Take That to the Bank (ep. 175)

Strategic reserves -- everything from Canadian maple syrup to seeds -- are intended to stabilize prices or to help us survive, in both the short and long term.  So what are we keeping and why?  (and what happens if someone steals it?!)

Like what you hear?  Become a patron of the arts for as little as $2 a month!   Or buy the book or some merch.  Hang out with your fellow Brainiacs.  Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter,  or Instagram.

Music: Kevin MacLeod, David Fesliyan.  

Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.

Links to all the research resources are on the website.

 

In the latter half of the 20th century, American wines finally began to come into their own on the global scene.  It was no longer a social faux pas to be seen drinking California chardonnay.  Hastened by a global recession, consumption of European wines by Europeans dropped precipitously, by nearly 1/2 in France and by almost ⅔ in Italy.  What’s a vineyard to do if they’ve produced more wine than the public is buying?  Put it in the wine lake, of course.  My name’s…

 

A strategic reserve is the reserve of a commodity or items that is held back from normal use by governments, organisations, or businesses in pursuance of a particular strategy or to cope with unexpected events.  Your mind may go immediately to the 35 million barrels or so of crude oil that the US has in storage, but there are all kinds of strategic reserves, sometimes called stockpiles, throughout the world.  Most of those stockpiles are intended to guard against price fluctuations.  Today will trend more toward survival necessities, but if you’ve ever done any kind of research, you know that start off thinking you’re going down one road and wind up goodness knows where. 

 

The rationing, deprivation, and economic collapse that were part and parcel to WWII affected the lives of Europeans so profoundly that the European Economic Community, a precursor to the European Union, began subsidizing farmers.  Farmers have never been raking in the big bucks, even when the are outstanding in their field [rimshot], but they were no longer able to rely on it to support their families, especially on land pock-marked with those pesky bomb craters.  Under-production was endemic to the 1950’s.  The Common Agricultural Policy was created in 1962 to pay guaranteed, artificially high prices to dairy farmers for surplus products.  These products were then sold the European public for higher prices, causing a drop in sales.  Attempts by non-EU dairies to get in on these high sale prices were kiboshed by heavy taxes.  A certain portion of products were stockpiled, to guard against crop failures, natural disasters, or in case someone got a wild hair and started WWIII.  In 1986 alone, the EU bought 1.23 million tons of leftover butter.  That’s 9,840,000,000 sticks of creamy saturated fat goodness.  While this may sound like a dairy-lover’s dream, the general public was not so enthusiastic when word got out of what was termed the “butter mountain,” nor were they keen to learn they were paying inflated prices for their dairy goods.  This program actually cost a lot of taxpayer money, almost 90% of the European Economic Communities entire budget.  Even as recently as 2003, these payments are approximately half of the EU budget, even though farming is only 3% of the overall economy.

 

It still took until the ‘90s for something to be done about it, however. Instead of paying farmers for their unwanted butter, the EEC switched to paying them to not produce it.  To move away from paying farmers guaranteed minimum prices for surplus goods, the government has shifted to paying to farmers so they won’t produce as much.  While it seems counter-intuitive, it’s not uncommon for governments to pay farmers not farm.  It’s been done here in the US since the 1930’s.  Some of the prohibitively high import taxes were rescinded as well.  In 2007, the butter surplus was liquidated, figuratively speaking.  In 2009, however, the global recession did require some of the old policies to be reinstated.  The EU claimed it was only a temporary measure that would result in a smaller butter reserve than before, a butter hill rather than a mountain.  A grass-fed knoll, if you will.  This was no magic butter, of course.  Critics argue that farming subsidies in first-world nations hurt developing countries whose farmers can’t compete with the artificial prices.   The 300,000 tons of butter the government bought cost taxpayers a whopping €280,000,000, or about a third of a billion dollars, and public pressure quickly rose to get rid of it again.  As of 2011, a portion of the butter had been donated to the worldwide Food Aid for the Needy program.  They don’t have this down pat, though.  Changing medical views about fat are leading people to return to butter rather than vegetable oils or margarine, at a rate that’s outpacing production.

 

Oh, Canada, the great white north, full of polite people, ice hockey, geese, and maple syrup.  There are worse reputations for a country to have.  What a pleasant and wholesome thing maple syrup is, drizzled on pancakes on a sunny Sunday morning.  It lands strangely on the brain to learn that there is a Global Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve.   The Canadian maple syrup industry produces approximately 80% of the world’s pure maple syrup and is the leading global producer of maple products.  The province of Quebec alone has almost 8,000 farms, fulfilling 72% of the worlds sticky sweet needs.

 

Maple syrup is harvested from the sap of maple trees, shockingly, but the process is even more fickle than your average crop.  Maple trees require nights below freezing and days that are in the low thirties but above freezing to  relinquish their sap in useful quantities.  If the nights are too warm or the days are too cold, production levels can vary wildly based on the weather.  That isn’t good news if you’re trying to maintain a large-scale industry.  It takes 40 units of sap to get one unit of syrup, though a long boiling process called sugaring off.  Corporate buyers depend on a consist supply.  Since 2000, the Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers has been squirreling away barrels of surplus syrup in rich times, in preparation for poor harvests.  The Federation’s warehouses have a capacity of 10 million kilos / 22.2 million pounds of syrup, or about two million gallons.  Each barrel weighs about 620 pounds and commands a price of $1,650, almost 20 times the cost of crude oil.  

 

Speaking of oil, some producers claim the Federation runs their operation like OPEC.  Those producers who don’t cooperate with the quota system, those with the temerity to find their own buyers, are dealt with harshly.  Small producer Angèle Grenier told reporter Leyland Cecco she will face criminal charges if she doesn’t stop selling to a private broker after the courts ordered her to hand her syrup over.  She has three choices: give the Federation her syrup crop, face jail time, or shut down.  “The federation’s goal by taking our maple syrup is that by taking our income, we cannot pay our lawyers,” says Grenier.  “If one year we make 45 barrels, and the next year is a very good year and we make 60, we want to get paid for the 60,” she says. Once a producer fills the quota, the surplus, no matter how large, is retained until it is sold.  That lag-time can run into years.  According to Grenier, a neighboring producer is owed almost 100,000 Canadian dollars in unsold syrup.  According to Al Jazeera America, a small Quebec producer described what happened to his family’s business: “The agent who came here to seize our syrup said, ‘If you were growing pot, we wouldn’t be giving you as much trouble.’ 

 

When an accountant went to inventory the barrels in the warehouse in Saint-Louis-de-Blanford, he was alarms to find a number of the barrels filled with water, while others were plain empty.

Because of the sheer volume of syrup, it would take two months to even determine how much was missing.  About 60 percent of the reserve, worth about $18 million at that time, had been stolen.  The thieves had rented space in the same warehouse and when the security guards were out of sight, siphoned the syrup from the barrels over the course of 11 months.  A multi-agency search began.  Hundreds of people were questioned and dozens of search warrants were issued.  It took a year for the 26 people believed to be involved in the robbery to be arrested.  About ⅓ of the syrup would never be recovered.  The mastermind, Richard Vallieres, received an eight-year prison sentence, which will be increased to 14 years if he doesn’t pay $9.4 million in fines, the CBC reports.  Vallières was found guilty of theft, fraud and trafficking stolen goods.  His father, Raymond, and syrup reseller Etienne St-Pierre, have also been found guilty.  Speaking of Canada, I’m 100% serious about a virtual watch-party for the Letterkenny season 10 premier, soc med.

 

To quote the show to make a clunky segue, what’s a Mennonite’s favorite kind of raisin?  Barn-raisin’.  Yes, Virginia, there is a national raisin reserve.  That's right, raisins, those polarizing wrinkly former grapes.  While most stockpiles are created to protect against shortage, the National Raisin Reserve came to be for the opposite reason.  We were up to our epaulets in raisins, apparently.   During World War II, both the government and civilians bought raisins en masse to send to soldiers overseas, as a sweet, shelf stable taste of home.  Increased demand led to increased production, but when the war ended and the care packages stopped, the raisin market was flooded.   In 1949, Marketing Order 989 was passed which created the reserve and the Raisin Administrative Committee to oversee it, under the supervision of the USDA.  The Committee was empowered to take a varying percentage of American raisin farmers’ produce, sometimes almost half, in an effort to create a raisin shortage and artificially drive up the market price. The reserved raisins didn't go to waste.  Much of it was used in school lunches, fed to livestock, or sold to other countries.  If the raisins were sold, the profit was supposed to be shared with the farmers, but those monies could easily be eaten up by operating expenses, leaving nothing for the people who actually grew the grapes.

 

This program stayed in place, business as usual, for 53 years, until 2002.  That's when farmer Marvin Horne decided that he would rather sell the product he had grown and processed instead of giving it away to the government. The government took exception to this idea.  Private detectives were dispatched to put his farm under surveillance, then trucks were sent to collect the raisins. When Horne refused to let the trucks on his property, he was slapped with a bill for about $680,000, the value of the raisins plus a penalty.  Not one to roll over that easily, Horne sued the government, claiming the forced forfeiture of his crop was unconstitutional.  For years, the case was volleyed from one court to another.  Eventually, it appeared before the U.S. Supreme Court, not once but twice.  The first time was to settle the issue of jurisdiction.  Justice Elena Kagan suggested that the question was “whether the marketing order is a Taking or it’s just the world’s most outdated law.”  The second time was the core issue - was the seizure of raisins a violation of the Fifth Amendment, which prohibits the government taking personal property without just compensation?  In 2015, thirteen years after the farce began, the court ruled 8:1 in favor of Horne: For seizures to continue, compensation would have to be paid, that the confiscation of a portion of a farmer's crops without market price compensation was unconstitutional. 

 

While many growers supports Horne in his efforts, even contributing to his legal fees, not everyone thinks of him as a champion of the little guy.  Some who followed the government’s orders while Horne defied them resent him for it.  “I lost a lot of my land, following the rules,” said Eddie Wayne Albrecht, a raisin grower in nearby Del Rey, Calif.   He lost so much money in turning in as much as 47% of his crop that his farm, once 1,700 acres strong, is now only 100 acres.  “He got 100 percent, while I was getting 53 percent,” Albrecht said. “The criminal is winning right now.”

 

What’s happening with the raisin reserve now?  The Agriculture Department could abolish it, but they have only hit pause on it, saying “Due to a recent United States Supreme Court decision, [the Volume Control] provisions are currently suspended, being reviewed, and will be amended.” At least that means that in the meantime, no more raisins should be put into the reserve and farmers are free to sell what’s theirs.

 

Bonus fact the first: Golden raisins aren’t dried white grapes.  Both regular and golden raisins are made from the same kind of grapes, but with slightly different processes.  

 

MIDROLL

 

Do you remember how, after like the third time Futurama got cancelled, they did a quartet of movies, which went back and forth in quality like the Star Trek films.  The one, Into the Wild Green Yonder, featured a creature called the Encyclopod, who preserved the DNA of all endangered species.  It’s not news that animal species are disappearing at an increasing rate, with a quarter of all known mammals and a tenth of all birds facing possible extinction within the next generation.  Global biodiversity is declining at an overwhelming speed. With each species that disappears, vast amounts of information about their biology, ecology and evolutionary history is irreplaceably lost.  In 2004, three British organizations decided to join forces and combat the issue.  The Natural History Museum, the Zoological Society of London, and Nottingham University joined forces, like highly-educated Planeteers, to create the Frozen Ark Project.  

 

To do this, they gathered and preserved DNA and living tissue samples from all the endangered species they could get their hands on (literally), so that future generations can study the genetic material far into the future.  No, not like Jurassic Park.  I think it’s been established that that’s a bad idea.  So far, the Frozen Ark has over 700 samples stored at the University of Nottingham in England and participating consortium members in the U.S., Germany, Australia,India, South Africa, Norway, and others.  DNA donations come from museums, university laboratories, and zoos.  Their mission has four component: to coordinating global efforts in animal biobanking; to share expertise; to help to organisations and governments set up biobanks in their own countries; and to provide the physical and informatics infrastructure that will allow conservationists and researchers to search for, locate, and use this material wherever possible without having to resample from wild populations.

 

The Frozen Ark Project was founded in 2004 by Professor Bryan Clarke, a geneticist at the University of Nottingham, his wife Dr Ann Clarke, an immunologist with experience in reproductive biology, and their friend Dame Anne McLaren, a leading figure in developmental biology.  Starting in the 1960’s, Clarke carried out comprehensive studies on land snails of the genus Partula, which are endemic to the volcanic islands of French Polynesia.  Almost all Partula species disappeared within just 15 years, because of a governmental biological control plan that went horribly wrong.  In the late ’60s, the giant African land snail, a mollusk the size of a puppy, was introduced to the islands as a delicacy, but soon turned into a serious agricultural pest, because, as seems to happen 100% of the time humans think they know better, the giant snail had no natural predators.  To control the African land snails, the carnivorous Florida rosy wolfsnail was introduced in the ’70s, but it annihilated the native snails instead.  As a last resort, Clarke’s team managed to collect live specimens of the remaining 12 Partula species and bring them back to Britain.  Tissue samples were frozen to preserve their DNA and an international captive breeding program was established.  Currently, there are Partula species, including some that later became extinct in the wild, in a dozen zoos and a there few been a few promising reintroductions.

 

The extinction story of the Partula snails resonated with the Clarkes, who realised that systematic collection and preservation of tissue, DNA, and viable cells of endangered species should become standard practice, ultimately inspiring the birth of Frozen Ark.  The Frozen Ark Project operates as a federated model, building partnerships with organisations worldwide that share the same vision and goals.  The Frozen Ark consortium has grown steadily since the project’s launch, with new national and international organisations joining every year.  There are now 27 partners, distributed across five continents.  Biological samples like tissue or blood from animals in zoos and aquariums can be taken from live animals during routine veterinary work or from dead animals.  Bonus fact: more of a nitpick, the post-mortem examination of an animal is a necropsy.  Autopsy means examining the self.  The biobanks can provide a safe storage for many types of biological material, particularly the highly valuable germ cells (sperm and eggs).  

 

Their work isn’t merely theoretical for some distant day in the future.  One success story of the Frozen Ark, which illustrates the benefits of combining cryobanked material, effective management, and a captive breeding program, is the alarmingly adorable black-footed ferret. The species was listed as “extinct in the wild” in 1996, but has since been reintroduced back to its habitat and is now gradually recovering.  More recently, researchers were able to improve the  genetic diversity to the wild population by using 20-year-old cryopreserved sperm and artificial insemination.  

 

There are many organizations around the world who have taken up the banner of seed preservation, nearly 2,000 in fact.  Most of us have heard of the seed vault at Svalbard, the cool-looking tower sticking out of a Norwegian mountain, where the permafrost ensures the seeds are preserved without need for electricity.  But that’s not the seed vault I want to talk about today and fair warning, this one’s gonna get heavy, but it’s one of those stories I find endlessly fascinating and in a strange way, uplifting.

 

In September 1941, German forces began to push into Leningrad, before and since called St Petersburg.  They laid siege to the city, choking off the supply of food and other necessities to the city’s two million residents.  The siege of Leningrad didn’t last a month, or two, or even six.  The siege lasted nearly 900 days.  Among the two million Soviet citizens struggling to survive were a group of scientists ready to make the ultimate sacrifice for the good of mankind.  While they did, their leader, Nikolay Vavilov, Russian geneticist and plant geographer, lay dying in a Soviet prison a thousand miles away. 

 

Vavilov had travelled the world on what he called “a mission for all humanity.”   Vavilov led 115 expeditions to 64 countries, to collect seeds of crop varieties and their wild ancestors. Based on his notes, modern biologists following in Vavilov’s footsteps are able to document changes in the cultural and physical landscapes and the crop patterns in these places.  To study the global food ecosystem, he conducted experiments in genetics to improve productivity for farmers.  “He was one of the first scientists to really listen to farmers – traditional farmers, peasant farmers around the world – and why they felt seed diversity was important in their fields,” says Gary Paul Nabhan, ethnobiologist and author of ‘Where Our Food Comes From: Retracing Nikolay Vavilov's Quest to End Famine’, continues: “All of our notions about biological diversity and needing diversity of foods on our plates to keep us healthy sprung from his work 80 years ago.”  His hope was that one day science could work with agriculture to increase each farm’s productivity and to create plants that would grow in any environment and bring an end to hunger.  As Russia fought to find its way through undergoing revolutions, anarchy, and, most importantly to Vavilov, famines, he went about storing seeds at the Institute of Plant Industry, also known as the Pavlovsk Experimental Station.  The scientists there collected thousands of varieties of fruits, vegetables, grains, and tubers.  Unlike Svalbard and Kew Garden, the seeds a Pavlovsk weren’t just stored as seeds, but some were perpetuated as plants in the field.  This is because some varieties do not breed true from seeds, so can’t be stored as seeds to get those plants in the future.

 

There was one obstacle in Vavilo’s way.  Two, really, but one was much greater a threat, that being Joseph Stalin.  The other threat was Stalin’s favorite scientist, Trofim Lysenkoly.  Lysenko was a dangerously mis-informed scientist.  Rather than survival of the fittest, where the genes that help an organism survive long enough to reproduce are the ones that are passed on, Lysenko believed that organisms could inherit traits the parent acquired during its lifespan.  Instead of believing that the giraffe with the longest neck was able to reach the food and live to have babies, he believed that the giraffe stretched its neck up and its baby would have a longer neck because of that.  He also believed that if you grafted a branch from a desirable tree onto a less desirable tree, the base tree would improve.  His theories about seeds and flowers were equally backwards.  It was garbage science at best.  At worst, well, we don’t need to speculate on that.  We saw it happen.  Crops failed under his now-mandatory systems on the new collectivized farms, which themselves reduced productivity.  Lysenko’s policies brought on a famine.  But he was in Stalin’s favor and in the Soviet Union, that was all that mattered.  In August 1948 when the Politburo outlawed the teaching of and research into classical Mendelian genetics, the pea plant-based genetics we learn about in middle school.  This disastrous government interference in the face of widely-accepted science and its outcomes are called the Lysenko Effect.  

 

There was no way Stalin’s favorite scientist was going to take the fall, so Stalin singled out Vavilov, who had been openly critical of Lysenko.  He claimed Vavilov was responsible for the famines because his process of carefully selecting the best specimens of plants took too long to produce results.  Vavilov was collecting seeds near Russia’s border when he was arrested and subjected to 1700 hours of savage interrogation.  World War II was in full swing and it was impossible for his family to find out what had happened to him.  Vavilov, who spent his life trying to end famine, starved to death in the gulag.

 

Back in Leningrad, some scientists from the Institute of Plant Industry were able to get the bulk of the tuber collection, and themselves, to another location within the city.  A dozen of Vavilov’s scientists stayed behind to safeguard the seed collection.  At first, it seemed as though they’d only have to contend with marauding enemy troops breeching the city, seeking to steal the seeds or simply destroy the building.  The red army pushed the Germans back as long as they could.  Nothing moved in or out of the city.  “Leningrad must die of starvation”, Hitler declared in a speech at Munich on November 8, 1941.  As the siege dragged on, the scientists then had to contend with protecting the seeds from their own countrymen.  Food was rationed, but once it ran out, people ate anything they could to survive--vermin, dogs, leather, sawdust, and as so often happens in such dark hours, some at the dead.  The scientists barricaded themselves inside with hundreds of thousands of seeds, a quarter of which were edible just as they were, along with rice and grains.

 

But they did not eat them.  They took turns guarding the store room in shifts, even as they grew weaker, even as they heard the Germans looting and destroying out in the streets.  The only thing that mattered was guarding the collection, safeguarding both the botanical past and future for mankind, and the work of their fallen Vavilov.  One by one, the scientist began to die of starvation.  One man died at his desk; another died surrounded by bags of rice.  In the end, nine of the twelve scientists did not live to see the end of the siege.  But not a single grain, seed, or tuber was eaten.  According to Nabhan, “One of them said it was hard to wake up, it was hard to get on your feet and put on your clothes in the morning, but no, it was not hard to protect the seeds once you had your wits about you.  Saving those seeds for future generations and helping the world recover after war was more important than a single person's comfort.”

 

Unlike many of the 85 million deaths in WWII, those nine scientists’ lives were not wasted.  Today, many of the crops that we eat came from cross-breeding with varieties the scientists saved from destruction.  As much as 80% of all the pre-collapse Soviet Union’s fields were sown with varieties that originated in Vavilov’s collection.  It’s a sad tale, I know, but also an amazing one that so few of us hear.  Which is odd when you consider the thousands of hours of WWII documentaries out there.  The world nearly lost Vavilov’s collection a second time, though.  In 2010, the land it sits on was being sold to a developer who planned to build private homes on the site.  The collection can’t just be moved; there are all sorts of complex legal and technical issues, including quarantines.  The public called for the site to be preserved and in 2012, the Russian government took formal action to prevent the land from being conveyed to private buyers.  As far as I can find, it stands safely still. 

 

Much to my lasting disappointment, the wine lake was not a physical lake of wine, like Willy Wonka’s chocolate river for women with Live, Laugh, Love decor.  In addition to subsidies equivalent to $1.7 billion per year, the EU purchased the vineyards’ lower-quality grapes for what it called “crisis distillation,” turning the grapes into industrial alcohol and biofuels, rather than for drinking.  This unfortunately encouraged some growers to produce more inferior grapes, so in 2008, the government just paid growers to dig up vines and abandon fields of surplus grapes.  In 2015, all of the previously enacted programs were phased out, meaning wineries would once again be responsible for their own excesses.  Remember…Thanks…   

https://listverse.com/2015/12/14/10-of-the-strangest-items-governments-are-stockpiling/

http://theweek.com/articles/454970/logic-behind-worlds-4-weirdest-strategic-reserves

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2012/12/20/why-maple-syrup-is-controlled-by-a-quebec-cartel/?utm_term=.8628802d4fe2

http://mentalfloss.com/article/87144/15-strategic-reserves-unusual-products

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butter_mountain

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-27/europeans-eat-into-butter-mountain-in-sign-high-prices-to-linger

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omBxXzdBR2Y

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiZ75XbG7YA

https://verdict.justia.com/2015/07/15/raisins-regulations-and-politics-in-the-supreme-court

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Raisin_Reserve

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/one-growers-grapes-of-wrath/2013/07/07/ebebcfd8-e380-11e2-80eb-3145e2994a55_story.html?utm_term=.74d6dccd2110

http://www.agr.gc.ca/eng/industry-markets-and-trade/market-information-by-sector/horticulture/horticulture-sector-reports/statistical-overview-of-the-canadian-maple-industry-2015/?id=1475692913659

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-01-02/the-great-canadian-maple-syrup-heist

https://explorepartsunknown.com/quebec/canadas-maple-syrup-cartel-puts-the-squeeze-on-small-producers/

https://modernfarmer.com/2014/01/illustrated-account-great-maple-syrup-heist/

http://time.com/4760432/maple-syrup-heist-prison-fine/

http://www.ediblegeography.com/syrup-stockpiles-wine-lakes-butter-mountains-and-other-strategic-food-reserves/

http://www.ediblegeography.com/syrup-stockpiles-wine-lakes-butter-mountains-and-other-strategic-food-reserves/

https://www.ft.com/content/982ed0e4-8a1d-11e4-9b5f-00144feabdc0

https://www.guildsomm.com/public_content/features/articles/b/guest_blog/posts/confeusion-a-quick-summary-of-the-eu-wine-reforms

http://mentalfloss.com/article/87144/15-strategic-reserves-unusual-products

https://listverse.com/2015/12/14/10-of-the-strangest-items-governments-are-stockpiling/

http://www.nww2m.com/2015/06/scitech-tuesday-when-the-rubber-meets-the-road/

https://insideecology.com/2018/01/12/the-frozen-ark-project-biobanking-endangered-animal-samples-for-conservation-and-research/

https://www.researchitaly.it/en/news/the-ice-memory-project-is-underway/#null

https://www.arctictoday.com/ice-cores-best-link-ancient-climates-scientists-racing-preserve-still-can/

https://www.rbth.com/blogs/2014/05/12/the_men_who_starved_to_death_to_save_the_worlds_seeds_35135

https://www.amusingplanet.com/2018/08/the-scientists-who-starved-to-death.html