Last week, I noted a December story from the New York Times regarding the shrinking global supply of food. That story was buried in section C.
Today’s Times carries a more prominent piece on the global shortage of food oil, palm oil particularly. Like the earlier piece, this story highlights the competition between the first world’s luxury (we’re converting food crops to biodiesel for our cars) and the third world’s survival. In between are the emerging economies, India and China, who are trying to live more like the first world and less like the third.
The spike in prices means even more trouble for the third world, as poor people are pushed off their land and forests are leveled to make room for more oil crop plantations – which will accelerate global warming from both ends.
Today’s Times piece mentions that one reason for the spike in demand for oil is that US farmers are converting soybean fields to corn, which they sell for ethanol. The article doesn’t expand on this point, but it seems the height of stupidity. Why would any farmer switch from soy, which yields approximately 48 gallons of vegetable oil per acre, to corn, which yields about 18 gallons per acre?
The only answer I can think of is that legislators, lobbied heavily by the corn industry, have provided richer subsidies for corn than soy.
The time of crisis is upon us and we have responded by doing exactly the wrong thing.
I was in an upscale restaurant Sunday night and the waitress was giving the specials and she described the fish special as “water fish.”
“Excuse me?” I said. “What’s water fish?”
“Oh, that’s pollock. It’s a white fish, light, flaky….”
“From the Atlantic or Pacific?”
“Gee… I don’t know….”
For the record, pollock is not not an upscale fish. You know fishpaste? That’s pollock. The sad state of our oceans is such that this is what we are reduced to eating. And really, we shouldn’t be eating it, because we’re taking too many pollock from the seas.
A report in today’s New York Times says in the UK, cod is selling for 30 pounds a kilogram. There are 2.2 pounds to the kilogram and about two dollars to the pound, so cod is England is fetching about 30 bucks a pound. Cod. Thirty bucks a pound. The same fish that was the British poor man’s fish and chips or the working-class American’s Friday night fish fry.
I should have known and checked on Saturday. The Bush administration, top to bottom, releases bad news on Friday. This rule even applies to fairly obscure agencies like the Energy Information Administration, which updated its world oil supply and demand numbers Friday.
The news is bad once again. (To see the numbers, click here scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the Excel icon next to “World Oil Balance.”)
The newest numbers say world oil demand exceeded supply by an average of 800,000 barrels per day in the third quarter of 2007. Revised figures for the second quarter of 2007 indicate that supply exceeded demand by 50,000 bpd. Hope that makes you feel better.
A friend tipped me off to a small story from last month’s New York Times: “World Food Supply Is Shrinking, U.N. Agency Warns”
You’d think it would be front page news, but it was buried in the section C. Food prices are spiking, especially for the world’s poorest people. Global warming is causing crops to fail and it’s expensive to ship food to areas remote from the infrastructure grid. The rising cost of oil exacerbates this because 1) it costs more to ship to those remote areas and 2) land is being removed from agricultural production to grow biofuel crops. Also, as China and India industrialize, their citizens want to eat meat like the westerners, and so grain that once fed the hungry poor now goes to feed the animals that feed the rich.
What the Times won’t mention is that gloablization of trade plays a role in this, displacing local agriculture with cheap food imports – until the cheap imports are no longer cheap and there’s no more local agriculture.
The article quotes Josette Sheeran, executive director of the World Food Program as saying some poor people will be “priced out of the food market.”
The day you can’t feed your family is the day rebellion is made legal.
The Washington Post is reporting this afternoon that various telephone companies have cut off FBI wiretaps when the bureau failed to pay its bills, one as high as $66,000.
The FBI, which has trouble keeping track of guns, computers and evidence, pleaded administrative incompetence.
So, either:
Telephone companies don’t mind unconstitutional breaches of citizens’ rights, as long as the police state pays for the breach, but if they don’t pay, the line goes dead.
– Or –
Telephone companies feel it’s their patriotic duty to help fight terrorists -even if a few civil liberties get trampled along the way – unless the FBI fails to pay up, in which case the line goes dead.
All those evil thoughts you’ve had about phone companies over the years? They were far too kind.
Lost in the Hospital
In a small northern city in the middle of the winter, it seems like the middle of the night when you arrive at the hospital. Everything is dark and cold, but the parking garage is alive with activity as couples and families pull one small bag from the trunk and lock up their cars. If you didn’t know better, you’d think you were at the airport, watching people seeing off a traveler.
Inside, the hospital’s up and running. People cluster in the intake waiting area, still wearing coats and hats and boots. As you move deeper into the hospital and the process, the outer clothes come off and the tags go on.
Suddenly, everyone’s clothes seem out of place, removed from the ordinary circumstances of their lives. They might wear hunter’s camouflage, a sports team logo or a monogrammed dress shirt, but all seem suddenly useless signifiers of identity. Many hospital staff walk around in scrubs, as if they’ve gotten the message and shed their civilian identities. The staff have plastic tags with their names and photos and magnetic strips on the back.
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