An Urban's Rural View

It's time to update three recent blog posts.

-- Oregon's ballot measure on GMO labeling, which I voted against (http://tiny.cc/…), lost by a mere 4,500 votes out of 1.5 million cast (http://tiny.cc/…) even though food and seed companies spent $18 million to defeat it (http://tiny.cc/…). State-labeling-law proponents vowed to try again, and well they might. They came very close this time. When will industry stop playing defense? When will it start lobbying for a mandatory federal labeling standard, one that actually provides consumers with information rather than the misleading warnings envisioned in the proposed state laws?

-- More than 75% of the voters in Berkeley, California, voted to impose a penny-an-ounce tax on sugar-sweetened beverages even though the soda companies spent $2.3 million on a campaign against the proposal (http://tiny.cc/…). Berkeley is the first city in the country to adopt a soda tax; soda-tax proposals had gone down to defeat in 30 cities and states previously. Soda-tax supporters hailed the vote as the beginning of a trend. Opponents shrugged it off as something that could only happen in a left-wing hotbed like Berkeley. Time will tell. What's clear, as I blogged last month (http://tiny.cc/…), is that soda sales will likely continue to decline across the country, with or without soda taxes.

-- China and the U.S agreed to notify each other of their military exercises and set rules of behavior when their ships and planes encounter each other (http://tiny.cc/…). In a quiet way, this is as important a step as the agreement the countries reached on climate change, which got most of the press coverage from the meeting between presidents Barack Obama and Xi Jinping.

China, as I explained in my last post (http://tiny.cc/…), has emerged as a global military power with nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed submarines plying the open oceans. The new security agreement will reduce the danger of unintended confrontations between our global forces and theirs. Another upside of both the security and climate agreements, David Ignatius argues (http://bit.ly/…), is that China is no longer hiding behind the excuse that "We're too poor a country to have global responsibilities." Under Xi, China seems very comfortable being depicted as a global power.

Urban Lehner

urbanity@hotmail.com

(CZ)

© Copyright 2014 DTN/The Progressive Farmer. All rights reserved.