The Economist had a good piece on this, pointing out that none of the fluffy promises of jobs, development etc have actually come true.
http://www.economist.com/node/18648855
"When deals like this first came to international attention in 2009, it was unclear whether they were "land grabs or development opportunities", to quote a study published that year. Supporters claimed they would bring seeds, technology and capital to some of the world's poorest lands. Critics, such as the director of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation, dubbed them "neo-colonialist". But no one had hard evidence to back up their claims. Now they do. Two years on, a conference at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) of the University of Sussex, the biggest of its kind so far, examined over 100 land deals. Most judgments are damning... When land deals were first proposed, they were said to offer the host countries four main benefits: more jobs, new technology, better infrastructure and extra tax revenues. None of these promises has been fulfilled."
The problem isn't so much that it'll ensure future food shortages - African farming has a lot of room for efficiency improvements - as much as that they're just bad deals and Africans are getting screwed by them.
... Therefore farmland must be leased (but I thought the factories and development ate it all up?). ...
Farmland in a different country which is presumeably why the foreign ministry is involved.
3: Oh, thanks. I totally misread the article.
I don't have a cite, but I'm pretty sure that Egypt is another example of this. Global corporate farming was invited in by Mubarek jr and other neo-liberals, turned the rice and wheat fields into cash-crop sugar (for example) for export, and Egypt became a net food importer subject to commodity volatility.
One of the reasons "core inflation" is so deceptive. We don't eat Ipods.
And a complicated argument concerning urbanization. Subsistence farmers may be poor, but they have a better chance of getting food to eat.
Based on the article, Bangladesh used to be self-sufficient. Then factories and development ate up all of the farmland
The article also mentions population growth, which is probably the most significant driver of food imports: Bangladesh's population tripled in the last 50 years.
I bet this story can be found in Marx and enclosure laws.
Colonization of the land is only half the story. The other half is creating a cheap desperate labor pool for factories in the cities.
This sounds like just another example of corporations from one country pillaging another country for its natural resources. Which inevitably impoverishes the host country, and enriches the corporation.
You realize this is indistinguishable from a parody of naïve leftism, don't you?
Not to defend any of these deals specifically (as ajay says, the bad or corrupt deals are a problem). But why shouldn't resource rich countries trade their resources with buyers who value them more highly? Some countries have become rich (or at least less poor) that way.
Subsistence farmers may be poor, but they have a better chance of getting food to eat.
I am a bit sceptical of this. Localised droughts and crop failures seem to hit rural farmers harder than they hit the cities. People in the cities are more likely to have money to buy food with, and will, by definition, be more able to use food distribution networks (because you have to have a good food distribution network in a city, otherwise you don't have a city at all). If you're a subsistence farmer and your crop fails, you are done for.
Bangladesh is an imperialist oppressor these days? You live and learn...
Bangladesh used to be self-sufficient. Then factories and development ate up all of the farmland
Bangladesh used to be an agricultural exporter; it's got some of the most fertile farmland in the world (Ganges delta mud, wonderful stuff) with the slight drawback that it keeps washing away or getting flooded. It was the breadbasket of British India.
Is Bangladesh where the Bangles are from? They were the BEST!
But why shouldn't resource rich countries trade their resources with buyers who value them more highly? Some countries have become rich (or at least less poor) that way.
Which ones? I thought it was near-universally a path downhill.
It was the breadbasket of British India.
And in twenty years it will be a fish farm.
it's got some of the most fertile farmland in the world (Ganges delta mud, wonderful stuff) with the slight drawback that it keeps washing away or getting flooded.
Aren't recurrent floods part of what keeps farmland fertile? Not that it doesn't make things rough in practice.
10:Yeah, but the cities didn't do that great in famine times either.
I have some trouble making a judgement about this, as in advocating a reversal or anything.
Just seems part of the inexorable process of capitalism and imperialism.
14: becoming rich by selling your natural resources to foreigners? Well, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait come to mind. The resource curse implies that you don't become democratic, not necessarily that you don't become rich.
18: How well distributed are the resources in those countries? I suppose I could just go look it up.
Exploitation is the worst case, but not the only one.
Africa doesn't use much fertilizer per arable hectare, let alone irrigation. Much of the arable land is tiny plots without clear title. While it's a shame that foreign aid has not produced either access to markets (that is, built local roads to get crops to cities or ports) or to technology (attempts to subsidize fertilizer have been disastrous). Capital investment and access to foreign markets could definitely help both Africa and grain-importing countries in Asia with capital.
The fact that anything tangible is happening at all is in my mind cause for optimism.
Oh, here's a another source for reading about this:
http://www.chinaafricarealstory.com/2010/11/african-public-opinon-on-china.html
Actually their Gini coefficients look ok.
Which shows that no single index tells you all you need to know.
I'm pretty sure that Marx would have viewed this kind of thing as a positive development.
Which ones?
Korea and Indonesia are the examples people usually cite.
Brazil and Argentina who are kicking foreign land investors out and Zambia and Tanzania (relatively well-governed, still welcoming) are the edge cases as far as I know. Oh, the survey I cited in 20 suggests that Kenyans and Nigerians think well of Chinese.
Angola is worth watching also (huge foreign investment driven by petroleum). I do not know how well the Angolan government works or how to find out.
The fact that anything tangible is happening at all is in my mind cause for optimism.
Really? Huh.
I've been wondering how this recent push for shale natural gas is going to fit into the conventional exploitation model. Is Pennsylvania going to be pillaged and wrecked? There was some article about a woman who could light her tap water on fire, and the oil companies swore up and down that it had nothing to do with the very close natural gas excavating they were doing.
I do not know how well the Angolan government works
Put it like this: they basically sold the oil exploration rights to the French because they paid bigger bribes, then bribed most of the French political class right back to sell them a huge quantity of arms in order to fight their civil war, using the same arms dealer who was also selling arms to the other side. Now the civil war is over and the oil is selling, so they're rich, but you'd be a fool to think it had got any less crooked.
Is Pennsylvania going to be pillaged and wrecked?
Yes, probably. Most of it is in pretty shitty shape to start with. Unless some industry needs enough natural gas to want to open plants nearby the source, I don't see that it will do the local economy much good. People who own land and have sold the leases right have made good money, but that isn't many people. The workers are mostly flown in from Oklahoma or Texas for two week shifts and then back.
Yeah, I don't think there's much impact on local employment from this shale gas thing, except for the downstream effects of the water pollution. Guess what, they want people who have been trained in specific skills. Local people are irrelevant.
It has helped the steel industry, but I suspect that would have happened if the gas were found 500 miles away.
I hate stories like this, because you have to know so much to have a real opinion. I get the impression that while Knecht is right that there's nothing inherently oppressive in landowners in underdeveloped countries being able to lease their land to foreign companies with the ability to farm the land more efficiently, in practice it is almost always a bad thing. But I really don't know enough to say.
I hate stories like this, because you have to know so much to have a real opinion.
My dreams of seeing LB as a famous pundit, dashed.
My two references for putting land sizes into proportion:
California is about one hundred million acres, of which about ten million acres are farmed and another ten million acres are in the Forest Service.
My irrigation prof visited Mali, and came home thinking they needed laser land leveling for their first big gains in irrigation efficiency. Also that there was no foreseeable prospect of laser leveling in their future. Laser leveling has a lot behind it, though, because you have to combine a lot of fields to get your big tractor through there.
Not directly related, but I saw a quote the other day that interested me. A midwestern grain farmer said that he and his friends are nothing more than the pipeline by which money flows from Cargill to Monsanto. Of course that skips over a lot, but I want to ponder it more.
From Cargill to Monsanto? I'm confused on why one is source and the other sink.
Cargill pays them every year for corn or soy or whatever. They pay Monsanto every year for seeds and fertilizer.
Cargill buys the grain from the farmers who then pay Monsanto for the right to grow more plants?
It's going to be a bumper pwnage crop, this year.
No, 38 was necessary because 37 had too many theys and thems.
Right. I should have just insisted that the question mark in 38 implied I was asking for pronoun clarification.
You want frustrating, try talking to an American audience about why Latin American farmers getting pushed off their lands see US migration as their children's most viable hope.
Which ones? I thought it was near-universally a path downhill
I got distracted by work, but I see that ajay and lw have capably defended my POV.
I would add the other Gulf states, Australia, Canada, Argentina (to a point), Chile (to a point), South Africa (to a point) and arguably Botswana, which outperformed most of its neighbors by careful stewardship of diamond wealth (which, admittedly, is different from land in that sales to foreigners don't really compete with domestic needs).
In a sense, we could also include the U.S. in that list, inasmuch as our government sold gazillions of acres of land to foreigners (immigrants) for a pittance under the Homestead Act.
35: They leveled my family's fields well before the L.A.S.E.R. became the "laser." You can do it perfectly well with old school surveyor tools. You still need a bunch of money.
Also, the usual joke does go the other way since Monsanto makes the seeds and the herbicide that can use the seeds. They all say that, not without reason.
farmers getting pushed off their lands see
I'm sure they were purely voluntary transactions that left all parties better off.
In a sense, we could also include the U.S. in that list, inasmuch as our government sold gazillions of acres of land to foreigners (immigrants) for a pittance under the Homestead Act.
To keep this sense accurate, you'd have to be primarily focused on how the Native Americans have delightfully thrived since the immigrants engaged in this mutally beneficial transaction.
43.last: Except that people actually on the land before the Homestead Act got the shaft big time.
I know almost nothing about this topic, but I do know that there is a bubble right now in farm land prices for staple crops that is pretty astronomical. I wonder if a lot of these foreign purchases aren't basically just pure speculation bubble plays on the land value, and also wonder if the purchasers won't feel in five years like folks who bought scrubland in San Bernadino to hold for development in 2006.
You should probably add Denmark to 43. Also California until about 1950.
A midwestern grain farmer said that he and his friends are nothing more than the pipeline by which money flows from Cargill to Monsanto. Of course that skips over a lot
The parallel pipeline running from the federal government via his fields to both Monsanto and Cargill, for one thing.
What is the critical difference between times when the pillaging benefits the host, and when it's destructive?
Ajay's 51 hits exactly why I had trouble with the original sentence. I kept trying to figure out where the federal government fit in.
49: Same thing has happened twice before in my dad's lifetime with the corn land back home. In the 80s, it was pretty much across the board foreclosure for everybody who bought a farm in the years immediately before.
This is one problem where I do have some sympathy with the estate tax complainers. You can easily wind up owing more in estate taxes on a farm than the farm is actually "worth." If you inherit land and no cash in the wrong year, you'll go broke.
Anyway, the more people go for the all meat cave man veldt-sicle diet, the more likely corn prices are to stay high.
A couple of thoughts: I think it is not so much the land sales that are troubling, as everything that having sold the land to outsiders with a lot of money implies. In the interior of the DRC, where my cousin runs his sustainable farming NGO, gasoline costs something like $4 per liter. Obviously, this is vastly more than any average person can afford. Also, in order to have certain crops (especially rice) processed, the crops have to be trucked a significant distance from the farms. And the millers are a pretty good example of why millers are the bad guy in some fairy tales -- they charge an exorbitant amount, and require cash, which requires loans, thus the interest eats up any profits the farmer might have made.
Where I see the biggest problem here is that, if I were some big agribusiness concern in Abu Dhabi, buying a 200,000 hectare tract in Kenya or wherever, I would be putting a lot of pressure on the government to make sure that my hired farm managers were safe from bandits & guerillas, that my trucks were safe from hijackers, and that the roads ran as straight as possible, no matter what that did to the environment.
This seems like a situation where the temptations to political corruption and repressive policing are only going to grow over time, with the added downside that the general population of the selling country loses some portion of its own food security.
Also, w/r/t the US experience, remember that there was a lot of land speculation with foreign money here too. Some of it was essentially Americanized over time, so that the foreign investors just became big landowners, and some of it failed outright (big tracts of the Dakotas and western Minnesota were opened up for farming by eastern corporations when mechanical farming implements became widespread, apparently most of those farms failed to profit in the long run), and some of it got rearranged due to political considerations. I think the main difference with the US experience is that even before the Louisiana Purchase, the diversity of both economic and ecological systems here allowed the entire macro-system to ride out rough times more easily.
Someday western Minnesota will be habitable. We just need more technology before that day arrives.
Did I tell my cousins' most wonderful/horrible anecdote here before? He asked whether there was much of a problem with snakes in the village. No, came the answer, during the civil war, the people ate all the snakes. Thinking in farm manager terms, my cousin then speculated that they must have a lot of problems with rats eating the crops. No, his interlocutor said, the people ate the rats too.
The idea that people were so hungry that they completely extirpated the local rat population is one of those things that's just hard to wrap your head around.
It isn't a good sign, but field rats would be perfectly safe to eat after cooking.
Safe for you to eat, that is. I have trouble with rabbit.
Not so much horrifying that the rats got eaten -- horrifying that ALL the rats got eaten. Rats are pretty clever. Imagining EVERY SINGLE RAT AND SNAKE in the surrounding area being hunted down for its meat is what I find most bizarre.
They probably didn't get all the rats -- just knocked the population down far enough that the remaining ones were hard to find. But it's still horrifying.
This is one problem where I do have some sympathy with the estate tax complainers. You can easily wind up owing more in estate taxes on a farm than the farm is actually "worth." If you inherit land and no cash in the wrong year, you'll go broke.
I had the idea that there were some family farm exemptions to the estate tax to help deal with this, but maybe I totally made that up.
What LB said. I'm guessing that after the first 90% of the rats go, the remaining ones have better cover and are especially adverse to human contact.
63: It was last a problem of people I knew in the 80s, so I don't know what has changed since then. I see from Wikipedia that the first $5 million is now free, which should pretty well solve that problem.
The republicans searched for such cases rather extensively, without success.
Anyway, the more people go for the all meat cave man veldt-sicle diet, the more likely corn prices are to stay high.
Really? All the all meat cave man veldt-sicle dieters I know are completely sold on grass-fed beef.
55 -- I thought high beef prices were driven by high corn and gas prices, and high corn prices driven by ethanol. But what do I know. Anyhow, everyone should eat grassfed bison.
62: Yeah, but rats breed pretty quick. And this was years after the worst of the fighting was over. I still maintain it is weird and horrible.
67, 68: There's only so much grassland and so much beef or bison you can get from it. Switching from plant-based food to meat, ceteris paribus, increases the amount of land need to feed people thus the price of corn.
Ethanol does raise the cost of corn, and all other food.
70: We do the best we can. We tried thinking about baseball, but we couldn't keep track of the stats.
they're describing possibly turning over 3% of the entire country.
Hmm, I get ~0.27% so I think there's an order of magnitude error. Still 1/375th is not nothing.
Also, not all of a country is arable.
Rats reproduce really fast. If there is no rat problem two years after the famine, I believe there are no rats.
75: First rule of animals: There are always rats.
44, 51: Sure. I wasn't endorsing the quote yet, because I haven't thought about it long enough. But here in California at least, it is so common to think of Big Ag as powerful bad guys, so I was struck by a quote suggesting that they're relatively small and getting played by the real giants.
This is one problem where I do have some sympathy with the estate tax complainers. You can easily wind up owing more in estate taxes on a farm than the farm is actually "worth." If you inherit land and no cash in the wrong year, you'll go broke.
Other commenters have already poked holes in the empirical basis for this complaint, but even if true, it's not entirely a bad thing (though obviously tough on the individuals affected).
One of the underappreciated benefits of the estate tax is that it discourages pyramid building -- purchasing assets that produce no income, or letting potential income-producing assets lie fallow. In essence, the risk of bankrupting one's heirs (or leaving them with no choice but to dispose of their inheritance at firesale prices) is a powerful incentive to reallocate underproductive assets and generally stay liquid.
Mind you, I'm in favor of the estate tax for distributional and sociological reasons alone. But there are perfectly valid efficiency arguments* for it as well.
*the other one being that taxing death is one tax that's guaranteed not to discourage the activity so taxed.
78: I don't know that this has ever actually happened (and my guess is that people worried about it as the sort of thing that might happen, but that it either never did or only very rarely). But the possibility Moby's talking about isn't, I think, just having to sell the farm to pay the taxes. It's having the farm assessed and taxed at a bubble-inflated value that it couldn't actually be sold at, so that the value of the tax is close to or more than the whole value of the farm.
78: That kind of thinking is why small farmers will eventually pitchfork all the bankers if the banks don't get the farmers first. Most of the farmers have a pretty good idea about what kind of income that asset will produce over the long run. Banks have repeatedly lent money to people who bid that price up past what anybody with a 20 year memory would pay. It isn't that the asset produces no income, it's that the asset produces a highly variable income and there's always a new bunch of fools who think whatever boom is happening now is a new, unending era of prosperity.
Shearer, if you quote 78.last, and then link to that WSJ article about geriatric patients trying to hang on to life until midnight on January 1, 2010 to avoid the estate tax, I will fly to Westchester and give you a wedgie.
I wasn't pwned because my comment included violence.
Most of the farmers have a pretty good idea about what kind of income that asset will produce over the long run.
I still call bullshit. You don't have to pay the estate tax in the year in which the liability is incurred (the terms are quite generous, actually). And anyway, land is a bankable asset; if a temporary undervaluation makes it unattractive to sell off the north 40 in a given year, you borrow against it.
LB's scenario is even more unconvincing. The estate tax is levied on fair market value, not peak bubble value or even assessed value (which on agricultural land tends to lag way behind FMV anyway) -- and anyone with enough assets to owe the estate tax can get in touch with a lawyer to negotiate with the IRS.
83.last: It doesn't sound terribly realistic to me as a final outcome, but it's close enough that I could picture reasonable people worrying about it.
78: is a powerful incentive to reallocate underproductive assets and generally stay liquid.
This seems a little to close to "Highest and Best Use" for my tastes. Even though that concept has some validity, in my state in the '70s it was used as a tool for setting ruinous high taxes on farms* near urban areas so that they could be turned into strip malls, condos and housing developments. And maybe the "state" (in the large sense) did have a legitimate interest in that outcome--but it was used in fundamentally corrupt ways (on preview, via the counsel of Harvard-educated consultants).
*Although I first became familiar with it via an organization that was laughably on the wealthy side of the spectrum fighting against it.
I'm very interested in an answer to 52, if anyone has a good understanding of this stuff.
Hmm, I get ~0.27% so I think there's an order of magnitude error.
You would not believe how long I hesitated before posting my math, because any math I post to the front page is guaranteed to have significant arithmetical errors.
88: Well, it's not as if you were an arithmetician.
My mom has a great joke she'd like me to tell you.
88: Also since hectares are metric, much easier to just do 1 sq kilometer = 100 hectares to get to 3,000 out of 1,000,000+.
But it gave something to get right on a bad day at work where everything I know and do is wronger than wrongest wrongmobile that ever drove down the wrong road.
KR,
LB's scenario is what I was trying to establish as my scenario. I was unclear if you thought otherwise. The 'fair market value' is the problem since that would be bubble value if they died at the wrong time. On googling things, I see that it is no longer a realistic concern for anything that I would call a family farm*. I am prepared to believe that it never was a concern as far as actually losing the farm, assuming the farmer's kids went to a lawyer before they got in too much trouble. Ideally, the farmer would have gone to the lawyer before he or she died. But, these types of stories are what got people to go to the lawyer.
How does the wrongmobile compare to the episiautomobile?
I'm very interested in an answer to 52, if anyone has a good understanding of this stuff.
I don't think there are any cut-and-dried answers. Transparency, absence of corruption, rule of law, honest courts, and public policy geared toward steering government revenues into basic needs (health and education) all seem to play a role. But how do those things come about? Not at all clear. Democratic accountability is often associated with those conditions, but the empirical record is full of exceptions (e.g. certain petrostates).
There's a lot of cheap theorizing that countries with a legacy of British colonialism are more likely to be sensible stewards of natural resources, but I don't find it entirely convincing (*cough* Nigeria *cough*).
I tried for a while, but didn't find a better chart than Chart 1 of this very long pdf. You can see how much movement there is in the land prices. I don't know if irrigated land shifts more slowly, but it probably does by a bit. Just in general, I see that land back home has doubled in value since 2005. That makes it hard to do estate planning. A similar shift under the old estate tax system would have put a whole bunch of people who never knew they needed estate planning into a high asset category.
But, these types of stories are what got people to go to the lawyer.
In fairness to Moby's point, there are states that levy estate taxes with much less generous exemptions and more onerous payment terms. It's possible that this produced the occasional horror story at the tail end of the 70's land boom. But to use these as ammunition against the federal estate tax is wrong, and wrong in a way that rewards bad faith propagandizing.
and wrong in a way that rewards bad faith propagandizing.
Probably. And a lot of these people fear going to a lawyer only slightly less than they hate losing a farm. They might have come out of the experience thinking that they narrowly dodged a bullet by getting terms for paying the tax when their lawyer got them what any fool with a phone could have gotten them. Also, so many people lost farms at the end of the 70s land boom, I find it very easy to believe the estate tax contributed to some of them even if it was not a sufficient cause in and of itself.
A similar shift under the old estate tax system would have put a whole bunch of people who never knew they needed estate planning into a high asset category.
Yeah, but remember, the tax is only levied on inherited assets over the amount of the exemption. If your father's three million dollar farm doubles in value to six million right before he dies, you owe tax on a million bucks. But guess what, you just got five million in assets tax free (or $3.5 million before the recent increase). Cry me a phosphate soaked, silted in river.
Also, so many people lost farms at the end of the 70s land boom, I find it very easy to believe the estate tax contributed to some of them even if it was not a sufficient cause in and of itself.
In the same way that just about every small businessman who goes belly up blames it on taxes and regulations.
Yeah, sure, if you imagine that you could have pocketed all the cash you remitted in payroll taxes and sales taxes, and if you never had to pay to install those illluminated exit signs and extra wide toilet stalls, then arithmetically your books would have looked OK. No one ever seems to recognize that every other small businessman in the same jurisdiction faces the same taxes and regulations. If your business didn't make it, either you got outcompeted, or your business plan wasn't such a grand idea in the first place. (To a first approximation; bviously there are extreme cases where this doesn't apply -- say, Cuba.)
Finally -- and then I'm going to stop beating this dead horse -- there's a difference between "we lost the farm" (repossessed for failure to make loan payments) and "we had to sell the farm".
In order to keep the farm intact in inheritance, the estate needs to have liquid assets equal to at least the value of the farm times n-1, where n is the number of heirs. That's true even without an estate tax. I wonder how many of those "we had to sell the farm" horror stories come down to "we would have had (n-1)X the value of the farm in cash and liquid securities, if only we didn't have to use some of the cash to settle the estate tax liability"?
100: I disagree. Cuba has a shitty business plan.
101.2: That was my point, kind of. If dad died five years earlier or later, the tax would have been lower. For a time, the market value was set by people who were driving the PCA, a bunch of savings and loans, and some banks into the ground because they were greedy idiots. The estate tax (and property taxes) were the only unavoidable ways this idiocy directly affected a farmer family with a long tenure on the land.
I have a complete answer to 52, but the margin of this page is too small to write it down.
No, seriously, I am personally suspicious of broad theories of political development. I beleive that paying attention to empirical details of poor places that are doing well and to the details of poor places that are not is the best way to think about this, but that's time-consuming.
Avoiding corruption seems like a baseline, a useful first principle; the last time that I mentioned this idea here, though, I got gently mocked for it.
I don't know what I'm talking about, as I said above, but I'd think a big factor would be whether the money for the lease of the farmland (or the resources generally) is spent in the local economy.
52: Well, how are we defining "benefit" here? Pace The Grapes of Wrath, the people who benefited from the Dust Bowl were probably the biggest landowners, car dealers and eastern bankers. Plus probably some associated industries. The people who did not benefit were communistic preachers, old people, and newborn babies. Everybody else wound up in California, where their kids had the advantage of a great educational system (for the first 50 years or so), and ready access to jobs in the defense plants once the war effort got going.
With the 1980s Farm Crisis, again we have big farmers gobbling up little farmers, bankers making money as usual, and Wal-Mart taking advantage of a weakened host to infect all kinds of rural markets that it probably wouldn't have been able to access 10 or 20 years before.
I'm sure with these African land grabs, there are some people, not just corrupt government officials, who are going to do quite well. Is that worth the misery of a mother watching her children starve to death? I would argue no, but other elements in our society feel differently.
Just to be clear, I'm not talking about my actual dad, who doesn't own a farm and is alive.
Wait, if Wisen Heimer II knows farm prices are in a bubble at his father's death, why not sell, live quietly on the excess, and buy it back after the crash? If the problem is that it would be nice to be insulated from market downsides... well, everyone would like that.
Everyone to whom that logic is appealing stopped farming years ago.
oh, well, if it's down to managing the economy for appeal, I give up.
China in Africa is variably just, based on rumor from returning researchers, but so is China in rural China, based on rumor from visiting researchers.
81
Shearer, if you quote 78.last, and then link to that WSJ article about geriatric patients trying to hang on to life until midnight on January 1, 2010 to avoid the estate tax, I will fly to Westchester and give you a wedgie.
Good thing I saw this.
I know. It would probably cost a thousand to get a good wedgie from a hooker.
to get a good wedgie from a hooker.
This probably means something very specific and non-improper if you play golf.
And in Westchester, I suppose that would be a source of confusion.
114: slow back, dinna press, and keep yer e'e on the buttcrack.
Lester Brown was talking about this today on Fresh Air, in the context of his Foreign Policy cover article about food geopolitics. Interestingly, he said that only about a third of projects are known to be devoted to food crops, another third to biofuels, and the last third is unclear.
I understand Brown is in the same cohort as Ehrlich, and therefore good to be skeptical about, but he presented a decent case based on things actually going on, I thought.
