Noam Chomsky writes: The chaos that derives from the so-called
international order can be painful if you are on the receiving end of
the power that determines that order’s structure. Even tortillas come
into play in the ungrand scheme of things. Recently, in many regions of
Mexico, tortilla prices jumped by more than 50 per cent.

In January, in Mexico City, tens of thousands of workers and farmers
rallied in the Zocalo, the city’s central square, to protest the
skyrocketing cost of tortillas.

In response, the government of President Felipe Calderon cut a deal
with Mexican producers and retailers to limit the price of tortillas
and corn flour, very likely a temporary expedient.

In part the price-hike threat to the food staple for Mexican workers
and the poor is what we might call the ethanol effect — a consequence
of the US stampede to corn-based ethanol as an energy substitute for
oil, whose major wellsprings, of course, are in regions that even more
grievously defy international order.

In the United States, too, the ethanol effect has raised food prices
over a broad range, including other crops, livestock and poultry.

The connection between instability in the Middle East and the cost of
feeding a family in the Americas isn’t direct, of course. But as with
all international trade, power tilts the balance. A leading goal of US
foreign policy has long been to create a global order in which US
corporations have free access to markets, resources and investment
opportunities. The objective is commonly called “free trade,” a posture
that collapses quickly on examination.

It’s not unlike what Britain, a predecessor in world domination,
imagined during the latter part of the 19th century, when it embraced
free trade, after 150 years of state intervention and violence had
helped the nation achieve far greater industrial power than any rival.

The United States has followed much the same pattern. Generally, great
powers are willing to enter into some limited degree of free trade when
they’re convinced that the economic interests under their protection
are going to do well. That has been, and remains, a primary feature of
the international order.

The ethanol boom fits the pattern. As discussed by agricultural
economists C Ford Runge and Benjamin Senauer in the current issue of
Foreign Affairs, “the biofuel industry has long been dominated not by
market forces but by politics and the interests of a few large
companies,” in large part Archer Daniels Midland, the major ethanol
producer. Ethanol production is feasible thanks to substantial state
subsidies and very high tariffs to exclude much cheaper and more
efficient sugar-based Brazilian ethanol. In March, during President
Bush’s trip to Latin America, the one heralded achievement was a deal
with Brazil on joint production of ethanol. But Bush, while spouting
free-trade rhetoric for others in the conventional manner, emphasized
forcefully that the high tariff to protect US producers would remain,
of course along with the many forms of government subsidy for the
industry.

Despite the huge, taxpayer-supported agricultural subsidies, the prices
of corn — and tortillas — have been climbing rapidly. One factor is
that industrial users of imported US corn increasingly purchase cheaper
Mexican varieties used for tortillas, raising prices. (05/22/07)

more…

Al Gore
writes: Not long before our nation launched the invasion of Iraq, our
longest-serving Senator, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, stood on the
Senate floor and said: “This chamber is, for the most part,
silent—ominously, dreadfully silent. There is no debate, no discussion,
no attempt to lay out for the nation the pros and cons of this
particular war. There is nothing. We stand passively mute in the United
States Senate.”

Why was the Senate silent?

In describing the empty chamber the way he did, Byrd invited a specific
version of the same general question millions of us have been asking:
“Why do reason, logic and truth seem to play a sharply diminished role
in the way America now makes important decisions?” The persistent and
sustained reliance on falsehoods as the basis of policy, even in the
face of massive and well-understood evidence to the contrary, seems to
many Americans to have reached levels that were previously unimaginable.

A large and growing number of Americans are asking out loud: “What has
happened to our country?” People are trying to figure out what has gone
wrong in our democracy, and how we can fix it.

To take another example, for the first time in American history, the
Executive Branch of our government has not only condoned but actively
promoted the treatment of captives in wartime that clearly involves
torture, thus overturning a prohibition established by General George
Washington during the Revolutionary War.

It is too easy—and too partisan—to simply place the blame on the
policies of President George W. Bush. We are all responsible for the
decisions our country makes. We have a Congress. We have an independent
judiciary. We have checks and balances. We are a nation of laws. We
have free speech. We have a free press. Have they all failed us? Why
has America’s public discourse become less focused and clear, less
reasoned? Faith in the power of reason—the belief that free citizens
can govern themselves wisely and fairly by resorting to logical debate
on the basis of the best evidence available, instead of raw
power—remains the central premise of American democracy. This premise
is now under assault.

American democracy is now in danger—not from any one set of ideas, but
from unprecedented changes in the environment within which ideas either
live and spread, or wither and die. I do not mean the physical
environment; I mean what is called the public sphere, or the
marketplace of ideas.

It is simply no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public
discourse. I know I am not alone in feeling that something has gone
fundamentally wrong. In 2001, I had hoped it was an aberration when
polls showed that three-quarters of Americans believed that Saddam
Hussein was responsible for attacking us on Sept. 11. More than five
years later, however, nearly half of the American public still believes
Saddam was connected to the attack. (05/22/07)
more…

BBC Environment –
As part of his BBC Springwatch series on changing habitats in the UK,
Nick Higham reports on efforts to re-build fish stocks in the Firth of
Clyde.

In the 1970s, Lamlash Bay on the Isle of Arran played host to an annual
sea angling festival. Each year, the total catch over the weekend of
the festival amounted to anything up to 5,000 fish, weighing 16,000 lbs.

By 1994, the last year of the festival, the catch had fallen to less than 200 lbs.

Lamlash Bay, like much of the Firth of Clyde in which Arran sits, has
been fished out: only one commercially significant species remains in
the bay. Scallops are a highly priced delicacy, but even they are
threatened by the very technique used to harvest them. Scallop dredgers
drag along the seabed, destroying everything in their path, including
maerl, a kind of pink coral, which is beautiful, fragile, increasingly
rare and a wonderful nursery for shellfish and a host of other species.

Lamlash
Bay used to be full of maerl; there are still some patches
left, but most has gone, and with it have gone the cod, the plaice, the
haddock, the turbot and the lobster which used to swarm in the Clyde. A
local campaign group, Coast (it stands for Community of Arran Seabed
Trust) thinks it has the answer - turning part of Lamlash Bay into a
“no take zone” for fishing. …

The Clyde’s fishermen are as perturbed by falling stocks as anyone; but
they’re opposed to a total ban on fishing, even in a limited area like
the northern end of Lamlash Bay. And experts question whether a no take zone in such a small area,
whatever it may do for shellfish, can really help regenerate stocks of
other free-swimming species like cod. But with the help of Scottish Natural Heritage and other agencies, a
compromise seems to be emerging: a “fisheries project”, with the
ostensible aim not of conservation but of developing the commercial
fishery.

Crucially, it would ban scallop fishing in part of the bay - preserving
the maerl, giving scallops somewhere to spawn and giving the Coast
campaigners much of what they want. (05/21/07)
more…