Tag Archives: mexican

Here’s a Great New Cause For the Tea Party

by CliftonBisdee Posted on October 2, 2014

Mother Jones

Harold Meyerson writes today about something called the Investor-State Dispute Settlement provision, a feature of most trade agreements since the Reagan administration. Basically, it means that if, say, a Mexican company objects to a regulation in Texas, it can sue Texas. But not in a US court. Instead the case is heard in a special extra-governmental tribunal:

The mockery that the ISDS procedure can make of a nation’s laws can be illustrated by a series of cases. In Germany in 2009, the Swedish energy company Vattenfall, seeking to build a coal-fired power plant near Hamburg, used ISDS to sue the government for conditioning its approval of the plant on Vattenfall taking measures to protect the Elbe River from its waste products. To avoid paying penalties to the company under ISDS (the company had asked for $1.9 billion in damages), the state eventually lifted its conditions.

Three years later, Vattenfall sued Germany for its post-Fukushima decision to phase out nuclear power plants; the case is advancing through the ISDS process. German companies that owned nuclear power plants had no such recourse.

After Australia passed a law requiring tobacco products to be sold in packaging featuring prominent health warnings, a Philip Morris subsidiary sued the government in Australian court and lost. It also sued the government through the ISDS, where the case is still pending. The health ministry in next-door New Zealand cited the prospect of a Philip Morris victory in ISDS as the reason it was holding up such warnings on cigarette packages in its own country.

Meyerson wants to know why Democratic presidents continue to support ISDS, but I’m more interested in why the tea party crowd hasn’t yelled itself hoarse over this. After all, this is a tailor-made example of giving up US sovereignty to an unaccountable international organization, something that normally prompts them to start waving around pocket copies of the Constitution and going on Hannity to complain that President Obama is trying to sabotage America. Agenda 21, anyone?

So why not this time? I guess it’s because ISDS is normally used by big corporations to challenge environmental laws. So which do you hate more? The EPA or an unaccountable international organization? Decisions, decisions….

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Here’s a Great New Cause For the Tea Party

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World Briefing: Mexico: Strides for Endangered Wolves

by Myrna Posted on September 3, 2014

Officials on Wednesday presented the first litter of Mexican gray wolves conceived in the country by artificial insemination, part of an effort to save one of the hemisphere’s most endangered animals. Read more: World Briefing: Mexico: Strides for Endangered Wolves

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World Briefing: Mexico: Strides for Endangered Wolves

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Three-Quarters of Mexican Child Migrants Have Been Caught at the Border Before

by CarmeloUBYX Posted on August 5, 2014

Mother Jones

Pew Research Center

While the focus of the recent border crisis has been on unaccompanied child migrants from Central America, thousands of Mexican kids also have been apprehended trying to cross into the United States since last fall. According to a new analysis by the Pew Research Center, the vast majority had been caught several times before—and 15 percent of them reported having been previously apprehended six times or more.


70,000 Kids Will Show Up Alone at Our Border This Year. What Happens to Them?


Map: These Are the Places Central American Child Migrants Are Fleeing


Why Our Immigration Courts Can’t Handle the Child Migrant Crisis


Are the Kids Showing Up at the Border Really Refugees?


Child Migrants Have Been Coming to America Alone Since Ellis Island

See MoJo‘s full coverage of the surge of unaccompanied child migrants from Central America.

The US Border Patrol made more than 11,300 apprehensions of unaccompanied Mexican child migrants from October 2013 to May 2014. Among the kids picked up, 76 percent said they’d been caught “multiple times before,” according to the Pew report, which is based on data provided by Mexico’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. As the map above shows, 64 percent of Mexican minors crossing alone came from six states: Tamaulipas, Sonora, Oaxaca, Guerrero, Guanajuato, and Michoacán.

Currently, child migrants from Mexico (and Canada) can be deported shortly after apprehension, unlike kids from elsewhere, who are reunified with US-based family while their immigration proceedings are pending. As I wrote last month in a post about why the federal government shouldn’t change the law to more easily deport Central American kids:

When an unaccompanied Mexican child is apprehended by the Border Patrol, agents are supposed to screen him within 48 hours. Specifically, they are supposed to determine three things: (1) whether the child has been the victim of trafficking; (2) whether the child has a fear of returning to Mexico; and (3) whether the child is able to voluntarily make the decision to return home. If the screening reveals that the child hasn’t been trafficked, isn’t afraid to go back, and can make the decision by himself, then he can be sent back.

In practice, says the ACLU’s Sarah Mehta, “when they’re happening, the screenings are inconsistent, but often they’re not happening.” Some agents don’t speak Spanish; in other cases, Mehta says, kids have reported not being asked any questions at all, or being told by agents that they can’t get deportation relief for whatever they experienced at home or along the way to the United States.

Perhaps not surprisingly, a UN Refugee Commission report claimed that more than 95 percent of Mexican children caught at the border by themselves in fiscal 2013 were returned to Mexico. If Mexican kids do have legitimate asylum claims, they’re likely not being heard, advocates claim. And when these kids do get sent back, many try to cross again.

Here’s another Pew chart, this one showing the numbers of unaccompanied child apprehensions by country of origin since 2009:

Pew Research Center

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Three-Quarters of Mexican Child Migrants Have Been Caught at the Border Before

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Why Are Immigration Detention Facilities So Cold?

by MarleneBrandenb Posted on July 16, 2014

Mother Jones

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In early 2013, three undocumented immigrants sued US Customs and Border Protection for abuse they suffered while spending days in custody. The three women claimed that CBP agents refused to give them soap or toothbrushes; sometimes, agents refused to feed them more than once a day. But the women’s biggest grievance was the unrelenting cold. “Her lips eventually chapped and split,” read one woman’s lawsuit. “The lips and fingers of her two sisters and her sister’s child also turned blue. Because of the cold, she and her sisters and her sister’s child would huddle together on the floor for warmth…There were no mattresses or blankets.”


70,000 Kids Will Show Up Alone at Our Border This Year. What Happens to Them?


What’s Next for the Children We Deport?


Map: These Are the Places Central American Child Migrants Are Fleeing


Why Our Immigration Courts Can’t Handle the Child Migrant Crisis


GOP Congressman Who Warned About Unvaccinated Migrants Opposed Vaccination

See MoJo‘s full coverage of the surge of unaccompanied child migrants from Central America.

If you’ve been following the immigration crisis at the Mexican border, you’ve probably heard about these freezing temperatures that migrants endure at border detention facilities. Migrants—especially unaccompanied kids—allege suffering a lot of harm at the hands of CBP agents: sexual assault, beatings, a lack of basic toiletries. But few forms of abuse are more pervasive than the hielera—the Spanish word for “icebox” that detainees and guards alike use to describe CBP’s frigid holding cells.

But why are CBP facilities so freezing?

The answer is elusive. That’s partly because CBP refuses to acknowledge that its detention facilities are consistently cold. Rather, the agency says that cells are kept at about 70 degrees, and it denies that its agents use the term “hielera.”

“We have heard those reports before, and you have to understand, when these folks come in from the desert, they’re hot,” a spokesman with CBP’s Rio Grande Valley sector told me. “They’re sweating…We’re not going to adjust the temperature for a each new group. It would work the system too hard.” He added that keeping the facility at 70 degrees helps control the spread of bacteria.

I replied that many detainees who complain of ice-cold temperatures have not come in from the desert—instead, they have been at a CBP facility for days. “We got that,” the spokesman says. “Sometimes, cells aren’t filled to capacity…and those people may say they’re a little cool.”

In informal talks, immigrant rights advocates say they have heard a different explanation. CBP officials will plead—truthfully—that their facilities were never designed to house migrants for more than a half day or so. And the cold is ideal for CBP agents who spend the day tramping along the border.

“You have agents that are wearing their boots, gear, and bulletproof vests and running around in the desert,” says Jennifer Podkul of the Women’s Refugee Commission. “A comfortable temperature for them is different for a person who’s been in the desert for several days, is wearing a tank top, and is very, very sweaty—and then sits there for two or three days…You wouldn’t believe the hours I’ve spent with CBP talking about the correct temperature.”

Migrants themselves have yet another theory: The cold is part punishment, part deterrent. A Fronteras Desk reporter spoke with an 18-year-old migrant who was detained by CBP along with his younger brother. When the boys complained of the cold, the young man recalls the guard sneering that “maybe we would think about it two times before trying to cross again.”

The specter of the hielera is so strong that even in the heat of summer, immigrants who previously have been detained report that they don’t leave home without a sweater—just in case they are picked up.

“The temperature makes a huge difference to their treatment,” Podkul says. “I’ve talked to children who took the toilet paper they got and laid it on the floor and laid down on that, because it’s one barrier between them and the cement floor.” In 2011, an advocacy group called No More Deaths took an anonymous survey of almost 13,000 former CBP detainees and found that 3,000 respondents had weathered extreme cold.

Like the three anonymous women who sued CBP last year, more and more former detainees are taking their claims to court. In June, Alba Quiñones Flores sued the agency after agents failed to treat her broken ankle and threw away her diabetes medication. CBP guards, she claims, made Quiñones and her cellmates beg for more toilet paper when they ran out. All of this happened, she says, in a holding facility kept freezing cold. Her description may sound familiar: “The cell was so cold,” her lawsuit says, “that Ms. Quiñones Flores’ fingers turned blue, and her lips split.”

Source: 

Why Are Immigration Detention Facilities So Cold?

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Mexican Government to Central American Migrants: No More Riding "the Beast"

by CorrineLey Posted on July 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Thursday, a freight train derailed in southern Mexico. It wasn’t just any cargo train, though: It was La Bestia—”the Beast”—the infamous train many Central American immigrants ride through Mexico on their way to the United States. When the Beast went off the tracks this week, some 1,300 people who’d been riding on top were stranded in Oaxaca.

How do 1,300 people fit on top of a cargo train, you ask? By crowding on like this:

Central Americans on the Beast, June 20. Rebecca Blackwell/AP

After years of turning a blind eye to what’s happening on La Bestia, the Mexican government claims it now will try to keep migrants off the trains. On Friday, Mexican Interior Secretary Miguel Ángel Osorio Chong said in a radio interview that the time had come to bring order to the rails. “We can’t keep letting them put their lives in danger,” he said. “It’s our responsibility once in our territory. The Beast is for cargo, not passengers.”

More MoJo coverage of the surge of unaccompanied child migrants from Central America.


70,000 Kids Will Show Up Alone at Our Border This Year. What Happens to Them?


What’s Next for the Children We Deport?


This Is Where the Government Houses the Tens of Thousands of Kids Who Get Caught Crossing the Border


Map: These Are the Places Central American Child Migrants Are Fleeing


“In Texas, We Don’t Turn Our Back on Children”

The announcement comes on the heels of President Obama’s $3.7 billion emergency appropriations request to deal with the ongoing surge of unaccompanied Central American child migrants arriving at the US-Mexico border. Many Central Americans take the trains to avoid checkpoints throughout Mexico—and the robbers and kidnappers known to prey on migrants. But riding the Beast can be even more perilous. Migrants often must bribe the gangs running the train to board, and even then, the dangers are obvious: Many migrants have died falling off the train, or lost limbs after getting caught by its slicing wheels.

Why, though, hasn’t the Mexican government cracked down sooner? Adam Isacson, a regional-security expert at the nonprofit Washington Office on Latin America, says the responsibility of guarding the trains often has fallen to the rail companies—who usually turn around and argue that since the tracks are on government land, it should be the feds’ problem. (Notably, the train line’s concession is explicitly for freight, not passengers.)

In his radio interview, Osorio Chang also signaled a tougher stance against Central American migrants, in general. “Those who don’t have a visa to move through our country,” he said, “will be returned.”

For more of Mother Jones‘ reporting on unaccompanied child migrants, see all of our latest coverage here.

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Mexican Government to Central American Migrants: No More Riding "the Beast"

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In Defense of "Flash Boys"

by Ethel3847dlr Posted on April 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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Felix Salmon reviews Michael Lewis’s Flash Boys today, and he’s not impressed. I think Salmon’s basic criticism is on point: the big problem with high-frequency trading isn’t that small investors get ripped off, it’s that the system is so complex that literally no one really understands how it works or what kind of danger it poses:

By far the biggest risk posed by the HFT industry, for instance, is the risk of the kind of event we saw during the flash crash, only much, much worse. The stock market is an insanely complex system, which can fail in unpredictable and catastrophic ways; the HFT industry only serves to make it much more brittle and perilous than it already was. But in Lewis’ book-length treatment of HFT, he barely mentions this risk: I found just one en passant mention of “the instability introduced into the system when its primary goal is no longer stability but speed,” on Page 265, but no elaboration of that idea.

HFT cheerleaders like to brag that their algorithms increase liquidity. And that’s probably true. The problem is that HFTs don’t guarantee liquidity. In fact, it’s far worse than that: they displace other sources of liquidity during normal times, but there’s a good chance that during a crisis, at precisely the moment when liquidity is most important, HFT traders could suddenly and systematically exit the market because events have outrun the parameters of their algorithms. This could easily spiral out of control, turning a bad situation into a catastrophe.

Is this a real threat? Nobody knows. And that’s the problem. HFT is so complex that literally no one knows how it works or how it will react in a crisis. This is not a recipe for financial stability.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t make for a very entertaining book, so Lewis instead focuses on the ability of HFT shops to “front run” orders in the stock market—that is, to see bids a few milliseconds before anyone else simply by virtue of having computers that are physically closer to a stock exchange than their competitors. An HFT algorithm can then execute its own order already knowing the direction the price of the stock is likely to go. But even though this isn’t the biggest problem with HFT, I do think Salmon is a little too dismissive of it. Here he is on the subject of Rich Gates, a mutual fund manager who discovered he was being front run

Gates “devised a test,” writes Lewis, to see whether he was “getting ripped off by some unseen predator.”….Gates “was dutifully shocked” when he discovered the results of his test: He ended up buying the stock at $100.05, selling it at $100.01, and losing 4 cents per share. “This,” he thought, “obviously is not right.”

Lewis does have a point here: It’s not right….In Gates’ mind, what he saw was the 35,000 customers of his mutual fund being “exposed to predation” in the stock market. Between them, those customers had lost $40: 4 cents per share, times 1,000 shares. Which means they had lost roughly a tenth of a cent apiece, buying and selling $100,000 of Chipotle Mexican Grill within the space of a few seconds.

But there’s always going to be a nonzero “round-trip cost” to buying $100,000 of a stock and then selling it a few seconds later….But still, $40 for two $100,000 trades is hardly a rip-off. Especially when you consider the money that Gates himself is charging his 35,000 mom-and-pop customers.

When Gates was running his experiments, his flagship fund, the TFS Market Neutral Fund, had an expense ratio of 2.41 percent: For every, say, $100,000 you had invested in the fund, you would pay Gates and his colleagues a fee of $2,410 per year. That helps puts the tenth of a cent you might lose on Gates’ Chipotle test into a certain amount of perspective. TFS trades frequently, but even so, any profits that HFT algos might be making off its trades are surely a tiny fraction of the fees that TFS charges its own investors.

MORE: Is High-Speed Trading the Next Wall Street Disaster?

That’s true. But the whole point of HFT has always been to skim tiny percentages from a large number of trades. Nobody has ever suggested that individual traders are losing huge amounts of money to HFT shops. Nevertheless, that’s no reason to downplay it. In fact, that’s one of the things that makes HFT so insidious: it’s yet another way for Wall Street players to game the system in a way that’s so subtle it’s hardly noticeable. This is the kind of thing that permeates Wall Street, and I think Lewis is correct to aim a spotlight at it.

There are plenty of reasons to be very, very wary of HFT. I wish Lewis had at least spent a few pages on the potential instability issues, but let’s face facts. Front running is a perfectly legitimate problem to focus on, and it’s likely to generate a lot more public outrage than a dense abstract about the possibility of robots causing a financial crash sometime in the dim future. So if you’re the rare person who can attract a lot of attention to a legitimate financial danger, it makes sense to write a book that concentrates its fire on the most accessible aspect of that danger. That’s what Lewis chose to do, and I don’t really have a problem with that.

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In Defense of "Flash Boys"

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Snow’s Melting in Alaska and Pelting the South. What’s Going On?

by LaurieBPKC Posted on January 29, 2014

Mother Jones

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This article originally appeared at Slate and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Earlier this month, squeals of delight (and/or searing pain) gripped much of the country as we were collectively introduced to the wonders of the polar vortex. But now the novelty’s over, and for the second time this month, an extreme weather pattern is sending Arctic weather toward the Deep South.

An uncommonly sharp kink in the jet stream is partly responsible for plunging more than half of the United States into the freeze. Meanwhile, (and for the same reason), Alaska is toasty warm. But we’ll get to that in a minute.

Satellite image shows the “Arctic blanket.” NOAA/NASA GOES Project.

Much of Alabama is currently under a “civil emergency” due to snow and ice. Interstates have been shut down, and traffic in Atlanta has slowed to a crawl. It’s almost like people there don’t know what to do anymore when winter arrives. #sneauxmageddon is already shutting down New Orleans, and nearly a foot of snow is on tap for the Carolinas by Wednesday morning. The bread and milk purveyors at Piggly Wiggly must be loving this, assuming they’ll be able to keep stores open.

Wind chills have already dipped below freezing all the way south to the Mexican border, and more than a half-inch of ice could cause widespread power outages from Mobile, Ala. across the Florida panhandle.

How’d we get to this point? Here’s the science.

A good measure of the magnitude of jet stream irregularity is the Arctic Oscillation, an indicator of short-term climate variability that, roughly speaking, tracks the strength of the jet stream. In extreme cases, like this week, the circumpolar jet stream—which typically locks the coldest of the cold air up by the North Pole where it belongs—can slow down and spill Arctic frigidity southward. The current Arctic Oscillation is even more negative than during the first polar vortex cold snap, earlier this month.

Research hints that this type of pattern can be triggered by the recent massive loss in Arctic sea ice due to the effects of human-induced climate change. One recent studywhich attempted to explain this counterintuitive “Warm Arctic—Cold Continents” phenomenon during similar patterns in the 2009-‘10 and 2010-‘11 winters called it “a major challenge” to understand, though the pattern is “consistent with continued loss of sea ice over the next 40 years.” Bottom line: Something weird is going on, but scientists are still trying to nail down exactly what it is.

In preparation for Tuesday’s polar weather, meteorologists have started a massive crash course in winter weather safety, lest millions of poor wayward souls abandon all hope for any shred of common decency (think: cats and dogs living together).

One such meteorological hero, Nate Johnson of WRAL-TV in Raleigh, N.C., sent out this helpful tip via Facebook:

“Best advice: By dinnertime tonight, be where you want to be (with whatever you need to have) through at least Thursday.”

Back in the day, cold weather wasn’t so rare down South. Earlier this month, Climate Central did an excellent survey of the dwindling frequency of extreme cold weather across the country, which even got picked up in an xkcd Web comic.

Chart by Climate Central.

Which brings us back to Alaska, where it’s currently more than a dozen degrees warmer than New Orleans. On Monday, Seward, Alaska hit 61 degrees and broke its daily record high by more than 20 degrees. Webcams across the southern part of the state showed snow melting down to bare ground over the weekend, with all-time January record high temperatures crushed and warm rain falling over the dwindling snowpack. As a result, the snow melted so fast that it triggered massive avalanches, cutting off the town of Valdez. A nearly unbelievable helicopter video went viral, showing the extent of the snow slide.

In comparison, Tuesday night’s snow dumping probably won’t even break the currentdaily record in Raleigh, where the biggest ever snowfall on Jan. 28 was 7.5 inches way back in 1899.

The current extreme warmth in Alaska is more typical of April and is essentially being stolen from California by the abnormally persistent jet stream that has dominated the winter so far.

Alaskans, break out the T-shirts, and Southerners, hunker down. Looking forward for the next week or two, there doesn’t seem to be any end in sight.

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Snow’s Melting in Alaska and Pelting the South. What’s Going On?

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My Glimpse Into the Zapatista Movement, Two Decades Later

by pela_elpol Posted on January 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Growing up in a well-heeled suburban community, I absorbed our society’s distaste for dissent long before I was old enough to grasp just what was being dismissed. My understanding of so many people and concepts was tainted by this environment and the education that went with it: Che Guevara and the Black Panthers and Oscar Wilde and Noam Chomsky and Venezuela and Malcolm X and the Service Employees International Union and so, so many more. All of this is why, until recently, I knew almost nothing about the Mexican Zapatista movement except that the excessive number of “a”s looked vaguely suspicious to me. It’s also why I felt compelled to travel thousands of miles to a Zapatista “organizing school” in the heart of the Lacandon jungle in southeastern Mexico to try to sort out just what I’d been missing all these years.

Hurtling South

The fog is so thick that the revelers arrive like ghosts. Out of the mist they appear: men sporting wide-brimmed Zapata hats, women encased in the shaggy sheepskin skirts that are still common in the remote villages of Mexico. And then there are the outsiders like myself with our North Face jackets and camera bags, eyes wide with adventure. (“It’s like the Mexican Woodstock!” exclaims a student from the northern city of Tijuana.) The hill is lined with little restaurants selling tamales and arroz con leche and pozol, a ground-corn drink that can rip a foreigner’s stomach to shreds. There is no alcohol in sight. Sipping coffee as sugary as Alabama sweet tea, I realize that tonight will be my first sober New Year’s Eve since December 31, 1999, when I climbed into bed with my parents to await the Y2K Millennium bug and mourned that the whole world was going to end before I had even kissed a boy.

Thousands are clustered in this muddy field to mark the 20-year anniversary of January 1, 1994, when an army of impoverished farmers surged out of the jungle and launched the first post-modern revolution. Those forces, known as the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, were the armed wing of a much larger movement of indigenous peoples in the southeastern Mexican state of Chiapas, who were demanding full autonomy from their government and global liberation for all people.

As the news swept across that emerging communication system known as the Internet, the world momentarily held its breath. A popular uprising against government-backed globalization led by an all but forgotten people: it was an event that seemed unthinkable. The Berlin Wall had fallen. The market had triumphed. The treaties had been signed. And yet surging out of the jungles came a movement of people with no market value and the audacity to refuse to disappear.

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My Glimpse Into the Zapatista Movement, Two Decades Later

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GMO corn crop trials suspended in Mexico

by Adriene56E Posted on October 17, 2013

GMO corn crop trials suspended in Mexico

By

Shutterstock

Sin maíz transgénico permitido.

Mexico, birthplace of modern maize, will remain (virtually) free of genetically modified varieties for now.

A moratorium on the growing of GMO corn has been in place in Mexico since 1988, but the government has recently made moves to allow the practice. That raised the ire of activists, farmers, and human rights groups — dozens of whom filed a lawsuit seeking to block field trials by Monsanto and other international companies.

Last week, a Mexican federal judge issued an order that suspends field trials from moving forward, citing risks of imminent environmental harm.

GMO corn imports will continue to be allowed. For Mexico, this is a battle over farming practices and environmental impacts, such as pesticide use and damage caused to insects; it’s not a fight about the safety of eating genetically modified food. From a report in Agriculture.com:

“The issue at hand relates to cultivation,” Andrew Conner, manager of global technology for the U.S. Grains Council told Agriculture.com Wednesday. …

The release of genetically modified corn is a controversial issue in Mexico, the birthplace of corn. It is the home to scores of traditional corn varieties as well as its wild grass ancestor, teosinte. And scientists have found low levels of modified genes in native corn, even though a moratorium on planting genetically modified corn has been in effect since 1998.

The Mexican government has been moving toward approval of planting genetically modified corn in an effort to increase the crop’s production in a nation that imports almost a third of the corn it consumes, mostly for livestock feed.

In a press release by La Coperacha, one of the NGOs involved in the lawsuit, human rights activist Miguel Concha said the ruling reflected the fact that Mexico is legally obliged to protect human rights from the economic interests of big business.

The groups say they aim to eventually turn the suspension into an outright ban.


Source
Acción colectiva de ciudadanos y organizaciones logra medida judicial histórica, La Coperacha press release
No export effect likely from Mexican GMO ban, Agriculture.com

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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GMO corn crop trials suspended in Mexico

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U.S. government is buying up $300-million sugar glut

by KathrynBetts Posted on October 9, 2013

U.S. government is buying up $300-million sugar glut

By

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“Take your kid to work” day at the USDA’s Washington headquarters.

Trick-or-treaters in waiting take note: The U.S. Department of Agriculture is buying up a stockpile of sugar, spending about $1 per American resident on a sweet bounty that it can barely give away.

That’s because the government has been promoting the planting of more sugar cane and sugar beet crops than the over-sugared country can bear. Meanwhile, the North American Free Trade Agreement has opened an import spigot that has seen Mexican sugar flowing unencumbered into the U.S.

To reduce the financial burden on the agricultural companies that planted all those unsellable, diabetes-inducing crops, the USDA is going on a sugar-buying binge. Bloomberg reports:

Since June, the sugar glut led the U.S. Department of Agriculture to buy sugar to prop up prices, sell it at a loss to biofuels producers and take steps to reduce imports. The efforts have barely dented the surplus.

“The government is still supporting growers to produce more sugar than we actually consume,” Arthur Liming, a Chicago-based futures specialist at Citigroup Inc., said in a telephone interview.

The total cost to the government of subsidizing the sugar industry for this year’s crops may be between $200 million and $300 million, according to Tom Earley, an economist with Agralytica, a food and agriculture consulting firm based in Alexandria, Virginia.

Imagine, just for a second, if it was a kale glut that we had to deal with — instead of life-shortening sugar. Leafy greens party in D.C., y’all!


Source
Government-Built Sugar Surplus May Cost U.S. $300 Million, Bloomberg

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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U.S. government is buying up $300-million sugar glut

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