Food for Thought
by John Mauldin

What countries are truly the have and have nots of the world? Good friend and business partner Niels Jensen of Absolute Return Partners suggests we look at the old equation in a new way? Food and energy resources may be at least part of the definition in the future. In this week’s Outside the Box we continue a them I mentioned a few weeks ago: agricultural needs are going to be a new and important force in the world and when coupled with energy may shift the balance of power in the world in strange a different ways.

When, as Niels points out, Afghanistan poppy farmers are shifting to wheat farming, the world is truly a different place. I think you will find the research he has done to be truly worth a few minutes of your thinking time.

And as a preface, I was reminded a little while ago that a Financial Times headline story last Friday mentioned that China is buying African farmland and building massive amounts of railroads and infrastructure to get grains to the market. I have long been bullish on African farmland. This week’s OTB will tell you why.

John Mauldin, Editor
Outside the Box

Food for Thought
By Niels Jensen

The Absolute Return Letter
May 2008

“There is nothing so disastrous as a rational investment policy in an irrational world.” ~ John Maynard Keynes

You just know that something is astray when Afghan poppy growers begin to switch from opium to wheat. According to the Independent newspaper here in the UK, that’s exactly what is now happening. I have no desire to enter into a pound for pound risk/reward analysis of producing wheat versus opium. However, the consequences of the rapid rise in energy and agricultural commodity prices are far reaching and perhaps not as well understood as they should be. That is the content of this month’s letter.

Read the rest at:

http://www.safehaven.com/showarticle.cfm?id=10253&pv=1

Monsanto relies on a shadowy army of private investigators and agents in the American heartland to strike fear into farm country

FULL

…A journalist friend who attended some recent meetings of green and environmental lobbyists described a strange scene in the gents toilet. No, not anyone adopting an extra-wide stance in the stalls, but rather the significant use of paper towels to dry hands. In the middle of a meeting on the environment, this behavior struck my friend as particularly stupid, but it also highlighted the deep cultural traits that have to be reversed in Europe and the US before any meaningful progress can be made.

Think about that for a second: if you pull out five hand paper towels to dry your hand every time in the toilet, the “footprint” of a single Westerner would be one tree every day. Multiply that by European and American populations and suddenly it becomes all too clear why Brazilian rainforests disappear at the rate of a few thousand acres every week.

Read the entire article at: http://atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/JD26Dj08.html

The International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology (IAASTD) recently released its final report in Johannesburg, South Africa. The result of an exhaustive 3-year international consultation similar to that of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IAASTD calls for an overhaul of agriculture dominated by multinational companies and governed by unfair trade rules. The report warns against relying on genetic engineered “fixes” for food production and emphasizes the importance of locally-based, agroecological approaches to farming. The key advantages to this way of farming-aside from its low environmental impact-is that it provides both food and employment to the world’s poor, as well as a surplus for the market. On a pound-per-acre basis, these small family farms have proven themselves to be more productive than large-scale industrial farms. And, they use less oil, especially if food is traded locally or sub-regionally. These alternatives, growing throughout the world, are like small islands of sustainability in increasingly perilous economic and environmental seas. As industrialized farming and free trade regimes fail us, these approaches will be the keys for building resilience back into a dysfunctional global food system.

Expecting solutions from the institutions that created the disaster in the first place is like calling an arsonist to put out the fire. Getting the poor back on the land and providing them the support presently being captured by the world’s agri-foods monopolies would be a truly systemic and durable solution to our current global food crisis.

and here’s more on the IAASTD:

Amongst the 22 findings of the study that chart a new direction for agriculture: a conclusion that the dominant practice of industrial, large-scale agriculture is unsustainable, mainly because of the dependence of such farming on cheap oil, its negative effects on ecosystems — and growing water scarcity.

Instead, monocultures must be reconsidered in favour of agro-ecosystems that marry food production with ensuring water supplies remain clean, preserving biodiversity, and improving the livelihoods of the poor.

“Given the future challenges it was very clear to everyone that business as usual was not an option,” IAASTD Co-chair Hans Herren told IPS. He was speaking at an Apr. 7-12 intergovernmental plenary in South Africa’s commercial hub, Johannesburg, where the assessment findings were reviewed ahead of Tuesday’s presentation.

While global supplies of food are adequate, 850 million people are still hungry and malnourished because they can’t get access to or afford the supplies they need, added Herren — who is also president of the Arlington-based Millennium Institute, a body that undertakes a variety of developmental activities around the world. A focus only on boosting crop yields would not deal with the problems at hand, he said: “We need better quality food in the right places.”

The notion that yield can no longer be the sole measure of agricultural success was also raised by Greenpeace International’s Jan van Aken, who said that the extent to which agriculture promotes nutrition needs to be considered. A half-hectare plot in Thailand can grow 70 species of vegetables, fruits and herbs, providing far better nutrition and feeding more people than a half-hectare plot of high-yielding rice, he added.

[...]

The plenary was marked by some disagreement over the ever-controversial matters of biotechnology and trade: indeed, during a long and fraught debate over biotechnology, the meeting very nearly fell apart. U.S. and Australian government representatives objected to wording in the synthesis report that highlighted concerns about whether the use of genetically modified (GM) crops in food is healthy and safe.

This issue, along with challenges pertaining to trade, had been thoroughly debated over the three-year IAASTD process and the final wording reflected scientific evidence. The report says biotechnology has a role to play in the future but that it remains a contentious matter, the data on benefits of GM crops being mixed; it further notes that patenting of genes causes problems for farmers and researchers.

Syngenta and the other biotech and pesticide companies abandoned the assessment process late last year.

In other words, called on their BS they walked off in a huff.

Hat tip to Bernhard at MoonOfAlabama for these links. Thanks B.

Its all about sheet mulching: http://www.permaculture-exchange.org/sheet.html (see the Permaculture Activist guidelines)

Robert, where abouts are you in Ohio? If your within a drive from Columbiana county I might be able to come out for a day and give you a hand setting up…

^^^^^^^
This error is also termed positivism, basing fundamental thinking in individual observations rather than social communication.

Valid scientific theories are more than the sum of the observations by individual scientists. Scientific theories are emergent levels from the observations of individuals, and individual brains. Theories are socially constructed. Sociality is the central human principle.

^^^^^

I will be discussing it more or less along these lines in my book, From Capitalist Discipline to Ecological Discipline: the scientific model that informs capitalist discipline is that of mechanics, whereas the model that informs ecological discipline will be that of thermodynamics…

^^^^^
You’ve probably read _The Dialectical Biologist_. The theses of that book might suggest the scientific model for the ecological discipline.

Nostalgia: In ’72 , I wrote a paper that used the historical thingy that the thermodynamic gas laws (Charles or Boyle) were reducible to mechanics, with the introduction of the particulate ( atomist) assumptions. However, sociology-anthropology cannot be reduced to individual psychology or biology. Human society is an emergent level from biology. Biology is an emergent level from physics-chemistry. Emergent level means the new level is a whole that is more than the sum of its parts.

Organisms are wholes that are more than the sum of their physical-chemical parts.

Humans are beings-wholes that are more than the sum of the biological parts of their organism. They are essentially social beings.