Firm conclusions based on total guesswork

From The Guardian:

The climate crisis is already eating into the output of the world’s agricultural systems, with productivity much lower than it would have been if humans hadn’t rapidly heated the planet, new research has found.

Advances in technology, fertilizer use and global trade have allowed food production to keep pace with a booming global population since the 1960s, albeit with gross inequities that still leave millions of people suffering from malnutrition.

But rising temperatures in this time have acted as a handbrake to farming productivity of crops and livestock, according to the new research, published in Nature Climate Change. Productivity has actually slumped by 21% since 1961, compared to if the world hadn’t been subjected to human-induced heating.

And from Nature.com itself:

Abstract

Agricultural research has fostered productivity growth, but the historical influence of anthropogenic climate change (ACC) on that growth has not been quantified.

We develop a robust econometric model of weather effects on global agricultural total factor productivity (TFP) and combine this model with counterfactual climate scenarios to evaluate impacts of past climate trends on TFP. Our baseline model indicates that ACC has reduced global agricultural TFP by about 21% since 1961, a slowdown that is equivalent to losing the last 7 years of productivity growth.

The effect is substantially more severe (a reduction of ~26–34%) in warmer regions such as Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean. We also find that global agriculture has grown more vulnerable to ongoing climate change.

Is there any part of this whatsoever that doesn't scream 'total guesswork'? You can't just add up inputs and assume a linear rise in outputs. Your factors are land, water and sunshine, seeds, labour, machinery, other capital and fertiliser, it's all trade-offs. How on earth do you ascribe one set of relative values? Machinery will be used if it is cheaper than using labour, so you use more tractors in high-wage countries and more labour in low wage countries.

Using 'enough' fertiliser will get you an optimum result; there is no point using more than that because the extra yield does not justify the extra cost. And the extra yield depends on how much you can sell your produce for. All plants require a minimum amount of land to grow, although you can enhance that by building greenhouses and polytunnels etc.

Billions of farmers worldwide have been making these calculations since farming was invented and they seem to have got it right most of the time. Somehow or other, food production has always kept pace with population growth (by definition) and there's no reason to assume that this won't continue for the foreseeable future.

There used to be famines all the time, but there haven't been many in the past couple of decades apart from those imposed by governments (North Korea) or warfare. Sure, there are droughts, floods and outbreaks of pests now and then, here and there, always have been and always will, but you don't read about hundreds of thousands or millions of people starving to death like you did for most of the 20th century.

So sorry, really not bothered.

Sexy bagels!

Here's a flyer we received this morning. The front seems innocent enough:
That can't be said for the reverse:

"Meat plants likely source of any coronavirus second wave"

From The Evening Standard:

Asked during a London Assembly investigation into coronavirus for the most likely sources of future outbreaks in the capital, Professor Fenton, the London director of Public Health England, said vigilance was needed in hospitals, care homes and people returning to the UK after foreign travel.

But he highlighted food factories as an “emerging area” of concern because of the proximity of workers to each other and the low pay, meaning staff were unlikely to be able to afford to self-isolate at home if they fell sick.

Outbreaks have been seen in food factories in Wales and Yorkshire, and in Germany, France, Spain and the US.

Interesting, the link is quite striking.

Prof Fenton thinks that the type of people who work there are the common denominator (see also - care home workers). Last month, Sky News quoted an expert who thought it was a combination of close proximity of workers and the fact that these places are kept so cold (not good for immune system).

The other possible link is the animals and meat themselves, as these outbreaks don't seem to happen in other frozen food factories. Which would sort of prove the militant vegetarians right. Oo-er.

Slaughterhouse 5 - maybe the vegetarians have a point

Is there a pattern emerging here..?

From the BBC: Many experts think Covid-19 likely originated in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, which has been linked to early confirmed cases. While not a wet market in the strictest sense, reports suggest the market was selling wildlife, including snakes, porcupine and deer.

BBC 13 June: Chinese officials aren't sure how the huge Xinfandi wholesale market - which supplies 80% of Beijing's vegetables and meat - has become the source of a new coronavirus outbreak.

BBC 17 June: Thousands of people in Germany have been told to go into quarantine after a coronavirus outbreak at an abattoir. More than 650 people have tested positive for the virus at the meat processing plant in Gütersloh, in the north-west of the country.

BBC 19 June: A coronavirus outbreak at a meat factory was shrouded in "secrecy", it has been claimed. Health Secretary Matt Hancock revealed at Thursday's daily briefing there had been cases in Kirklees, West Yorkshire.

BBC 19 June: Schools in Anglesey will not reopen as planned, after an outbreak of coronavirus at a meat processing factory. All staff at the 2 Sisters chicken factory, in Llangefni are self-isolating after 61 workers tested positive.

Sky News gives a possible explanation:

People working in refrigerated environments in food factories could be at a higher risk of contracting coronavirus, a microbiologist has told Sky News...Dr Simon Clarke, a microbiologist at the University of Reading, told Sky News: "There are two possible explanations. The first one is that people aren't observing proper distancing and working together. But then if that were the case, why would you see it only in food processing plants and not other factories?"

"I think a more likely explanation may well be the cold - these places tend to be refrigerated. If these places are refrigerated, do you get an increased susceptibility to infection like you get during the winter with the cold? The truth is, we don't really know. But my suspicion is it's got something to do with the cold, refrigerated environment in food factories."

Yeah but no but. I don't think that the Chinese wholesale/wet markets are refrigerated, and I'm not aware of any outbreaks in frozen vegetable or ice cream factories, so the common link is the animals, living and dead. There was also an outbreak in a factory in Wrexham that makes ready meals so I assume that meat involved.

Ceteris Paribus

From here

Me: "[famers] can put up greenhouses anywhere (as long as it's not too steep). Mushrooms grow underground."

Bayard: "You still have to grow plants in something. If it was more economical to grow fruit and veg in polytunnels, everyone would be doing it already."

Well not necessarily.

The point was that dairy farmers claim to be worried about Brexit, for some reason they say milk prices will fall if they can't export it as easily, ignoring the fact that the UK might well be importing less milk and milk products as well, so it would largely cancel out and might even go in their favour.

But let's assume they are right.

The economics is this:

At present, with milk prices as they are, the most profitable use of a certain field is dairy. Putting up polytunnels to grow fruit and veg is less profitable. More income but more expenses. So the rational thing to do is dairy.

If milk prices fall sufficiently, dairy will less profitable or even loss making. At which stage, polytunnels and fruit and veg is the more profitable alternative. Probably not for Welsh hill sides used for insanely unprofitable sheep farming, but the best use for those hill sides is just let trees grow on them (or whatever grows naturally on Welsh hill sides).

Plus I'm not sure Bayard is even right. Take a train across the Netherlands and the entire countryside (the small gaps between towns) appears to be covered in polytunnels. And, despite being such a small country, the Netherlands is the second largest food exporter in the world (the article has a photo of the one single field not covered in polytunnels or surrounded by housing).

I'm not "eating crisps"...

... I'm "staying carbohydrated".

Cheap food

I was listening to Radio 4 today and there was an article on cheap food, which mentioned, inter alia, that the government has a policy of keeping food cheap, to the detriment of farmers in particular and others in general.

This is something my mother had been wont to bring up now and again since my childhood and for some time I wondered why.

However, my wondering ceased when I heard on Radio 4 a few months ago that 100 years ago, on average, 20% of the expenditure of the poor went on rent and 50% on food. Now it's the other way around. A similar point is made in this article.

So basically, farmers are kept poor and subsidised, we eat rubbish food and animals are reared in inhumane conditions so that landlords can grow rich, but, of course, it's never put like that.

Nobody move or everybody starves to death!

From the BBC:

A no-deal Brexit threatens the UK's food security and will lead to higher prices and empty shelves, retailers are preparing to warn MPs...

If the UK were to revert to WTO rules, the retailers warn that would "greatly increase import costs that would in turn put upward pressure on food prices"...

The letter spells out the UK's food relationship with Europe, with nearly one third of the food in the UK coming from the EU.

*sigh*

I can't track down the actual wording of the letter, which was no doubt a bit more nuanced than the BBC claim.

1. At worst, one-third of shelves will be empty. let's not forget that Norway and Switzerland seem to manage somehow, it can't be insurmountable.

2. What retailers should have said (and quite possibly, did say) is "Dear Government, for the time being, whatever happens with Brexit, can you please exempt food imports from any sort of quotas and duties and ensure that Customs wave through anything that was clearly grown in an EU Member State?".

This in turn boils down to "Dear Government, please make sure that nothing changes post-Brexit".

"Do nothing" should always be first on the list of options to be considered, and in the circumstances, would clearly be the best for all concerned.

Reader's Letter of Last Week

From The Metro:

If the Supreme Court finds that Daniel and Amy McArthur discriminated for refusing to do a 'gay cak' (Metro, Wed), does this mean halal butchers can be forced to provide port to customers if asked?

Anon.

Possibly not the best analogy, but surely there is a Muslim cake shop somewhere we could use as a test-case? Ask them to lace a cake with alcohol and decorate it with a pig?

"Restaurant diner cheesed off by Asda baked camembert"

From The Times:

A diner who ordered a £13 baked camembert at a restaurant was served one costing £1.15 from Asda which was still in its round supermarket box. Emma Daniels chose the sharing starter at Severnshed to eat with her partner.

It arrived on a board with bread, chutney and the cooked cheese sitting upside down inside the Asda wrapping. She went on the TripAdvisor website on Saturday and left a two-star review for the Bristol restaurant.

OK, it was a bit naff to leave it in the supermarket box, rather than prising it into a "terracotta dish", but apart from that, so what? Don't people know that when you eat in a fancy restaurant, the retail price of the food you eat is only 10% - 20% of the final price of the meal incl. VAT and tip?

Either it tasted nice or it didn't, end of. The £13 price is meaningless, they chose to pay that much.

Unless this is all a clever ASDA marketing campaign..?

Fun with numbers (race to the bottom)

From The Evening Standard:

Fast-food takeaways will be banned from opening within 400 metres of schools in a bid to tackle the capital’s child obesity epidemic.

In addition, all new chicken, fish and chip and pizza outlets will have to sign up to minimum healthy food standards before getting planning permission. Sadiq Khan will announce the policy in his draft London Plan, the capital’s “planning bible”, due to be published later this week.

You know the answer is going to be 'zero', but let's do the numbers.

400 yds = 366 metres.

A circle with a radius of 366m has a surface area of 420,000 sq m = 0.42 sq km.

There are approx. 3,700 schools in Greater London (24,372 x 8 million/53 million).

3,700 schools x 0.42 sq km = 1,554 sq km.

Surface area of Greater London 1,569 sq km

I was a bit slow on the uptake here.

Dan Cookson beat us all to it, and even the BBC has pointed out that "In some parts of London, the only places that new fast food outlets would theoretically be allowed are in the middle of parks or the River Thames."

"It’s not a takeaway when we do it, say middle class people"

This bit from an article by The Daily Mash has me slightly worried:

Museum curator Helen Archer said:

“The news about these awful diets is so sad. I’m just glad it’s something that I’m able to avoid. I’m super busy so I’m always on Deliveroo – usually Szechuan, pan-Indian, or Five Guys – but it’s not really comparable, because when it arrives I put it on plates.

We get takeaways every week or two (usually Chinese or Indian, like everybody else) but we always serve it nicely on plates and use cutlery, why would you not? They put it all into separate plastic tubs, so you have to, unless you want to alternate between spoonful of rice from one tub and spoonful of sauce from the other.

Does that mean we are middle-class? If we get fish and chips, we use the fish forks and fish knives, maybe that'll help you answer the question.

Nobody move or the fry-up gets it!

The Guardian makes itself look stupid.

Not sure even George Osborne's Evening Standard would stoop that low.

Economic Myths: "We all hate wasting food"

Quite clearly we don't, or we wouldn't do it, but people keep bringing up the topic, so here goes...

For example, they have posters up at my local Tesco saying Love Food Hate Waste. They had a segment on a recent Food Unwrapped programme (which are very interesting programmes on the whole) where one of them was interviewing a farmer who employs people to sort carrots for the supermarkets. About a third of them are not 'supermarket quality' i.e. long, straight and easy to peel and these are chucked on a huge pile and sold for animal feed etc.

The presenter then got on his Righteous Horse, bagged up some of the odd-shaped ones and got permission to sell them in a supermarket for half the price of the long, straight ones. "They taste just as good as the long straight ones", he explained breathlessly to a few Righteous Shoppers who bought them.

1. Well of course they taste the same, that's not the issue here - they just aren't as easy to peel and chop. Peeling and chopping carrots is a chore and you want to get it done as quick as poss, so people who value their own time are quite happy to pay double for fairly uniform, long, straight ones.

2. It's like pre-washed lettuce. If we were given bags of unsorted carrots, assuming that people value their own time, it would make economic sense to buy more than you need, peel and chop the easy ones and chuck the rest in the compost. There is simply no point faffing about for ten minutes rescuing ten pence worth of carrots.

3. Farmers are businesses like anybody else, and of course there are unwanted by-products. They are quite happy to throw away all the carrot leaves, the odd-shaped carrots are just a by-product, the same as the leaves.

4. In theory, farmers could reduce their carrot production by one-third, see a corresponding fall in income and use the spare land for growing something else. We have to assume that markets have sorted that out and that growing more carrots (even if a third end up being sold for pennies) gives them the most extra income compared to growing more of something else. So in economic terms, this is not waste - they are maximising the value of their output.

"Morrisons raises Marmite price by 12.5%"

Says the BBC.

Why is this a headline? Didn't everybody panic buy a year's supply a week or two ago?

Notwithstanding the stuff is wholly UK made and not imported anyway...

Fun Online Polls: Politicians, sugar & "hard" brexit.

The results to last week-and-a-half's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

Which of these politicians avoids sugar?

Jeremy Corbyn - 54%
Nigel Farage - 6%
Both - 16%
Neither - 24%

A bit of an anorak question, but 16% of participants got the right answer. Well done!

Top (and only) comment:

View From The Solent: Who cares?

Answer = not many. Only 50 people took part and only 16% of those chose the right answer (and one of them was me). It was multiple choice, so if people had chosen an answer at random, 25% would have chosen the correct one :-)
-------------------------------------------------
The gamble which some Brexiteers made appears to have paid off in some quarters, pint-sized former French president M. Sarkozy has said that if re-elected he would offer the UK a new treaty for a new Europe.

Clearly he could't care less about British votes, so presumably what he means is a new deal which will  favour France generally, the UK tangentially and placate some potential Le Pen voters. Former Tory leader 'Lord' Howard stretched his head out of his earth-filled coffin and "described the terms “hard” and “soft” Brexit as unnecessary and unhelpful."

In which he would be correct. So that's this week's Fun Online Poll.

"Which kind of Brexit would you like?"

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Stupid advertising slogan

The one for Quorn, where Mo Farah is running a burger van has annoyed me for ages. The slogan is:

"When healthy food tastes great, you forget it's healthy"

This slogan makes more sense if you invert it completely:

"When unhealthy food tastes great, you forget it's unhealthy"

"When booze tastes great, you forget it will give you a hangover"

"When you're high on opioids, you forget that an overdose can kill you"

Etc etc etc.

Nobody move or the Cornish Pasty gets it!

... says View From The Solent, who spotted this in The Register:

Any reader who's still undecided as to how to vote in the forthcoming, and increasingly tedious, EU referendum, should consider a Brexit future without the culinary protection afforded us by membership of the happy European family of nations.

Last week, the Cornish Pasty Association came out in favour of Britain remaining in the European Union, because "after working so hard for so many years to gain recognition for the Cornish pasty through the EU Protected Food Names scheme, it would be wholly inappropriate for it to support anything that could potentially impact on that status".

In a brief statement, association chairman Jason Jobling said: "As an organisation that has benefitted from the EU protected food names system, and no clear evidence available to demonstrate that Brexit would enable that protection to continue, the CPA supports Britain remaining in the EU and being able to participate in that system."

Protected Geographical Status is indeed an typical EU protectionist thing.

But... from Wiki:

This regulation (enforced within the EU and being gradually expanded internationally via bilateral agreements between the EU and non-EU countries) ensures that only products genuinely originating in that region are allowed to be identified as such in commerce.

So if we want to protect our pasties, all we have to do is sign up and preserve the status quo.

(If we didn't sign up, then UK producers would be able to use all the other protected names and sell their produce to non-EU countries, probably a net gain for them overall, and I can't see the EU letting us get away with that.)

Nobody move or your ice cream gets it!

Via MBK, from politico.eu:

“Take one of our … products, Magnum,” Polman said, sending a (raspberry) ripple through the Brexit debate. “If you have trade restrictions, because undoubtedly if the U.K. will leave the conditions will not be as good as if they stay in. That is a fact that I think is broadly accepted.”

“How does that affect ice cream?” asked Channel 4 News anchor Jon Snow.

Polman’s chilling response was: “For example, you will have import duties on dairy; anybody from outside the EU has import duties that could be up to 40-50 percent. So the price of dairy products will go up, the price of ice cream will go up, and ultimately the consumer will pay the price for that.”

He's taking it as a given that the UK would impose import duties on milk from overseas, false assumption, fail.

And it's a good thing the internet never forgets, from The Guardian five months ago:

Unilever, the consumer goods group behind Persil and Magnum ice-creams, has said it will not scale back its UK operations if Britain votes to leave the EU.

The comments from Paul Polman, the chief executive of the Anglo-Dutch business, echo those of Akio Toyoda, his counterpart at Toyota, who said the Japanese carmaker would continue to produce cars in Derbyshire even if Britain left.

In an interview with the Guardian, Polman said Britain should remain in the EU, but that Unilever’s UK sites, including three research and development centres, would not be affected by a vote to leave. “The effectiveness of my research centre is the quality of the people I have there and the ideas coming out in terms of the innovations that we produce. We don’t make a decision on moving research centres around depending on if you are in the EU or not,” he said.

BBC Recipes

From the BBC

The BBC Food website carrying more than 11,000 recipes is to close as part of a plan to cut £15m from the corporation's online budget, a BBC source has said.

All existing recipes are likely to be archived, though whether some could move to the commercial BBC Good Food website is still to be decided. TV show recipes will be posted online but only made available for 30 days.

The BBC source said online services had to be "high-quality, distinctive, and offer genuine public value".

Which is why this makes sense. There are plenty of sources for recipes out there: food.com, epicurious, Martha Stewart, food network, all recipes, Delia Smith, netmums, cbc, as well as bloggers and food companies and supermarkets giving recipes away. There's nothing distinctive about the BBC's recipes, nothing superior about them.

And they might look free, but they aren't. They're free at the point of access. You don't directly pay for them. But your license fee is, and anyone who wants to watch live TV is forced to pay for a license fee, regardless of whether they then use BBC services. We don't force people who read the Guardian to pay for the Daily Mail. We respect that there are market choices. Now, there are things that count as public service TV - things that the market won't provide. We might include things like parliamentary broadcasting, or CBeebies, but it's clear that the market will provide recipes for creme brulee or coq au vin, so we don't need to have the BBC doing it. We can allow people to choose who provides it.