usually come back to that great phrase: “well, it just wasn’t done right, or it would have worked.
The curious thing is that these armchair socialists are generally thought of as smart. Funny stuff. Especially since they combine the notion of self sufficiency in food production as a prerequisite for ‘national security’, yet propose a collectivist approach that does not use market price as a market signal of scarcity. Central planning indeed Comrade.
Someone should send them the ‘Wealth of Nations’ by Adam Smith. While its a couple of hundred years old, it might help tether them to some form of objective reality.
“Here profit-hungry speculators, investors and hedge funds scoop up millions of dollars through frenzied bidding and betting on price changes and predictions of scarcities”. LOL. How do you speak with someone so far disconnected with reality?
perhaps a fund can be raised to finance an extended sabbatical in zimbabwe for this academic? i’ve heard that robert mugabe could use some help. maybe the perfesser could explain and fix what happened to the “breadbasket of africa”?
Let’s not forget that we have 2 Professors sitting in the Official Opposition that want to Be PM’s.
Just Food for Thought
I advocate paying professors and other wackos like farmers get paid.
First get a permit book from a Cdn Education Board
Fill in hour many hours you plan to teach.
Break those hours down/subject
Send in book to get your permit.
Do the above before the school year starts, with no guarantees you will have students or a room to teach in.
CEB will then tell you what they will pay/hour.
At some point the CEB will issue a cheque for partial pymt of hours taught.
These partial pymts will come periodically.
Finally, after you have taught all year and are into the next year, you will get a final pymt on hours you taught during the past school yr. But, remember, all the costs of supplying you a place to teach will be deducted from your cheques. That would be utilities, infrastructure costs, wages for the CEB directors, supplies and a few other things.
Another thing these “experts” forget or never knew, feed fed to animals would not pass expection to go for human food. Also, the land this feed is raised on will not produce human crops in some cases.
Almost forgot, perhaps some of the subjects you planned to teach didn’t pan out, but you can’t change it.
Spike1 is the man! University folks are so proud of themselves for creating their world in which they are so important. I went to university and convocated with high marks – the entire experience was a farce – the best value in it was meeting my future wife and for that I’m thankful -otherwise it would’ve been a complete waste of 30 Grand.
In regards to the bartering comment – that’s bang-on, too. The real world dictates value – not university research and poo-pooing.
A common sense revolution is needed.
What a perfect response, spike1. I hope it gets sent to the two of them.
What utter drivel these two pontificating ‘professors’ are pontificating. What the heck does ‘neoliberal’ mean? It’s obviously meant as an insult, as are the terms: industrial, corporate and globalized’.
Don’t these ignorant people know that, with our world population, food production must be industrial? That peasant or local food production won’t sustain the population? As others have noted, check out what happened when Mugabe rejected industrial agriculture and turned the land back into peasant local agriculture. Disaster.
Oh, and they weep that ‘less than half the world’s grain’ is eaten by humans; it’s instead eaten by animals. Don’t they know how much food and other products we obtain from animals?
Agrofuel – for fuel for cars? I bet they refuse to travel by car. Or plane. Or train.
And what is a ‘culturally appropriate food production’? I don’t know what that means.
Ah well, academics tenured in their safe havens, supported by the taxpayer, living in big cities where No-One can be agriculturally self-sustaining – they are fun to read just for the sheer ignorance and arrogance.
Reasonable gasoline price is simple justice – Opinion
Took the words right out of my mouth bryanr “those that can do, those that can’t teach…university”
cheers Bubba
Couldn’t have put it any better than Spike1. Will it get through the professors’ thick skulls? Not a chance.
As for “Reasonable gasoline price is simple justice” no argument at all, provided you can tell me the “reasonable price” for a diamond drill, or the “reasonable price” for a rig hand’s wages, or the “reasonable price” for an offshore drilling rig, or the “reasonable price” for a blowout preventer or the “reasonable price” for a seismic line or the “reasonable price” for an exploration permit or the “reasonable price” of risk capital to explore for and develop future production or . . .
I hope I live long enough to see food get expensive. People in the USA spend less % of income on food every year.
As with oil, higher value will mean more exploration. When I see the assholes that wrote that stupid article plow up their front lawns and plant corn, then I’ll know prices are high.
Isn’t “The Little Red Hen” still in print? How is it that for all of time the majority of people just have not concept of how things work?
It’s in the free market that people have enough to eat. In the “fair” markets of places elsewhere that they starve.
…and the lesson is?
If you want a particular result, look at a place in history where that result was achieved. Unless you have something better, use that model.
RE: WESTERN PRODUCER. In the April 17 issue of the Producer, Rob Brown, a regular communist, oops, columnist, stated that rising wheat prices were causing bread prices to soar up to, and I quote, “$5.00 per loaf.” Yet on the very day that the article was published, I phoned at least four major chains. Average price for a one pound loaf was $1.10, store baked bread 1.5 lbs. loaves could be had for $1.99.
I’m told that many people send in letters to the editor (Barb Glen) of the W. Producer, and that the letters are either scrapped, or edited. Yet a guy like Stewart Wells of the NFU will send in a letter, they give him a whole column and more.
What I find so hypocritical of the W. Producer is that they do however accept ads from Monsanto, Cargill, John Deere and many other corporations. Yet on the same breath, the continously bash free enterprise.
Ah, these modern academics are just too moderate for my revolutionary zeal! What about the good old days under pol pot who executed people who wore glasses because they might be intellectuals?
Surely too much thinking is just as bad as speculating?
(note to academics – just kidding…)
Intellectual – a misnomer.
on second thought.
Roses are red
Stop signs are red
Fire hydrants are red
Gee, isn’t communism swell
Can you even imagine how pc the field of “justice studies” is? Any college major ending with “studies” is total crap, and anyone who has payed for one deserves a refund, with interest.
Amen, Kate!!
the isolation of most everyone, but particularly the “learned”, from the riches of the earth and the harvesting of its rich fruits drives the chattering classes to inanity and insanity.
Lone Ranger: “I’m told that many people send in letters to the editor (Barb Glen) of the W. Producer, and that the letters are either scrapped, or edited. Yet a guy like Stewart Wells of the NFU will send in a letter, they give him a whole column and more.”
Told by who?
The Producer publishes the vast majority of letters received, with minimum editing. I can say this with confidence because I work there, although not in the editorial department.
As for the ads, there is no hypocrisy. What there is, is a very strict firewall between advertising and editorial policy. Of course we accept advertising from major ag companies. How else are we to pay our staff? (And I don’t work in the advertising department, either.)
I understand that the perception of the Producer having a left-leaning, anti-free enterprise slant exists. It comes from the years we were owned by the SWP, where the editorial page policy was set by the SWP board rather than WP management.
However, if you were to dispassionately analyse the Producer’s content, I think you’d find a lot more balance than you think is there.
Beyond that, I think Spike1’s comments are spot on. And thanks to Kate for adding a spotlight to the issues facing the people that feed us.
Right-on…Remove all government intervention / subsidies and let the market prevail. Farmers, at least in the USA, are the biggest consumer of government handouts of all (other than defense), by far.
The Vietnam experience with Communism was interesting. The elite Professor/teacher was determined to be valued at 1/2 the salary of shovel labor working the Hoe Chi Min Trail (Tourism). When a country is trying to feed itself, results based science has value… The thought game nonsense is near worthless.
Hey Profs, GRAB A HOE!
And then you can give away all the food you want!
“…a cheap food policy in the Trudeau years, and the result was the decimation of the farm population. Maybe it’s time for a cheap university education policy – not with subsidies, but with the slashing of income for professors, like the cheap food policy did for farmers.”
When you break their racket down into its constituent parts, you end up with a ‘physical plant’ — classrooms and offices, a small number of actual teachers, a handful of management types, and a great financial grist mill. The real wage slaves in the colleges, the clerks, the cooks, the cleaners, the groundskeepers are all invisible and out of mind. At my first college, they were, when needed albeit seldom, merely called wombats.
It’s a great scam, sustained by the accreditation bodies. Which, in my second college, ruined a perfectly good library with a wonderful reading room with giant tables and stacks in Deucy Decimal to partitions of audio/visual louts, and 3/4 of the books lost in the conversion to Library of Congress. But we passed the accreditation review. They were in fact five ‘officials’ from competitor colleges around the nation. And what they did was to level their playing field. They sure as hell didn’t give a damn about students and their experience.
Ever since I dream of new colleges taught by energetic and bright Master’s degrees who are graduating faster than the mind can count — enough for 50 times the total tenured staff in the world each year every year, who need a job and don’t give a damn about tenure, who still love their area of expertise. With an explicit point that their teaching is not a career choice but a waystation towards something else — think a launching pad.
All it takes is a crakerjack librarian, a good administrator and secretary, a bean counter and clerk, a registrar and staff, and a big roomy building or five.
Plus the real staff, led chiefly by someone who can maintain and improve the entire physical plant. Someone like a farmer. Knows big buildings and has a can-do attitude.
So what would the tuition be? If you drive it low enough, you don’t have to suck up to the government social controllers. And if you spit on accreditors and just produce great graduates, you may just drive a stake in the heart of these self-important people.
Just a dream, though.
More please good person. Unfortunately our current professorate are followers. They got their positions by being obedient.
Stereotyping…a wonderful thing, done correctly. Few, however, do. You don’t think universities add value? Stop sending your precious little darlings, with their heads stuffed full of selfish entitlement, their desire to have the world handed to them on a plate, their woefully inadequate preparation for any real thinking, or even their ability to be properly trained.
You prate of the market economy? How the h*ll do you think the university system operates? This has got to be one of the purest market systems in current extent. Universities are businesses, students are currency. It’s not about the teaching, it’s about bums in seats. As for research – hah! It’s all HQP (highly qualified personnel). Profs are rewarded for having a large research group, with lots of graduate students…with a reduction in their teaching load. Bringing in the research dollars is not enough, unless you are a media star and attract enrollment indirectly. Again, it is not about knowledge generation, or about commercialization, or any of these wonderful things…truth, justice, or beauty. It is about money, and selling the brand. That universities still function at all is due to the contributions of the ever-decreasing idealistic few, and the fact that in large extent, the useful portions have degenerated into technical trade schools, be they medicine, engineering or business.
Stop buying. You are responsible for the state of the professoriate. After all, it IS supply and demand. And the demand for stupidity is apparently infinite.
Ladies and gentlemen, you don’t want market competition, you just want cheap food. You idealistic “movement” conservatives…How many of you are willing to impose a pure market-based ag system on this country overnight? Staged over how long? What is your success metric? Cost alone?
You whine and moan about freedom of expression, and then b!tch when Desmerais and Handy exercise their right (their freakin job!) to do so. Rather than address the fundamental issues, you mock and denigrate. Solutions? Oh, no! That’s someone else’s job. “Let the market decide”? Blindly? Under present circumstances? Without any regulatory constraint? What?!
If you are not going to contribute, then mind your betters. Children should be quiet when adults are speaking.
Man, I gotta stop reading Coulter and Shaidle…
🙂
Tenebris – “Let the market decide”? Blindly? Under present circumstances? Without any regulatory constraint? What?!”
Yes. We are where we are – because we aren’t. Reality bites!!!
Funny, I was just thinking that. Apropos of which,
Old farming adage with a modern update……
COMMUNISM: If you have two cows, you give the two cows to the state, and the government will give you a little milk.
FASCISM: If you have two cows, you keep the cows and give the government the milk, then the government sells you the milk.
SOCIALISM: If you have two cows, the government takes one and gives it to someone else.
NAZISM: If you have two cows and happen to be a jew, the government kills you and takes the two cows.
CAPITALISM: If you have two cows, you sell one and buy a bull and increase production.
PERONISM: Argentina)Current version – If you have two cows, Nestor and Cristina Kischner take the milk and export it at a record high world commodity price, and then give the farmers whatever money is left over after the Kirschners pay off their political cronies and subsidize their urban poor political base. If the farmers can’t cover their costs, too bad.
(via theo…wisdom among the cheesecake)
“Instead, grains are used primarily to feed animals, and recently these grains are now being converted into agrofuel to feed cars. This is manufactured scarcity par excellence.”
As my economics professors used to say, this is called “Value Added”, a desireable trait of advanced markets which through the increase of the value of a good causes increased wages and profits by producers. That is a good thing for farmers.
Of course most of the economics professors I listened to had done things in the real market economy instead of sitting around and making up BS like these clowns of “justice” and “revisionist history”. Fire them.
Tenebris says (stupidly): “useful portions have degenerated into technical trade schools, be they medicine…”
@ Tenebris: Well, I may have degenerated but at least I do something useful.
Secondly, no one here is suggesting those silly professors shouldn’t excercise free speech. We’re simply pointing out how ignorant they are and lamenting that we pay their salaries.
…my salary, too, langmann.
Why are they ignorant?
@ Tenebris: I already explained why I think they are ignorant (as per the definition of ignorant). Spike1 has also provided an excellent rebuttal.
If you are a professor in the same vein as these pretenders than I lament I pay your salary as well.
“According to Statistics Canada, the total number of hog farms in Canada at April 1, 2008 fell to 8,820 farms, down 19.3% from the level one year earlier.”
Apparently BLT’s aren’t as popular in universities as they were last year.
http://tinyurl.com/6nd68c
To “djb” RE WESTERN PRODUCER. I noticed that you wrote that with some caution. You publish “the vast number of letters” because that “vast number of letters” come from the socialist-CCF-Sask. Wheat Pool-Federated CO-OP cult that once made up the “vast number” of farmers in Saskatchewan.
RE: THE VERY STRICT FIREWALL. I was a sales rep for a major chemical supplier for many years.. When one of our guys wrote a letter to protest the lies and deception that was published with regards to the Percy Schmeiser lawsuit, our letter was never published. And the writer was using actual court transcripts to prove that Schmeiser had concocted the whole story about having GMO Canola blown over onto his property. In the end, the courts ruled against Schmeiser.
When a Sask Pool Rep threatened our company with a lawsuit because we were allegedly undercutting the SWP by selling LV96 herbicide and 46-0-0 at a lower price, I personally witnessed and mailed the letter to the editor of the Western Producer that our secretary had composed. It never got published. Imagine the insanity of believing that the SWP had a monopoly on the price of 24D and fertilizer, although many farmers beleived it. Who owned the Western Producer at that time? The SWP.
We were also bulk fuel dealers. When our company tried to offer farmers a 5 cent a gallon volume discount on ag diesel, Federated COOP threatened to cut off our fuel supply. (They were the only refinery in Sask.) We ended up having to order our fuel from an Alberta supplier. When I personally wrote a letter to the WP protesting this move, the letter was scrapped. I have at least five witnesses who read the letter before it was mailed.
I think you better get in touch with reality. Just look at a few back issues and read the long winded letters of Stewart Wells. (Pres–NFU.) No one else was ever accorded that kind of space. And as for letter not being published, why don’t you contact the Western Wheat Growers Assoc. and see what they have to say about that!!
Dont complain about farmers with your mouth full of food
PS: RE: WESTERN PRODUCER. I’m one person who is aware of at least three letters that weren’t published. Saskatchewan has over 50,000 farmers, how many letters would that add up to??
history is never really studied, otherwise we would not be making the same mistakes over and over again. with the passing of each generation we seem to lose the knowledge gained by that generation. the lesson of the commons has already been dismissed by professors of economics worldwide. duh.
We make the same mistakes because everything moves in cycles.
The problem with universities,as I see it, is quite simple. Those that achieve the highest credentials are the ones that play the game the best. They winner is the one who best understands their audience and their clients. Right now that means they must be highly progressive/leftists. This creates a glut of academic papers trying to be more progressive than the competition. So when the MSM or politicians look for “experts” on any topic they find only carbon copy solutions that are all based on the same socialist ideology. The politicians, MSM and public then mistake this for a “consensus” and base policies around this unbalanced wisdom.
Universities are not a free market, they are a virtual monopoly. The solution in academia, ironically, is more diversity. BTW, I mean the social sciences and humanities not engineering and other math dependent sciences.
Food isn’t cheap and there is no cheap food policy.
Not one in a thousand farmers are self-sufficient in food, buying their sustenance from the same supermarkets as every one else.
If university professors are not duly compensated for their labour, (that is their “investment”) they will go into other professions in which they will be duly compensated. That is the difference, they have real jobs, unlike Spike 1, who has lived 50 years with his hand in the public cookie jar.
Troll Alert !
30 million tonnes, or
30 billion kilograms, or
66 billion lbs
is the average annual grains & oilseeds production by only a 100 thousand or so Canadian Farmers.
Soooo, how does 660 thousand kilos (almost one and a half million lbs) of food, every year, stack up against a couple, or so, of “research” papers !? Asked for by who ? Other academics ?
I know some professors who are worth their weight in gold – others, annnh. Tenure puts them all in the same heap.
Lets have a public inquiry into more than a billion dollars of lost NISA Program share of money due the western farmers. Explain the alleged concealing evidence, perjury fabricating evidence and fraud in the Boyko judicial review and the corruption of the farmers legal representation in not filing all the evidence with the court and most importantly the required case law with the court and Crown’s council. How does a lawyer omit filing the case law in the largest non-statute barred (as was the Indian Residential School cases based on attendance) proposed class action that should have been the first and largest case certified in Saskatchewan?
More lawyer payolla. See Canada Contracts
U of S Professor Daniel R Ish- $2,505,944
http://www.usask.ca/law/about_us/bio.php?id=12 – 8k – Cached
Commodity- Legal Services/Litigation/Lawyer
Date Sept 18, 2007
Trade Agreement-WTO-AGP/NAFTA/AIT
Client Department-Indian Residential Schools Resolution Canada
plus 43 contracts at $1,580,779 for Adjudication Services dated Nov 05, 2007. Totally $70,479,312 when fully completed.
Lawyers are being proposed for criminal charges for omissions and other wrongful conduct in a case of farmers being denied what may amount to over a billion dollars. Did they rob Peter to pay Paul????
Curious more than anything, but into which “real” job does an associate professor of justice studies go?
One of the HRCs.
Anny,
“If university professors are not duly compensated for their labour, (that is their “investment”) they will go into other professions in which they will be duly compensated.”
Most professors are unemployable anywhere but the university and the public sector. They have no useful skills and a bad attitude.
Totally agree with Spike1, except for his understanding of the life of a university professor. Like being “paid tens of thousands of dollars with not one nickle invested”, say what? Do you think 10 years of university education is free? These days, most university grads are carrying loans that will take their entire working lives to pay off. Anyway, the average university prof is making scarcely more than your average teacher and certainly less than most tradespeople.
I would also remind you all that not all professors are liberal arts hacks. Who do you think all those engineers and medical doctors learn their skills from?