Thanks! In my experience, ‘cliched and obnoxious’ frequently equals, “true.”

jpz, I find your remarks cliched and obnoxious. It’s well established that high fertility rates coincide with the worst oppression of women through state and religion. Education of women is the major factor in decreasing fertility through take-up of contraception. The fertility rate in Mexico (and you did state “Mexico”, not USA)is now heading down to 2 and will probably drop below that in the next few years.

As to the CIA Factbook, I think it’s just a straightforward compendium of facts as revealed in official stats. The little introductory stories to the various sections are a different matter, but I skip them.

Well that is a very astute point, and I wish you would broadcast it more loudly. A good observation, and one which I don’t see made very often.

“I checked the CIA Factbook for Mexico…”

Yeah, that’s one way of gathering data. You know what I did instead? I spent a number of years working with Mexican emigres, interviewing them, and collecting point-specific information about their lives. Hoo-whee! Come and ride a bus some time, in pretty much any city in California, Arizona, Texas (and now Illinois, Oregon, North Carolina, etc. etc.) What you see will be pretty interesting. What you hear –and what you don’t hear– might be even more interesting. (And as I recall, the CIA also told us there were WMDs hidden under all the sofas in Iraq, as well.)

What Mexicans want to do in Mexico is of no concern or interest to me. But if what they get up to begins to massively impact what happens in my own country, in every conceivable dimension, then yes, I feel bound to take notice.

j_p_z, no you’re not retarded, but to me it seems you think that Mexicans breed out of sheer wilful stupidity. I checked the CIA Factbook for Mexico against the World, and some perhaps comparable countries. Their fertility rate of 2.42 per woman ranks 108/222 and is almost spot on the world average. They are close to the world average on quite a few measures, but have a low death rate, noticeably lower than for the US. So they are no good at dying. Migrating isn’t ranked but they seem quite good at that.

If the poor are breeding rapidly, as they seem to in most places, then perhaps Jeffrey Sachs has a clue in concentrating on the education of women, starting with providing meals at school and encouraging the girls to go to school. That is as part of a comprehensive aid program.

Of course we don’t want to turn the thread over to how to bust poverty but as a last word I’d say that I’m not keen on comprehensive free trade agreements unless the countries have similar levels of development, similar social structures and similar values. But that is another big topic.

If they want to go on breeding like rabbits, then Vegas odds are pretty certain that they will just have to, well, live like rabbits.

j_p_z, this is irrelevant even if you want to defend the idea that it is correct.

US NAFTA corn displaces Mexican corn

Mexican corn price rises leaving some Mexicans eating noodles

Surely we can all understand this simple story without getting our knickers twisted over the relative breeding rates of different populations.

In Australia we don’t have any special animus towards Mexicans so you rant seems misplaced. Now, if you wanted instead to talk about Lebanese ..

As to breeding like rabbits. I’m here to tell you that your calling them on it is going to change things not one little bit. I’ve noticed that human reproduction is not a perticularly rational matter. If anyone asked me whether it was rational to have kids, I’d tell them, no. Funnily enough no-one asks me or seems the slightest bit interested in what I think!

In terms of emotion, the experience of growing up on a farm where we produced most of what we ate is imprinted on my soul. But I know that farm is not there anymore. I’ve been back and the farm I knew has gone. The landscape has entirely changed.

And in response to your last question about why people stay on the land, one day a couple of years ago I was listening to the radio as they discussed the latest rural crisis. Suddenly I recognised the voice. It was my brother telling some reporter that he’d rather live in a cave than move to the city.

That’s the emotion. All I’m saying is that the family farm is under pressure and that some other people see corporates claiming the future. Quiggin’s article supports the first part. He says that holdings are getting bigger and/or people are earning part of their income off-farm. That’s because they have been under pressure. My mail is that Australian farmers have coped with these pressures better than most around the world, some by becoming corporate.

That’s where the definitional problems start, but few of the farmers in the district where I grew up are operating on a single contiguous block of land unless they have developed an off-farm income stream. My best friend of those days went from 600 acres to 6,000 acres and told me he should have at least doubled again. Our class-mate, on the other hand, the kid next door to me, now has 5 houses, not sure how many farms, but he puts 300 animals a month in his own feed-lot for finishing. He lives in a town and spends a good deal of time being the shire mayor. He’s already corporate, but if he bought another operation the same size he’d probably have to establish a corporate office and employ a CEO. He’s the sort of bloke who would. So I’m not I’m not sure that Quiggin is right in saying that the corporate influence is declining. It may be just beginning. As Quiggin says, they are not defined as large businesses but traditional family farms they are not.

But that is happening in an evolutionary way that is normal and acceptable in a capitalist world. It is the external shocks that fracture the social fabric and end up with people dispossessed, displaced and some dead that I mourn.

In the case of Mexican corn it is a deliberate market intervention of a foreign government that is causing the current shock, on top of the earlier market intervention of US food subsidies.

If I read the articles correctly I think they are saying that it is the non-farming poor who are being shafted this time, and that the Mexican corn-producing peasants, who have already been shafted, won’t gain much if at all from the higher corn prices.

Is that simple enough English?

There’s an old Irish joke about farming. Farmer wins the lottery, the papers ask him what he’s going to do with all that money. “Well,” he says, “I’m going to keep right on farming until it’s all gone.”

Corporate agribusiness farming gives you certain decisive macro advantages, but at certain rather heavy (and often invisible) costs. (Animal cruelty, unhealthy yet cost-effective produce, top-down corporate over-management; and plus, do we really want to have to eat just any old sort of shit that Monsanto and Archer Daniels Midland decide to shovel out?). On the other hand, I’d be willing to bet that Indian subsistence farming is nobody’s idea of a good time. Ultimately the best thing would be to find a harmonized system where one kept one’s sturdy yeomen on the land, but it didn’t result in inefficiency and dire poverty. I suspect that in a truly civilized system, subscription-based food cooperatives reaching out to individual organic and biodynamic farming systems will go some of the way towards covering the spread. It’s already starting to happen. Pete Townshend:

“It’s alarming
How charming
It is to be a-farming.”

A friend of mine who deals in exquisite wines tells me that the ones which come from bio-dynamic vineyards have astounding qualities that most of the world has not yet discovered. A future, perhaps.

On the other hand, _this_ is the past, and we’ve lived it before:

Around the year 1000, the Byzantine Empire decided that, for various economic and political reasons, it would favor massive large-holding farms (their version of agribusiness) over and against the small-holders in Anatolia. The natural upshot was that, although farming was improved in efficiency, Asia Minor became critically underpopulated, which had adverse effects on the Byzantine Army. ‘No problem,’ they thought, ‘We’ll just replace the shortfall with these new Turkish mercenaries.’ Then, in their first critical battle with a foreign incursive force, which turned out to be –guess who?– Seljuk Turks, the Turkish mercenaries defected to the side of their ethnic confreres.

The battle, which the Byzantines massively lost, was the Battle of Manzikurt in 1071 A.D., and it lost much of Anatolia for Constantinople, and spelled the ultimate ruin of the Byzantine Empire. It was also a major proximate cause of the Crusades. Goes to show what a careless approach to farming policy and linked demographics can do for you.

That’s one end of the spectrum. On the other hand, and at the other end, from the original post, I notice *this* howler:

“The typical Mexican family of four consumes about one kilo — 2.2 pounds — of tortillas each day.”

Let me see if I got this straight. A “typical” Mexican family of *four*?! Show me a typical Mexican family of four, and I’ll show you a typical 3-legged centipede. The biggest structural problem of the “campesinos” (what a fucking medieval word, and what a fucking medieval attitude it expresses) is that on average they produce about six more new campesinos than the four new campesinos that they already couldn’t afford. If they want to go on breeding like rabbits, then Vegas odds are pretty certain that they will just have to, well, live like rabbits. That’s an old equation, and if they don’t want to responsibly adjust for it, then I don’t see why anybody else should have to make up the shortfall for them. I don’t like to see anybody living in poverty, but these knuckleheads are every bit as thoughtless as some nitwit yuppie driving an SUV, and they should be called on it.

Ahh, farms. How does the tune from “Green Acres” go again?

Being on the land has its good points, sure, but it’s a hell of a way to make a living. The swings of climate and commodity prices make it one of the most volatile industries out there; and yet it’s run by small entrepreneurs with limited risk hedging ability and whose lifestyles vary greatly according to these vagaries.

In the developing world and subsistence farming, replace “lifestyles” with “ability to eat properly”.

With regards to Devinder Sharma’s article, the question arises why farmers (in the Western world) are prepared to continue to farm if they are really making no money.

You’re missing the point anyway. US corn is subsidised and will be more so after the US Congress passes ethanol industry related laws – this is the real mistake here. Corn is a inferior base to produce ethanol from. Trade is good, subsidies are bad.

I thought I’d made that point, but yesterday I had trouble finding my head. After posting I switched on the radio and heard a certain cricket match in progress. It mightily disturbed my sleep.

I thought there was confusion also and was hoping that commenters would cast some light. So far the most light has been cast by Lefty E for which thankyou.

As I understand it peasant farming is quite a good production system, or can be in many parts of the world. Vandana Shiva says that in India 100 farmers each farming an acre will produce more food and of vastly greater variety than one farmer with modern equipment. But 100 farmers are never going to make enough to each buy a car, have a holiday at the beach and send their kids to university. Also large monocultures allow better secondary processing/distribution/marketing systems so that their produce can take its place among 25,000 plus items at my supermarket on the other side of the world.

Smallholder farming is under pressure all over the world. The New Delhi food analyst Devinder Sharma looks at what’s happening from where he sits and sees 600 million Indian farmers going through the mincer. In the end the real gains will be the corporates, according to him. Sharma is always bitter, but there seems plenty to be bitter about.

My elder brother who sold the family farm, shifted north and now has 5 or 6 properties. He’s doing OK at the moment. But he sees the future also as belonging to the corporates who, he says, already own most of the prime country in his industry (beef). I understand that Australian family farmers by expanding as he has have generally done better than the Canadians, but I don’t have solid research to back that.

In the US Willie Nelson has been doing concerts for 20 years to try to keep family farmers on the land. Some of them will find a niche, at least for a time, some won’t.

The EU decided to treat their farmers humanely 40 years ago and look at where that got them.

Personally I left school at 15, worked on the farm for 2 years, decided it was a mugs game and went back to school.

dd I hear three problems with the maquilledoras. First there is the shit wages and exploitative working conditions. Second there have been dreadful stories about local pollution. Third there is the giant sucking sound in recent times of factories being moved or replaced by those in China.

But all my information is anecdotal, garnered from lefty sites on the internet.

That whole idea had been pretty thoroughly debunked, last I heard. The original research was truly appalling (synopsis: monarch butterfly caterpillars die if they eat only GM corn pollen. They also die if you try and keep them alive on non-GM pollen from any plant. In fact they die on any food other than milkweed leaves…)

Chris

One moment, cheap corn forces people off the land, the next minute cheap corn forces meat prices to rise.

Alternatively, expensive corn forces people off the land and forces meat prices to rise.

The second alternaitve relies on a highly unlikely situation where vertically integrated MNE is less efficient than arms length trade. If this were true, it would not continue for long.

The production function always cuts through the murkiness. Y = f(L,K,A,t…)

The Mexicans are better off. US and Mexican total output have increased.

“The Washington Post article says that Mexico went from exporting 137,000 tons of corn in 2005 to importing 800,000 tons in 2006, I’m not sure why.”

Perhaps they don’t have comparative advantage in corn. US corn production went through huge productivity changes in the 20th century, pre GM. In a way, it is a very capital and technology intesnive commodity.

You’re missing the point anayway. US corn is subsidised and will be more so after the US Congress passes ethanol industry related laws – this is the real mistake here. Corn is a inferior base to produce ethanol from. Trade is good, subsidies are bad.

Maquilledoras are springing up in the north, yes. The vast majority of campesinos live in the south – some 2000 kilometers away. Many in Chiapas are indigenous Mayan speakers, whose grasp of Spanish isn’t that much better than mine. Not exactly ideal factors to abstractly transfer between sectors.

Their GDP quotient is utterly misleading, and a fairly useless stat – as they are mainly subsistence farmers. That is, they eat most of their produce themselves. They dont figure in market logic – except when their tiny post-diet margins get wiped out by cheap corn they cant always afford to eat. This even goes to seed replanting and tools – it undermines the diet cycle itself.

And wasnt the point of Brian’s post the increased dependence on imports that have dramatically price-spiked? They need ‘more’ of this alleged market efficiency?

Note also that you cant flood the US in the same way under NAFTA rules. It becoming clear Mexico would do better in pursuing food self-sufficiency first.

As for the agricultural revolution – I can see your point in the abstract there. But these are tenant farmers living in semi-feudal arrangements under the big blanco landlords. NAFTA is hitting them, but not the root problem. Its not clear to me how NAFTA is going to address the monopoly on land ownership by a southern blanco elite thats been doing things the same way for 500 years. These guys are the sticks in the mud. The campesinos are just trying to eat.

That’s another way of saying that agricultural workers are only about 18% as productive as other Mexican workers. Put another way, on average agricultural workers can boost their income by a factor of 5 by moving to other industries.

They need a revolution in agriculture, either by shifting people off farms or by massive capital investment to boost production, or both. NAFTA enables – indeed probably will in the long run force – both.

The real issue is where the people will go. Again, it is NAFTA that encourages the creation of maquilledoras to absorb the rural population. But it doesn’t sem to be doing that fast enough at the moment, which is why the displaced population is tending to become wetbacks. The answer to which is more, not less, investment by evil US corporations in such sweatshops.

vertical integration of oligopolistic transnational corporate industrial food production

No Tim T I didn’t have to put it like that! I wrote something, looked at it for a moment, thought I was on a roll, put in another word and let it rip!

corporate culture in nations that do not have a rule of law is even less benign. directing campesinos to improve their lot as though they were harvard b-school grads riding the chicago commodity market is amusing, from a safe distance.

i suspect the only cure for humanity’s various problems is mass death. at 10% of the current population, many problems would disappear. unfortunately, this die-back will only be effective if it proceeds from the bottom up. from a moral standpoint, one could wish it were the other way around.