Farm & Food File
A syndicated column by Alan Guebert
Finance
Mexico’s election delivers new leader to tackle old problems
Posted on August 2, 2024
Farm and Food File for the week beginning Sunday, June 23, 2024
While Americans still face a long season of political campaigning, more than 80 other nations have completed their federal elections this year or are about to go to the polls.
For example, France’s general elections will be held June 30, the United Kingdom’s on July […]
The failure to learn history’s simple lessons
Posted on August 2, 2024
Farm and Food File for the week beginning Sunday, May 5, 2024
Long before it became a cliché, there were many heroes who never wore capes.
I met one: the rail-thin, then-86 year old Theodore W. Schultz, in his sun-filled, University of Chicago office on a cold, January day in 1989, a decade after he had been awarded a Nobel Memorial […]
How to win the SAF game: Part 2
Posted on August 2, 2024
Farm and Food File for the week beginning Sunday, April 28, 2024
Federal policymakers and their Big Ag friends have a problem: Their hope to make corn and soybeans the feedstock for sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) hit a wall when the aviation industry ruled that biofuel from either crop did not meet its “sustainable” guidelines. As such, there would be […]
How to win the SAF game: Part 1
Posted on August 2, 2024
Farm and Food File for the week beginning Sunday, April 21, 2024
The easiest way to win any game is to rig the rules.
That’s what Big Ag and its loyal boosters at the Department of Agriculture (USDA) appear to be doing to make sure their new project, Sustainable Aviation Fuel, or SAF, a hoped-for 3-billion-gallons-a-year jet biofuel market by 2030 […]
Another $1 billion to refinance status quo won’t stop avian pandemics
Posted on August 2, 2024
Farm and Food File for the week beginning Sunday, April 7, 2024
When word came out of Texas on April 1 that avian flu had made another unwelcome hop–this one from a dairy cow to a human–the news seemed like an April Fool’s joke.
It wasn’t. In fact, highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI or bird flu), the quick-killing […]
‘Right to Repair’ Fight Between Farmers and Machinery Giants is Just Getting Started
Posted on April 10, 2023
Before a January “memorandum of understanding,” or MOU, on a farmer’s “right to repair” his farm machinery, U.S. equipment makers and their farm and ranch customers were locked in a legal and legislative fight over who could fix today’s complex ag machinery–the customer who owned or leased it, or the maker that designed, built, and […]
It Will Take Guts to Fix Our Abusive, Cheap Food and Illegal Labor System
Posted on April 10, 2023
Less than a month after the revelation that a Wisconsin-based contractor, Packers Sanitation Services, Inc. (or PSSI), had illegally hired at least 102 teenagers between ages 13 and 17 to clean some of the nation’s most profitable industrial meatpacking plants, one middle school child at the center of the story has, according to a March […]
Biggest Foreign Owner of ‘Ag Land’ Isn’t Who You Think
Posted on April 10, 2023
If an editor used standard punctuation to relate the emotion expressed by Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst in a recent Capitol Hill discussion of foreign ownership of U.S. land, it would look something like this:
“… foreign persons hold an interest in approximately 40! Million! Acres! Of U.S. ag! Land! That’s more total acres than make up […]
Commodity markets see winter thaw, securities markets remain in deep ice
Posted on February 22, 2023
As 2023 searches for a toehold, both the commodities and securities markets continue on the paths plowed for them by last year’s larger-than-expected inflation, Russia’s brutal war, a likely surge in the global pandemic, and a growing power vacuum in American politics.
Securities markets hated 2022’s bad news and most market indices hit yearly highs in […]
You’re a Neoliberal, I’m a Neoliberal, We’re all Neoliberals–For Now
Posted on January 6, 2023
For almost 50 years, the world has gotten faster, richer, and–yes–fatter. The power behind all that (ahem) growth has been neoliberalism.
It’s not a political label or a personal slander. Instead, as author Rana Foroohar explains in her new book, Homecoming, neoliberalism is “an economic and political philosophy that capital, people, and goods should be able […]