Re: Food, Food, Food

["schulte-baeuminghaus" <cresscourt@xxxxxxxxx>]

Geoffrey,

I can't possibly compete with your brilliant account of dining in
Britain and on the Continent.
Anyway, why say it again? I agree with virtually all you have to tell
us.
I remember touring Burgundy and having stopped to have a meal at what
looked like a poor peasant's barn or cowshed, just about to collapse
before our eyes. Inside, we had one of the finest meals of our lives
at a price about that of a Mac hamburger, with ketchup and fries. But
the real memory is of enjoying a Nuits St Georges or a Gévrey
Chambertin at the price of a Coca Cola. Maybe I'm exaggerating but
it's basically correct.
I remember too my wife and I staying at a little hotel in Albury, on
the Murray River in Australia, and my wife, a thoroughgoing European,
being amazed and delighted at the quality of the meal in the
restaurant. Again, the price was derisory.
But one of the more meretricious points that this raises is that
farming goes far beyond the farm.
Barkley has said that only 5% of the population are farmers.
Therefore, he implies, they are not important in the big scheme of
things.
Yes, Barkley, they are.
You are right, Geoffrey, that a lot of consolidation of farm
properties has taken place in France and elsewhere in Europe. Big
owners have largely replaced small owners/tenants. Employment has been
reduced through this consolidation and the increasing use of
agricultural machinery.
But, in Europe as I see it, the farms are still there and, although
the grand days of booming profits from the brand-new CAP have largely
gone - the process is normal and was to be expected - the farming
areas are still doing well. The small towns are still there with all
the facilities - eating and other - that go with them.
It might be worth noting that France, with a population of 55 to 60
millions, I think, has only one really big city, Paris, and three or
four over a million or so. Most of the population is spread over a
multitude of relatively small cities, towns and villages all around
the country.
Those small "urban societies" are serving the farmers and others in a
variety of ways, as well as tourists/"settlers" from all around the
world.
The produce of the farms does not go only into local restaurants but
is transported to the big cities. It is stored and much of it
exported, under subsidies, all around ther world. It goes to sustain
the food-processing industries, the textile, garment and fashion
industries. Transporters, insurers, bankers, doctors, lawyers - a
whole multitude of people - are not farmers but they derive their
income from the farm industries.
This becomes terribly clear when the farms are abandoned and the
farmers destroyed. Barkley underestimates the degree of protection of
agriculture in the United States and the degree of desolation that
agricultural protectionism has prevented.
Much of American secondary industry has been gutted. Factories
overseas, sometimes owned by multinational corporations, sometimes by
local companies, now supply the American consumer and much of the
capital equipment for the industries that still survive.
But agriculture in the United States has suffered no such violence -
inadvertent or other. Export subsidies have been massive. I do not
have the statistics to determine whether United States subsidies are
greater than those of the EU. But I certainly would not be surprised
to find that they are. George W. Bush may speak blithely about the
great blessings of free trade but he will never allow Texas cattlemen
to be subjected to free competition from Australia and the Argentine.
The sheep men are safe from Australian competition too. They can rest
snug and unworried in their beds at night despite the talk - will it
ever be more than that? - of some sort of free-trade arrangement
between the United States and Australia.
Despite all the rhetoric about the horrors of government spending,
socialism, the welfare state and threats to sturdy individualism, the
United States has two or three of the most enormous social-welfare
programmes in the world. Indeed, on the first, I doubt that any
society, even the most totalitarian, has ever come close to the
achievement of the Americans.
That first and, I suspect, the biggest the world has ever known,
centres on the defence forces and the defence industries. I don't know
how many millions of people - at all levels of income and wealth -
draw their sustenance or the conspicuous luxury of their lives from
the billions - or it must be trillions of dollars - spent each year to
keep the armed forces and the defence industries going at full
throttle.
Of course, it can be claimed that national security distinguishes all
this employment and spending from the Keynesian
hole-digging-and-filling that is assumed to be the mark of the welfare
state.  There is a good deal of truth in this and a little crisis like
the collision of the American "spy 'plane" is needed from time to time
to concentrate the mind away from the welfare state and on to national
security.
Exports of arms, sophisticated and other, and even of "refined"
instruments of torture, help to replace the more peaceful products of
the industries gutted by past United States policies.
The second great social-welfare programme is the support given to
agriculture. My guess is that not as many millions of dollars are
spent on farm social-welfare enterprises as on defence and the number
of people who benefit is probably less.
But don't forget that it's not only the farmers themselves who get the
government handouts. The traders, the exporters, the bankers, the
lawyers, the people who administer the various giveaway and subsidy
programmes all get their cut at some point between the farmer and the
hungry mouths waiting to be fed.
It's all well entrenched. Vested interests are huge. Remember a
character called Billy Sol Estes in the 1950s who made millions of
dollars out of subsidies for silos that didn't exist? The tricks are
probably more sophisticated now.
Contrast all this with such a country as Australia. Our governments -
"left" or right - economists, media, Australian postgraduates from
American universities - virtually everyone in our suffering country,
even probably many of the farmers themselves - have been sold the
Brooklyn Bridge or its equivalent. We can't possibly match the
enormous subsidies of the United States and the EU anyway. We can't
match the giveway programmes. We can protest when the United States
simply walks into a market and takes it away from our farmers. But the
protest has no effect. We've been trying for the last sixty years - at
least - to get some relaxation of the wool tariff in the United
States. So far as I'm aware, it's still there - and will be until, not
hell, but the whole world freezes over - a prospect that, with global
warming, gets more distant year by year.
Australian country towns go back to the bush. Country roads become
unsealed, rutted, dangerous. Railway lines are closed. Doctors stay in
the big cities. Banks close their branches in the country.
I wonder if that superb Chef in that Albury restaurant still offers
those meals we loved so much at such incredibly low prices?
I like to believe that, somehow, he has survived and that, sooner or
later, sanity will return to Australian thinking and we'll again have
a thriving agriculture that once helped make us great and that still,
in its complex and formidable way, contributes so much to the
greatness of the countries of the European Union and even the mighty
United States.


James Cumes


----------
>From: GGard97342@xxxxxx
>To: pkt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>Subject: Re: Food, Food, Food
>Date: Mon, Apr 30, 2001, 10:25 am
>

> 29th April 2001
>
> In a message dated 25/04/01 21:58:37 GMT Daylight Time, rosserjb@xxxxxxx
> writes:
>
>> One of the main reasons
>>  for this discrepancy is the very high price of food in Europe,
>>  despite the fact that the US also has some ag protectionism.
>
> The OECD report of 1990 put US subsidies per farmer at two and a half times
> the EU level. A new report has just been issued but I do not yet have a
> copy.
> Does anyone know the comparison now? I heard somewhere a figure of $1400
> subsidy per milk cow. Barkley seems to assume that US subsidies are less
> than
> EU. Is this correct. Here we believe it is the other way