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05-02-2008, 19:42 PM
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#31 (permalink)
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Resident Curmudgeon
Military Professional
Join Date: 03-12-05
Location: Panama City Fl
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Quote:
Originally Posted by S-2
Oh, I bet you ate well in the field.
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Did you ever make Sun Tea in the field? Or is that a southern thang?
Field packing list for 2 week op,
Ranger roll on buttpack, 1 pr socks, 550 cord, socks inside and pens,O.F. fan , workstuff, Marlboros
Alice Pack Large 2 t-shirts, 6 pr socks, Fill rest with paperback books, geedunk, smokes 
A mans gotta know whats important. |
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05-02-2008, 19:53 PM
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#32 (permalink)
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Senior Contributor
Join Date: 01-27-06
Location: DPRK, Democratik People's Republik of Kalifornia
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Ironduke
Wouldn't game theory posit that if one farmer lowered his production, others would increase theirs to reap extra profit?
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No, that would not work. The government controls the price by setting it below the asking price on the market. This happens assuming the production cost has gone up for a variety of reasons, therefore, pushing the asking price up in the first place. The profit margin is razor thin, if at all. So by producing more, I don't make enough profit to justify the extra capital cost involved. If I make a profit at all.
I might as well cut back on my production to do other things like read a book or play with my kids.
__________________
"Only Nixon can go to China." -- Old Vulcan proverb.
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05-03-2008, 15:06 PM
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#33 (permalink)
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Moderator
Join Date: 02-23-05
Location: Krblachistan
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FT.com | The Economists’ Forum | Food crisis is a chance to reform global agriculture
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Paul Collier: The sharp increase in the world price of staple foods is an inconvenience for consumers in the rich world, but for consumers in the poorest countries, especially in Africa, it is a catastrophe. Despite the predominance of peasant agriculture, most African countries are net food importers and food accounts for over half of the budget of low-income households. This is the result of decades of agricultural stagnation combined with growing populations. Although many of the net purchasers are rural, evidently the problem is at its most intense in the urban slums. These slums are political powder kegs and so rising food prices have already triggered riots. Indeed, they sow the seeds of an ugly and destructive populist politics.
Why have food prices rocketed? Paradoxically, this squeeze on the poorest has come about as a result of the success of globalization in reducing world poverty. As China develops, helped by its massive exports to our markets, millions of Chinese households have started to eat better. Better means not just more food but more meat, the new luxury. But to produce a kilo of meat takes six kilos of grain. Livestock reared for meat to be consumed in Asia are now eating the grain that would previously have been eaten by the African poor. So what is the remedy?
The best solution to a problem is often not closely related to its cause (a proposition that that might be recognized in the climate change debate). China’s long march to prosperity is something to celebrate. The remedy to high food prices is to increase food supply, something that is entirely feasible. The most realistic way to raise global supply is to replicate the Brazilian model of large, technologically sophisticated agro-companies supplying for the world market. To give one remarkable example, the time between harvesting one crop and planting the next, in effect the downtime for land, has been reduced an astounding thirty minutes. There are still many areas of the world that have good land which could be used far more productively if it was properly managed by large companies. For example, almost 90% of Mozambique’s land, an enormous area, is idle.
Unfortunately, large-scale commercial agriculture is unromantic. We laud the production style of the peasant: environmentally sustainable and human in scale. In respect of manufacturing and services we grew out of this fantasy years ago, but in agriculture it continues to contaminate our policies. In Europe and Japan huge public resources have been devoted to propping up small farms. The best that can be said for these policies is that we can afford them. In Africa, which cannot afford them, development agencies have oriented their entire efforts on agricultural development to peasant style production. As a result, Africa has less large-scale commercial agriculture than it had fifty years ago. Unfortunately, peasant farming is generally not well-suited to innovation and investment: the result has been that African agriculture has fallen further and further behind the advancing productivity frontier of the globalized commercial model. Indeed, during the present phase of high prices the FAO is worried that African peasants are likely to reduce their production because they cannot finance the increased cost of fertilizer inputs. While there are partial solutions to this problem through subsidies and credit schemes, large scale commercial agriculture simply does not face this problem: if output prices rise by more than input prices, production will be expanded because credit lines are well-established.
Our longstanding agricultural romanticism has been compounded by our new-found environmental romanticism. In the United States fears of climate change have been manipulated by shrewd interests to produce grotesquely inefficient subsidies for bio-fuel. Around a third of American grain production has rapidly been diverted into energy production. This switch demonstrates both the superb responsiveness of the market to price signals, and the shameful power of subsidy-hunting lobby groups. Given the depth of anti-Americanism in Europe it is, of course, fashionable to criticize the American folly with bio-fuels. But Europe has its equivalent follies.
First, the European Commission is now imitating the American bio-fuels policy. At present the programme is small enough to be unimportant, but we need to pull it back before it does real damage. We have surely learnt enough about European agriculture to realize how important it is to kill this incipient scam before we are engulfed by it. But the true European equivalent of America’s folly with bio-fuels is the ban on GM. Europe’s distinctive and deep-seated fears of science have been manipulated by the agricultural lobby into yet another form of protectionism. The ban on both the production and import of genetically modified crops has obviously retarded productivity growth in European agriculture: again, the best that can be said of it is that we are rich enough to afford such folly. But Europe is a major agricultural producer, so the cumulative consequence of this reduction in the growth of productivity has most surely rebounded onto world food markets. Further, and most cruelly, as an unintended side-effect the ban has terrified African governments into themselves banning genetic modification in case by growing modified crops they would permanently be shut out of selling to European markets. Africa definitely cannot afford this self-denial. It needs all the help it can possibly get from genetic modification. Not only is Africa currently being hit by rising food prices, over the longer term it will face climatic deterioration in the context of a rapidly growing population.
While the policies needed for the long term have been befuddled by romanticism, the short term global response has been pure beggar-thy-neighbour. It is easier for urban slum dwellers to riot than for farmers: riots need streets, not fields. And so, in the internal tussles between the interests of poor consumers and poor producers, the interests of consumers have prevailed. Governments in grain-exporting countries have swung prices in favour of their consumers and against their farmers by banning exports. These responses further politicize and fragment an already confused global food market. They increase the risks of investing in commercial-scale food production and drive up prices further in the food-importing countries. Unfortunately, trade in agriculture has been the main economic activity to have resisted being subject to global rules. We need stronger and fairer globalization, not less of it.
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"So little pains do the vulgar take in the investigation of truth, accepting readily the first story that comes to hand." Thucydides 1.20.3
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05-05-2008, 13:39 PM
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#34 (permalink)
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Patron
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Shek
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I agree that the way to go would be to raise commercial investment in agriculture as well as do away with the (current) charade(s) of bio-fules and bans against GM food. However there also has to be a realisation that commercial investment in agriculture in some parts of the world is a highly politically charged issue. That is one f the ways in which colonialism progressed through some of these countries. It is also not possible to simply take away land from peasants in democratic countries like India, we are not China after all.
A lot of work needs to be done by economists/ policiticians/ agriculturists to show the value of technology intensie farming to the common 3rd world farmer. Even coopearative farming societies would be better than the way things operate currently. |
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05-05-2008, 14:18 PM
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#35 (permalink)
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Senior Contributor
Join Date: 01-27-06
Location: DPRK, Democratik People's Republik of Kalifornia
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Zimbabwe could have made a killing on the world market today had Robert "Madman" Mugabe not ruined his nation.
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05-05-2008, 14:32 PM
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#36 (permalink)
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Moderator
Join Date: 11-10-04
Location: Te Ika a Maui
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Quote:
To give one remarkable example, the time between harvesting one crop and planting the next, in effect the downtime for land, has been reduced an astounding thirty minutes. There are still many areas of the world that have good land which could be used far more productively if it was properly managed by large companies. For example, almost 90% of Mozambique’s land, an enormous area, is idle.
Unfortunately, large-scale commercial agriculture is unromantic. We laud the production style of the peasant: environmentally sustainable and human in scale. In respect of manufacturing and services we grew out of this fantasy years ago, but in agriculture it continues to contaminate our policies. In Europe and Japan huge public resources have been devoted to propping up small farms.
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Issues of sustainability arise if it becomes too intensive, but basically damn straight.
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In the realm of spirit, seek clarity; in the material world, seek utility.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
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05-05-2008, 16:09 PM
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#37 (permalink)
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Patron
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Quote:
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To give one remarkable example, the time between harvesting one crop and planting the next, in effect the downtime for land, has been reduced an astounding thirty minutes. There are still many areas of the world that have good land which could be used far more productively if it was properly managed by large companies. For example, almost 90% of Mozambique’s land, an enormous area, is idle.
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Madmen dictators aside, this is not necessarily the case with the major rice producing nations. In India for e.g., the available area for cultivation has remained the same or has decreased. Whatever area is left available is split into miniscule (by US standards) land tracts and therefore may not yield to high technology agriculture.
In such cases the government would do well to try and persuade farmers to pool their land and use high productive techniques, as well as high yield varieties of rice... |
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05-05-2008, 23:16 PM
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#38 (permalink)
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Moderator
Join Date: 02-23-05
Location: Krblachistan
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FT.com / Home UK / UK - Rebooting the Indian green revolution
Quote:
Rebooting the Indian green revolution
By Amy Yee in New Delhi
Published: May 2 2008 03:00 | Last updated: May 2 2008 03:00
Ajit Singh, a farmer in the poor northern state of Uttar Pradesh, had never seen a computer until four years ago when ITC, the Indian agribusiness-to-hotels conglomerate, installed a PC in his village, Kurthia.
Now the thin 47-year-old farmer visits the ITC station, known as an "e-choupal" after the Hindi term for "gathering place", every day for online access to news-papers, crop prices, weather forecasts and farming techniques. As ITC's village manager, he passes on what he gleans to fellow farmers.
Knowing the fair market value of crops allows farmers to fetch better prices and circumvent local traders who used to dictate terms. Farmers can also sell wheat and other crops to ITC.
The result has been a big jump in crop productivity. Annual incomes in Kurthia have risen from Rs40,000- Rs50,000 ($1,000-$1,230) before e-choupal to Rs100,000- Rs120,000 now, says Mr Singh.
ITC has rolled out 6,400 e-choupals across India since 2000. The initiative has gained new relevance as New Delhi urgently tries to tackle threats to food security, the growing gap between rich and poor and stagnant agricultural growth that has added to soaring food prices,
India "needs another green revolution", the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (Unescap) recently urged. "Growth and productivity in agriculture are slowing, and the green revolution has bypassed millions."
India has the most to gain from improvements in agriculture because it is home to nearly two-thirds of Asia's poor, most of whom rely on farming, Unescap said.
Middle-class Indians are eating more and better food. Yet its population of 1.1bn is growing at about 1.4 per cent and food grain production increased just 0.9 per cent last year, according to ministry of agriculture statistics.
Agricultural growth has steadily decelerated because of years of under-investment as attention has focused on high-growth manufacturing and service industries.
But big strides can be made with relatively simple measures. In Kurthia, which is 40 km from the bustling holy city of Varanasi, the e-choupal consists of a computer in a modest house rigged with a small satellite dish. Farmers pose questions that are e-mailed to ITC -agricultural scientists and experts at agricultural -institutes.
Yogesh Bhrigulanshi, a farmer and the ITC local manager in nearby Bisuari village, says rice yields have risen 70 per cent, to 3,900kg per acre, since the arrival of the e-choupal. "We used to use fertiliser without any knowledge," says Mr Bhrigulanshi. "We used to use pesticides for any disease on plants. Now we know which pesticide to use and if it needs to be used."
ITC plans to invest $1bn on e-choupals in the period to 2015 to connect farmers to information, products and services. The hope is that as rural incomes rise, farmers will buy more products and services, ranging from seeds and fertilisers to insurance and healthcare.
Rural standards of living have improved. Mr Bhrigulanshi bought his second mobile phone last month and two years ago purchased a television. His 11-year-old son, wearing a white uniform and striped blue tie, goes to an English school that costs Rs25,000 ($625) per year. That compares to the $7 annual cost of his previous government school.
There is still a long way to go. Farmers say there has been little improvement in roads, electricity and water over the years. Government agricultural subsidies for fertiliser, pesticide and equipment do not reach them. Subsidies should be provided through private parties, Mr Singh suggests.
They remain sceptical of the Indian government's recent promises to invest heavily in agriculture and waive $15bn (€9.7bn, £7.6bn) worth of loans to farmers. Writing off bad loans means "defaulters benefit. Those who have paid do not have any benefit," opines Mr Bhrigulanshi.
"Government always talks about farmers when elections come," adds Mr Singh. "But practically, we are not seeing anything."
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05-06-2008, 01:09 AM
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#39 (permalink)
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Contributor
Join Date: 12-19-07
Location: india
Country: 
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Quote:
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"Government always talks about farmers when elections come," adds Mr Singh. "But practically, we are not seeing anything."
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So very true. We are seeing this live in the runup to elections in Karnataka (Southern indian state). Even in Bangalore suddenly roads are getting tarred, sewers cleaned and storm water drains de-silted. |
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05-06-2008, 02:29 AM
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#40 (permalink)
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Patron
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Shek
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Yes, these guys are the Big Retails that I was talking about. There are several others like Reliance
Several farmers hae come out and said that Reliance provides them with better prices than the traditional mandis that they were used too.
There is a deep seated distrust for Big Retail amongst farmers, and there is a high degree of political mobilization against them from the middle men/ small buisnessmen class |
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05-06-2008, 03:18 AM
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#41 (permalink)
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Contributor
Join Date: 12-19-07
Location: india
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Quote:
Originally Posted by antimony
Yes, these guys are the Big Retails that I was talking about. There are several others like Reliance
Several farmers hae come out and said that Reliance provides them with better prices than the traditional mandis that they were used too.
There is a deep seated distrust for Big Retail amongst farmers, and there is a high degree of political mobilization against them from the middle men/ small buisnessmen class
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For once I find myself cheering reliance on! 
Would really love it for those middlemen SOBs  to be squished like bugs.. |
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05-06-2008, 10:00 AM
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#42 (permalink)
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Patron
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Quote:
Originally Posted by bolo121
For once I find myself cheering reliance on!
Would really love it for those middlemen SOBs to be squished like bugs.. |
I definitely do not want that, there are a lot of families involved. I would rather want to see them integrated into the procurement-processing-distribution chain.
This is something that is politically difficult to achieve (even though its happening slowly), since both the right and left are against it. |
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05-06-2008, 10:32 AM
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#43 (permalink)
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Contributor
Join Date: 12-19-07
Location: india
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Well middlemen as far as i can see have no value to the supply system. They simply make it more difficult for the farmer and make food more expensive than it should be. They are also important vote banks for local politicos.
So i believe that the only way they would go down would be if some big retail empire like reliance crushes them. This in itself is proving very tough and will probably take years.
As to the families thing, this being india a lot of people will get hurt no matter what. But my sympathy is with average small farmer.
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05-06-2008, 12:58 PM
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#44 (permalink)
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Senior Contributor
Join Date: 01-27-06
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Heh...you guys need Walmart to boost the efficiency of your supply system. |
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05-06-2008, 13:24 PM
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#45 (permalink)
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Contributor
Join Date: 12-19-07
Location: india
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Wal mart!!! no way.
At least some mercy must be shown.. |
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