Some Medical Bureaucrats Can Help

I run a Google Alert for "bureaucrats". Here's a link to someone with a sense of humor, dealing with medical bureaucracy on a matter of life and death. People are amazing. And so is Quality Management.

Education States

The NY Times had a report on education statistics, including these numbers.

A couple things struck me--in 10 years there will be no majority group in school--whites will be a minority like everyone else. And about 40+ percent of kids qualify under the food lunch program. And 56 percent of college students are women.

Decline Is Everywhere

I almost linked to an article in the Herkimer NY paper about a meeting on the closing of the Herkimer office. But I'm tired of the stories, as important as they are for the people affected. Other things arouse emotion as well--including the timing of the 200th anniversary of the founding of the place, as described in this NYTimes article today. (They picked a date that happens to be Yom Kippur.)

But decline is also found among other organizations than FSA--this piece from the Jewish Forward describes the decline in Buffalo:

In the recent decades since advances in technology and competition from abroad sounded the death knell for the industries that provided employment for the Rust Belt states of the Northeast and the Midwest, states that have lost major parts of their population to the Sun Belt, once-thriving Jewish communities in those regions have seen thousands of members head south and west. The Northeast and Midwest, where 80 percent of American Jewry lived as recently as 1960, now is home to barely half of American Jews, according to the latest National Jewish Population Survey.

For JCCs, synagogues and other communal institutions, this drop in members and in income has meant drastic, often painful, belt-tightening measures: mergers, downsizings and property sales and closures.

“The local Jewish community,” a front-page article in The Buffalo News states, “is adjusting to dramatically reduced numbers.” That means less money for Jewish federation fundraising campaigns, fewer volunteers for synagogues and other organizations, and smaller enrollments in religious schools.

And just recently there was an article on the "Odd Fellows" a fraternal and charitable organization that's composed of old fogeys like me. It's the nature of society to have this ebb--not that it's any consolation to those being washed out by the tide.

Decline of Wonder Bread

LA Times has an article on Wonder Bread--it's closing its local plant. Californians prefer upscale, perhaps more healthy brands. Is there a convergence between French and Americans re: bread?

[The other question inquiring minds want to know: why the hell am I suddenly so interested in food?]

Pigford Perspectives II

Apparently the theory of the original lawsuit is the disproportionate decline in black farmers must be the result of racism. From the EWG's 2004 report:

"In part due to lack of equal access to USDA loans, the number of farms operated by African Americans has declined dramatically over the past 20 years, plummeting from 54,367 in 1982 to just 29,090 in 2002."[My emphasis added.]

I'm not aware of, and can't google up, any reports on the reasons for the decline so there's no way to know whether racism is 99 percent of the cause or some lesser proportion. [Side note: The academic and government researchers I ran across in my casual googling seem usually to ignore race in their analysis. That may be a real bias--seldom asking the question of whether there is a real difference based on race. Or it may just be my incompetence at searching. ]


Let's say the drop in farms is caused as follows:

50 percent due to lack of equal access to USDA credit. A followup question is what caused the lack of access. I'll leave that for other posts.

50 percent due to other causes, such as:

• general trend of declining farm numbers
• smaller farms (i.e., blacks may have had smaller farms to begin with, and smaller farms may have failed more often than large farms)
• less capital (a variant of the "smaller farms" argument)
• poorer land (i.e., when black farmers were acquiring land from 1865 to 1920, they may have been less able to buy the good land)
• less and poorer education (I'm assuming fewer black farmers went to college and perhaps those that did got a poorer education than their white counterparts--would you rather go to Texas A&M or Delta State?)
• bias among the bankers (of course, Farmers Home/FSA was supposed to be the lender of the last resort)
  
• bias among suppliers--the general agribusiness community (might particularly include co-ops, which have been important in farming. When did many white southern co-ops open their doors to blacks?)
  
• poorer location (a variant of the poorer land, but this would consider things like access to railroads and roads to get crops to market, attractiveness to labor, etc.)

After listing all the causes, I'm not willing to rate the USDA/FSA problems as 50 percent of the cause. Are you?

On Reading RightWing Blogs

I do occasionally read right wing blogs. Take this excerpt:

"The central element ... is land ownership. There's nothing more primordially American, more conducive to the spirit of self-reliance and pride that fuels this country's origin myths, than cultivating one's own piece of land. Today more than ever."

A sentiment to warm the cockles of the heart of every libertarian (that's if libertarians actually had a heart).

Unfortunately, the omitted words are "in making urban ag sustainable, according to the Food Project," and the piece is from the green/lefty GRistmill.

My Fantasy Life

As befits a bureaucrat, my fantasy life is dull, dull, dull. One of the livelier parts is imagining returning to college (mostly to get free access to some interesting journal articles that aren't publicly available. Never have, never will.

But I might just follow Professor DeLong and his class on American economic history. Here's his lecture notes for the first class. One interesting point--he cites corn as having a 40 to 1 yield ratio, compared to wheat's 5 to 1. (At least back in 1800 or so.) Sounds questionable to me, but I never had to deal with either.

French Bread

Dirk Beauregard tells us lots about the current state of French bread, bakeries, and its price (rising).

The View from Europe

This is late, but here's an excerpt from a post on the blog of the EU's secretary of agriculture (that's how I interpret her role). It relates to a visit in February that she made to DC. (Her blog is interesting--she responds to the questions/comments of some of the farmers who write in.)

"I’ve just come back from almost three days in a freezing cold Washington DC.
It was an extremely educational visit – hopefully for my hosts as much as for me.
But it was also a reality check.
We have talked at length in Brussels about the importance of farm subsidy reform in the US for the future prospects of the Doha trade round.
We have looked to the new US Farm Bill proposals to give a clear signal that reform is on the horizon.
My discussions in Washington showed that the Farm Bill will be written very much with domestic concerns in mind.
DOHA does not seem to be high on the agenda in farm bill discussions.
This is a very different approach to ours, where we reform first and then look to lock these reforms into a WTO agreement.
I was also struck by the fact that many of the forces that today shape European agriculture policy – consumer interest, environmental considerations, budgetary pressure, development policy - seems strangely absent from the American debate. It’s farming interest – and increasingly also energy (biofuels) that is shaping policy. Could you imagine that in Europe?
I like the straight talking you hear on Capitol Hill. But it brings home to me clearly how different the political process in Washington is to that I know so well in Brussels.
Of course there were bright spots.
Crucially, my visit was an important exercise in confidence-building.
Deal-making is so much easier if the people facing each other across the table know and like one another.

"One Stop Shopping"

I remember, vaguely, when the Farm and Home Center was built on Upper front Street in Broome County. This piece discusses the closing of the FSA office (no mention of the NRCS office's fate). The statistics are interesting--farms and acreage up, but program participation down. I suspect that's common throughout the area. The urbanites are buying land in the sticks for their hobby farms (lots and lots of vineyards around the Finger Lakes, there was one--Taylor--in 1959). "Hobby" is a bit pejorative, but it's the closest term I've run into.