Posted on 4/28/2004, 5:57:03 PM by The kings dead
TOPPENISH, Wash. - After 55 years of packing Eastern Washington asparagus, the Del Monte Foods factory here moved operations to Peru last year, eliminating 365 jobs. The company said it could get asparagus cheaper and year-round there.
As the global economy churns, nearly every sector has a story about U.S. jobs landing on cheaper shores. But what happened to the U.S. asparagus industry is rare, the farmers here say, because it became a casualty of the government's war on drugs.
To reduce the flow of cocaine into the United States by encouraging farmers in Peru to grow food instead of coca, the United States in the early 1990s started to subsidize a year-round Peruvian asparagus industry, and since then U.S. processing plants have closed and hundreds of farmers have gone out of business.
One result is that Americans are eating more asparagus, because it is available fresh at all times. But the growth has been in Peruvian asparagus supported by U.S. taxpayers.
"We've created this booming asparagus industry in Peru, resulting in the demise of a century-old industry in America," said Alan Schreiber, director of the Washington Asparagus Commission. "And I've yet to hear anyone from the government tell me with a straight face that it has reduced the amount of cocaine coming into this country."
Government officials respond that it was never their intent to hobble an American industry. But they say a thriving asparagus industry in Peru stabilizes the country and provides an incentive to grow something other than coca leaves, the raw material of a drug used regularly by about 2.8 million Americans.
"Apologies to the people affected," said David Murray, special assistant for the White House's drug policy office, "but the idea of creating alternative development, countrywide, does serve our purposes." Murray said that net cultivation of coca leaf in Peru had fallen considerably, but that it was unclear how big a role the alternative crop incentives had played.
Here in Washington, the nation's second-leading asparagus producer, after California, about 17,000 acres have been plowed under since a 1991 trade act prompted a flood of less-expensive Peruvian asparagus, a 55 percent decline in acreage.
During the same period, Peruvian asparagus exports to the United States have grown to 110 million pounds from 4 million pounds.
When the American factories closed, Washington farmers were left without a buyer for millions of pounds of asparagus. Among them was Ed McKay, who has given up on asparagus, a crop that takes three to five years to mature and then grows perennially. After growing it for 50 years and employing more than 100 people at the height of the season, he turned over his 225 acres in central Washington near Othello last year. He now plants some in corn and wheat, and lets other land go fallow.
"We're a victim of the drug war," said McKay, 73. "It seems like we still got plenty of cocaine coming into this country, but now we got cheap asparagus as well."
Acreage devoted to asparagus has dropped by a third in California, and the crop has nearly disappeared from the Imperial Valley, once a huge source of asparagus. Growers blame imports from Peru, but also cheaper asparagus from Mexico, which benefits from the North American Free Trade Agreement.
In Michigan, the value of the industry has fallen by 35 percent since the Andean trade agreement. Michigan and Washington have been hit the hardest because they lead the nation in production of canned or frozen asparagus.
"The irony is that they-didn't plow under the coke to plant asparagus in Peru," said John Bakker, executive director of the Michigan Asparagus Advisory Board. "If you look at that industry in Peru and where it's growing, it has nothing to do with coca leaf growers becoming normal farmers. Coca leaf is grown in the highlands. The asparagus is near sea level."
In a letter to the State Department in March, Peru's government said the asparagus industry employed 50,000 people, 40 percent of whom came from coca-producing regions.
U.S. auditors, in a 2001 report to Congress, said the Foreign Agricultural Service "does not believe that Peruvian asparagus production provides an alternative economic opportunity for coca producers and workers -- the stated purpose of the act."
And here-in lies the rub. Uncle Sugar and his band of State Dept CLOWNS once again screw the pooch. And we pay for it.
And State was TOLD in no uncertain terms that this would happen and that it is happening!
I saw no mention of children in the article. But the harm children of U.S. asparagus farmers is much clearer than the alleged benefits of the WOD for children.
I like it once in a while. Brussels sprouts ... now, that's nasty.
Balderdash!
Asparagus au Gratin
2 tablespoons butter
1 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons flour
2 cups milk
1 cup shredded cheese
1 1/2 cups cracker crumbs
3/4 chopped walnuts
1 to 1 1/2 pounds fresh trimmed asparagus
In a saucepan, melt butter; stir in flour and salt until smooth. Add milk gradually and continue cooking, stirring constantly, until sauce is slightly thickened. Add shredded cheese to the sauce. Combine cracker crumbs and chopped walnuts. Into a buttered casserole, place a layer of asparagus, a layer of cracker mixture and a layer of the sauce. Repeat layers, using remaining ingredients. Bake at 375° oven until top is nicely browned, about 15 to 20 minutes.
Asparagus recipe serves 4 to 6.
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