“Mars Sets Goal for Sustainable Cocoa Sources”

Another Washington Post story suggests that “sustainability” –whatever it may mean — still can stir the cold hearts of capitalist managers.  Utopians have long been distressed by the differential working conditions around the world.  Poverty does have less pleasant impacts than affluence.  The problem is that associated with all egalitarian policies.

Our desire to improve the plight of the poor too often merely cuts away the rungs on the ladder out of poverty.

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When it comes to things such as environmental policy, the Progressives have been rather successful at promoting their world view.  They realized that it would be futile to argue that property rights and human ingenuity could not solve anything - so they did not try (immediately) to socialize oil or other sub-surface minerals but they did succeed in derailing the evolutionary process by which institutions emerged to resolve emerging problems.  The economist Ronald Coase  noted this in an essay pointing out…

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Last Wednesday, The New York Times ran an appealing story on the rise of an Ecuadorian Quichua community from a cocoa grower to a chocolate producer.  The 850-families cooperative, located in the Amazonian rainforest, sells rich chocolate bars to American supermarkets without intermediaries.

This initiative is worth emulating, and should be followed by Ecuadorian agribusiness men who export fruits with no added value, such as bananas, mangoes, passion fruits, and coffee beans.  Read NYT’s When Chocolate is a Way of Life

Wearing a…

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During the presidential primaries and in the campaigns, there was a lot of rhetoric about the need for “fair” trade instead of free trade. Candidates were in a populist mode, catering to critical manufacturing states that have lost jobs and serving up trade as the villain.

Now that Senator Barack Obama is the President-elect, there is renewed speculation on what path his administration will take on international trade. Will he make good on his campaign rhetoric that echoed the Democratic platform’s call for renegotiation…

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The stalled U.S.-Colombia free trade agreement has become a campaign issue in Florida’s 25th District, which is home to a substantial Colombian-American population. Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart is using his support of the agreement as a club with which to beat his challenger.

That challenger, Joe Garcia, doth protest. He says he is “for fair trade and getting it done in a way that protects American jobs and American commerce.” That’s another way of saying that he thinks consumers are paying too little…

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If goods do not cross borders, then soldiers will.

It’s an old saying. Maybe even a cliché. But there is some truth to it. What wonderful news, then, that India and Pakistan have re-opened a trade route through the Kashmir region.

Soldiers have been crossing that border for 60 years. Replacing those soldiers with spices, apples, and other, ahem, non-fatal goods will have two positive effects. First, those goods will become cheaper and more abundant in India and Pakistan.

Second, the new trade route…

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Iowa has decided to put a tax on pumpkins that are not consumed. You have to sign a form promising to eat the thing and you will save 7 percent sales tax. Between the added paperwork for both vendor and customer and the invasion into my kitchen, this is an example of stupid taxation.

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Just as France has put a temporary freeze on growing corn bred with molecular plant breeding techniques, Austria fails to create a majority within the EU for banning the corn altogether. WTO has already said its an illegal ban, and none of these countries can come up with new scientific information to justify further moratoriums.

We have eaten the food for 11 years now, and there has not been any evidence, either litigious or trustworthy scientific evidence, that indicates risk connected…

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Congress is set to pass a bloated farm bill that will increase federal sugar subsidies, which have cost taxpayers billions of dollars, and prevent farmers in some of the poorest countries in the world from selling their sugar to the United States at low prices. Even The New York Times thinks President Bush is right to consider vetoing the bill.

In a letter to the House Agriculture Committee joined by public interest and consumer groups, Fran Smith explained that the sugar subsidies will…

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The other side of India’s boom is the corruption and lack of protection of rights for the poor. This story from NPR about a month long protest march for protecting the property rights of the poor gives a picture of India that you seldom see in the media.

If you have been to India, you might have passed through the roadside encampments outside the big cities, where nothing stays clean for more than half an hour, where people live, not paycheck to…

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Owner of one of the largest food retailers in Norway, Trond Lykke says organic food is selfish because it requires more land area and drives up retail prices at the cost of poor farmers in developing countries, according to Norwegian Dagsavisen. Other Norwegian retailers agree with him and say consumers should not get caught up in food fads and hysteria.

The organic food movement in the country does not appreciate such heresy. Some claim that the inefficiency of organic food production does…

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So far as I can tell, it’s gotten no attention whatsoever, but today is the 25th Anniversary of the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the very first ever biotech medical product: Humulin, a recombinant version of human insulin invented by the biotech company Genentech, and marketed by Eli Lilly.

This was a stunning breakthrough because, until Humulin was approved, diabetics used insulin taken from pig and cow pancreases to treat their condition. Using recombinant DNA techniques, Genentech was able to create…

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The Italian language version of my book, The Frankenfood Myth, co-written with CEI adjunct scholar and Hoover Institution fellow Henry I. Miller, was published jointly by Lindau publishers and the Turin-based Istituto Bruno Leoni on Thursday. The first review — “La scienza non è ‘divisa’,” by Armando Massarenti — appeared in yesterday’s Il Sole 24 Ore, Italy’s leading financial daily, and it can be viewed on the IBL website.

The Babel Fish translation is almost as incomprehensible to me as the Italian language original,…

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Okay, here’s a government action I can agree with: Pennsylvania Secretary of Agriculture Dennis Wolff ordered 16 dairies in Pennsylvania to correct their milk labels because they gave false or misleading information to consumers.

Wolff said in a news release that 16 of the 140 dairy companies the department has reviewed use inaccurate or misleading labels because they contain claims that cannot be verified, or they imply their product is safer than others by telling consumers what’s not in the milk.

Wolff said…

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The bloated farm bill making its way through the new Congress is not only a budget-buster. It is chock full of corporate welfare and environment-ravaging ethanol subsidies, and is seen as contributing to pollution and obesity on a grand scale. Moreover, it prevents the U.S. from negotiating trade deals that would open up new markets for our exports, and impoverishes Third World farmers. And that’s just the fairly understated criticism of the farm bill you read in the liberal Washington Post!

To camouflage its…

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Yesterday NPR’s All Things Considered took up the 2007 Farm Bill again and focused on the clout that sugar producers enjoy in both the House and the Senate.  The recently passed House bill gives sugar cane and sugar beet producers all they wanted and more in the form of higher guaranteed prices for their sugar, more restrictions on imports, and new subsidies for sugar used for ethanol production.  Now that August recess is over, the Senate will be crafting its version…

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Bob Novak in his column yesterday had an interesting take on the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement and Democratic opposition to this trade pact. Novak notes that the Uribe government has turned to the Democrats in Congress to try to gain their support:

The forced resignation two weeks ago, under pressure from President Alvaro Uribe, of three prominent officers accused of drug trafficking is not likely to end the shakeup in Colombia’s army and navy. More heads will roll in a long-overdue purge…

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Great farm subsidy database — now updated — maintained by EWG using USDA and other government data. Here’s just one example: a map of Manhattan showing a lot of red dots signifying farm subsidy recipients living in the Big Apple. You can click on the dots and get the names of the recipients.

Much more on this website, such as that only 19 percent of the congressional districts account for one-half of all crop subsidy payments between 2003-2005; and the top 10…

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Talks broke down among a group of four countries — the U.S., the EU, India, and Brazil — to move forward on the WTO Doha Round negotiations. The discussions in Potsdam were considered important in trying to reach agreement on greater market access in both agriculture and manufactured goods.

Previous talks saw the U.S. and the EU blaming each other for the lack of agreement. But this time, those countries blamed India and Brazil for not wanting to move at all in…

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Fran, you make a very good point. The big problem, as many of us at CEI have discussed, has been our nation’s approach and our focus on bilateral trade agreements. Although tempting at first because they gave quick wins, the bilateral agreements have opened up great opportunities for the anti-trade forces to do all kinds of mischief. Meanwhile, we get caught fighting for agreements that are trivial in every possible way and a Doha round that’s obviously going nowhere.

When I was…

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