Author: rickpace1

Farm Free or Die

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New Englanders have never been shy about revolting against what they see as unfair food regulations. Remember that whole thing?

So perhaps it’s not so surprising that in Maine, towns have been staging another revolution: They’ve declared independence from state and federal regulations on locally produced foods.

In May, the tiny Isle of Haut became the tenth town in the state to pass what’s known as a food sovereignty ordinance. Essentially, these resolutions claim that small local food producers don’t have to abide by state or federal licensing and inspection regulations if they are selling directly to consumers.

The NPR Report

Slave Labor and the Food You Eat

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A recent briefing paper by the International Labor Rights Forum and the Warehouse Workers United noted labor abuses at Thai shrimp producer, Narong Seafood, which has been a major supplier to Walmart and a leading shrimp processor for the U.S. market. But despite the prevalence of abuse, the paper recommends that Walmart not drop Narong as a supplier, but instead “work with labor and human rights activists in Thailand to ensure the rights of the workers who produce shrimp for Walmart in Thailand are respected.”

Forced labor, including debt bondage, also continues to sustain palm oil plantations in Malaysia, also on the Tier 2 Watch List, and Indonesia. (Palm oil is used in lots of processed foods, from Dunkin Donuts to Girl Scout cookies.) Cargill, the largest importer of palm oil and trader of 25 percent of the world’s palm oil supply, says it has a policy of not using any slave or child labor. But the Rainforest Action Network has alleged that one of Cargill’s palm oil suppliers used slave labor on the island of Sumatra in Indonesia.

Even in the U.S., food workers aren’t exempt from abuse and even slavery. As our NPR colleague Yuki Noguchi last month, men with intellectual disabilities who worked at an Iowa turkey-processing plant suffered severe verbal and physical abuse for over 20 years. A jury eventually awarded the men approximately $3,000,000, the largest jury verdict in the history of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

The NPR Article

How many slaves work for you?

http://slaveryfootprint.org/

Rural Ethics and Risk Management

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This is a lovely, thoughtful article about West, Texas.

The Article

Having sat through last week’s tragedy in Boston (with a daughter’s apartment abutting Watertown) I became acutely aware of the ‘uncertainty’ of urban areas….and the limitations of even masses of good-willed police and soldiers.

The article is an affirmation of the comfort provided by small communities.

The U.S. Economy and the Federal Debt

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I’ve been doing some research on the Federal debt based upon the current arguments of conservatives about U.S. government debt reduction. I’ve also been interested in the portion of our current debt resulting from the Iraq/Afghanistan Wars and the Bush Era tax cuts.

First…an article with valuable graphic on government debt as a function of several factors.

The Article

My question is “Are we in financial trouble?”.

Since 1900 we’ve only seen three periods with increases in federal debt as a percentage of GDP comparable to the period beginning in 2009 – World War 1, The Great Depression, and World War 2.

The graphs in the article show total debt as a function of several factors – the Iraq/Afghanistan Wars and the Bush Era Tax Cuts are two of those factors. It also shows projected debt out to 2019.

Next, a link to data on Federal budget, with a number of valuable graphs.

The Link

I’m interested in your opinion.

Monsanto, Soybeans, and an Indiana Farmer

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What does a Supreme Court case about the sale of soybean seeds have to do with life sciences? A lot, says the U.S. Solicitor General and life sciences attorneys.

Bowman v. Monsanto concerns farmer Vernon Hugh Bowman who bought seed from one of Monsanto’s licensed seed producers and did a first and then, much later, a second seeding. Monsanto claimed Bowman had infringed the patent and the technology agreement that was in force when he had purchased the seed. The lower courts found there had been infringement.

The “first sale” or “patent exhaustion” doctrine provides that the first unrestricted sale by a patent owner of a patented product exhausts the patent owner’s control over that particular item. Bowman petitioned the Supreme Court for review, arguing that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit erred by refusing to find patent exhaustion in patented seeds after an authorized sale and by creating an exception to the doctrine of patent exhaustion for self-replicating technologies. Against the SG’s advice, the court granted review.

In his amicus brief to the court filed Jan. 8, the SG argued that the Federal Circuit’s ruling that patent exhaustion did not apply should be affirmed and stated that not affirming the ruling would also affect the “enforcement of patents for man-made cell lines, DNA molecules, some nanotechnologies, and other technologies that involve self-replicating features.” Companies marketing patented recombinant plasmids and transformed cell lines capable of replication “would lose much of their value if purchasers of patented bacteria or other self-replicating products could reproduce and sell those items free from the restraints of patent law,” the SG wrote.

Howard Bremer told BNA that the court’s affirming the Federal Circuit’s ruling would be the best solution and would prompt the continuation of the “motivation factor for the private sector to license self-replicating technologies for development and marketing under the auspices of licensing arrangements with universities and thereby serve the public interest.”

This is a case to watch.

(Source: Bloomberg News)