Eric Holt Gimenez over at Food First sent along this wee nugget from Grand Island, Nebraska.
It's a story about biofuels, based on a report from, er, the American Meat Institute, which ascribes the rise in the price of meat to biofuels. The estimates per animal are striking: "the costs [are] 53 cents per chicken; $3.40 per turkey; $38 per hog and $117.50 per fed beef animal." These are the costs associated with higher corn-feed for the animals, the price of which has been driven up by the US governments hare-brained biofuels schemes.
But statistics, like love, is a battlefield. Later in the report, we learn from Ron Litterer, president of the National Corn Growers Association (NCGA, that "too often, corn and ethanol demand are blamed for high food prices overall".
And this is the bit that interests me. We know that there's a great deal of environmental harm in meat consumption. Biofuels are clearly bonkers. So what are we to do to drive down the amount of harm caused through the production and consumption of meat?
The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals have an idea: a meat tax. I was initially attracted to it -- I think there are some interesting similarities between a meat tax and a cigarette tax.
But if there are, then the more progressive case is not to tax the consumers of the offending goods, but the producers. This is why the cigarette class-action settlements were so very important, and why similar action is warranted around meat manufacture. Just as with cigarettes, the revenue could be used to help steer folk away from steers, and guide us, through active public policy, toward sustainable food.
For the working poor, the price of food is getting higher, and there's no sign that wages are catching up. Another tax on already-expensive food doesn't seem to be the answer. Active politics that targets the profiteers, on the other hand, offers many reasons to cheer.
And, like it or not, the market has a role to play here. One of the deep problems is that the price of energy doesn't reflect its social and environmental costs - a Pigouvian carbon tax would be the way to go. This would, I suspect, also bump up the price of meat (since most meat is produced unsustainably). To offset this kind of tax, a great deal of redistribution would be required. But it's the kind of redistribution, living in a world of profound inequality, that's long overdue.
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Ch.5. Corporations in Agriculture | Ch. 9. Geography, Taste, Aesthetics, Obesity, Body Image | agrofuels | biofuels | meat | United States
Posted on 20 March, 2008 - 22:32
Bingo, Gyan.
There's a great deal of anxiety in the press about the growth in food demand from developing countries. But the concern concentrates on the fact that there are many more people in these countries than in the US, and wondering what the consequences are of many people consuming a little bit more, rather that asking the harder question of why so few are able to consumer a great deal more.
Always easier to rely on thinly-veiled racism than to face these tough home truths.
Hi,
If the producer is taxed, won't they simply pass on the cost to the consumer?
Beezle
You're right, Beezle. There's no reason to think that the corporations that get taxed in this way, the ones that are forced to adhere to the polluter pays principle, won't pass the costs on to consumers.
But in a sense, consumers are *already* paying a tax on food - the price has soared in the past year.
That's a windfall profit for those who are able to reap the rewards in the food system, those people unlikely to be small farmers and the landless. Targeting these profits isn't a bad way to go, particularly if the benefits are very specifically designed to be redistributive.
We've seen governments do exactly this with oil windfalls (Thatcher frittered it away in Britain, for instance). And since food is increasingly a by-product of oil, it seems only reasonable to take a slice of those profits, and funnel them back into the communities most hurt by them. No?
You aren't even allowed to butcher your own cows on your own farm anymore, tan your own hides, convert their own trees into lumber for farm use, or distill ethanol from farm waste for supplementary fuel.
What would the specific implementation of a 'meat tax' on producers be? a per-head tax on cattle? A per-head tax to take it to the slaughterhouse?
A 'meat tax on producers' sounds like a typical reactionary band-aid solution, which like all 'solutions' developed by out of touch ivory-tower urban intellectuals, screws the smallholder harder than it will ever impact the 'corporation'.
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Hello Raj,
Very good blogs. What is the state of ecological footprint in North America when compared to China and India? These days I often hear from the western media that the recent food crisis is also due to the economic boom and the growth of the new consuming middle class in these two countries. How true is this fact-wise? And why don't the western media say anything on conspicuous consumption that marks consumer capitalism of North America? Does this not indiacte the same kind of blame game that an imperialist power always uses to correct and discipline the rest of the world?
Thanks,
Gyan