Indolent charity

The only difference between Timmins's dinner and his neighbour's was, that he had hired, as we have said, the greater part of the plate, and that his cowardly conscience magnified faults and disasters of which no one else probably took heed.

...guilty consciences, I say, made them fancy that everyone was spying out their domestic deficiencies: whereas, it is probable that nobody present thought of their failings at all. People never do: they never see holes in their neighbours' coats—they are too indolent, simple, and charitable.

William Thackeray – A Little Dinner at Timmin’s

I suspect many of us have what Thackeray calls a cowardly conscience – imagining that other people pay more attention to us than they ever do.

Yet many people in public life appear to have no such thing, or rather they understand what Thackeray might have called the simple, indolent charity of their audience. They are well aware that their inadequacies may be obscured behind the crudest dishonesty, misdirection and sheer chutzpah so essential for serious political aspirants.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Ethical investment in African farming

See Josh Altman's new piece on the Agriculture Page.

Money is Pouring into Farmland Investments in Africa - But Can They be Ethical as Well as Profitable?

As the average age of populations in western countries continues to creep slowly upwards, institutional investors such as pension funds are increasingly seeking investments that throw off a steady stream of income with dependable increases in capital gains. One asset class that has seen a huge inflow of investment into it is farmland, as many investors are very favorably disposed to the asset class due to the ongoing agricultural "super cycle" as coined by noted farmland and commodities investor Jim Rogers.

In the UK for example, over the last ten years, agricultural land has appreciated roughly 13 per cent per year in the according to Investment Property Databank (IPD).  The US and other Western countries have seen similar farmland investment returns. Farmland prices have therefore skyrocketed, reaching as high as £17,300 (approximately $30,000) per hectare in the northwest of England to take just one example.

As a result, investors are increasingly turning their interest in farmland investing to areas of the world where prices are starting from a much lower base, thereby providing much greater upside potential. One area where this has been particularly prevalent is Africa, where hedge funds and other large institutions have been making large agricultural farmland investments. Hedge funds and private equity funds alone have purchased 148 million acres of farmland in just the last three years. Just to take one example, last year the UK’s well known Guardian newspaper outlined how a full 5pc of African agricultural land had been purchased or leased by outside investors, and that more than 200m hectares (495m acres) of land – roughly eight times the size of the UK – were sold or leased between 2000 and 2010.

Given the long history of colonial exploitation in Africa, there has been increasing resistance to what is perceived by many Non-Governmental Organisations as well as African citizens as a “foreign land grab.” Whilst some of these feelings may be based on old stereotypes rather than current conditions, there is no question that some abuses have occurred. Just to take on example, in 2009 the US magazine Businessweek had a comprehensive piece detailing abuses by an American investor named Dominion Farms - this article is well worth a read if you want to understand the legitimate concerns many Afrricans possess regarding foreign land investments in their countries.

Large institutional investors frequently make deals directly with the central governments of African countries, and unfortunately, given the amount of corruption and generally poor governance that still exists in Africa, the investment capital frequently disappear into the pockets of corrupt local officials whilst local farmers are forcibly removed from their homes and lands.

By the same token, it is far from true that all foreign investments in African farmland are predatory and exploitive.  Global consultancy McKinsey recently produced a report on the future of Africa which noted that the continent had over 25 per cent of the globe’s arable land yet produced only ten per cent of agricultural output.  McKinsey argued that up to $50bn/year of African agricultural farmland investment would be needed to bring the sector up to global standards and allow African agriculture to maximize its potential output.

Given the need for investment in African agriculture, there is no reason that foreign farmland investment on the continent cannot be structured as a win-win for both private investors and the host country populations. With the right guidelines and intentions, foreign investment in African farmland can be both ethical and profitable.  The major issue is whether a set of basic principles for “win-win” farmland investment in Africa can be developed.  Just as an example, the following principles can be used to evaluate the fairness of foreign farmland investment in Africa:

1. The farmland investment was negotiated directly with local villagers and tribal chiefs, so there was no chance for corruption at senior government levels;

2. The investment was directed at completely unused land, and none of the local population has been removed from any of the land since it was not in use as a food source;

3. Farmland investments in developing countries should not simply be premised on the food security concerns of the foreign investors, who may want to simply ship the entire crop production back to their home countries;

4. The workforce should as much as possible be local hires who should be paid a fair wage well above the minimum for that country; and

5. Finally, foreign investors in African farmland should also have at least some kind of community re- investment programme in the host country.

Whilst these principles will not solve every concern of local African NGOs, they are at least a starting point for considering examining whether a farmland investment is structured as a win-win for both the investor and the local population, or if the investor is behaving in an inherently exploitative manner. One other interesting factor is that when farmland investment projects are structured such that retail investors can participate, the project is more likely to be fair, as individual investors are much more likely to demand that any project they are involved with be both ethical and profitable.

Josh Altman is with GreenWorld, an alternative investments firm specializing in such areas as forestry and farmland investments. The aim is to allow smaller investors to access such stable, "hard asset" alternative investments that pay high current income and also offer excellent opportunity of long-term capital gains. GreenWorld is on the web at http://www.greenworldbvi.com

UPDATE (22.01.2017): GreenWorld appears to have ceased trading and the website has been taken over by another user.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Oxford reunion, 40 years on

photo: H M Cotterill, 2007

See World Voices for this year's midsummer revelry under a magical moon.

Ridley the GM supporter vs. Ridley the green farmer?

Running with the hare, or the hound?

Guy Adams' article yesterday, "The Frankenfood Conspiracy", details the tactics used by the Big Three companies behind genetically modified food.

As with so many other aspects of public life, it seems that decisions are now influenced not by electoral or opinion polls, but by commercial interests that know how to gain the ear of political power.

An interesting nugget from this piece concerns the self-styled "rational optimist", member of the House of Lords and pro-GM writer Matt Ridley:

"Environment Secretary Owen Paterson’s wife, Rose, is the sister of Viscount Matt Ridley, who is better known as the former chairman of Northern Rock. After presiding over the bank’s collapse, he has concentrated on his career as a pro-GM blogger and science writer.

"Has Ridley had formal or informal discussions with his brother-in-law the Environment Secretary on the subject of GM? DEFRA couldn’t tell me.

"Matt Ridley did not respond to our request for a comment."

In the House of Lords Register of Members' Interests, Viscount Ridley lists a shareholding in Blagdon Farming Ltd - the Blagdon Estate has been in his family since 1700. The farm is certified by the LEAF organisation, which promotes "environmentally responsible" principles and collaborates with (among others) the RSPB, WWF, Waitrose and the Crop Protection Association. The Blagdon Farm Shop says, "We only sell food that has been produced by farms that are either organic or follow traditional farming methods, that are kind to the natural environment."

Very reassuring.

On the other hand, Ridley is also a shareholder in California-based genetic research company Illumina Inc, which includes "agrigenomics" among its fields of interest; and Greggs, the UK bakery shop that has more outlets here than McDonald's. Food for thought...

He is also an "occasional speaker" (three times between February and April this year) via Chartwell Partners. The speeches were:

1. When Ideas Have Sex
2. Reasons To Be Cheerful: How Prosperity Evolves (video)

... and (3) a talk at Suboptic 2013, summarised in part thus (on page 5):
 

"The secret of human prosperity is that everybody is working for everybody else. In this talk Matt will explore the ways that the cross fertilisation of ideas leads to prosperity-enhancing innovation, drawing an analogy with the way that the recombination of genes leads to genetic innovation..."

The reader might be forgiven for thinking that there is some possible inconsistency with being a landowner whose family farm makes much of its "organic/traditional/environmental" values, and being a journalist, writer and speaker who advocates the benefits of genetic research in feeding us all.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

BLOGGER ALERT: EU now makes its big power grab

The European Central Bank has given itself permission to take control of Europe via the economic system. The news comes via a small item buried in the Telegraph website, but John Ward sees this as a dangerous watershed.

Please read his article and if you agree, promote wider readership via your own electronic connections.

ANALYSIS: WHY THE REAL EU FUHRER IS NOW MARIO DRAGHI

Slipping quietly onto the Telegraph’s website at 10.45 pm Thursday night was this potentially earth-shaking piece (the italics are mine): ‘EU agrees rules on bank rescues by bailout fund: using the €500bn rescue fund to shore up struggling banks directly is a pillar of Europe’s so-called banking union, which seeks to hand European institutions the job of supervision and rescue rather than leaving weaker member states to fend for themselves.’ It came to nine lines in total, attracted six comments, and has now been reduced to a tiny sub-head 75% of the way down the Finance page.
History will come to see this as perhaps the outstanding media miss of the entire eurozone crisis.
It’s entirely contrary to the Lisbon Treaty of course – but let’s not worry about that: Gordon Brown never wanted to sign the bloody thing anyway. The more important point to make here is that the steam coming out of Bundesbank President Jens Weidmann’s ears yesterday will have been enough to power the Frankfurt U-Bahn for a year at least.

“Central banks in recent years have been pulled into the role of a crisis manager,” Herr Weidmann told Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat in an interview four months ago, “Some think that central banks are the only able ones. I consider this thinking wrong and dangerous”. A consistent anti-ECB direct aid hawk, Weidmann is one of the few German élite members who talks consistent sense….and, privately, has come to realise that Chancellor Merkel is an unbalanced egomaniac.

But it’s beginning to look like the Anti-ECB Hawkeyes are being stitched up by Berlin.

What we’re seeing here is the megastate technocrats of Berlin-am-Brussels handing absolute power to the unelected….at the expense of the citizen. Merkel and Schäuble may dislike what the Demon Draghi has achieved at their expense, but that’s a tiff about power, not principles. The very fact that we are getting the direct ESM usage with no sign of Fiskalunion (which wasn’t what last year’s summit agreed) means that all the power now resides in the hands of the man with the printing machine: Mario Draghi.

The Merkeschäuble would prefer that power to lie with them, but they’re on the same mission as the Italian Machiavelli from Goldman Sachs.

Take the Karlsruhe ‘decision’ on the Constitutional or otherwise nature of the German Government partaking in eurozone OMT. The facts surrounding the case are beginning to suggest Merkeschäuble political interference on a grand scale. While the Court was meeting earlier this month, I was under the distinct impression that Karlsruhe would give a decision by the Friday of that week. Contacts across Europe and the US were of the same opinion.

So too were the German media.

This from Spiegel June 10th last: ‘alarm bells are again ringing inside the ECB tower — only this time it’s no drill. On Tuesday and Wednesday of this week, Germany’s Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe will rule on the euro crisis aid measure that Draghi announced last fall. As Draghi and his monetary experts on the executive floor of the bank were told by their constitutional experts long ago, this court decision could have an enormous impact on the bank’s policies — and potentially spell the end of the euro.’

But then three days later – the day before the decision was due – the June 13th, Time Magazine was saying, ‘The court will deliver its ruling in the fall, probably not before the German parliamentary elections on September 22.’

Very handy, that. Especially as it was widely known in German élite circles that the decision was on a knife-edge: Wolfgang Schäuble was briefing and spinning like an overactive Dervish for the entire week. He obviously didn’t think the portents were good.

Now the shroud around all this is getting increasingly diaphanous.

This is what it says on the Federal Court’s website today: “We regret not to be able to present to you the decisions of the Federal Court of Justice in English language. The court has no staff, capacity or equipment to do so.”

Sorry folks, but LOL or what?

Leading German anti-OTM camapaigner and eurosceptic Peter Gauweiler has led the Karlsruhe suit from day one. He seems able to afford English translation of his views….but not Germany’s Federal Court.

When I rang the Bundesbank press office this morning, they declined to comment. Funnily enough, so did the ECB.

We need to take this on board in a big way – even if the mainstream media are half-asleep on the EU’s fascist illegality, and Berlin’s willingness to ride roughshod over its Constitution.

We still await the ECB capital flight data. It was due for publication on June 17th. It’s now June 21st: where is it?

Get real, people: Mario Draghi is the most powerful human being in Europe, and he is a crook. He is subverting European democracy and breaking any law that gets in his way.

Mario Draghi is a former senior manager at Goldman Sachs. He recently gave a presentation to EuroFinMins openly encouraging a policy of reducing citizen incomes to cut production costs: that is antithetical to Article 3 of the Lisbon Treaty. He has now been given carte blanche to supply money direct to any eurozone institution, thus bypassing all democratically elected Assemblies in the region. This too is forbidden under the Lisbon Treaty. Mario Draghi is completely unaccountable to any body or institution – elected or otherwise. Under the ECB’s Constitution guaranteed by the European Commission he is totally immune from prosecution. He cannot be removed from his position. He is obviously censoring any and all information that might reveal the true situation in the eurozone. He illegally subordinated an entire class of bondholders over the second Greek bailout. He managed and spearheaded an overt heist to steal the banking expertise and economic wellbeing of Cyprus, and in so doing committed an act of grand larceny against innocent depositors in the Island’s banks.

As of today – following the FinMins’ disgracefully amoral decision of yesterday – Mario Draghi has more power than Hjalmar Schacht and Josef Goebbels combined in 1941. And he is a far better political strategist than Adolf Hitler. Slugging it out with this gargoyle to be the EU’s top money manager is Wolfgang Schäuble: a lying humbug and former Spook enjoying the political protection of a former DDR Communist Youth leader – a Stalinist hardliner who speaks fluent Russian….Angela Merkel.

This is not a queue for the showers, European nations. It is the line heading directly to the extermination of your democratic rights, individual liberties, and personal wealth. There may be 27 of you and only one Draghi; but your divisions just make his job far easier. Step in the way of the Beasts now, or you will have a jackboot stepping on your face forever. 
 
I try as much as possible to keep these appeals to a minimum, but I am asking anyone interested enough to please email, share, tweet, text, reblog, and otherwise give this piece a maximum chance of viral epidemiology. The mainstream media are obsessed with superficial news, gossip and settling political scores, but in giving this decision a low profile they are in complete dereliction of their duty.

UK: Gaudy

photo: H M Cotterill, 2007

By the time I had parked in St Giles and collected my room key from the girl in the College porters' office, the dinner was ending. Changed into smart casual, I headed for Third Quad and the College Bar, passing wine-loudened stragglers in the dining hall, knots of blacktied alumni on the path and a servant watching a man being helped back into his wheelchair at the foot of the steps.

Second Quad, where the JCR (junior common room) used to be. This comprised four rooms:  first, an oak-lined room for morning toast and newspapers (and a small red-haired mathematician who would complete the Times crossword as fast as he could write the answers). This opened onto a second room with a TV, where we would watch Match of the Day and hold JCR meetings; the year before I came up, the students elected a goldfish as President (because like his predecessors, he went round in circles, opening and closing his mouth) and appointed an interpreter to convey the President's rulings. Across the stairway entrance, the Piggery, where they played poker and table football, and one Welshman would regularly smash the glass top on the Gottlieb pinball machine when he failed to get a replay.

Once, as the dons proceeded from sherry in the Senior Common Room to the dining hall, they were met with a hail of breadrolls from the open JCR windows as they passed; from then on, they simply used the path on the other side of the quad. Late at night, Bill, the medical student and rugby player, would shamble through the archway from Third Quad, stand solus in mid-lawn facing the Junior Proctor's room, drop his trousers and sing the Sheep-Shagger's Song in a hoarse, drink-exhausted voice. A decade or two ago, the bar (smartened and relocated) included a reference to his ritual in its decor, echoing the way that Oxford had become a theme park dedicated to a cute version of its history; missing the jab of atavistic defiance in his nightly bawling against authority. The decor has changed again, now that a new, ambitious generation is in possession and society here is restratifying (as a St Andrews graduate confirmed to us later that night); the low Gini Index days of the Seventies are gone.

Escaping the roar of the bar, I drank my vodka tonics and exchanged news and reminiscences with half-remembered faces. Below the College library (where one used to catch glimpses of a silent, white-haired professor of Celtic) once lay the evil-smelling toilets or "traps", graffitied ("beware of limbo dancers"); and the baths to whose provision an earlier Principal had objected, saying that the terms were only eight weeks long, and besides, he and wife went to Rhyl every summer.

I went out of the massive wooden side gate to get a lamb kebab from the large, clean van on Broad Street (no more dodgy late-night boiled hot dogs on Magdalen Bridge now, I expect) and got back in using the electronic key, for the days of open College premises have passed. "Weren't you at dinner?" "No, you only get to talk to two or three people and you can't hear anyway. What was the food like?" "Not bad, though there wasn't very much." "And the wine?" "Better than last time." The speeches had been few and short; the Principal had said that if this were America, the doors would have been locked and donations solicited. We expect to be invited back more frequently now, the retired and retiring, the greyhairs watching the smartly-attired whippersnappers walk past from their post-Finals celebrations. There is the sound of fireworks, startling a bat; youngsters are collecting each other and working out where to go; the lights come on in the Graduate Common Room.

A few minutes to go before the bar closes; last chance to get one or two more in. My friend strolls into First Quad to find a toilet and look for an off licence; comes back empty-handed and goes down the bar to get a couple of bottles of red. We sit on a bench in the moonlit sky, chatting to the late leavers. Isolated wisps of backlit clouds drift above the parapets; ghostly white birds wheel over the buildings at midnight; the moon's face appears at a crenel. It is Midsummer Night, and the stage is all but empty.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment.