Bt Byproduct Found In Human Blood

From India Today:

Fresh doubts have arisen about the safety of genetically modified crops, with a new study reporting presence of Bt toxin, used widely in GM crops, in human blood for the first time.
Genetically modified crops include genes extracted from bacteria to make them resistant to pest attacks.
These genes make crops toxic to pests but are claimed to pose no danger to the environment and human health. Genetically modified brinjal, whose commercial release was stopped a year ago, has a toxin derived from a soil bacterium called Bacillus thuringiensis ( Bt).
Till now, scientists and multinational corporations promoting GM crops have maintained that Bt toxin poses no danger to human health as the protein breaks down in the human gut. But the presence of this toxin in human blood shows that this does not happen.
Scientists from the University of Sherbrooke, Canada, have detected the insecticidal protein, Cry1Ab, circulating in the blood of pregnant as well as non-pregnant women.
They have also detected the toxin in fetal blood, implying it could pass on to the next generation. The research paper has been peer-reviewed and accepted for publication in the journal Reproductive Toxicology. The study covered 30 pregnant women and 39 women who had come for tubectomy at the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Sherbrooke (CHUS) in Quebec.
None of them had worked or lived with a spouse working in contact with pesticides.
They were all consuming typical Canadian diet that included GM foods such as soybeans, corn and potatoes. Blood samples were taken before delivery for pregnant women and at tubal ligation for non-pregnant women. Umbilical cord blood sampling was done after birth.

I'm not sure what to make of this.  I think it falls in with the concerns of Don Huber at Purdue, about potential sterility in livestock fed Roundup GM corn.  I think there probably ought to be a number of research projects funded to look into it, but I don't know that any results will satisfy the seriously anti-GM anti-Monsanto folks.  I wouldn't think Bt itself would be very serious, since organic gardeners use it as an insecticide, but this is well outside of my area of expertise (breaking things).

Subsidies and Nutrition

The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine looks at the farm bill and subsidies (also from Ritholtz):

The Farm Bill, a massive piece of federal legislation making its way through Congress, governs what children are fed in schools and what food assistance programs can distribute to recipients. The bill provides billions of dollars in subsidies, much of which goes to huge agribusinesses producing feed crops, such as corn and soy, which are then fed to animals. By funding these crops, the government supports the production of meat and dairy products—the same products that contribute to our growing rates of obesity and chronic disease. Fruit and vegetable farmers, on the other hand, receive less than 1 percent of government subsidies.
The government also purchases surplus foods like cheese, milk, pork, and beef for distribution to food assistance programs—including school lunches. The government is not required to purchase nutritious foods.

That threw me for a minute.  I couldn't figure out what they meant about meat subsidies, until I realized they were talking about corn and soybeans as feed grains.  I guess that makes sense. 

Corn Planting Slow, Especially In Ohio

Des Moines Register:

The U.S. Department of Agriculture said that despite gains last week, corn planting still lags behind last year and five-year averages because of cold, wet weather in the Corn Belt east of the Mississippi River, and in Minnesota and the Dakotas, as well as flooding in the Lower Mississippi River valley.
The corn market reflected nervousness about corn supplies, driving up the price for the July contract 16 cents per bushel to $6.98 Monday on the Chicago Board of Trade.
The national crop is now 63 percent planted, the USDA said, compared to 87 percent planted last year and 75 percent planted over a five-year average.
Farmers generally want their corn crop planted by mid-May to avoid yield loss during later pollination during August heat, or vulnerability to early frost in September.
Iowa’s crop is 92 percent planted as of Sunday, the USDA said. That compares to 96 percent last year and 84 percent in a five-year average between 2006 and last year.
But while Iowa benefited from warm weather last week and the widespread use of larger planters, other states haven’t fared as well. Just 69 percent of Illinois’ crop is planted compared with 96 percent last year; only 29 percent of Indiana’s crop is in and just 7 percent of Ohio’s corn is planted.

That is right, things are going extremely poorly here.  We are around 20% planted, but it went into marginal ground, and the forecast doesn't look very good either. 

Western Kansas Drought Takes Toll

From Morning Edition:

ERIC DURBIN: There are parts of the Midwest that have received more rain in a single day than huge tracts of Kansas have seen since last fall. That's when farmers here planted hard red winter wheat. That's the wheat primarily used for making bread. The drought covers significant portions of Kansas, Texas and Oklahoma.

The Wheat Quality Council's annual wheat tour recently cataloged the crop and estimated a harvest almost 30 percent less than last year.

Farmer Jason Ochs walks through a field of yellowish-green wheat stalks almost two-feet tall. While in the field, Ochs gets word of another Hamilton County farmer whose fields were appraised at only three bushels per acre, 27 bushels below the county average.

Mr. JASON OCHS (Farmer): They won't even take that to harvest at that point in time. They'll tear it up and start conserving moisture for the next crop, as far as that goes. I've seen - or heard of several thousand acres where that's happened.

DURBAN: Dean Stoskopf is a former Kansas Wheat Commissioner. He says weather patterns over the next several weeks could potentially swing harvesting totals here by as much as 50 million bushels either way. But even if it rains now, farmers will still see low yields, and Stoskopf says that will show up in the price of bread, although not as much as you might expect.

Mr. DEAN STOSKOPF (Former Kansas Wheat Commissioner): The fluctuation from actually the amount of wheat that goes into a loaf of bread doesn't change a whole lot. We could have a really reduced crop, and from the wheat side of that, maybe a couple cents a loaf of - for bread.

3 bushel per acre.  That would be two semi loads from a full (640 acre) section.  That is very hard to imagine.

Naked Capitalism Link of the Day

Today is an excellent set of links.  I'm going to highlight two, because they are both significant agriculturally, but there are excellent links to an awesome sky survey, an investigation of corruption in Southern Illinois courts, concern that Fukushima is as bad as, or worse than Chernobyl, a report on Bahrain's Sunni government demolishing Shiite mosques, an interesting history of the removal of the gold indexation clause in debt contracts in the Great Depression, and several other interesting stories.

The first link I'll highlight is Unnatural Selection: Wily Weeds outwit herbicides, at New Scientist:

The weedkillers atrazine and simazine were introduced in 1958. Ten years later, a plant nursery in the US that had been regularly using the pesticides reported that they were no longer effective against a plant called common groundsel – the first confirmed case of herbicide resistance.

Half a century on, the number of known strains of resistant weeds stands at 357 and counting. "Herbicide resistance is a fantastic example of evolution in response to human-induced selection pressure," says Stephen Powles of the University of Western Australia in Perth, who studies the problem.

Because of its huge commercial importance, a lot of money is spent studying the problem and in many cases we know exactly how plants are evolving resistance. The mechanisms range from changes in leaf shape or waxiness to reduce herbicide uptake, to mutations that prevent herbicides binding to the proteins they target.

Strategies such as alternating the type of herbicide used can slow the evolution of resistance, but it is not foolproof. Many weeds have developed resistance to more than one herbicide. In some cases, this is due to plants evolving resistance mechanisms that are effective against more than one pesticide. For instance, many break down pesticides using new variants or higher levels of enzymes of a kind called P450s. These enzymes often protect against a range of different herbicides. In the 1980s, two weeds were found to be resistant to weedkillers that had never been used in the field. In other words, says Powles, weeds can evolve resistance to herbicides that have not even been developed yet.

The second story is Farm Antibiotics: 'Pig Staph' in a Daycare Worker, at Wired:

It’s been just about seven years since an alert epidemiologist in the Dutch town of Nijmegen identified an aberrant strain of MRSA, drug-resistant staph, in a toddler who was going in for surgery to fix a hole in her heart. The strain was odd because it didn’t behave normally on the standard identifying tests, and because it had an unusual resistance factor — to tetracycline, a drug that it should not have been resistant to, because the Netherlands had such low rates of MRSA that tetracycline wasn’t being used against the bacterium there.

Pursuing the source of the strain, researchers at Radboud University found it in the toddler’s parents and sister, and in the family’s friends. Not knowing where else to look, they asked what the parents and their friends did for a living; discovered they were all pig farmers; and went to their farms, and checked the pigs, and found it being carried by them, too. Suddenly, that strange resistance pattern made sense: The Netherlands uses more antibiotics in pig agriculture than any other country in the European Union, and the drug that it uses the most is tetracycline. Clearly, the aberrant strain — known as MRSA ST398 for its performance on a particular identifying test — at some point had wandered into pigs, become resistant to the drugs being given to the pigs, and then crossed back to humans, carrying that new resistance factor as it went.

From that first discovery unrolled the microbiological equivalent of a car-chase scene, complete with unpredictable turns, skids around corners, and unexpected dead ends. Researchers have identified ST398 in animals, people and retail meat in most of the EU; in pigs, farmers and hospital patients in Canada, and in pigs and a few farm workers, and most recently supermarket meat, in the United States. (You’ll find a long archive of posts on ST398, and more here.)

Both of these stories raise significant concerns about how we raise our foods.  They each also indicate that things may become more challenging in the near future, as we deal with glyphosate resistance and antibiotic-resistant bacteria.  Without even throwing in peak oil, I believe there will be no shortage of challenges in the future.

Chinese Food Safety and the Political Class

James Fallows notes that China may face some real muckraking reform, or maybe not:

- From China Geeks, which translates material from the Chinese press and blogosphere, an English version of a very important story from Southern Weekend,  南方周末, as fearless a reform publication as you will find in China, about a true "let them eat cake" saga underway there now.

At a time when tainted-food scandals are erupting all over the country, the story describes a special farm and food-supply system for government bigshots, to spare them exposure to the heavy-metal laden, adulterated, and otherwise contaminated food the rest of the population ingests. People often compare early 21st century China to early 20th century America, when industrial abuses gave way to the Muckraking and Progressive era. We'll see whether reformers can get similar traction there. If you want an idea of what makes ordinary people in China angry, check out this story.

Wow, that has tremendous potential to bring about massive reform, or it may bring a government crackdown on such media outlets.  Heavy-metal laden, adulterated and otherwise contaminated food.  That is a disturbing situation in a country with 16% or so of the world's population.

Naked Capitalism Link of the Day

Today's link: Food inflation, land grabs spur Latin America to restrict foreign ownership, at the Christian Science Monitor:

One of the first things passengers see when disembarking at Cuiaba airport in central Brazil is a real estate advertisement promoting arable land to foreigners.
South America has some of the most productive land on the planet, and buyers have long been drawn to pastureland for cattle; fields for grains, soybeans, and sugar cane; and forests where they can plant eucalyptus for timber and paper. Farms can reach the size of small nations.
Such advertisements may soon be preaching to an empty audience, however, as this and other South American nations that traditionally welcomed foreign investors are now changing land laws to restrict foreign ownership as arable areas worldwide become more sought after, a fact underlined by recent food crises. For lawmakers in Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay, a nation where an estimated 25 percent of all land (an area the size of Denmark) already sits in foreign hands, it isn't a moment too soon to roll back the welcome mat.
These three nations produce much of the world's beef and grains and have been attractive to investors not just because land is available, but also because buying it was relatively straightforward.
Newly concerned over land grabs and eager to exercise more control over its food security, Argentinean Pres­ident Cristina Fernández de Kirch­ner said April 27 she would send a bill to Congress restricting how much land foreigners can buy or own. Uruguay fears that nations such as China and Saudi Arabia want to buy prime real estate and has promised to clamp down. Brazil, the world's biggest producer or exporter of beef, coffee, sugar cane, orange juice, and tobacco, last year blocked foreign companies based in Brazil from purchasing additional local real estate.

There was a big push ten years ago for U.S. farmers to go down and buy land in Brazil.  It economically made sense, but I couldn't see moving down there permanently to farm in a foreign land.  Guys who got involved were making a killing, but there was a lot of risk involved also.  I'm not surprised they are clamping down, and would anticipate laws in some Corn Belt states limiting corporate ownership.  Things are going to be very interesting in the near future.

There is also an interesting story about Ireland's alleged plans to restructure its debts to the EU and the IMF within 3 years.

Ohio Amish Feel Impact of Meth

A scourge of rural Ohio has begun impacting the Wayne and Holmes County Amish community:

More than 150 Amish men and women filled a farm building this spring to learn about the chemical curse that is surrounding them. Methamphetamine, the drug peddled by outlaw bikers and street-corner dealers for decades, is on the rise in the land of the horse and buggy -- though no one caught with the drug in the area has been Amish.
The rural hills of Holmes and Wayne counties, about 90 minutes south of Cleveland, is a place where violent crime and major drug trafficking have seldom been a problem. Many associate the region with Ohio's largest Amish population, quilt shops and large family farms.
But beneath the idyllic setting is an underbelly of criminal cookers who have begun brewing the gritty, illicit stimulant into a growing drug of choice in a region that might be one of the last in the state to face the drug's scourge.

This is a more serious crime wave than Amish milk smugglers.  Luckily, none of the people caught with meth have been Amish, but the increased drug activity in the area has driven the Amish to meeting with police to understand the problem:

"The devil doesn't care where we live, whether in the city or in the country," said Ed Miller, an Amish general contractor from Apple Creek. "He seeks out the weakest. . . . There's a big concern about [methamphetamine.] We don't want that."
David Smith heads the Medway Drug Enforcement Agency, an anti-drug group that works mostly in Wayne, Holmes and Medina counties. In 2007, the agency dismantled one lab in the region. Last year, it cleaned up 17.

Meth producers have found rural areas to be good places to make the drug.  Meth, along with prescription drug abuse, is slowly growing to become nearly as damaging to rural communities as crack and heroin have been to inner cities.  Last month, the Summit County Sheriff warned highway cleanup volunteers to be careful about handling bottles used in backroad meth production.  This is an epidemic, which was highlighted in the book, Methland, which described the impact of methamphetamine around the community of Oelwein, Iowa.  It is sad how the drug destroys the lives of people so thoroughly.

Naked Capitalism Link of the Day

Today's link: Climate Shifts 'hit global wheat yields,' at the BBC.  This is a recap of the posts here and here.  From the BBC story:

The team carried out a large statistical analysis that tried to isolate the effects of temperature and precipitation on crops, independent of all other factors such as changes in technology and land management.

Wheat and corn are the staple crops that are most affected by changes in temperature

"We can see how much these variables affect crops... for example, for a crop like wheat, a degree (Celsius) of warming on a global average translates to about a 5% loss in production."
Professor Lobell said the study only referred to past relationships, as extrapolating the findings to predict future trends would require a number of assumptions to be made.
"In particular, you have to assume how non-linear the response will be and how different the crops of tomorrow will be from the crops of today," he said.

Population growth and energy consumption is straining agricultural resources, adding increasing global temperatures to the mix could very easily lead to catastrophe.

Other links of note include a story on the right-wing campaign to destroy the public schools, and a solar device to sterilize medical equipment.  A daily visit to Yves Smith's naked capitalism site is highly recommended.

Why the Slowdown in Agricultural Productivity?

From Greed, Green and Grains, via Mark Thoma:

Two words:

Climate Change  Global Warming.

Well, there may be more to it.  Like reduced public research and pathogens like wheat stem rust.

But new research by my colleagues David Lobell and Wolfram Schlenker, along with Justin Costa-Roberts shows that warming has hurt corn and wheat yields on all continents except North America:

Farms across the planet produced 3.8 percent less corn and 5.5 percent less wheat than they could have between 1980 and 2008 thanks to rising temperatures, a new analysis estimates. These wilting yields may have contributed to the current sky-high price of food, a team of U.S. researchers reports online May 5 in Science. Climate-induced losses could have driven up prices of corn by 6.4 percent and wheat by 18.9 percent since 1980.

The article was embargoed until 2pm today, but it's already circulating.

Why not North America, or why not yet in North America?  I think any climatological change in the Corn Belt could be disastrous. Don't fear, if you say nothing is happening, nothing is happening, right Republicans?

Are the Chinese Hoarding Commodities For Financing?

Yves Smith highlights  that Michael Pettis claims China is importing excess copper because (somehow) it allows cash-strapped businesses to access financing.  He also speculates that they might be doing the same thing with soybeans:

As much as it may sound barmy to stockpile commodities to obtain better terms on financing, Michael Pettis claims that’s one of the factors behind what looks to be unduly aggressive purchases of copper by the Chinese. An excerpt from his latest newsletter, courtesy Michael Shedlock:

China had been importing for many months far more copper than was needed for real use…. Imports continued even when London prices exceeded Shanghai prices by more than the equivalent of China’s value-added tax.

Instead of being shipped to end users, it seems that copper was being stockpiled in warehouses.　 Why?　 One possibility of course was pure speculation…

It turns out, that the copper purchases were not entirely, or even mainly, speculative.　 They were part of a financing scheme for companies that….were having trouble accessing bank credit.　

Credit-starved companies were importing copper because they could obtain trade finance or some other sort of foreign financing, and then used the physical copper (or warehouse receipts, I guess) as collateral for domestic borrowing.　 The financing was continually rolled over.　 Buying copper was just a way to borrow for companies that needed loans and were otherwise unable to get them.

As I mentioned two weeks ago, when I discussed this in February with a senior executive in a major commodities company, he responded by saying that he thought the same thing might also be happening in soya…

I don't understand this at all, but if they cut back purchases, we might get some really nasty price drops, especially if this wet weather continues and the market gets concerned about acres switching from corn to beans at the end of the month.

More Levee Coverage

NPR had a segment this morning in which the farmers complained that the removal of a 2 mile section of levee was too big and caused too much damage.  They wanted a smaller section removed downstream.  Unfortunately for the farmers I think they are wrong here.  The wider opening would lessen the extent of the damage in whatever spot the levee was opened, while the smaller opening further downstream would not have had the intended effect, and would have caused a lot wider hole to open up at that location.  Anyway, here are before and after satellite photos via Jeff:

Before

                                                             


After

Also, the story mentioned how the Army Corps holds floodage easements on the 130,000 acres of farmland, and another story indicated farmers will be eligible for crop insurance payments.  It is really just the erosion and sedimentation damage that they'll have to deal with, which is plenty in itself. 

Inflation in Food

Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas, via Mark Thoma:

Among the causes of the recent world food price surge are weather-related poor harvests of staple crops such as wheat and some coarse grains. Affected heavily by drought in Russia and excessive rains in Canada and Australia, world wheat production for the 2010–11 marketing period is on track for a decrease of 5 percent compared with the 2009–10 period. World production of coarse grains (corn, sorghum, barley, rye and oats) is on pace to fall 2.5 percent.[4] Export bans by some countries, increased stockpiling by others and higher input costs—especially for energy in the production of fertilizer—likely also contributed to diminished supplies of many agricultural commodities.[5]

A basic principle of economics is that decreased supply increases a good’s relative price—that is, its price in terms of the other enjoyable things one must sacrifice to acquire the good. The number of theater tickets or MP3 downloads or haircuts one must sacrifice in order to enjoy a steak dinner increase when the relative price of steak increases. So too, does the number of hours one must work—and forgo leisure—to obtain a given amount of steak.

This is true in a world where money is used to facilitate the exchange of goods and services and would be true in a world without money (and thus without monetary policy).

Over periods of a few years (and, of course, over longer horizons), central banks can exercise considerable control over the rate at which the prices of an economy’s goods and services rise or fall, in units of money. An important point, though, is that—with a few qualifications—monetary policy affects money prices for goods and services in general, not the terms at which goods and services exchange for one another.[6]

Monetary policy can slow the rate at which food prices (together with all other money prices) rise; it cannot make food—or any other particular good or service—more affordable in terms of other goods and services.

Also, it includes a chart with the food components of CPI, beer is one.

Crop Yields

Mark Thoma:

Why is food production slowing down? This is from Michael Roberts:

Is this because of changes at the intensive or extensive margins? That is, is the slowdown due to declining productivity on existing land, e.g. from bad luck with the weather for several years in a row, or a more permanent change like global warming? Or is it because world growth is bringing marginal, less productive land into production? Whatever the cause, Michael Roberts thinks it's likely a permanent rather than a temporary problem:

There are many reasons for high commodity prices. But recent data from FAO shows a pretty rapid slowdown in productivity growth. The price spike in 2008 occurred in a particularly bad year in which yields declined on a worldwide basis for three of the four largest food commodities. In 2009 all four of the majors saw yield declines, something that hasn't happened since 1974. 2010 couldn't have been much better and was probably worse, given how bad things were in the U.S, the world's largest producer and exporter (worldwide data for 2010 isn't available yet).

The yield slowdown comes at a particularly unfortunate time, with accelerating demand from emerging economies like China and subsidy-driven expansion of ethanol. Keep in mind: we need productivity growth to accelerate considerably to keep up with projected demand growth. FAO says we need 70 percent higher yields by 2050. (Although I'd like to do my own projections, and will one of these days...)

Blowing the Levee, ctd.

So far, it's working.  From Minnesota Public Radio  (h/t KB):

Source, National Weather Service

Hopefully, the damage to the farms isn't as bad as it could be.  Also, hopefully the secondary levees hold.

Levee Blown

NYT:

EAST PRAIRIE, Mo. — Ruben Bennett, his back bent and his fingers gnarled from a lifetime of labor, has lived all of his 88 years on an expanse of rich farmland here, just below where the Ohio River pours into the Mississippi. He survived his share of floods — including the record-setting one that swept away his boyhood home — but he has never run from one, until now.
For days he returned repeatedly, despite a mandatory evacuation, with the hope of riding out another major flood in his longtime home above his shuttered grocery store. But under threats from law enforcement officials, and the cajoling of his family, he finally agreed to retreat. As explosives tore open a protective levee Monday night, he waited for the news that his home has been destroyed.
“I can’t tell you how I feel, because there no feeling for that,” he said hours earlier, sitting in his daughter’s house — nearby, and safe from possible flooding — where he has been sleeping on the couch. “I hate it so bad.”
The Mississippi River, already at record levels here, keeps rising, fed by punishing rains. As the flood protection systems that safeguard countless communities groan under the pressure, federal officials executed a fiercely debated plan to destroy a part of the levee holding back the river in the area Mr. Bennett calls home for the greater good of the region.
With a flash of light and a massive rumbling that shook windows miles away, the Army Corps of Engineers set off explosives at 10 p.m. along the first of several sections of the earthen barrier, sending 550,000 cubic feet of water a second across the 130,000 acres of farmland known as the spillway. There were 90 homes in the spillway, but under the cover of darkness it was impossible to gauge the initial devastation. “This doesn’t end this historic flood,” said Maj. Gen. Michael J. Walsh, who commands the Mississippi Valley Division of the corps, explaining that the river may rise again in a few days. “This is not the end, this is just the beginning.”
Col. Vernie L. Reichling Jr., commander of the corps’ Memphis District, said the blast was successful, calling it “historic as well as tragic.”
The move was a desperate effort to lower the river, which had climbed to about 61 feet in nearby Cairo, Ill., to head off calamity up- and downriver. In Illinois, the pressure on the levee created a geyser, forcing the evacuation of Cairo. In Louisiana, there was concern about whether levees could survive a record flood.
And it raised a new risk in this part of Missouri, which had challenged the plan unsuccessfully in court, because any water filling the spillway would put pressure on an untested secondary levee that protects more populous communities.
Some of the 200 residents in the spillway have argued that the young shoots of corn and knee-high carpet of wheat offered evidence enough that the area was worth protecting. Their claims will be soon be forgotten as the attention shifts downriver. But for these people, some of whom watched the blast, the flooding represents the beginning of a long process they say will drastically change their lives.

That is just a brutal situation.  I remember reading about how the river bottom fields were covered in 3 feet of sand after the Mississippi River topped levees in the flood of 1993, and how it would take a couple of years for those fields to recover.  It would feel worse knowing those fields were intentionally flooded, but that is part of the Army Corps job in maintaining those levees, sometimes they just have to be removed.  When you have a record flood, those choices have to be made.  It will look like a pretty poor decision if those secondary levees fail, but I assume the Corps believes that is unlikely.

Blowing Up A Levee

NYT:

Chugging north along the Mississippi River, twin barges laden with more than 250 tons of explosive material were ordered to dock at a final staging area on Saturday in an apparent sign that the Army Corps of Engineers was making further preparations to breach a nearby levee, inundating roughly 130,000 acres of Missouri farmland to relieve pressure on the groaning levee system upstream.

Missouri officials sued unsuccessfully last week to try to block the corps from flooding the cropland, a federally mandated flood way that is home to about 200 people. On Saturday, the Eighth Federal Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the lower court’s decision, clearing the way for the corps to move forward if necessary.

If General Walsh orders the levee breached, the two barges will pump explosives into an 11,000-foot system of pipes buried below the levee. A detonation crew will then blast the levee, allowing water to tear through the gap at an estimated 550,000 cubic feet per second, which they expect to drastically lower water levels upstream. Over the following 24 hours, the crew would blast two more holes in the levee downstream, allowing the water to re-enter the river.

Flooding 130,000 acres of farmland, or losing a 3,000 person town.  That's a lose-lose situation.  So those levees are built with pipes underneath to facilitate demolition?  I didn't know that.

Naked Capitalism Link of the Day

Today's link: How Goldman Sachs Created the Food Crisis, at Foreign Policy.  The whole thing is fascinating.  There is also more on food production here.  To summarize, Goldman created a long-only commodity index fund, and after the CFTC allowed speculators to take unlimited positions in 1999, long-only funds have grown massively.  The new money flowing in from investors, pension funds, insurance companies and such are driving up food prices.  I really liked this history at the beginning of the article:

It took the brilliant minds of Goldman Sachs to realize the simple truth that nothing is more valuable than our daily bread. And where there's value, there's money to be made. In 1991, Goldman bankers, led by their prescient president Gary Cohn, came up with a new kind of investment product, a derivative that tracked 24 raw materials, from precious metals and energy to coffee, cocoa, cattle, corn, hogs, soy, and wheat. They weighted the investment value of each element, blended and commingled the parts into sums, then reduced what had been a complicated collection of real things into a mathematical formula that could be expressed as a single manifestation, to be known henceforth as the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index (GSCI).
For just under a decade, the GSCI remained a relatively static investment vehicle, as bankers remained more interested in risk and collateralized debt than in anything that could be literally sowed or reaped. Then, in 1999, the Commodities Futures Trading Commission deregulated futures markets. All of a sudden, bankers could take as large a position in grains as they liked, an opportunity that had, since the Great Depression, only been available to those who actually had something to do with the production of our food.
Change was coming to the great grain exchanges of Chicago, Minneapolis, and Kansas City -- which for 150 years had helped to moderate the peaks and valleys of global food prices. Farming may seem bucolic, but it is an inherently volatile industry, subject to the vicissitudes of weather, disease, and disaster. The grain futures trading system pioneered after the American Civil War by the founders of Archer Daniels Midland, General Mills, and Pillsbury helped to establish America as a financial juggernaut to rival and eventually surpass Europe. The grain markets also insulated American farmers and millers from the inherent risks of their profession. The basic idea was the "forward contract," an agreement between sellers and buyers of wheat for a reasonable bushel price -- even before that bushel had been grown. Not only did a grain "future" help to keep the price of a loaf of bread at the bakery -- or later, the supermarket -- stable, but the market allowed farmers to hedge against lean times, and to invest in their farms and businesses. The result: Over the course of the 20th century, the real price of wheat decreased (despite a hiccup or two, particularly during the 1970s inflationary spiral), spurring the development of American agribusiness. After World War II, the United States was routinely producing a grain surplus, which became an essential element of its Cold War political, economic, and humanitarian strategies -- not to mention the fact that American grain fed millions of hungry people across the world.
Futures markets traditionally included two kinds of players. On one side were the farmers, the millers, and the warehousemen, market players who have a real, physical stake in wheat. This group not only includes corn growers in Iowa or wheat farmers in Nebraska, but major multinational corporations like Pizza Hut, Kraft, Nestlé, Sara Lee, Tyson Foods, and McDonald's -- whose New York Stock Exchange shares rise and fall on their ability to bring food to peoples' car windows, doorsteps, and supermarket shelves at competitive prices. These market participants are called "bona fide" hedgers, because they actually need to buy and sell cereals.
On the other side is the speculator. The speculator neither produces nor consumes corn or soy or wheat, and wouldn't have a place to put the 20 tons of cereal he might buy at any given moment if ever it were delivered. Speculators make money through traditional market behavior, the arbitrage of buying low and selling high. And the physical stakeholders in grain futures have as a general rule welcomed traditional speculators to their market, for their endless stream of buy and sell orders gives the market its liquidity and provides bona fide hedgers a way to manage risk by allowing them to sell and buy just as they pleased.

I've cursed the speculators a number of times, but they are important to the liquidity of the markets.  Unfortunately, the limitations on the size of their positions shouldn't have been removed.  There is a special place in hell for Phil Gramm.

Update: The Food issue has a lot of interesting stuff.

Naked Capitalism Link of the Day

Two today, both ag related: First, Pigs have 'evolved to love mud', at BBC:

That analysis has led Dr Bracke to propose that mud wallowing, like rolling, could play a role in reproduction in pigs.
But more fundamentally, Dr Bracke suggests the behaviour could have evolved in pigs' most ancient relatives.
"We all evolved from fish, so it could be that this motivation to be in water could be something that was preserved in animals that are able to do so."
For many animals, this would be too dangerous, because watering holes are ideal places for predators to ambush their prey.
"But pigs, like many carnivores, are relatively large animals with enlarged canine teeth, so they would be better able to fend off an attack."
So rather than pigs needing to cool down in mud because they do not have [functional] sweat glands, Dr Bracke thinks that they "did not evolve functional sweat glands like other ungulates because they liked wallowing so much".

Second, Why Is Damning New Evidence About Monsanto's Most Widely Used Herbicide Being Silenced, at Alternet.  If Don Huber at Purdue is correct about Roundup, we've got a serious problem on our hands:

But Huber says this is not true. First of all, he points out, evidence began to emerge in the 1980s that "what glyphosate does is, essentially, give a plant AIDS." Just like AIDS, which cripples a human's immune system, glyphosate makes plants unable to mount a defense against pathogens in the soil. Without its defense mechanisms functioning, the plants succumb to pathogens in the soil and die. Furthermore, glyphosate has an impact on microorganisms in the soil, helping some and hurting others. This is potentially problematic for farmers, as the last thing one would want is a buildup of pathogens in the soil where they grow crops.
The fate of glyphosate in the environment is also not as benign as once thought. It's true that glyphosate either binds to soil or is broken down quickly by microbes. Glyphosate binds to any positively charged ion in the soil, with the consequence of making many nutrients (such as iron and manganese) less available to plants. Also, glyphosate stays in the soil bound to particles for a long time and can be released later by normal agricultural practices like phosphorus fertilization. "It's not uncommon to find one to three pounds of glyphosate per acre in agricultural soils in the Midwest," says Huber, noting that this represents one to three times the typical amount of glyphosate applied to a field in a year.
Huber says these facts about glyphosate are very well known scientifically but rarely cited. When asked why, he replied that it would be harder for a company to get glyphosate approved for widespread use if it were known that the product could increase the severity of diseases on normal crop plants as well as the weeds it was intended to kill. Here in the U.S., many academic journals are not even interested in publishing studies that suggest this about glyphosate; a large number of the studies Huber cites were published in the European Journal of Agronomy.
If Huber's claims are true, then it follows that there must be problems with disease in crops where glyphosate is used. Huber's second letter verifies this, saying, "we are experiencing a large number of problems in production agriculture in the U.S. that appear to be intensified and sometimes directly related to genetically engineered (GMO) crops, and/or the products they were engineered to tolerate -- especially those related to glyphosate (the active chemical in Roundup® herbicide and generic versions of this herbicide)."
He continues, saying, "We have witnessed a deterioration in the plant health of corn, soybean, wheat and other crops recently with unexplained epidemics of sudden death syndrome of soybean (SDS), Goss' wilt of corn, and take-all of small grain crops the last two years. At the same time, there has been an increasing frequency of previously unexplained animal (cattle, pig, horse, poultry) infertility and [miscarriages]. These situations are threatening the economic viability of both crop and animal producers."
Some of the crops Huber named, corn and soy, are genetically engineered to survive being sprayed with glyphosate. Others, like wheat and barley, are not. In those cases, a farmer would apply glyphosate to kill weeds about a week before planting his or her crop, but would not spray the crop itself. In the case of corn, as Huber points out, most corn varieties in the U.S. are bred using conventional breeding techniques to resist the disease Goss' wilt. However, recent preliminary research showed that when GE corn is sprayed with glyphosate, the corn becomes susceptible to Goss' wilt. Huber says in his letter that "This disease was commonly observed in many Midwestern U.S. fields planted to [Roundup Ready] corn in 2009 and 2010, while adjacent non-GMO corn had very light to no infections." In 2010, Goss' wilt was a "major contributor" to an estimated one billion bushels of corn lost in the U.S. "in spite of generally good harvest conditions," says Huber.
The subject of Huber's initial letter is a newly identified organism that appears to be the cause of infertility and miscarriages in animals. Scientists have a process to verify whether an organism is the cause of a disease: they isolate the organism, culture it, and reintroduce it to the animal to verify that it reproduces the symptoms of the disease, and then re-isolate the organism from the animal's tissue. This has already been completed for the organism in question. The organism appears in high concentrations in Roundup Ready crops. However, more research is needed to understand what this organism is and what its relationship is to glyphosate and/or Roundup Ready crops.

Naked Capitalism Link of the Day

Today's link: Boom and bust signals ecosystem collapse, at BBC:

The Peter Lake food web contained four key components. Insects such as fleas ate tiny water-borne plants, small fish such as golden shiners ate the fleas, and much bigger largemouth bass ate the little fish.

Beginning in 2008, the researchers began to add more bass, and more than a thousand hatched the following year.

Sensing the threat from these predators, the golden shiners began to spend more time in the shallows or sheltering under floating logs.
Larger fleas moved in, eating the floating plants (phytoplankton).
But the changes were anything but smooth, with wildly varying numbers of fleas and phytoplankton seen at different times.
Eventually, by late 2010, the ecosystem appeared to have finalised its transition from one stable state to another.
This second state, dominated by fleas and largemouth bass, is similar to the situation that had existed for years in neighbouring Lake Paul.
This lake showed no major changes during the three years, indicating that the changes seen in Peter really were caused by the addition of bass.

I would guess that most people in western Ohio understand that large population increases of blue-green algae in Grand Lake St. Mary's signals an ecosystem collapse.  Some just don't want to believe why that is occurring.