Ukraine and Foreign Soldiers

I quote

There is a ton of context and history behind this photo that should be known. I made this post yesterday, which should help explain why some Ukrainians were initially so welcoming of the Nazi invasion. Copy-pasting

This photo was taken in the city of Kharkov at the height of the Holodomor. The Holodomor refers to the 1932-33 famine that affected Soviet Ukraine, but during this time famines struck other parts of the USSR too. Most historians now believe that the Holodomor was a man-made famine that occurred due to Stalin's "collectivisation" and "dekulakization" policies. But there are still huge debates about the Holodomor's death toll, its status as a "genocide", and whether it was deliberately planned or mostly caused by Soviet incompetence. It comes up often as a point of contention between Russia and Ukraine. Denial of the Holodomor is still a thing just like Holocaust denial. Timothy Snyder (in my opinion) is one of the best researchers of the Holodomor; he believes that though the death toll is lower than most believe ("only" 3.3 million died), Stalin did deliberately starve Ukraine to target kulaks and Ukrainians.

Thus it is not surprising why Ukrainians, who suffered horrifically under Soviet rule, would welcome the Germans in 1941. Many hoped the Germans would grant them autonomy or even full independence. This was not what happened. Instead the Reichskommissariat Ukraine was set up to govern the area. The policies they enacted quickly drove much of the population into resistance. During the Nazi occupation millions of Ukrainians died. After the end of WW2, anti-Soviet resistance continued but was eventually crushed.”

How soon the Ukrainians forget, eh? Specially the Eastern ones…and also explains the antipathy of the Western Ukrainians to Russia.

Could California's Salmon Make a Comeback?

Kannu

The collapse of the pisiculture and fish stocks is one of the big disasters currently happening. There are loads of reasons. Like this happening outside normal life. Who cares about fish? You can't see them can you? 

Second is the issue of politics. The European fisheries policy, the American one. The Asian policies are frankly extremely stupid and short sighted. 

So we are slowly screwing up one of the worlds most important biodiversity species and sources of protein. 

And once fish stocks collapse, they don't return usually. They leave behind a sea desert. As a Bengali son, this is cultural, scientific and logical for us to Worry about and raise our voices. 

Love

Baba 

Could California's Salmon Make a Comeback? | OnEarth Magazine
http://www.onearth.org/print/35449

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After years of decline, the rich human community that depends on California’s salmon runs may at last be rebounding

Jon Rosenfield and I bushwhack through the scrubby willows that line the American River east of Sacramento. The air is crisp this October morning, and the timing of our visit should be just right to watch California’s Chinook salmon as they return to where their lives began and spawn the next generation. Rosenfield, a biologist, works for a conservation group called the Bay Institute, and he wants me to witness an annual ritual that future generations might not have the opportunity to see.

For the salmon, it’s the end of a hard journey that typically lasts three years. After hatching in the river’s gravelly bottom, the young often hang out in its shallow backwaters, developing the bulk and camouflage they need for survival. They then travel downstream toward the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta — the tidal estuary where they start their transition from fresh to salt water — and out through San Francisco Bay to the Pacific Ocean. There the fish spend most of their lives, feasting on krill, crab larvae, herring, sardines, and anchovies. This is in preparation for the most arduous part of their life cycle: the swim upstream to close the loop. By the time the salmon reach the spot where Rosenfield and I are standing, their energy has been channeled entirely from survival toward reproduction. They’ve stopped eating. Their skin is falling off. After depositing eggs or fertilizing them, they will die. Their carcasses — “these millions of 20-, 30-, 40-pound bags of fertilizer,” says Rosenfield — will be eaten by coyotes, bears, and eagles, which in turn will spread their droppings across forest floors and agricultural fields. “In watersheds where wine grapes are grown and salmon still spawn,” he says, “you can detect the ocean-nutrient signature in the wine.”

French farmers challenge ban on GM maize

The entire debate about GM foods is now in fairly ridiculous territory. USA is merrily going about growing and using GM food. But here in Europe, its like its Frankenstein food. Which is also such a big reason why Europe is so much more expensive food wise and the poor end up spending more money on food. But then, never let it be said that the politicians can actually do something smart. They would prefer to ban GM food and say it benefits farmers. But here’s an interesting counterpoint. I quote

French maize growers and seed companies have appealed a ban on the cultivation of a strain of genetically modified maize to the country's highest court, saying it was unjustified and economically harmful for farmers.

France placed a temporary ban on the growth of Monsanto's MON810 GMO maize earlier this month after a previous moratorium was annulled by the country's top court in November on the basis that it was not sufficiently justified.

"This restriction does not rely on any serious scientific element, and maize producers, hit by [insects], sustain real financial damage," French growers group AGPM, French seed firms group UFS and the maize and sorghum producers federation FNPSMS said in a joint statement yesterday (29 March).

EU countries are able to restrict genetically modified crop cultivation under strict conditions asauthorisation licences are valid across the 27-country bloc, in accordance with the principles of the EU's single market.

Several member states have repeatedly invoked an EU safeguard clause enabling them to suspend the marketing or growth on their territory of GM crops that enjoy EU-wide authorisation, but the European Commission has never substantiated their applications and has always ordered the lifting of national bans.

France asked the European Commission in February to suspend authorization to sow the insect-resistant maize, the only GMO crop allowed for cultivation in the European Union.

The French government's request to the EU Commission was based on "significant risks for the environment" shown in recent scientific studies, it said.

Global agribusiness company Monsanto said its GMO maize is perfectly safe.

French and European farmers have expressed concerns about the consequences of EU consumers' hostility to GMOs, saying it is likely to make them fall behind in the competitive world grain market.

The safety assessments performed by the European Food Safety Authority have come under criticism over the years. The EU executive has tried to introduce practical changes to the EFSA'sGMO-approval process. 

Of course it will fall behind, it is already behind and my taxes are currently going to keep these more efficient agricultural practises out and inefficiency in. Bah

The unconsidered impacts of Jatropha biodiesel

Fairly typical situation here. People are getting all excited about biodiesel and thinking its the next thing to sliced bread. Let me quote the abstract.

Governments around the world see biofuels as a common solution to the multiple policy challenges posed by energy insecurity, climate change and falling farmer incomes. The Indian government has enthusiastically adopted a second-generation feedstock – the oilseed-bearing shrub, Jatropha curcas – for an ambitious national biodiesel program. Studies estimating the production capacity and potential land use implications of this program have typically assumed that the ‘waste land’ slated for Jatropha production has no economic value and that no activities of note will be displaced by plantation development. Here we examine the specific local impacts of rapid Jatropha plantation development on rural livelihoods and land use in Rajasthan, India. We find that in Jhadol Tehsil, Jatropha is planted on both government and private land, and has typically displaced grazing and forage collection. For those at the socioeconomic margins, these unconsidered impacts counteract the very benefits that the biofuel programs aim to create. The Rajasthan case demonstrates that local land-use impacts need to be integrated into decision-making for national targets and global biofuel promotion efforts.

So they have conveniently given some research highlights

► Hardy biofuel crops like Jatropha replace edible feedstocks that use arable land.

► In Rajasthan, Jatropha displaces grazing and forage on both public and private land.

► As Jatropha plantations mature, the loss of grass becomes more pronounced.

► Unconsidered impacts negate the benefits that the biodiesel program aims to create.

► Local land-use impacts need to be integrated into decision-making.

The authors further state

the science of Jatropha is seriously lacking. Although many university, government and industry researchers are working to refine planting materials and management techniques, the plant's five-year maturation period has so far impeded quick progress. The formal, peer-reviewed publication of scientific research has also been slow, which may result, in part, from concerns about intellectual property rights in an industry that has garnered substantial interest from investors. Without refined management techniques and planting materials, rapid plantation development may limit benefits for decades. Since the plants can live for 50 years, the impact of poor planting materials and early pruning mistakes will be magnified in the long term. Overall, it is unlikely that Jatropha will become a successful cash crop within the current scientific and policy climate, given the poor state of knowledge of the plant's agronomy and the disappointing seed yields in block plantations.

More work required before thinking this is a panacea for India and the world’s fuel issues.

Designed for failure: A critique of the Common Fisheries Policy of the European Union

You might wonder why a banker is talking about fish? Well, there are many reasons, not least that I am a Bengali and fish is in my blood or fishy blood or bloody fish, but anyway, you get what I mean. Fish is integral to my culture :). But that’s the jokey reason, i am interested in fish because it is a crucial part of the world’s economic, political and environmental system. If you do not manage your fish stocks properly, you WILL get into trouble because unemployment in a vital sector will plunge, nutrition across the wider population will be impacted, the upstream and downstream impacts of lack of fish is huge, and so on and so forth. Being in a bank unfortunately guarantees that every problem will ultimately impact the banking system in some shape or form. Whether its to do with corporate funding, interest rates, bankruptcies, you name it, a bank has to handle it.

One would have expected that a supranational body like the EU, which was original designed for making sure that the Coal and Steel production in the core European Union countries was coordinated, could have handled something like the fish stocks in the EU? After all, the Europeans have been fishing for thousands of years, much longer than they have been making steel. But no. This paper bluntly puts in clear terms, the reasons why the European Union has spectacularly failed in managing its fish stocks via the Common Fisheries Policy and has inexorably lead to overfishing, massive unemployment in so many fishing communities around Europe, huge subsidy bills and basically screwed up the sea environment. So what were the issues?

1. Biological Issues: Every year, the scientists propose a sustainable level of fish stocks based upon a rather clear mathematical model based upon unexploited stock size, the maximum economic yield, the maximum sustainable yield and a precautionary lower biomass limit. Based upon this model, you know how much fish to catch. There are other factors such as when do juvenile fish become adults and start spawning, how many times do you want the fish to spawn before being caught, etc. Guess what? the European Commission and the Council of Ministers usually agree a limit circa 50% higher than what the scientists propose. Hmmm, that really helps guys.

2. Economic Issues: Fish stocks suffer from the problem of common goods, everybody owns fish and nobody owns them at the same time. Its like common pasture grounds where everybody can graze their cows but nobody has to take responsibility for the pasture. So individual motivation is to overfish and thus have overcapacity. If you provide fishing quotas to fishermen, which is comparatively economically efficient (even if you consider the 50% over permissioning from above), it still doesnt work efficiently as monopolies can form, quotas dont really address the issue of the catch size itself and finally this doesnt apply to fishermen from outside the political structure. Not much can be done about Japanese fishermen fishing off the economic zones in Europe, can you? And who will validate once the fishing boat lands up in a Japanese port? not the EU authorities anyway. In the EU’s case, subsidies have been given for developing boats, subsidising fuel, and so on and so forth. Totally distorted economic market in Europe.

3. Legal Issues: You have to have ONE regulatory / legal body to handle issues such as this. But no, the whole panoply of rules, regulations, decrees, courts, councils, and and and is just complex, non transparent, riddled with inefficiencies, cannot enforce suitably, and so on and so forth.

4. Political Issues: The fisheries ministers in the respective EU nations are not judged on the basis of how well they manage fish stocks on an European wide basis but on how much quota they manage to get for their own constituents. There is no minister representing the poor fish, see? So everybody goes about raping the fish and devil take the hindmost. Also because this is a slow decline, politicians do not take responsibility as they will be long gone by the time the populations actually collapse. Due to different election timelines, there is no consistent policy making either. Consequently, the European Fisheries policy frequently reduces to the lowest common denominator.

These are just few of the issues that we are facing. Looking at how the EU actually handled something that was huge and crucial such as the Bosnian Crisis, the Kosovo Crisis or even the Greek Debt Crisis, I am not sanguine how it will handle a situation like this with the fish stocks, but still, some attempts need to be made to address this problem from a multi disciplinary perspective.

Who is the big cheese then? Surprise – the UK

Hot diggity dog, i would never have thought this. I quote:

“How can anyone govern a nation that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese?” General Charles de Gaulle famously asked.

But a burst of innovation among Britain’s cheesemakers in the past 15 years means Gordon Brown might now have grounds to ask the question even more plaintively than France’s postwar leader.

A new cadre of artisan cheese producers and a middle-class obsession with the provenance of produce have helped propel Britain to the top of an international league table that measures varieties of cheese produced per head of population.

Britain’s “innovation score” of 11.4 cheese variants for every million people puts it ahead of Switzerland with 9.6 types of cheese per 1m people, and France with 9.2.

Now something else to crow over those damn frogs :). I love my cheese despite it being horrible for my health, lol. Here’s some of the good stuff I have got for the Christmas dinner :)

It has Red Leicester, Cheddar, Cornish Camembert and a fruity cheese. Also in the fridge is a big lump of Bavarian Smoked Cheese. Yummy :)

How Pakistan and USA caused famines in Bangladesh

Curious, no? how people forget about the war criminals living in their midst and reach across half the world to talk about another set of criminals? But then, its easier to blame others (specially if they are Jews) than to do something to pull their own to justice.

But here's some sad similarities between Bangladesh of 30 years back and now.

All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!!!

Farm subsidy junkies fight attempts to wean them off!

Well, it was perhaps far too much to expect that they will be economically literate and voluntarily stop sucking on the public purse subsidy tit. Irrespective of whether they are cooperatives or owned by single owners, I see no reason for subsidies to be given in a rich country. What on earth do you want subsidies for? And now they are claiming environmental benefits (just shut down the farm!).

Look at why UK and Germany hates it? While the UK fears losing the comparatively little money it gets from the CAP, Germany worries that thousands of workers on farms in the former communist east could lose their jobs, adding to high unemployment.

Do you see anything that has to do with actual farming? Nope.

Mariann Fischer Boel, the European Union farm commissioner, had attempted to slay one of the CAP's many demons - that the rich get most - by proposing less money for the biggest farms from next year. "We are raising this issue partly because the public raises it again and again," she saidof the €45bn ($67bn, £32bn) a year policy.

About 80 per cent of the money goes to a fifth of the EU's 7m farmers.

Technorati Tags: Farming , EU , Europe

Better management of foodstocks will lead to less famine!

Ethiopia is a country which is in the news for all the wrong reasons. If it is not war then its famine. But now the country is embarking on a remarkable exercise, to implement a commodities exchange which will allow for better price formation, manage the wild swings of prices, better hedging, better knowledge of inventories, better foodgrain production and management of buffer stocks. Some quotes:

The government of Ethiopia, which has one of Africa’s most state-dominated economies, is stepping into uncharted territory by launching a commodity exchange to help alleviate food shortages and encourage the commercialisation of agriculture.
The exchange will create a pool of liquidity and reference prices that reflect the amalgamation of demand from across the country, thereby reducing the price volatility caused by the existence of multiple fragmented markets.
Price tickers at 200 rural sites will give farmers independent access to price information from Addis Ababa, enabling them to negotiate a fairer deal with middle-men and giving them incentives to produce.
Traders, meanwhile, will be able to profit from arbitrage opportunities by buying cheap grain in areas of surplus and selling it at higher prices closer to areas where
there are shortages, which will itself facilitate food distribution.

I know, I know, delivery and execution risks are huge, corruption is always present, but given the fact that these chaps are starting from negative territory, even this government driven initiative is welcome news for me!
Perhaps sometime in the next century, they will actually take the step which will remove famines permanently, and that's the Amartya Sen's prescription: DEMOCRACY. Its not the lack of food which causes famine, its the lack of governance which does it.

All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!!!

Only in Zimbabwe can you be chucked into jail for growing food!

Zimbabwe is facing mass starvation, very high inflation and the government is now chucking people into jail for growing food. Leaving aside the fact that it is clearly racist to target white farmers (that nobody seems to have picked up on, its all right when you are racist towards whites, eh? You blithering mentally challenged hypocritical idiots!), look at what they have done now. I quote:

Ten white farmers appeared in court in Zimbabwe yesterday accused of growing crops on their land — in a country where millions of people will need food aid within the next few months.

Since 2000, when the government began seizing white-owned farms, many of them violently, the agricultural sector has collapsed and the economy has gone into freefall, with inflation now at 6,600 per cent, the highest in the world.

The World Food Programme estimates that it will be feeding 4.1 million Zimbabweans, one third of the population, by the end of the year.

Didymus Mutasa, the lands minister, has said that the few hundred remaining white farmers will be forced out, one way or another.

"The position is that food shortages or no food shortages, we are going ahead to remove the remaining whites," he said recently. "Too many blacks are still clamouring for land and we will resettle them on the remaining farms."

Outside the court, the scruffy shops of Chegutu were empty of basic foods, and street vendors sold small, sour oranges.

They came from a once-prolific citrus farm in the district now devastated after it was seized by Bright Matonga, the deputy information minister, earlier this year.

Crooks!

All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!!!

More on the luddite and stupid policies of the Indian Politicians

Here is a full column from the FT which I am reproducing in full as this needs to be said. I have fulminated about this issue earlier, but this tells the story in far more detail.

Read and weep!

India spurns creative destruction at its peril

By Jo Johnson

Published: October 3 2007 19:30 | Last updated: October 3 2007 19:30

Paying villagers to dig holes and break stones is easier than undertaking the reforms that create sustainable jobs. Anyone who believed Rahul Gandhi’s elevation to the rank of Congress general secretary signalled a push to “reinvent and modernise” India’s ruling party will have been disappointed by his first initiative.

In a meeting last week with Manmohan Singh, the prime minister, who has hailed him as the country’s “future”, Mr Gandhi – son of Sonia Gandhi, party president – demanded an extension of a vast make-work programme to all 600 districts in the country, up from about 330. The government duly obliged and from next year the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, which promises one member of every household 100 days’ paid work each year, will reach all corners of India.

The move was designed to signal the Cambridge and Harvard-educated former management consultant’s empathy for the aam admi, the “common man”, who has yet to share the fruits of 8 per cent-plus growth, and to help the Congress party tart itself up for a general election that could come next year. The government’s communist backers have threatened to withdraw support if it moves ahead with a nuclear co-operation agreement with the US that they believe compromises India’s strategic autonomy. While the expansion of the gigantic NREGS boondoggle, a scheme blighted by corruption and fraud, is a handsome coming-out present for the 37-year-old Mr Gandhi, it provides no solution to poverty and underemployment in India’s immiserated villages.

But at the same time as Congress politicians were celebrating the creation of futile, back-breaking tasks for the rural poor, Reliance Industries, one of India’s flagship industrial groups, was being forced to abandon plans to create thousands of real jobs at its revolutionary new chain of grocery stores. India has one of the most antiquated retail sectors in the world. Most farm produce is sold in street markets or door-to-door by hawkers pushing carts. Although malls have been springing up in the cities, Indian consumers still principally do their shopping in the country’s 12m “mom and pop” stores. Uncomputerised, poky and offering limited choice, these family-owned shops account for more than 95 per cent of India’s $330bn retail industry.

Taking on the small-trader lobby was always going to be a fight. Reliance and a handful of other Indian business houses, including Bharti, which has a wholesale joint venture with Wal-Mart, have made strong arguments in support of organised retailing. Reliance promises to invest $5bn-$7bn in a “farm-to-fork” supply chain and to bring the largest and most inefficient sector of the Indian economy into the 21st century. It talks of lower prices for consumers, better-off farmers, higher labour standards, massive investment in rural infrastructure and elimination of waste (about 40 per cent of perishable goods rot before reaching market). The scale of its ambition is breathtaking: it has opened 350 stores since launching in Hyderabad in November and wants $25bn sales
by 2010.

Yet much of this is now on hold. A Luddite anti-supermarket movement is spreading across the country. Gangs of traders, backed by opportunist politicians, are systematically vandalising the company’s outlets in states as far apart as Uttar Pradesh in the north, Orissa in the east and Kerala in the south. Reliance last week took the dramatic step of closing down its 20 supermarkets in UP, a state of 166m that is pivotal to the success of its retailing venture. This week it dismissed 870 workers, shelving plans to open hundreds more stores and create an estimated 50,000 jobs. Its move came after Mayawati, the state’s populist new chief minister, suspended Reliance’s operations and berated the company for creating a “law and order situation”.

UP is not alone. Reliance this week dismissed 470 workers in communist-run West Bengal, with a further 300 expected to follow in the coming days. It may be forced to take similar steps in Orissa and Kerala, where the government has launched its own chain of 5,700 shops selling heavily subsidised products. Organisers of a national “Quit Retail” movement hope to attract 100,000 to a demonstration in Mumbai on October 10. They are calling on the government to enact a law banning Indian companies from muscling in
on the mom and pop stores that provide a livelihood for about 40m people and create the densest network of shops in any country in the world, with approximately 11 stores for every 1,000 people.

That is not going to happen. But it goes without saying that the backlash against organised retailing by Indian companies bodes ill for further loosening of the country’s strict foreign direct investment rules.

Whereas China started permitting FDI in retailing in the early 1990s, successive Indian governments have failed to embrace the creative destruction that liberalisation brings. New Delhi’s timid approach has been to give India’s oligopolists a head start in consolidating the sector before foreign groups such as Tesco, Carrefour and Wal-Mart can enter under their own steam. Now even that is at risk from political short-termism. If Mr Gandhi really wants to show he is the future, and is not in hock to the outdated policies of Congress’s socialist past, he should extend a welcoming hand to organised retailing – both Indian and foreign.

All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!!!

The EU's sugar policy is also a total mess

I talked about the EU's fisheries policy being a mess, its regulatory impact analysis regime being totally unfit for purpose and now as it turns out, its sugar policy sucks. The FT reported:

Relations between the European Union and its former colonies soured further on Wednesday after Brussels was accused of “coercion” for planning to scrap a 30-year-old deal on sugar imports while talks continue on its replacement.

The European Commission said scrapping the measure by October 2009 was vital to ensure duty- and quota-free access for all 70-plus African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries when new EU trade rules came into effect.

The preferential access regime was ruled illegal by the World Trade Organisation, and a waiver granted in Geneva expires at the end of the year.

The EU is also struggling to remove 6m tonnes of domestic production by 2010, when the cut takes full effect, to bring European prices closer to world levels.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and this is what the pathetic EU subsidies have done to the 70 odd ACP countries (mostly African and Caribbean). It has made them dependent upon feeding on the public trough and left them indolent. Rest of the sugar producing countries managed to become more efficient and produce sugar with less effort and less cost. So now the situation is that the EU is struggling to reconcile its finances, its commitments to its previous colonies and its commitments to the WTO. I love it, couldn't have happened to a better organisation. Again, violate the laws of economics at your peril, you ignorant twits!

Technorati Tags: Europe , European Commission , WTO , Farming

Reliance cuts jobs in grocery chain in UP , India after idiot politicians protest

Here we go, typical moron behaviour which I have already alluded to. I would expect that the chief minister of one of the poorest states in India would want more jobs, more efficient farming and better economics all around? Oh! no, we do not want that. Besides the grotesquely stupid Uma Bharati protested, now it was the chance of the current Chief Minister, Mayawati, herself accused of serious corruption, who has closed 20 grocery chain stores.

So Reliance, the company which is busy generating jobs and money for farmers and people in other states said, ok, no worries, you can live with corrupt, moronic, idiot and stupid leaders, we are outies.

Pity the poor farmer and pity the poor unemployed youth who would have had a chance to break their poverty and unemployment status's.

Read and Weep!

Technorati Tags: India , Farming , Economy , Unemployment

The way to deal with a labour shortage is to raise wages and improve working conditions!

Check out the commentary on the Economist website, I couldnt have written it better.

“LABOUR shortage” is one of the most nonsensical phrases ever coined. Real shortages happen outside the market economy: armies run short of ammunition; sailing ships may lack wind. But with six billion people on the planet, labour is not in short supply. What “labour shortage” means is that employers can’t find workers with the right skills at a price they like. Similar shortages are reported of Rembrandts, lobsters and nice houses in London.

Nonetheless, the news that British farmers are complaining of a “labour shortage” is excellent news. For the past five years, eastern European workers have been pouring into Britain—perhaps as many as a million Poles, and hundreds of thousands of other nationalities, legal and illegal. The result has been a triumph of European integration. The diligent new arrivals have boosted economic growth in Britain, and many have gained money and know-how to help rebuild home countries ruined by communism.

The solution for British farmers is simple: compete. They need to offer their seasonal workers better pay, living accommodation and other treatment. As Marina Lewycka’s new novel “Two Caravans” illustrates so poignantly and amusingly, the bottom end of the agricultural labour market is a cesspit of scams, abuse and squalor. Workers are paid below the minimum wage, overcharged for cramped and dirty accommodation, ripped off for bogus “agency fees” and transport costs.

The farming lobby wants the government to ease the “shortage” next year by bringing in thousands more workers from Ukraine under a special scheme in which a temporary work visa comes tied to a particular job. That, the farmers explain, gives them “certainty” that their workers won’t bunk off half way through the harvest.

That is an odd argument: the best way of encouraging workers to stay put and work hard is to treat them properly, not to use schemes more reminiscent of the imperial days of bonded labour and coolies. Britain and other EU countries should allow Ukrainians to compete in the western labour markets—but as full-fledged participants, not as a reservoir of uncomplaining low-paid workers for a noisy, influential but actually peripheral bit of the economy.

All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!!!

A tale of three farmers

When we talk about farmers in the west, the idea that emerges is of automation, subsidies, factory farming, etc. When we talk about farming in the lesser developed countries, they are at the subsistence level (farming just enough to feed their family). So the economics and public policy orientation for these emerging market farmers is seriously different to the western farmers. After all, if they do not make it work and their farms are flooded out, they get insurance and other assistance. But for farmers in say India, the results are tragic.

Many farmers suffer from overload of debt, fall into the trap of loan sharks and then commit suicide. In just one Indian state, Maharashtra, there have been 500 farmer suicides already according to a recent report. But be very careful when politicians start talking about farmers. I am immediately very suspicious about political help for farmers. Almost always, it is related to the politicians interest, and not to the farmer nor to the country and is almost always economically bad for the farmer, the state, the region and country.

And this is the tale of the second farmer. The BBC reports that Reliance, a conglomerate is closing its stores in another Indian state because of politically motivated violence against its stores. Apparently left wing and other political party supporters have attacked Reliance stores and destroyed property. You might think, yes, sir, makes sense, evil capital sucking the blood out of the farmers and small shopkeepers. But as I mentioned in an email today morning,

How amusing! :), the delicious irony when politics, love of power and ideology go bang against each other.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/6966251.stm

guess who loses? the poor themselves who have to pay for the inefficiencies of the farmer, infrastructure, skewed policies, corruption and various other grand standing stupid economically illiterate ideas that have kept our people poor. But the genie is out of the jhola, and if even one other state goes ahead with these new stores, the fraud comitted on the poor will be exposed! :)

And then came this story, that farmers in Uttar Pradesh, another very poor state in India, are demanding that the Reliance stores be re-opened. It is worthwhile quoting the entire section from the third set of farmers.

Gosainganj farmers also joined the protests on Monday. They said the Reliance stores had greatly benefited farmers. Farmer from Gosaiganj Dev Narayan said, “The government has done a great injustice to farmers. We got better facilities at Reliance. We were finally free from the nexus of middlemen at mandis. The government’s decision has pushed back investment in the state.”

Usually, when a farmer takes his produce to the mandis, he has to pay a 2.5 per cent mandi tax, besides bearing cost for loading, unloading and weighing. Farmers said they lost around 20 to 30 per cent of their produce in this process.

The Reliance collection centres had negated the role of middlemen as farmers could directly sell their produce here. This also meant keeping at bay the numerous other hands that were thrust forward to squeeze money from them.

Farmer Shiv Kumar said: “We got the best prices without much haggling. The method of weighing was electronic and, so, more transparent. We got immediate cash payment and were exposed to new technology. The consumer too could take their pick of products at good prices. We request the government to open the Reliance stores to afford farmers a better future.”

So for political reasons, these political parties are willing to knock the poor farmers and the urban poor. Their investment in corrupt practises, their sheer economic illiteracy, their desire to keep people poor and kill themselves is criminal. Did you notice another word there? transparency? That's what scares these political parties, because transparency exposes these cockroaches and maggots feeding on the body of the state.

Long way to go yet, but as I said in my email, you cannot stop progress and you cannot keep on violating the laws of economics! :)


All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!!!

Palagummi Sainath wins the2007 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature and Creative Communication Arts

I wrote about farmer suicides and coincidentally, the one person who was responsible for publicising the farmer suicides in India was a gentleman called as Palagummi Sainath. As it so happens, he has been awarded the The 2007 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature and Creative Communication Arts. This is indeed very creditable news. See his citation here.