“I do all my own milking and everything,” Rice told a couple during the weekly market at Town Center in Virginia Beach. Her business, Shady Goat Farm, just received the first cheese-making license in Hampton Roads in late June.
“That’s fantastic,” said Tabitha Lilly, who had strolled over with her husband and 2-year-old son. As she left Rice’s stand, the 31-year-old Virginia Beach mom said she tries to buy as much food from local purveyors as possible.
“In the summer, I think 80 percent of my pantry is local goods,” she said. “I’d rather pay a little extra and know what I’m getting.”
Small-scale growers, artisanal foodmakers and at-home producers all over Hampton Roads are finding success serving an expanding number of consumers like the Lillys, who try to buy their food from suppliers close to home.
Selling local has become a viable business proposition – no longer just a labor of love or a feel-good venture. These operators are starting up at a more rapid pace and watching sales climb as a result of their local flavor. Some are breaking even or making a profit for the first time after years of operation.
“We’re self-sustaining now,” said Alison Wilson, who operates Full Quiver Farm in Suffolk with her husband and nine children. Selling pasture-raised meat and eggs full-time since 2008, Full Quiver enhanced its on-the-farm sales with a table at the Old Beach Farmers Market on 19th Street and Cypress Avenue on Saturdays. “Our business has doubled here this year.”
Sales made from Virginia farms directly to consumers – mostly through farmers markets and community-supported agriculture programs – increased by 72 percent, from $16.8 million in 2002 to $28.9 million in 2007, according to “Virginia Farm to Table,” a report released this year by Virginia Cooperative Extension, Virginia Tech and Virginia State University.
Those numbers likely have climbed to $30 million or more, said Eric Bendfeldt, chief author of the report and the extension’s specialist for community viability, though he had no recent data. Besides consumer purchases, more institutions such as schools and hospitals are emphasizing local products, he said.
“The trend for buying local has really taken off in the past four years,” said Bendfeldt, who works in Harrisonburg. “The growth is happening so quickly that it’s hard to keep up.”
A greater emphasis on food safety – spurred by reports of contamination at corporate farms in recent years – has contributed to the growing numbers of those who prefer to eat locally, said Rachel Burns, director of Buy Fresh Buy Local Hampton Roads. The belief that products that travel shorter distances generally taste better and a desire to support businesses in the local economy are other factors feeding the “locavore” movement.
FoodRoutes Network, a Millheim, Pa.-based group that launched the Buy Fresh Buy Local organization 12 years ago to support locavore activity, has increased its chapters by 50 percent since 2007, Burns said. Chapters now top 70 in 20 states.
“People are looking for it,” Burns said. “It is a lot easier to get your product to market than it was five to 10 years ago.”
In April, Rice quit her job as director of development for the local chapter of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society to focus on Shady Goat Farm. Her husband, Tim, supports the venture by working as a government contractor doing software training, currently at a hospital in Afghanistan.
They estimated that their investments in milking and pasteurizing equipment, alterations to their Indian River Road property to meet state requirements, and animal care have totaled about $50,000.
“We had to know that it would be a marketable product,” Rice said. “We’re not huge risk-takers. We wanted to make an educated decision on our future.”
Rice isn’t the only Virginia cheesemaker who saw this as the right time to launch. For about 25 years, the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services licensed only one or two operators under its Farmstead Cheese Program. In 2005, the program had issued 13 permits, a number that has since grown to 27 as of March.
Just as crucial as consumer demand to the small suppliers’ boom in business is having the channels to reach those customers – mostly through farmers markets. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the number of farmers markets operating nationwide grew 17 percent between 2010 and 2011, to 7,175 as of last year. That marked a 63.6 percent increase in five years.
In Virginia, the farmers markets listed with the Virginia Grown program of the state Agriculture Department have more than doubled since 2006, from 88 to 208, said Elaine Lidholm, the department’s spokeswoman. Most communities in Hampton Roads have at least one farmers market, and many have several that operate at least once a week.
This year, Jessica Harkness and Kristal Miller started the weekly Farmers’ Fare market in East Beach to give local food to that and nearby neighborhoods in Norfolk, where residents previously had few options other than supermarkets. “That was important to me, to fill the gap,” said Harkness, who lives in the nearby Bayview area.
The market has attracted shoppers who express gratitude that they can find items such as eggs and meat, seafood, produce, baked goods and ice cream near their homes and “not have to drive to Pungo to the farm itself,” she said.
Outdoor seasonal markets aren’t the only way for small suppliers to sell their goods. Year-round small grocers have popped up, such as Westside Produce & Provisions on Colley Avenue in Norfolk, offering local fruits and vegetables, seafood, baked goods, jam, honey and soaps made within 100 miles.
Coastal Farms LLC launched its online, year-round farmers market in April 2010 to gather the bounty across Hampton Roads. Members who pay a six-month fee can place orders and pick them up at locations in most of the region’s cities.
“We work with a lot of small farms that wouldn’t necessarily have the amounts to sell at a farmers market,” said Kimberly Atkinson, who left her job at Windsor Elementary School to start Coastal Farms, which she envisions helping those budding operators build a customer base. “Our business is just one more little tool that they can put in their pocket.”
Greater access to retail customers has changed the scope of Don Edmonds’ business. About 15 years ago, when Edmonds Farm started selling bison meat in Lancaster, on the Northern Neck, most of his customers were restaurants – many of which were reluctant to take his product.
“I would seriously have to put on a suit, show up at restaurants, bring the meat” and show them how to cook it, he said.
Now, his sales at three weekly farmers markets leave him with too little supply to commit to restaurants or stores, some of which have b
egged
him for product. His herd has grown from about a dozen bison to more than 75.
At the Old Beach market, in the parking lot of Croc’s 19th Street Bistro, a pound of Edmonds’ ground meat costs $8.50, and filet mignon goes for $28.99 a pound. This year, Edmonds said, his sales about doubled from two years ago and he might cover his costs for the first time.
“I wouldn’t have the clientele base without it,” Edmonds said of the growth in farmers markets, as he folded up his Old Beach table at noon on a recent Saturday. “I have to do a lot of educating about the meat and the animal. I couldn’t do that on the farm.”
The value of selling local isn’t lost on big retailers and national restaurant chains. Discount giant Walmart, fast-food operator Chipotle and regional grocer Harris Teeter all have promoted programs for locally grown produce. Larger operators tend to define “local” as coming from producers within the same state as the store, while groups such as Buy Fresh Buy Local and some farmers market operators limit the “foodshed” to a 100-mile radius.
BJ’s Wholesale Club rolled out its Farm To Club program last year in Florida and worked its way up the East Coast, reaching Virginia stores just two weeks ago.
The chain added “locally grown” signs and package stickers on at least five products – including peppers, squash, eggplant and corn – identifying the farms within the state that grew them, said Dominic Viglione, a produce buyer for the retailer, based in Westborough, Mass.
BJ’s sales on those vegetables jumped after the “local” labels appeared, Viglione said. “Our sales were up 27 percent in units and 21 percent in dollars” in North Carolina. Georgia stores saw an 84 percent increase in unit sales and 64 percent in dollar value.
Some of those stores already were getting the vegetables from local farmers. “We never called out the fact that it was locally grown,” he said of the new marketing. “It has just drawn incredible attention.”
Laura Habr, co-owner of Croc’s and a co-founder of the Old Beach market, agreed that the marketing of the locally sourced elements of her menu “makes good business sense for us.” Customers frequently tell her that they come to the restaurant because of its local items, which include Virginia Pork Chili Verde using meat from Full Quiver Farm.
“They wanted to try us and support us,” she said, “and it has brought them back.”
On a recent Saturday at the Old Beach market, Rice sold out of her goat cheese in just over an hour. At her table, she displays several goat-farming and goat-cheese books, including her text from Goat School, a two-week class in Maine that she took in 2010.
That’s when she decided to try her hand as a hobby farmer, making her own cheese, butter and milk. She shared her chevre (French for goat cheese) with friends, who insisted that she should offer it commercially.
She sells plain and flavored goat cheese, infused with herbs or nuts and honey, in 4-ounce cups for $8 each and slabs of feta cheese for $9 or $12 marinated, plus goat cheese truffles in chocolate and lemon.
She now has 24 goats, as well as free-range chickens supplying eggs, and milks every day at 5 a.m. and 5 p.m. It’s a hefty commitment, but Rice foresees a payoff, particularly with no other cheesemaking competition in Hampton Roads – for the moment.
“If there was anytime to do it,” she said, “it was going to be now.”
U.S. Slaps Tariffs on Washing Machine Imports
in Uncategorized/by MAM Team07/30/12
Daewoo received an 82 percent duty for its Korean-produced washers, while LG and Samsung were hit with tariffs of 12.2 percent and 9.6 percent respectively.
Samsung and Whirlpool subsidiaries in Mexico were also given 72 percent duties.
In all, South Korea and Mexico combined to produce around $1 billion worth of large residential washing machines that were exported to the U.S. – $434 million from Mexico, and $569 million from Korea.
Whirlpool had complained last year that rival manufacturers were selling washers below market value in the U.S., and receiving subisidies from their home countries.
In a Monday statement, a Whirlpool spokeswoman said that the Michigan-based manufacturer felt vindicated by the Commerce Department decision.
“Whirlpool is committed to building products in the regions where they are sold and investing in our U.S. manufacturing presence,” said the spokeswoman, Kristine Vernier. “Our investments will continue as long as we can compete on a level playing field, with all of our foreign competitors playing by the established rules.”
Whirlpool also said that it had stopped shipping washing machines from Mexico to the U.S., and expects to make close to 100 percent of the large washers it sells in the U.S. in 2013 in Ohio.
Samsung also said that it had stopped producing washers in Mexico, and said that the government’s decision was based on a faulty methodology.
“Samsung strongly disagrees with this finding, and it is confident that once the final phase of the investigation is completed, the Department of Commerce will determine that Samsung has not engaged in dumping and is in compliance with U.S. trade laws,” a company spokesperson said in a statement.
The federal government is expected to make its final decision in the case in December.
Sales Explode as ‘Buy Local’ Movement Grows Up
in Uncategorized/by MAM TeamThe Virginian-Pilot
July 30, 2012
At a small table surrounded by a crowd at the Ynot Wednesdays? Farmers Market, Shannon Rice offered samples of her goat cheese infused with herbs or sun-dried tomatoes.
“That’s fantastic,” said Tabitha Lilly, who had strolled over with her husband and 2-year-old son. As she left Rice’s stand, the 31-year-old Virginia Beach mom said she tries to buy as much food from local purveyors as possible.
“In the summer, I think 80 percent of my pantry is local goods,” she said. “I’d rather pay a little extra and know what I’m getting.”
Small-scale growers, artisanal foodmakers and at-home producers all over Hampton Roads are finding success serving an expanding number of consumers like the Lillys, who try to buy their food from suppliers close to home.
Selling local has become a viable business proposition – no longer just a labor of love or a feel-good venture. These operators are starting up at a more rapid pace and watching sales climb as a result of their local flavor. Some are breaking even or making a profit for the first time after years of operation.
“We’re self-sustaining now,” said Alison Wilson, who operates Full Quiver Farm in Suffolk with her husband and nine children. Selling pasture-raised meat and eggs full-time since 2008, Full Quiver enhanced its on-the-farm sales with a table at the Old Beach Farmers Market on 19th Street and Cypress Avenue on Saturdays. “Our business has doubled here this year.”
Sales made from Virginia farms directly to consumers – mostly through farmers markets and community-supported agriculture programs – increased by 72 percent, from $16.8 million in 2002 to $28.9 million in 2007, according to “Virginia Farm to Table,” a report released this year by Virginia Cooperative Extension, Virginia Tech and Virginia State University.
Those numbers likely have climbed to $30 million or more, said Eric Bendfeldt, chief author of the report and the extension’s specialist for community viability, though he had no recent data. Besides consumer purchases, more institutions such as schools and hospitals are emphasizing local products, he said.
“The trend for buying local has really taken off in the past four years,” said Bendfeldt, who works in Harrisonburg. “The growth is happening so quickly that it’s hard to keep up.”
A greater emphasis on food safety – spurred by reports of contamination at corporate farms in recent years – has contributed to the growing numbers of those who prefer to eat locally, said Rachel Burns, director of Buy Fresh Buy Local Hampton Roads. The belief that products that travel shorter distances generally taste better and a desire to support businesses in the local economy are other factors feeding the “locavore” movement.
FoodRoutes Network, a Millheim, Pa.-based group that launched the Buy Fresh Buy Local organization 12 years ago to support locavore activity, has increased its chapters by 50 percent since 2007, Burns said. Chapters now top 70 in 20 states.
“People are looking for it,” Burns said. “It is a lot easier to get your product to market than it was five to 10 years ago.”
In April, Rice quit her job as director of development for the local chapter of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society to focus on Shady Goat Farm. Her husband, Tim, supports the venture by working as a government contractor doing software training, currently at a hospital in Afghanistan.
They estimated that their investments in milking and pasteurizing equipment, alterations to their Indian River Road property to meet state requirements, and animal care have totaled about $50,000.
“We had to know that it would be a marketable product,” Rice said. “We’re not huge risk-takers. We wanted to make an educated decision on our future.”
Rice isn’t the only Virginia cheesemaker who saw this as the right time to launch. For about 25 years, the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services licensed only one or two operators under its Farmstead Cheese Program. In 2005, the program had issued 13 permits, a number that has since grown to 27 as of March.
Just as crucial as consumer demand to the small suppliers’ boom in business is having the channels to reach those customers – mostly through farmers markets. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the number of farmers markets operating nationwide grew 17 percent between 2010 and 2011, to 7,175 as of last year. That marked a 63.6 percent increase in five years.
In Virginia, the farmers markets listed with the Virginia Grown program of the state Agriculture Department have more than doubled since 2006, from 88 to 208, said Elaine Lidholm, the department’s spokeswoman. Most communities in Hampton Roads have at least one farmers market, and many have several that operate at least once a week.
This year, Jessica Harkness and Kristal Miller started the weekly Farmers’ Fare market in East Beach to give local food to that and nearby neighborhoods in Norfolk, where residents previously had few options other than supermarkets. “That was important to me, to fill the gap,” said Harkness, who lives in the nearby Bayview area.
The market has attracted shoppers who express gratitude that they can find items such as eggs and meat, seafood, produce, baked goods and ice cream near their homes and “not have to drive to Pungo to the farm itself,” she said.
Outdoor seasonal markets aren’t the only way for small suppliers to sell their goods. Year-round small grocers have popped up, such as Westside Produce & Provisions on Colley Avenue in Norfolk, offering local fruits and vegetables, seafood, baked goods, jam, honey and soaps made within 100 miles.
Coastal Farms LLC launched its online, year-round farmers market in April 2010 to gather the bounty across Hampton Roads. Members who pay a six-month fee can place orders and pick them up at locations in most of the region’s cities.
“We work with a lot of small farms that wouldn’t necessarily have the amounts to sell at a farmers market,” said Kimberly Atkinson, who left her job at Windsor Elementary School to start Coastal Farms, which she envisions helping those budding operators build a customer base. “Our business is just one more little tool that they can put in their pocket.”
Greater access to retail customers has changed the scope of Don Edmonds’ business. About 15 years ago, when Edmonds Farm started selling bison meat in Lancaster, on the Northern Neck, most of his customers were restaurants – many of which were reluctant to take his product.
“I would seriously have to put on a suit, show up at restaurants, bring the meat” and show them how to cook it, he said.
Now, his sales at three weekly farmers markets leave him with too little supply to commit to restaurants or stores, some of which have b
egged
him for product. His herd has grown from about a dozen bison to more than 75.
At the Old Beach market, in the parking lot of Croc’s 19th Street Bistro, a pound of Edmonds’ ground meat costs $8.50, and filet mignon goes for $28.99 a pound. This year, Edmonds said, his sales about doubled from two years ago and he might cover his costs for the first time.
“I wouldn’t have the clientele base without it,” Edmonds said of the growth in farmers markets, as he folded up his Old Beach table at noon on a recent Saturday. “I have to do a lot of educating about the meat and the animal. I couldn’t do that on the farm.”
The value of selling local isn’t lost on big retailers and national restaurant chains. Discount giant Walmart, fast-food operator Chipotle and regional grocer Harris Teeter all have promoted programs for locally grown produce. Larger operators tend to define “local” as coming from producers within the same state as the store, while groups such as Buy Fresh Buy Local and some farmers market operators limit the “foodshed” to a 100-mile radius.
BJ’s Wholesale Club rolled out its Farm To Club program last year in Florida and worked its way up the East Coast, reaching Virginia stores just two weeks ago.
The chain added “locally grown” signs and package stickers on at least five products – including peppers, squash, eggplant and corn – identifying the farms within the state that grew them, said Dominic Viglione, a produce buyer for the retailer, based in Westborough, Mass.
BJ’s sales on those vegetables jumped after the “local” labels appeared, Viglione said. “Our sales were up 27 percent in units and 21 percent in dollars” in North Carolina. Georgia stores saw an 84 percent increase in unit sales and 64 percent in dollar value.
Some of those stores already were getting the vegetables from local farmers. “We never called out the fact that it was locally grown,” he said of the new marketing. “It has just drawn incredible attention.”
Laura Habr, co-owner of Croc’s and a co-founder of the Old Beach market, agreed that the marketing of the locally sourced elements of her menu “makes good business sense for us.” Customers frequently tell her that they come to the restaurant because of its local items, which include Virginia Pork Chili Verde using meat from Full Quiver Farm.
“They wanted to try us and support us,” she said, “and it has brought them back.”
On a recent Saturday at the Old Beach market, Rice sold out of her goat cheese in just over an hour. At her table, she displays several goat-farming and goat-cheese books, including her text from Goat School, a two-week class in Maine that she took in 2010.
That’s when she decided to try her hand as a hobby farmer, making her own cheese, butter and milk. She shared her chevre (French for goat cheese) with friends, who insisted that she should offer it commercially.
She sells plain and flavored goat cheese, infused with herbs or nuts and honey, in 4-ounce cups for $8 each and slabs of feta cheese for $9 or $12 marinated, plus goat cheese truffles in chocolate and lemon.
She now has 24 goats, as well as free-range chickens supplying eggs, and milks every day at 5 a.m. and 5 p.m. It’s a hefty commitment, but Rice foresees a payoff, particularly with no other cheesemaking competition in Hampton Roads – for the moment.
“If there was anytime to do it,” she said, “it was going to be now.”
About Carolyn Shapiro
Contact info:
757-446-2270
carolyn.shapiro@pilotonline.com
U.S. Raises Tariffs on Chinese Wind-Turbine Makers
in Uncategorized/by MAM TeamPublished: July 27, 2012
The finding is the fourth this year in favor of American wind and solar manufacturers and is likely to intensify tension with the Chinese, who have been rapidly expanding manufacturing capacity for alternative energy technologies and flooding global markets with inexpensive products, especially solar panels.
Earlier this year, the Commerce Department ruled that China was dumping solar panels on the American market and imposed duties of 31 percent on most of the imports, which added to earlier duties imposed over what the department said were unfair subsidies for its manufacturers.
On Thursday, a group of about 20 European solar manufacturers announced that they had filed an antidumping case against the Chinese with the European Commission.
The Chinese government has responded to the trade complaints by beginning its own investigation into whether American and Korean manufacturers of polysilicon, the main ingredient in the solar panels, were selling the material below cost. Dumping occurs when a company sells a product in another country at less than fair value.
In the wind tower case, the decision is preliminary, but the Commerce Department will direct customs agents to begin collecting cash deposits equivalent to the tariffs, which are in addition to duties of 13.7 to 26 percent that the department imposed in May for what it said were unfair subsidies of the industry by the Chinese government. The department set the tariffs for the companies that account for the bulk of Chinese exports at 20.85 to 30.93 percent. Any others would be required to pay the highest rate.
“Commerce has taken an important step to address the significant dumping that is taking place,” said Alan H. Price, a lawyer at Wiley Rein, which is representing the American wind manufacturers that brought the complaint. The duties “will help to remedy the material injury already suffered by the U.S. industry and force the Chinese and Vietnamese producers to compete fairly,” he said.
The Chinese embassy in Washington did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment on the decision.
How the tariffs will affect the market is unclear. Like solar, the wind industry has been under pressure to bring down the cost of producing power to better compete with conventional fuels, a task made more difficult by the low price of natural gas and the expiration of an important subsidy at the end of this year. Wind industry executives say that the looming end of the support, a production tax credit, has already led to a decrease in demand for equipment and layoffs.
“On one hand, you say this is good for American manufacturing to have tariffs if they’re truly dumping towers below their cost into the U.S.,” said Michael Garland, chief executive of Pattern Energy, a wind developer. “On the other hand, it’s not going to solve the bigger problem we have, which is a dysfunctional Congress that can’t get anything passed. Because there’s this cliff that everybody’s facing at the end of the year, you’re not going to have any manufacturing in the U.S. anyway.”
The towers, which can cost $600,000 each, often account for 20 percent of the cost of a turbine. So although the tariffs might end up adding only a small percentage to the overall cost of a project, they could cut substantially into profits because that margin is only 7 to 10 percent, Mr. Garland said.
On the solar side, there are also questions about the impact of the duties. The major Chinese solar manufacturers have been able to keep prices low and skirt the tariffs by purchasing cells, the component of the panels to which the tariffs apply, elsewhere.
Imports of Chinese panels and cells decreased in May to $124 million from $226 million the year before, according to the Coalition for American Solar Manufacturing, an industry group that supports the trade cases. But shipments from other countries like Malaysia, Taiwan and the Philippines were up sharply. In the case of Malaysia, shipments were up by 950 percent over the previous May, to $135.5 million, exceeding China, according to the coalition.
Although the overall solar market continues to grow, executives and analysts warned that uncertainty about the outcome of the trade cases, which are only at the preliminary stage, could damp enthusiasm for future projects because costs are unclear.
“I’m paying X rate today. Am I going to have to pay a duty on that six months, a year down the road?” asked John Smirnow, a vice president of the Solar Energy Industries Association, a trade group that is advocating for negotiations between China and the United States to occur simultaneously to the legal cases.
But those who brought the trade cases say it comes down to adhering to the law.
“We have to be doing legal activity when we’re doing business,” said Steve Ostrenga, chief executive officer of Helios Solar Works, a panel manufacturer based in Milwaukee. “It’s not trying to penalize them. It’s just trying to make it right.”
Fighting GMO Labeling in California Is Food Lobby's "Highest Priority"
in Uncategorized/by MAM TeamPublic Health Lawyer
07/30/2012
In case you had any doubt that California’s Prop 37 — which would require labeling of food containing genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) — is a significant threat to industry, a top food lobby has now made it perfectly clear.
You may not know the Grocery Manufacturer’s Association, but its members represent the nation’s largest food makers — those with the most at stake in the battle over GMO labeling; for example, soft drink and snack giant PepsiCo, cereal makers Kellogg and General Mills, and of course, biotech behemoth Monsanto.
According to state filing reports, so far GMA has spent $375,000 on its efforts to oppose the labeling measure, with its members adding additional out-of-state lobbying power in the tens of thousands of dollars.
Never mind polling demonstrating that a whopping 90 percent of Californians think they deserve the right to know what they are eating. GMA also won’t bother to mention the more than 40 other nations (including the European Union, Brazil, and China) that already require food makers to disclose GMOs.
Big Food Lobbying to Undermine Health
This is hardly the first time the nation’s most powerful trade association of food manufacturers has marshaled its resources to oppose common sense food and nutrition policy — at both the national and state levels.
As I documented in my book, Appetite for Profit, for years GMA flexed its lobbying muscle in state legislatures all over the country fighting bills that were simply trying to remove junk food and soda from school vending machines.
Big Food lobbyists have also banded together to vociferously fight any attempt to restrict out of control junk food marketing to children on TV and other media.
For example, in 2005, GMA was a founding member of the Alliance for American Advertising, whose stated purpose was to defend the food industry’s alleged First Amendment right to advertise to children and to promote voluntary self-regulation as an alternative to government action.
More recently, the Grocery Manufacturers Association was among leading trade groups and corporations opposing the federal government’s attempt to improve industry’s own voluntary guidelines for food marketing to children. As this Reuters special report from April explains, GMA’s chief lobbyist visited the White House last July along with several top food industry representatives (including from Nestle, Kellogg, and General Mills) to scuttle an effort by four federal agencies that would have protected children from predatory junk food marketing.
But Food Makers Love Labels Don’t They?
It seems rather ironic that the same food makers taking advantage of every inch of food packaging space to convince shoppers to purchase its products would object so strongly to labeling for something they claim is not harmful.
Indeed in recent years, the federal government , in recognizing that food companies’ so-called “front of package” labeling is so out of control that it commissioned not one but two Institute of Medicine reports to make recommendations to fix the problem and un-confuse consumers.
Unwilling to tolerate government intervention designed to help Americans, the Grocery Manufacturers Association has been aggressively promoting its own new nutrition labeling scheme it calls “Facts Up Front.” But as Food Politics author Marion Nestle has explained, this is an obvious end-run around the feds. Here is how the food industry describes its own voluntary program:
– Facts Up Front is a nutrient-based labeling system that summarizes important information from the Nutrition Facts Panel in a simple and easy-to-use format on the front of food and beverage packages.
Translation: We are repeating information already required on the back of the package, now placing it in a format we like better on the front.
See how that works? The food industry is always in charge. That’s why the nation’s largest packaged food lobby and its members are shaking in its boots over 90 percent of Californians wanting to see GMO labeling on food.
And no wonder, because as GMA President Bailey correctly warned her audience: “If California wins, you need to be worried the campaign will come to your state.”
Very worried.
A Mission to Self-Destruct: America's Culture of Imports
in Uncategorized/by MAM Team07/27/2012
How did we create this culture of imports? After World War II, America was the lone superpower remaining. The Marshall Plan was ushered in to help devastated European countries get back on their feet. It was a rousing success. American products were the best in the world and it was important that other countries had enough money to purchase them in order to keep our industries growing.
Later, America made concerted efforts to continue knocking down trade barriers and to buy foreign goods. It helped other countries greatly, but by the 1990s, it was apparent that the money was not coming back in equal measure, eventually forming large deficits in trade. Japan became an industrial powerhouse after the war — mostly thanks to American efforts to help them rebuild their country. We assisted in the drafting of a constitution that placed a newly developed focus on industry. Soon, Japan became an industrial leader in a number of fields, to the point where six of the top 10 best-selling cars in America today are Japanese. America helped many countries back on their feet, and our consumers delighted in the lower prices their imported goods could offer.
At the same time, other countries made purchasing their own domestically manufactured products a national priority over the following half century. As an example country, South Korea created a national manufacturing policy that today has them at the top of the world in manufacturing and industry. Until recently, it was strictly taboo for South Koreans to be caught handling or buying foreign-made goods. South Korea’s sense of consumer nationalism has survived to this day, long after a time when it was “necessary” for them to uphold it. This kind of “us-first” thinking lifted these countries and their largest corporations to a stature previously unfathomable. It is easy to see why companies like Hyundai have reached international success when you consider that 99% of the cars on the roads of Korea are Korean-made. This is true for Japan and many other countries, too. Their consumers’s domestic buying preferences are a crucial benefit for their private manufacturers. Similar preferences and cultural attitudes have prevailed in Germany, now economically the strongest country in Europe.
In America, younger generations have been brought up in a culture of “free trade,” where the pervasive attitude is that “industry doesn’t matter.” A culture of imports dominates. Manufacturing as a share of total employment has fallen from 30% in 1970 to only 10% in 2011. Other countries have suffered losses in the manufacturing employment sector as well, as a natural response to increased productivity and mechanization. Even with this, the industrial employment of Germany is still 20%, Japan is 17% and France manages to have 13%. Come on, America. Let’s use our combined efforts to at least match the manufacturing employment rate of France. It would bring our unemployment rate of 8% back down to the traditional 5%.
In this new race to the bottom, we are trading satisfying, higher-paying, higher-skilled jobs in manufacturing and industry for low paying, low-impact jobs stacking shelves at endless superstores packed with low-grade imports from other countries. Salaries get depressed, unemployment rises, and people can soon afford only the cheapest, usually imported, goods, accelerating the cycle and digging a deeper hole for all of us. Those cheap imports aren’t so cheap any more. The exchange became: good jobs sent abroad for which we received low-quality items and low paying jobs.
Those Olympic uniforms are a symbol of our current, culturally caused unemployment problem. We felt comfortable outsourcing the production of everything we used to make, from American flags to the trinkets at the Smithsonian gift shop. As we did with pollution, smoking, and car safety, we need to wake up, recognize we have an import addiction problem, and start making the individual and governmental changes to pull ourselves out of this mess.
About Alan Uke:
Alan Uke is a San Diego entrepreneur, community leader, and founder of Underwater Kinetics, which he started 41 years ago as a sophomore at the University of California San Diego. He holds more than 50 patents, and the majority of his SCUBA diving and his industrial lighting products are exported to more than 60 countries. He has won the Entrepreneur of the Year Award for Consumer Products from the Entrepreneur of the Year Institute, is a member of the World Presidents Organization, and conceived of and founded the San Diego Aircraft Carrier Museum. He is the author of Buying America Back: A Real-Deal Blueprint for Restoring American Prosperity.
Why We Can't End Poverty In America: It's The Ignorance
in Uncategorized/by MAM Team7/29/2012
That isn’t what people mean by poverty in such advanced nations though. The idea is much closer to Adam Smith’s point about a linen shirt. Such may not be a necessity: but if you live in a society where not being able to afford one means you are regarded as poor then not being able to afford one makes you poor in that society.
So the US, or UK, Swedish, South Korean or Japanese definitions of poverty are not to do with being able to eat: they’re to do with what each society thinks you need to have in order not to be poor.
Which brings us to how the US measures that: through the poverty level. This is, roughly speaking, three times the household budget of the early 1960s for a cheap yet nutritious diet for that household. Upgraded for inflation since then. Maybe that’s a good measure and maybe it isn’t (just about everywhere else uses a percentage of median income but so what? That’s more a measure of inequality than poverty) but that is what it is.
At which point we should get very alarmed by the opening of Edelman’s Op/Ed:
“RONALD REAGAN famously said, “We fought a war on poverty and poverty won.” With 46 million Americans — 15 percent of the population — now counted as poor, it’s tempting to think he may have been right.
Look a little deeper and the temptation grows. The lowest percentage in poverty since we started counting was 11.1 percent in 1973. The rate climbed as high as 15.2 percent in 1983. In 2000, after a spurt of prosperity, it went back down to 11.3 percent, and yet 15 million more people are poor today.”
This just isn’t the way is is supposed to work. It’s a basic observation that wages tend to rise faster than inflation: no, not every year, but over time, the decades, we most certainly expect to see this happening. Further, we can see that the US government has been spending ever more on poverty alleviation of these decades. Yet poverty is rising, not falling. This must be a catastrophe which cries out for concerted attention, no?
Well, no actually, it isn’t. For Professor Edelman then goes on to show that he hasn’t got a clue what he’s talking about in the very next paragraph.
“At the same time, we have done a lot that works. From Social Security to food stamps to the earned-income tax credit and on and on, we have enacted programs that now keep 40 million people out of poverty.”
No, no and thrice no. I’m sorry but this is the sort of mistake that disqualifies one from commenting upon poverty in America. For it is absolutely true that food stamps and the EITC alleviate poverty: of course they do, giving poor people money and food alleviates poverty, how could it not? But it does not reduce poverty by a fraction of a percentage point: it doesn’t reduce poverty by one single person.
Which is where we have to get grubby in the detail of how the US counts the incomes that mount up to that poverty level, that three times the 1960s food budget. Included in the incomes used to calculate who is poor and who is not are cash incomes into the household. So, anything earned by going to work, any money from investments (yes, I know, silly, for poor don’t have investments. But if you don’t do this then you’re counting a retired billionaire living off his dividends as poor. Hello George Soros!) and any money that the government just gives you, like say traditional welfare. Social security gets included here.
What is not included is anything that the government gives you either through the tax system or in kind. So that knocks out the EITC: we know this alleviates poverty but it does not reduce the number in poverty. The same with SNAP or food stamps: these are in kind. So maybe you’re getting $5,000 a year (a little over $400 a month is entirely possible based upon family size) in free food through the program. But this is not counted as your income, does not take you above the poverty line because it is not counted as your income. Which is how we can continually expand the EITC and SNAP (and Section 8 housing vouchers, Medicaid and on and on as they are all treated the same way) without ever reducing the number of poor people in America.
And that’s what’s wrong with Peter Edelman’s thesis about poverty in the USA. He doesn’t actually understand how it is measured. And as I never tire of pointing out if you misdiagnose the problem then you will never, unless through pure blind luck, manage to produce a viable solution.
Another way of looking at this is that the New York Times Op/Ed page is where distinguished professors go to flaunt their ignorance. Given that there are many things I’m ignorant of perhaps I should give it a go? Say, a piece insisting that the Laffer Curve shows that all tax cuts all the time increase tax revenues.
Hmm, no, that won’t work, not even the NYT would fall for something that silly. Anyone got the WSJ phone number?
For Olympic Rowers, Uniforms Will Be Made in USA
in Uncategorized/by MAM TeamBy Bob Fernandez
Inquirer Staff Writer
“We compete because a) we are custom and b) we are fast,” the company’s founder, John Strotbeck, himself a former Olympic rower, said in an interview. “You should never turn your back on your core.”
He was talking about Boathouse’s rowing niche, but he also could have been talking about Philadelphia, having spurned offers in the late 1990s to relocate to cheaper-labor Southern states.
Bitten with the rowing bug at Marietta College in Ohio, Strotbeck “sweep rowed” in a double (a two-person boat) at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, then sculled in a quad (a four-man boat) at the ’88 games in Seoul, South Korea.
In 1989, he launched Boathouse Sports in a factory in Northern Liberties. Within a few years, Boathouse had expanded into an almost-exclusive outerwear company that sold parkas, award jackets, and warm-ups to athletes for Division I football teams, the National Football League, and other sports.
Times were good in the 1990s. But then Nike and Adidas crashed the party by paying multimillion-dollar sponsorships to outfit Division I teams for the national TV exposure, wiping out part of Boathouse’s business.
Seeking new revenue, Strotbeck recast Boathouse to supply full lines of apparel, uniforms, and accessories for lacrosse, field hockey, rugby, rowing, track and field, volleyball, and other sports that “flew under the radar,” he said. It also supplies nontraditional sports clubs, such as those for ultimate Frisbee, chess, and paintball.
The company processes about 45,000 orders a year and has annual revenues of about $20 million. It pitches its products to coaches and athletic directors with the simple message that Boathouse will manufacture custom uniforms and deliver them within 20 days of an order – a difficult timetable for a Chinese factory.
“We do everything from design, graphics, inventory of raw materials, cutting and sewing, screening and sublimation, to putting it in a box,” Strotbeck said. “We produce, pretty much, 100 percent of what we ship.”
Dressed one day last week in blue jeans and a black short-sleeve shirt, Strotbeck, 55, said that before he moved into his current factory he had been wooed with incentives by three Southern states: Mississippi, North Carolina, and Tennessee.
He had doubts. Auto companies were investing heavily in assembly plants in the South, which Strotbeck thought could put pressure on their labor markets. Instead of relocating, he bought the former GE aerospace factory on the 400 block of East Hunting Park Avenue in 1999. The company’s mostly female workforce is comprised of Asian and Hispanic immigrants.
A member of the Vesper Boat Club in Philadelphia, Strotbeck said rowing is growing as a sport because of Title IX rules that require colleges to invest in women’s sports.
In 2009, Boathouse signed a deal with the United States Rowing Association, based in Princeton, to sponsor the national rowing teams, leading it to supply with gear the 44 U.S. male and female rowers in London. That gear includes unisuit racing uniforms, practice uniforms, basic training gear, cold-weather vests, long-sleeve shirts, and other items.
“Rowing is out of the Ivy League. It is getting to be an everyman’s sport,” said Strotbeck.
“We did it,” he said of the sponsorship, “because we like rowing and we were getting back into the uniform business. . . . It’s important for us to be an Olympic brand.”
When he was an Olympic athlete in 1984, the official clothing sponsor was Levi’s. Four years later, the clothing sponsor was Adidas. With both companies, the garments were sourced overseas, said Strotbeck.
“This is not anything new,” he said of the made-in-China Ralph Lauren clothing for the London Olympics, “but given the changes in the economy, there’s a realization that we can make stuff in the U.S., and should make things in the U.S.”
That, Ralph Lauren now says, is where it will manufacture clothing for the 2014 U.S. Olympic athletes.
As China Costs Rise, Technology Lures U.S. Factories Home
in Uncategorized/by MAM TeamBy Scott Malone and Ernest Scheyder
Schenectady, NY/NEW YORK
“When we do the numbers we’re actually ahead manufacturing here instead of paying for air freight and dealing with the logistical issues that we’re having in China,” said Raymond Sjolseth, the company’s president and co-founder.
With just $11 million in revenue last year, Seesmart is a tiny company, but it is one of many manufacturers of all sizes – from Master Lock to blue-chips General Electric Co and Caterpillar Inc – that are expanding production in the United States.
After decades roaming the world in search of lower costs, U.S. manufacturers are finding that factories at home can compete with China, India, Mexico and other low-cost countries.
To be sure, labor-intensive industries like clothing and electronics, which are heavily dependent on hand assembly, are seen as unlikely to come back to the United States in a major way. And the trickle of returning jobs is far from a flood.
But higher transportation costs and wage inflation in China could drive more production back to the United States.
Prime candidates for return are bulky, heavy items. GE has shifted production of appliances from Mexico and China to Louisville, Kentucky, partly due to rising shipping costs. The new plant that Caterpillar is building near Athens, Georgia, will employ about 1,400 and make small bulldozers and excavators.
As manufacturers have learned to run factories with fewer workers – whose jobs consist of keeping high-cost, high-speed machines running smoothly, rather than assembling goods by hand – they have found that wages are a less critical issue in choosing a factory site.
Caterpillar, which has announced nine new plants or expansion projects in the past year alone, said it has chosen to grow in the United States both to meet local demand and because it has been able to find a steady supply of workers able to run the advanced equipment that powers its plants.
A survey by the Hackett Group Inc consultancy found that 46 percent of executives at European and North American manufacturing companies said they were considering returning some production to the United States from China, while another 27 percent said they were actively planning for or are in the midst of such a shift.
In the face of continued high unemployment, outsourcing and offshoring have become potent issues with U.S. voters. In the race for the White House, President Barack Obama, a Democrat, has called attention to job cuts made by private equity firm Bain Capital, formerly run by Mitt Romney, the presumed Republican nominee.
Despite the gloom, there has been a slight rise in U.S. factory employment. Some 11.95 million Americans worked in production jobs as of May, up 4 percent from the sector’s recessionary low in January 2010.
Manufacturing gained its reputation as a key to the U.S. middle class, in part thanks to its historically unionized work force. However, companies including Caterpillar and the Detroit automakers have succeeded in winning concessions in labor negotiations that include two-tier wage structures that provide substantially lower wagers for the newest workers.
At Seesmart, shifting production from China to the United States is cutting logistics costs by about 30 percent as it no longer needs to fly merchandise across the Pacific. Products can also be made and shipped to customers more quickly, Sjolseth said.
“The LED business involves a very compulsive buy, and the client can’t tolerate long lead times,” he said. “So if you’re not delivering in four to six weeks, it’s not going to happen. You’re going to lose the deal and they’re going somewhere else.”
Higher wages have not been a roadblock for the company because its automated factories mean that labor costs represent less than 2 percent of the cost to manufacture lighting.
“Are our labor costs higher in the U.S. versus China? Yes, but in our case the total cost to produce our U.S. units is lower when all factors are calculated,” said Sjolseth. The company today makes 20 percent of its products in the United States, a number it aims to push to 75 percent by the end of next year.
NARROWING COST GAP
The falling share of wages in total costs also played a role in a new battery plant opened by General Electric in Schenectady, New York, this month.
“With all the manufacturing technology we have, labor is a relatively small component” of costs, said GE’s chief executive, Jeff Immelt. “That’s different today than it was 10 years ago.”
The new plant will employ 450 people, a slice of the 14,500 positions the largest U.S. conglomerate has added since 2009. It employs 301,000 people worldwide and 131,000 in the United States.
The plant is highly automated, with high-tech machines processing the ceramic forms that surround the batteries. Some processes are still done by hand; during a recent tour of the site, workers were applying a layer of carbon paint to the cells with paint brushes.
The hand-painting is a technique that GE researchers used in developing the batteries, and it remains a more reliable approach than applying the carbon by machine, said Prescott Logan, general manager of GE’s newly formed energy storage technologies unit. But GE is working on a way to reliably automate the process.
“There are a lot of parts of that factory that will look very different five years from now,” Logan said.
Rising wages in emerging markets and higher shipping costs are also closing the cost gap between developing markets and the United States.
In 2005 it cost 45 percent less to make electric motors for automobile windshield wipers in China and ship them to the United States, rather than make them domestically, according to an analysis by AlixPartners.
Today, the Chinese motor costs only 18 percent less than a U.S.-made model. The consultancy forecasts that by 2015 the Chinese motor will cost just 9 percent less, due to rising wages and shipping costs and an appreciation in the Chinese yuan versus the U.S. dollar.
The study also looked at costs for motors made in India and Mexico and found they had risen, though not as dramatically as in China.
“If you go back to the heyday of outsourc
ing to
China, at that time with the exchange rates and the ocean freight it was pretty hard to go wrong from a cost standpoint,” said Steve Maurer, a managing director at AlixPartners who specializes in manufacturing efficiency.
“Now that costs in China are increasing … people are stepping back and saying, ‘We need to reevaluate this.'”
(Editing by Patricia Kranz and Leslie Adler)
Steel for America’s Military Will Once Again be ‘Made in USA’
in Government/by MAM Team“ArcelorMittal is pleased with the Department of Defense’s decision to reinstate the longstanding requirement that steel armor plate procured for defense purposes be melted domestically. We are grateful for the support of leaders like Senator Brown who have fought tirelessly for this policy to be reinstated. This is an important decision for our hardworking employees in Ohio and nationwide. ArcelorMittal is proud to support the defense efforts of the United States through our production of steel armor plate, and we commend the Department of Defense for its decision to help ensure a vibrant industrial base in the years to come,” said John Mengel, Chief Operating Officer, ArcelorMittal USA Plate.
“As a major supplier of raw materials to the domestic steel industry, Cliffs is encouraged by the Department of Defense’s proposal to again require that all stages of steel armor plate manufacturing occur domestically. This proposed rule reflects the importance of producing strategically significant steel products in the United States from a domestic supply chain,” said Kelly Tompkins, Executive Vice President – Legal, Government Affairs and Sustainability and Chief Legal Officer at Cliffs Natural Resources Inc.
Steel armor plate is used for military vehicles, tanks, and equipment. Under DoD regulations, specialty metals procured for defense purposes—including steel armor plate—must be produced in the United States. Despite more than 35 years of legal interpretation and administrative practice requiring that specialty metals be melted in the United States, DoD in 2009—in the midst of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and during a time when the demand for steel was high—published a final rule defining the word “produced,” as it applies to armor plate under the Special Metals Amendment, to include simple finishing processes. This means that armor plate melted in foreign countries, including Russia and China, could be imported and subjected to simple finishing processes in the United States and then deemed to have been “produced” domestically.
After numerous Congressional inquiries and report language questioning DoD’s interpretation of “produced,” the FY11 National Defense Authorization Act included a provision requiring a review and, if necessary, revision of the existing regulation to ensure the definition is consistent with Congressional intent (the review was required to be completed within 270 of enactment of the law, i.e., early October 2011). On July 25, 2011, DoD published its request for comment, and the deadline for public comment was September 8, 2011. Earlier this year, Brown introduced the United States Steel and Security Act, which would have required steel armor plate to be both melted and finished in the United States, not only protecting American steel jobs, but our country’s national security. Cleveland’s ArcelorMittal manufactures steel armor plate, as does Nucor.
In September 2011, Brown—along with Sens. Richard Burr (R-NC), Robert P. Casey, Jr. (D-PA), Kay Hagan (D-NC), Daniel Coats (R-IN), Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), Al Franken (D-MN), and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN)—sent a letter to Defense Undersecretary Ashton Carter urging him to revise the Department’s requirements on steel plate. A copy of that letter can be seen here. During consideration of the National Defense Authorization Act in December 2011, Brown and Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-MI) called for the DOD to expedite its review of this issue.
Yesterday, the DoD published in the Federal Register a proposed amendment to the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulations revising the definition of “produce” as it relates to the Specialty Metals Amendment. The proposed amendment is the result of section 823 of the FY 2011 National Defense Authorization Act, in which Congress directed DoD to review the current the definition of produced to ensure its consistency with congressional intent. There will be a 60-day comment period on the proposed rule.
Cargill Recalls Ground Beef After Link to Salmonella
in Uncategorized/by MAM TeamPublished: July 23, 2012
Hannaford is offering refunds to customers who have any ground beef in their freezers bought in its stores with its store brand and stamped with sell-by dates ranging from May 29 through June 16. It has posted signs in its meat departments and on its Web site, and sent media advisories locally and nationally.
In a pop-up announcement on its Web site, Cargill Meat Solutions Corporation, which processes and distributes pork, beef and turkey products to retailers and food service outlets, said it was voluntarily recalling the meat, which it described as an 85 percent lean ground beef product.
Hannaford bought the meat in bulk from Cargill and repackaged it under its own name. It will be making refunds on all such ground beef stamped with the specified dates regardless of the fat content, a spokesman said.
Salmonella infections, which tend to be most severe among infants, older adults and the sick, can be life-threatening to those with weak immune systems. Typically, they strike within 72 hours after the consumption of tainted food. The Department of Agriculture recommends cooking meat to an internal temperature of 160 degrees Fahrenheit, as measured by a thermometer, to ensure against salmonella poisoning.
The department’s Food Safety and Inspection Service has been investigating an outbreak of salmonella Enteriditis, one of the most common types of salmonella serotypes, affecting 33 patients in seven states, including those where Hannaford has stores, as well as Rhode Island and Virginia. That continuing inquiry involves the health departments in those states as well as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Through epidemiology and by tracing purchases, investigators were able to link the illnesses of five people, two of whom had been hospitalized, to meat produced at Cargill Meat Solutions. Not all meat samples led back to a specific point of sale.