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How the UN’s FAO tacitly supports environmentally and socially ruinous commodity agriculture

This post originally appeared on Bitter Greens Journal.

In business terms, a commodity is a useful item, produced in bulk, with no characteristics that distinguish it from others of its kind. What brand of DVD player do you own? Few people know. DVD players have become a commodity; they're all pretty much the same.

In commodity markets, prices tend to drop over time. Personal computers, for example, have steadily fallen in price over the past 15 years. Remember when "IBM or Macintosh?" meant something? Now it's "PC or Mac," and PC controls upwards of 90 percent of the market. In commodities markets, the producer that can churn out the most product at the cheapest price wins. Dell clawed its way to the top of the PC market by streamlining production and squeezing its suppliers for price breaks as it gained heft. Producing a great, innovative product had nothing to do with it.

It's counterintuitive to me that we would surrender something as sensual and poetic as food production to the brutal economics of commodity markets. Food a commodity? Nonsense!

Well, it is. Last year, the UN's Food and Agricultural Organization released a report called "The State of Agricultural Commodity Markets." It provides an interesting look at what happens when food is treated as a commodity, and what role international aid organizations play in propping up the system.

The imperative to fight climate change cannot trump all other concerns

Unlike, apparently, 150 other environmentalists, I don't know enough about the proposed Cape Cod wind farm to venture an opinion on it.

Bill McKibben says "when [other environmental] efforts come into conflict with the imperative need to act urgently on global warming, they have to take second place." It's a common sentiment these days, but I'll be honest that it makes me a bit nervous.

My inclination, of course, is to support wind farms. But they are industrial development, and as such deserve reasonable regulation, smart siting decisions, and community involvement.

I like to think I "get" global warming, but I don't necessarily accept that it's the One and True Problem, the overwhelming existential threat before which all other considerations must go overboard -- any more than I believe the same of terrorism.

The clean coal and nuclear power lobbies would love to use global warming as a trump card. GE would be all over it. So would the ANWR-hungry Republican Congress.

But even in light of global warming, we still owe ourselves honest debate about other issues. Biodiversity matters. Wilderness matters. Human culture, democracy and rule of law matter. The economy matters. If you go far enough down the matters scale, eventually you find the pastoral ocean views of American aristocracy on Nantucket, and hell, even they matter a little bit.

Giving any issue the status of get-out-of-jail-free card is an invitation to abuse. Not abuse by Bill McKibben -- a veritable secular saint -- but by hangers-on. Everybody with a project to fund, political favor to call in, tax break to push, or axe to grind.

Of course, this discussion is a bit moot in light of the fact that global warming receives nothing near the attention it deserves in most contexts. I just don't want to end up saying, "You're with us or you're with the global warmists," to batter down all local or countervailing concerns. That kind of Manicheanism is for the other side.

Dogs are leftover from a time when we needed them, and now they suffer

Dogs have been in the news lately -- poisonings from tainted dog food and less than respectful treatment by a baggage handler. We have a lot of shared history with dogs. Dogs were once extremely valuable survival tools, used for the tracking of game, the herding of other domesticated animals, and most of all for the detection of dangerous predators, usually upright walking ones. That last use is still the most common. Modern burglar alarms have yet to emulate a dog's keen sense of hearing and smell.

You can just look at a dog to see how we have altered their genes. But, how have they altered ours? The alterations have to be there, given so much intimate contact over so much time. I am going to hypothesize (as I have done way too many times before) that the good feelings many of us get from dogs are the result of selective pressure, implying once again that dog lovers may have had a slight reproductive advantage over a long period of time. What else could explain the intense attachment some people develop for their pet dogs? Similarly, both of my daughters developed strong attachments to soft fuzzy objects as small children (a blanket named DeeDee, still providing great pleasure, and a sheepskin named Woooly).

Readers talk back about hookers, condoms, and biofuels

  Re: OK, We’ll Just Drill Over Here Instead Dear Editor: I thought your statement that Cheney and the energy task force treat ecosystems like a “two-bit hooker” was inappropriate, […]

Pope

Carl Pope explains why the U.S. is not yet Syria. I think he means it to be optimistic.

Landscaping for water-runoff management

Not quite two months ago, my wife and I became homeowners. We love it. But in addition to the pride of ownership, there are also the worries: Can we really afford this house? Should we get earthquake insurance? Why does a small lake appear in the backyard when it rains?

That last one has been on our minds a lot lately. After 26 consecutive days of rain (and counting) here in Seattle, there's a frighteningly large pool of water that has swamped the roses and turned the lawn into something resembling the Everglades. My dad jokingly suggested that we stock it with trout. But I have a better idea: I'm going to landscape my way out of the problem.

Hypocrisy again

Over on Treehugger, Lloyd Alter claims to have enjoyed this Wall Street Journal piece by Dan Akst (yes, yes, subscription only). I can't say I did.

Since you can't read it, I'll summarize: People who build "green" houses that are huge and isolated are hypocrites.

It's a bit mystifying to me why this genre of writing is so prevalent. I suppose it's fun to point out that a preachy celebrity drives a Hummer, or that the head of an environmental group flies all over the country to give talks, or that some recycling suburban mom commutes 50 miles to work. For pundits, charges of hypocrisy are nigh irresistible, since they require no thought, research, or analysis. "Look, person says A and does not-A! Gotcha!" It's easy.

But is hypocrisy really that important? To the point that seemingly the bulk of writing on environmentalism begins and ends there?

I think not.

Michael Fumento gets dropped.

Another rightwing pundit has been dropped by a media outlet after it was revealed that he was taking payments from private interests in exchange for columns.

Who was the corporate paymaster this time? Monsanto.

Scripps Howard News Service (SHNS) announced Friday that it severed its relationship with Michael Fumento -- a senior fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute -- for taking payments in 1999 from agribusiness giant Monsanto. The payola was revealed by BusinessWeek Online, which also broke the story that columnist Doug Bandow had accepted bribes from Jack Abramoff. Copley News Service subsequently dropped Bandow.

Incidentally, if any wealthy interests out there are interested in a column about, say, the evils of suburbia, drop me an email and I'll send you my rates.

Eco-media Gawker-ing

As most any enviro-news junkie with a modem knows, Tidepool has been a great online resource for the better part of the past decade. Tidepool was aggregating the daily eco-news out of the Northwest before the term "aggregator" was even a gleam in the eye of the internets.

With every day's thematic compilation of news and views from California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia and Alaska, Tidepool constructs the Northwest's identity as the unified region of Cascadia.

Tidepool split from founding group Ecotrust a couple years ago, and the uptick in requests for donations had me a little worried that the service might disappear. So here's hoping Tidepool's made a soft landing into a great new situation, now that the project's been taken over by Northwest Environment Watch:

This is what a Honda sounds like …

Normally, with the exception of those for hybrids, I can't stand car commercials. But then there is this.

As you will learn from the length of the commercial, as well as the fact the car is on the "wrong" side of the road, it is for UK audiences. Sigh ... Europeans do so many things so much better.

I'd like to see a counter ad from Toyota with "this is what a Prius sounds like ..." followed by silence.

(Via PSFK)