← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Petr
Thread ID: 18737 | Posts: 22 | Started: 2005-06-20
2005-06-20 21:26 | User Profile
[url]http://www.dailystar.com/dailystar/news/76261.php[/url] [FONT=Arial]
[SIZE=5]Brazilian crop boom threatens U.S. farms [/SIZE]
COX NEWS SERVICE
PETROVINA, Brazil - The six-seat Embraer airplane glides from a cloudless sky onto a red-dirt runway. Views of scrub-brush savanna stretching to the Amazon River give way to fields of 10-foot high corn and boll-bursting cotton.
It's a farmer's wonderland, where the fecund soil can be had for as little as $200 a sun-drenched acre and a Maryland-sized chunk of land is cleared each year for cotton, corn, soybean and cattle farms.
Agriculture is booming in Brazil, and U.S. farmers are taking notice. Buffeted by high production costs, low market prices and the World Trade Organization, Americans increasingly look to low-cost, low-wage Brazil for economic survival.
Hundreds of U.S. farmers have visited the Brazilian states of Mato Grosso, Parana and Bahia the last two years. A few have spent millions to buy land and equipment and become Brazilian farmers. Others have put their money in U.S.-managed investment groups. For $25,000, an investor can own a piece of a 13,000-acre Western Bahia corn, cotton and soybean farm that promises a minimum 15 percent return.
[B]Virtually every U.S. commodity farmer fears the Brazilian agricultural revolution that threatens to hollow out the domestic industry the way the Asians gutted manufacturing[/B]. "I see agriculture being taken away from us by Brazil. It's very scary," says cotton and peanut farmer Don Wood of Rochelle, Ga., after visiting Brazil. "We can keep doing what we're doing for two years. But after that, it looks like we'll stop planting cotton. There's no way we can compete with those guys."
In second place now
Brazil, the world's No. 2 agricultural power, might displace the United States as the top food producer within a decade.
The world's fifth-largest country, with a land area similar to the continental United States, could turn another 420 million acres into crops, according to the U.S. Agriculture Department. The United States has 250 million total acres of cropland.
Brazil is the world's top exporter of coffee, beef, sugar, ethanol, tobacco, poultry and orange juice.
"Sitting back home, looking at your 80 acres, you can't imagine what it's like to see tractors planting all the way to the horizon, then just disappearing," says Matthew Kruse, 26, a sixth-generation Iowa farmer who helps run an investor-backed farm. "There definitely is a lot of opportunity here that you'll not find in the United States anymore. Come down and see what you're up against." [/FONT]
2005-06-20 22:08 | User Profile
and meanwhile the UsA is paying folks NOT to farm...
Conservation Reserve Program -- Paying Farmers Not to Farm
The Conservation Reserve Program is the largest of the USDA's programs designed to keep the price of commodities high. Each year the USDA pays farmers nearly $2 billion to keep part of their land idle. Since the program began in 1986, the government has paid farmers to idle 36 million acres of farmland, an area the size of the entire state of Iowa. Taking such a huge chunk of farmland out of production restricts the supply of commodities, which ultimately raises their prices. Because of the USDA's supply control programs the consumer is forced to pay twice, once to the government and once at the check out line at the supermarket.
[url]http://www.consumeralert.org/issues/subsidy/farmbr.htm[/url]
:shocking:
2005-06-20 22:13 | User Profile
Remember that in June of 04 we stopped exporting food.
Oil now at $59.30.......get ready.
GM now giving the same discount to the public that they are giving their workers.......... the last huraaaaaaaaaa.
2005-06-20 23:56 | User Profile
They chopped the hell out of this article. There is a Brazilian legislator who introduced a bill to remove US patent protection if they didn't get their way. When asked if this was to put pressure on US corporations to get onto Bush he admitted that was the case. He said that evey day there was delay was costing Brazilian farmers money.
2005-06-21 00:01 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Petr].......Agriculture is booming in Brazil, and U.S. farmers are taking notice. Buffeted by high production costs, low market prices and the World Trade Organization, Americans increasingly look to low-cost, low-wage Brazil for economic survival.
Hundreds of U.S. farmers have visited the Brazilian states of Mato Grosso, Parana and Bahia the last two years. A few have spent millions to buy land and equipment and become Brazilian farmers. Others have put their money in U.S.-managed investment groups. For $25,000, an investor can own a piece of a 13,000-acre Western Bahia corn, cotton and soybean farm that promises a minimum 15 percent return. .......................
The world's fifth-largest country, with a land area similar to the continental United States, could turn another 420 million acres into crops, according to the U.S. Agriculture Department. The United States has 250 million total acres of cropland. [/QUOTE] I'm not really sure how the Brazilians make this kind of return on new cropland. Right now U.S. farmers can barely pay operating expenses on existing, prepared farmland. That's why in the U.S. marginal farmlands has been going out of cultivation for a long time now.
That's agricultural/commodity economics though. The scary thing for U.S. farmers is Brazil isn't even the only competitor. Canada and Australia are already tough. If the former Soviet Union could get its act together it would also be a big competitor. Together they could easily reduce all our farmers to running dude ranches and retirement estates. (Which they rapidly are becoming anyway).
Not that's its a great idea. Just as we are finding out with Saudi oil, there are a lot of hidden costs sometimes in importing a large part of your vital commodities.
2005-06-21 00:09 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Okiereddust]Just as we are finding out with Saudi oil, there are a lot of hidden costs sometimes in importing a large part of your vital commodities.[/QUOTE]
And the reason our Congress doesn't slap a big, fat tariff on these commodities being imported is...???
2005-06-21 00:17 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Texas Dissident]And the reason our Congress doesn't slap a big, fat tariff on these commodities being imported is...???[/QUOTE]I'm not sure what the exact terms and situation are, but you might start by looking at the legal obligations are country has toward fair trade after looking at the applicable provisions of NAFTA, GATT, the WTO, and any other similar treaties in force which are in force.
2005-06-21 00:25 | User Profile
The edited out part of the article stated it was under WTO rules this suit came about.
2005-06-21 00:37 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Texas Dissident]And the reason our Congress doesn't slap a big, fat tariff on these commodities being imported is...???[/QUOTE]
Tex? no one should place a tariff on food, we can do without oil,tv, dvd, cars and so on but not without food.
If anything that's a message that the US should acknowledg and do something about.....produce more food in the US of A.
2005-06-21 02:41 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Sertorius]The edited out part of the article stated it was under WTO rules this suit came about.[/QUOTE] So the Brazilians are already attacking the tiny protections we already have, under WTO? That figures. Good luck then getting tougher with them.
2005-06-21 03:42 | User Profile
Central America (Cemerica) and South America (Somerica) knows that the only way that they can get away form North America (Nomerica) is to create their own group and that way be strongher.
PS: Cemerica, Somerica and Nomerica are my domain names and for sell. :thumbsup:
2005-06-21 05:57 | User Profile
Well, Brazilian progress on this sector was to expected - do you think they are razing down Amazon just to annoy Greenpeace?
Petr
2005-06-21 06:33 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Petr]Well, Brazilian progress on this sector was to expected - do you think they are razing down Amazon just to annoy Greenpeace?
Petr[/QUOTE]Brazil does seem to be making a huge investment in the agricultural economy. I suspect it is because mass urbanization their has been such a disaster, with filled with shanty towns, street urchins, and some of the highest crime rates in the world. They made the committment to an ethanol fuel economy (which helps support agricultural prices) long ago, and now it seems to be paying dividends.
2005-06-21 07:45 | User Profile
[QUOTE=confederate_commando]Conservation Reserve Program -- Paying Farmers Not to Farm The Conservation Reserve Program is the largest of the USDA's programs designed to keep the price of commodities high.[/QUOTE]
I know someone who is paid "not to farm." He's not a farmer and he has a good income with what he does. He doesn't even know what it is that he's being paid not to farm. But, he acquired some farm land many hundreds of miles away from where he lives, and now gets government checks.
To make make this program even more bizarre, while one hand of government is trying to jack up commodity prices by lowering supply, the other hand is trying to drop commodity prices by subsidizing crop production.
2005-06-21 14:08 | User Profile
How many good harvests can be gotten off freshly-cleared forestland without use of expensive fertilizers?
2005-06-21 14:52 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Ponce]Tex? no one should place a tariff on food, we can do without oil,tv, dvd, cars and so on but not without food.
If anything that's a message that the US should acknowledg and do something about.....produce more food in the US of A.[/QUOTE]
Is it just me, people? :wallbash:
2005-06-21 15:35 | User Profile
duh? :wub:
2005-06-21 16:08 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Ponce]duh? :wub:[/QUOTE]
Ponch,
Since you are blond-hair, blue (green?)-eyed, son of an Irish mother and Cuban father, "hat in hand" immigrant to America and veteran, with numerous patents pending, inventor, living on an almost self-sufficient and secure refuge in the deep woods of Oregon, but still speaking a bit of broken English despite of what we all know is a good faith effort from a heart of gold, let me spell this out for you:
The reason we put up a tariff on imported commodities/food is to encourage our own domestic agricultural production, doofus. We should not be dependent on any other nation to eat or build weaponry (steel man.).
2005-06-21 20:04 | User Profile
[QUOTE=BrianTheDog]How many good harvests can be gotten off freshly-cleared forestland without use of expensive fertilizers?[/QUOTE]Good question - I always thought just a few years, re: the "slash and burn" farmers. This seems to be something entirely different.
Here's an odd link on Brazil agriculture I just happened to find. [url]http://www.wiley.com/college/kuby/0471400939/pdf/cows.pdf[/url] Note of course that most of this new farming investment seems to be underwritten by foreign, and often American, lending agencies of some sort. A fairly common occurrence actually when we see the emergence of vaunted foreign commodity producers.
If we subsidized Americans to grow, work whatever the same way we do foreigners we probably wouldn't have all these problems.
2005-06-21 20:13 | User Profile
Green eyes, only have two patents and none pending.....but did make my money with one of my inventions :thumbsup:
Tex? my point is that if the US does not make the food that we need and we have to importeted from the outside then it should not be "taxed', after all the consumer would be the only one to be hurt by this.
And besides, who do you think is going to get that "tariff"? the farmer in order to help them grow stuff? hellllllllllllllllllll no, that money goes into the coffer of the black hole of the government and no one sees it again.
The same as the billions paid by the tabacco companies, where did that money go to? did the smokers get any?......sure, the goverment place a few adds on radio and tv telling people not to smoke but where did the bulk of the monies went to ? :angry:
And about weapons, as long as we have the Jews as "friends" all our secrets and best weapons will continue to go to China......the state of Israel knows that the American people wont accept them for much longer and now they are getting ready in order to transit their "friendship" to China.
The same way that I don't blame the illegals for coming to America I don't blame the Jews for stealing our secrets and spying on us but I DO BLAME THE US GOVERNMENT FOR ALLOWING THIS TO HAPPEN :angry: :angry: :furious:
2005-06-21 20:42 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Ponce]Tex? my point is that if the US does not make the food that we need and we have to importeted from the outside then it should not be "taxed', after all the consumer would be the only one to be hurt by this.
And besides, who do you think is going to get that "tariff"? the farmer in order to help them grow stuff? hellllllllllllllllllll no, that money goes into the coffer of the black hole of the government and no one sees it again.[/QUOTE]
Forget I said anything, Ponch.
2005-06-21 23:55 | User Profile
Ponch <--------good show Charlie Brown :clown: