Typical of politics, if you want the cream, you have to eat the e. coli
too. In this case it is the Water Bill before Congress.

The following is an extract from Eat Here by Brian Halweil.


pg.25

Probably very few people have had an opportunity to hear both pitches
(for the widening of the locks on the Mississippi and the La Plata in
South America) and compare them. But anyone who has may find something
amiss with the argument that U.S. farmers will become more competitive
with their Brazilian counterparts, at the same time that Brazilian
farmers will, for the same reasons, become more competitive with their
U.S. counterparts. A more likely outcome is that farmers of these two
nations will be pitted against each other in a costly race to maximize
production, resulting in short-cut practices that essentially stripmine
their soil and throw long-term investments in the land to the wind.
Farmers in Iowa will have stronger incentives to plow up land along
stream banks, triggering faster erosion of topsoil. Their brethren in
Brazil will find themselves needing to cut deeper into the savanna, also
accelerating erosion.
That will increase the flow of soybeans, all right‹both north_and south.
But it will also further depress prices, so that even as the farmers
ship more, they will get less income per ton. And in any case,
increasing volume can't help the farmers survive in the_long run,
because sooner or later they will be swallowed by larger, corporate,
farms that can make up for the smaller per-ton margins by producing even
larger volumes.
So how can the supporters of these river projects, who profess to be
acting in the farmer's best interests, not notice the illogic of this
form of competition? One explanation is that from the advocates' (as
opposed to the farmers') standpoint, this competition isn't illogical at
all‹because the lobbyists aren't really representing_farmers. They're
working for the commodity processing, ship-_ping, and trading firms who
want the price of soybeans to fall, because these are the firms that buy
the crops from the farmers. In fact, it is the same three agribusiness
conglomerates‹Archer_Daniels Midland, Cargill, and Bunge‹that are the
top soybean processors and traders along both rivers.
Welcome to the global economy. The more brutally the U.S. and Brazilian
farmers can batter each other's prices (and standards of living) down,
the greater is the margin of profit for these three giants. Meanwhile,
another handful of companies controls the markets for genetically
modified seeds, fertilizers, and herbicides used by the farmers‹charging
oligopolistically high prices both_north and south of the equator. In
assessing what this proposed_digging-up and reconfiguring of two of the
world's great river basins really means, keep in mind that these
projects will not be the activities of private businesses operating
inside their own private property. These are proposed public works, to
be undertaken at huge public expense. The motive is neither the plight
of the family farmer nor any moral obligation to feed the world, but the
opportunity to exploit poorly informed public sentiments about "farmers'
plights" or "hungry masses" as a means of usurping public policies to
benefit private interests. What gets thoroughly Big Muddied, in this
usurping process, is that in addition to subjecting_farmers to a
gladiator-like attrition, these projects will likely trig-_ger a cascade
of damaging economic, social, and ecological impacts within the very
river basins being so expensively remodeled.
What's likely to happen if the lock and dam system along the Mississippi
is expanded as proposed? The most obvious effect will be increased barge
traffic, which will accelerate a less obvious cascade of events that has
been under way for some time, accord ing to Mike Davis of the Minnesota
Department of Natural Resources. Much of the Mississippi River ecosystem
involves aquatic rooted plants, like bullrush, arrowhead, and wild
celery. Increased barge traffic will kick up more sediment, blocking
sunlight and reducing the depth to which plants can survive. Already,
since the 1970s, the number of aquatic plant species found in some
stretches of the river has been cut from 23 to about half that, with
just a handful thriving under the cloudier conditions. "Areas of the
river have reached an ecological turning point," warns Davis. "This
decline in plant diversity has triggered a drop in the invertebrate
communities that live on these plants, as well as a drop in the fish,
mollusk, and bird communities that depend on the diversity of insects
and plants." A 2002 report from the Fish and Wildlife Service said that
the Corps of Engineers project would threaten the 300 species of
migratory birds and 127 species offish in the Mississippi river, and
could ultimately push some into extinction. "The least tern, the pallid
sturgeon, and other species that evolved with the ebbs and flows,
sandbars and depths, of the river are progressively eliminated or
forced away as the diversity» of the river's natural habitats is removed
to maximize the barge habitat," says Davis.

The outlook for the Hidrovia project is similar. Mark Robbins, an
ornithologist at the Natural History Museum at the Uni versity of
Kansas, calls it "a key step in creating a Florida Everglades-like
scenario of destruction in the Pantanal, and an American Great Plains
like scenario in the Cerrado in southern Brazil." The Paraguay-Parana
feeds the Pantanal wetlands, one of the most diverse habitats on the
planet, with its populations of woodstorks, snailkites, limpkins,
jabirus, and more than 650 other species of birds, as well as more than
400 species of fish and hundreds of other less studied plants, mussels,
and marsh land organisms. As the river is dredged and the banks are
built up to funnel the surrounding wetlands water into the navigation
path, bird nesting habitat and fish spawning grounds will be eliminated,
depriving the indigenous societies that depend_on these resources.
Increased barge traffic will suppress river species here just as it will
on the Mississippi. Meanwhile, herbicide-intensive soybean monocultures
on farms so enormous that they dwarf even the biggest operations in the
U.S. Midwest are rapidly replacing diverse grasslands in the frag-_ile
Cerrado. The heavy plowing and periodic absence of ground cover
associated with such farming erodes 100 million tonnes of soil per year.
Robbins notes that "compared to the Mississippi, this southern river
system and surrounding grassland is several orders of magnitude more
diverse and has suffered considerably less, so there is much more at
stake."

--
FB - FFF

Billy
http://angryarab.blogspot.com/

In article ,
Billy wrote:


The following is an extract from Eat Here by Brian Halweil.


pg.25

Probably very few people have had an opportunity to hear both pitches
(for the widening of the locks on the Mississippi and the La Plata in
South America) and compare them. But anyone who has may find something
amiss with the argument that U.S. farmers will become more competitive
with their Brazilian counterparts, at the same time that Brazilian
farmers will, for the same reasons, become more competitive with their
U.S. counterparts.
(snip)
So how can the supporters of these river projects, who profess to be
acting in the farmer's best interests, not notice the illogic of this
form of competition? One explanation is that from the advocates' (as
opposed to the farmers') standpoint, this competition isn't illogical at
all‹because the lobbyists aren't really representing_farmers. They're
working for the commodity processing, ship-_ping, and trading firms who
want the price of soybeans to fall, because these are the firms that buy
the crops from the farmers. In fact, it is the same three agribusiness
conglomerates‹Archer_Daniels Midland, Cargill, and Bunge‹that are the
top soybean processors and traders along both rivers.
(whack)
Welcome to the global economy. The more brutally the U.S. and Brazilian
farmers can batter each other's prices (and standards of living) down,
the greater is the margin of profit for these three giants. Meanwhile,
another handful of companies controls the markets for genetically
modified seeds, fertilizers, and herbicides used by the farmers‹charging
oligopolistically high prices both_north and south of the equator. In
assessing what this proposed_digging-up and reconfiguring of two of the
world's great river basins really means, keep in mind that these
projects will not be the activities of private businesses operating
inside their own private property. These are proposed public works, to
be undertaken at huge public expense..
--
FB - FFF

Billy

Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights.
Get up, stand up, Don't give up the fight.
- Bob Marley