Tim Worstall

Nearly half of all towns have at least five supermarkets within a ten-minute drive.
We clearly have a highly competitive retail sustem.
Thus everyone can stop droning on about the overweening power of the supermarkets.
For you can’t have both: both a competitive system and also market or pricing power.

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This is interesting.
Talking about how “foreigners” are setting up big commerical farms in Africa, displacing peasant farmers without compensation. Interesting for a number of reasons, the first being Paul Collier’s insistence that such large scale farming is exactly what Africa needs. Yields are typically two to three times higher which, even after exports, means more [...]

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It is hardly surprising, then, that out of every pound spent in a supermarket, only 8p makes it back to the farmer.
Perhaps it is a shocking figure.
I wasn’t aware that farming is so easy that it adds very little value while the logistics of supply and retailing were so difficult that they add a lot [...]

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Well, yes, umm….
Stephen and Sarah Nunn are believed to be the first people to sell olives grown in Britain……The couple’s glass-covered grove has yielded 200 kilos of olives, which are worth a total of about £4,000 and are being sold for £3.50 pounds per 100g, four [...]

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Ban butter to save thousands of lives, says heart surgeon
Doctors demand ban on ‘damaging’ trans fats
Do make up your minds guys.

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Much to my surprise the answer might in fact be yes.

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For this looks like one of he great opportunities of our time.
Ethiopia’s great land lease project is moved swiftly ahead. In an effort to introduce large-scale commercial farming to the country, the government is offering up vast chunks of fertile farmland to local and foreign investors at almost giveaway rates. By 2013, 3m hectares of [...]

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The cost-cutting zeal of the big chains is threatening our farmers’ livelihoods
And the zeal of consumers for cheap furniture is threatening cabinet makers’ livelihoods and the zeal of the consumer for cheap cars is threatening motor industry workers’ livelihoods and the zeal of the consumer for cheap clothing has entirely wiped out the livelihoods of [...]

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Even the barley barons, whom you might expect to be rolling in the predicted boom in cereal prices, speak through gritted teeth. They are adjusting to a new era of extreme price volatility – fantastic if, like the Cambridgeshire magnifico Oliver Walston two years ago, you’ve managed to sell your wheat for £200 a tonne; [...]

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Now have EU protected status.
I’d never actually heard of Cornish sardines, had to go and look it up.
Ah, you mean pilchards then?

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Err, yes, and?
After all, bacon is far more important in our lives: we might have one, two or three or so babies but anyone with a well rounded diet will have, ooooh, 18,250 or so bacon sandwiches in their lives.
It’s also important that they smell different of course for identification purposes: babies are terribly difficult [...]

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India has urged the West to give up eating beef to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions responsible for global warming.
A couple of minor points: firstly, where will all the organic fertiliser come from if there’s no livestock and secondly, the figures used are for intensive feedlot operations: not for the pasture grazing which 60% of [...]

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Yeah, right.
Hugo Chávez calls for dieting in streets of Caracas
Fat is a socialist issue, says president as Venezuelans pile on the pounds
Nothing at all to do with having entirely cocked the agricultural and food distribution systems with price controls.
Oh no siree, nothing at all.

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Scurvy is back:
However, newly released statistics show that the number of children admitted to hospital with scurvy soared by over 50 per cent in the past three years.
Released following a parliamentary question, the figures show that in 2004/05 there were 61 children admitted with scurvy in England.
But by 2007/08, the latest year for which figures [...]

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Blimey:
Children as young as eight who drink milk every day have a lower body mass index than those who drink the low fat variety, according to the study from Gothenburg University in Sweden.
The new study found that children who drink full fat milk weigh on average [...]

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Earlier this week I wondered whether those figures for grain and meat production actually applied to all meat of just to US style feedlot operations.
What Stern appears not to have grasped is that different forms of livestock agriculture produce greenhouse gases in different measure and some do not produce them at all. As [...]

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Friends of the Earth report:
….could leave UK consumers forking out almost £6.50 for a loaf of bread and more than £18 for a pint of beer by 2030,
Apparently they seem to think that Labour are going to win the next few elections. That’s the only way we’d get that much inflation isn’t it?
H/T El Ingles.

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Well, not quite, but Ambrose EP predicting a huge advance in commodity food prices. The major point:
The UN says global farm yields must rise 77pc, which means redoubling Norman Borlaug’s “green revolution”.
That’s a cumulative rise I think, to 2050. So a doubling (ish) of global yields in 40 years. Seems high?
I wouldn’t [...]

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About GM crops:
Nor have they so far shown much sign of feeding the world. Contrary to widespread belief, they do not generally increase crop yields, and may actually cut them. And because the world’s poorest farmers – who make up most of the world’s underfed – [...]

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OK, so Asda has cut the price of bananas. Cue people going bananas about this. How will the workers be able to live at these prices and so on. Best bit:
The Fairtrade Foundation has attempted to protect smaller growers by setting a minimum guaranteed price paid to its farmers. The system seemed to work with [...]

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