Reposted from The Nation.

The Empire Backfires

Jonathan Schell

The first anniversary of the American invasion of Iraq has arrived. By now, we were told by the Bush Administration before the war, the flower-throwing celebrations of our troops’ arrival would have long ended; their numbers would have been reduced to the low tens of thousands, if not to zero; Iraq’s large stores of weapons of mass destruction would have been found and dismantled; the institutions of democracy would be flourishing; Kurd and Shiite and Sunni would be working happily together in a federal system; the economy, now privatized, would be taking off; other peoples of the Middle East, thrilled and awed, so to speak, by the beautiful scenes in Iraq, would be dismantling their own tyrannical regimes. Instead, 549 American soldiers and uncounted thousands of Iraqis, military and civilian, have died; some $125 billion has been expended; no weapons of mass destruction have been found; the economy is a disaster; electricity and water are sometime things; America’s former well-wishers, the Shiites, are impatient with the occupation; terrorist bombs are taking a heavy toll; and Iraq as a whole, far from being a model for anything, is a cautionary lesson in the folly of imperial rule in the twenty-first century. And yet all this is only part of the cost of the decision to invade and occupy Iraq. To weigh the full cost, one must look not just at the war itself but away from it, at the progress of the larger policy it served, at things that have been done elsewhere–some far from Iraq or deep in the past–and, perhaps above all, at things that have been left undone.

Nuclear Fingerprints

While American troops were dying in Baghdad and Falluja and Samarra, Buhary Syed Abu Tahir, a Sri Lankan businessman, was busy making centrifuge parts in Malaysia and selling them to Libya and Iran and possibly other countries. The centrifuges are used for producing bomb-grade uranium. Tahir’s project was part of a network set up by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the “father” of the Pakistani atomic bomb. This particular father stole most of the makings of his nuclear offspring from companies in Europe, where he worked during the 1980s. In the 1990s, the thief became a middleman–a fence–immensely enriching himself in the process. In fairness to Khan, we should add that almost everyone who has been involved in developing atomic bombs since 1945 has been either a thief or a borrower. Stalin purloined a bomb design from the United States, courtesy of the German scientist Klaus Fuchs, who worked on the Manhattan Project. China got help from Russia until the Sino-Soviet split put an end to it. Pakistan got secret help from China in the early 1970s. And now it turns out that Khan, among many, many other Pakistanis, almost certainly including the highest members of the government, has been helping Libya, Iran, North Korea and probably others obtain the bomb. That’s apparently how Chinese designs–some still in Chinese–were found in Libya when its quixotic leader, Muammar Qaddafi, recently agreed to surrender his country’s nuclear program to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The rest of the designs were in English.

Were Klaus Fuchs’s fingerprints on them? Only figuratively, because they were “copies of copies of copies,” an official said. But such is the nature of proliferation. It is mainly a transfer of information from one mind to another. Copying is all there is to it. Sometimes, a bit of hardware needs to be transferred, which is where Tahir came in. Indeed, at least seven countries are already known to have been involved in the Pakistani effort, which Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the IAEA, called a “Wal-Mart” of nuclear technology and an American official called “one-stop shopping” for nuclear weapons. Khan even printed a brochure with his picture on it listing all the components of nuclear weapons that bomb-hungry customers could buy from him. “What Pakistan has done,” the expert on nuclear proliferation George Perkovich, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has rightly said, “is the most threatening activity of proliferation in history. It’s impossible to overstate how damaging this is.”

Another word for this process of copying would be globalization. Proliferation is merely globalization of weapons of mass destruction. The kinship of the two is illustrated by other details of Tahir’s story. The Sri Lankan first wanted to build his centrifuges in Turkey, but then decided that Malaysia had certain advantages. It had recently been seeking to make itself into a convenient place for Muslims from all over the world to do high-tech business. Controls were lax, as befits an export platform. “It’s easy, quick, efficient. Do your business and disappear fast, in and out,” Karim Raslan, a Malaysian columnist and social commentator, recently told Alan Sipress of the Washington Post. Probably that was why extreme Islamist organizations, including Al Qaeda operatives, had often chosen to meet there. Global terrorism is a kind of globalization, too. The linkup of such terrorism and the world market for nuclear weapons is a specter that haunts the world of the twenty-first century.

The War and Its Aims

But aren’t we supposed to be talking about the Iraq war on this anniversary of its launch? We are, but wars have aims, and the declared aim of this one was to stop the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. In his State of the Union address in January 2002, the President articulated the threat he would soon carry out in Iraq: “The United States of America will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons.” Later, he said we didn’t want the next warning to be “a mushroom cloud.” Indeed, in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Secretary of State Colin Powell explicitly ruled out every other justification for the war. Asked about the other reasons, he said, “The President has not linked authority to go to war to any of those elements.” When Senator John Kerry explained his vote for the resolution authorizing the war, he cited the Powell testimony. Thus not only Bush but also the man likely to be his Democratic challenger in this year’s election justified war solely in the name of nonproliferation.

Proliferation, however, is not, as the President seemed to think, just a rogue state or two seeking weapons of mass destruction; it is the entire half-century-long process of globalization that stretches from Klaus Fuchs’s espionage to Tahir’s nuclear arms bazaar and beyond. The war was a failure in its own terms because weapons of mass destruction were absent in Iraq; the war policy failed because they were present and spreading in Pakistan. For Bush’s warning of a mushroom cloud over an American city, though false with respect to Iraq, was indisputably well-founded in regard to Pakistan’s nuclear one-stop-shopping: The next warning stemming from this kind of failure could indeed be a mushroom cloud.

The questions that now cry out to be answered are, Why did the United States, standing in the midst of the Pakistani nuclear Wal-Mart, its shelves groaning with, among other things, centrifuge parts, uranium hexafluoride (supplied, we now know, to Libya) and helpful bomb-assembly manuals in a variety of languages, rush out of the premises to vainly ransack the empty warehouse of Iraq? What sort of nonproliferation policy could lead to actions like these? How did the Bush Administration, in the name of protecting the country from nuclear danger, wind up leaving it wide open to nuclear danger?

In answering these questions, it would be reassuring, in a way, to report that the basic facts were discovered only after the war, but the truth is otherwise. In the case of Iraq, it’s now abundantly clear that some combination of deception, self-deception and outright fraud (the exact proportions of each are still under investigation) led to the manufacture of a gross and avoidable falsehood. In the months before the war, most of the governments of the world strenuously urged the United States not to go to war on the basis of the flimsy and unconvincing evidence it was offering. In the case of Pakistan, the question of how much the Administration knew before the war has scarcely been asked, yet we know that the most serious breach–the proliferation to North Korea–was reported and publicized before the war.

It’s important to recall the chronology of the Korean aspect of Pakistan’s proliferation. In January 2003 Seymour Hersh reported in The New Yorker that Pakistan had given North Korea extensive help with its nuclear program, including its launch of a uranium enrichment process. In return, North Korea was sending guided missiles to Pakistan. In June 2002, Hersh revealed, the CIA had sent the White House a report on these developments. On October 4, 2002, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and Pacific Affairs James Kelly confronted the North Koreans with the CIA information, and, according to Kelly, North Korea’s First Vice Foreign Minister, Kang Suk Ju, startled him by responding, “Of course we have a nuclear program.” (Since then, the North Koreans have unconvincingly denied the existence of the uranium enrichment program.)

Bush of course had already named the Pyongyang government as a member of the “axis of evil.” It had long been the policy of the United States that nuclearization of North Korea was intolerable. However, the Administration said nothing of the North Korean events to the Congress or the public. North Korea, which now had openly embarked on nuclear armament, and was even threatening to use nuclear weapons, was more dangerous than Saddam’s Iraq. Why tackle the lesser problem in Iraq, the members of Congress would have had to ask themselves, while ignoring the greater in North Korea? On October 10, a week after the Kelly visit, the House of Representatives passed the Iraq resolution, and the next day the Senate followed suit. Only five days later, on October 16, did Bush’s National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, reveal what was happening in North Korea.

In short, from June 2002, when the CIA delivered its report to the White House, until October 16–the period in which the nation’s decision to go to war in Iraq was made–the Administration knowingly withheld the news about North Korea and its Pakistan connection from the public. Even after the vote, Secretary of State Colin Powell strangely insisted that the North Korean situation was “not a crisis” but only “a difficulty.” Nevertheless, he extracted a pledge from Pakistan’s president, Pervez Musharraf, that the nuclear technology shipments to North Korea would stop. (They did not.) In March, information was circulating that both Pakistan and North Korea were helping Iran to develop atomic weapons. (The North Korean and Iranian crises are of course still brewing.)

In sum, the glaring contradiction between the policy of “regime change” for already disarmed Iraq and regime-support for proliferating Pakistan was not a postwar discovery; it was fully visible before the war. The Nation enjoys no access to intelligence files, yet in an article arguing the case against the war, this author was able to comment that an “objective ranking of nuclear proliferators in order of menace” would put “Pakistan first,” North Korea second, Iran third and Iraq only fourth–and to note the curiosity that “the Bush Administration ranks them, of course, in exactly the reverse order, placing Iraq, which it plans to attack, first, and Pakistan, which it befriends and coddles, nowhere on the list.” Was nonproliferation, then, as irrelevant to the Administration’s aims in Iraq as catching terrorists? Or was protecting the nation and the world against weapons of mass destruction merely deployed as a smokescreen to conceal other purposes? And if so, what were they?

A New Leviathan

The answers seem to lie in the larger architecture of the Bush foreign policy, or Bush Doctrine. Its aim, which many have properly called imperial, is to establish lasting American hegemony over the entire globe, and its ultimate means is to overthrow regimes of which the United States disapproves, pre-emptively if necessary. The Bush Doctrine indeed represents more than a revolution in American policy; if successful, it would amount to an overturn of the existing international order. In the new, imperial order, the United States would be first among nations, and force would be first among its means of domination. Other, weaker nations would be invited to take their place in shifting coalitions to support goals of America’s choosing. The United States would be so strong, the President has suggested, that other countries would simply drop out of the business of military competition, “thereby making the destabilizing arms races of other eras pointless, and limiting rivalries to trade and other pursuits of peace.” Much as, in the early modern period, when nation-states were being born, absolutist kings, the masters of overwhelming military force within their countries, in effect said, “There is now a new thing called a nation; a nation must be orderly; we kings, we sovereigns, will assert a monopoly over the use of force, and thus supply that order,” so now the United States seemed to be saying, “There now is a thing called globalization; the global sphere must be orderly; we, the sole superpower, will monopolize force throughout the globe, and thus supply international order.”

And so, even as the Bush Administration proclaimed US military superiority, it pulled the country out of the world’s major peaceful initiatives to deal with global problems–withdrawing from the Kyoto Protocol to check global warming and from the International Criminal Court, and sabotaging a protocol that would have given teeth to the biological weapons convention. When the UN Security Council would not agree to American decisions on war and peace, it became “irrelevant”; when NATO allies balked, they became “old Europe.” Admittedly, these existing international treaties and institutions were not a full-fledged cooperative system; rather, they were promising foundations for such a system. In any case, the Administration wanted none of it.

Richard Perle, who until recently served on the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, seemed to speak for the Administration in an article he wrote for the Guardian the day after the Iraq war was launched. He wrote, “The chatterbox on the Hudson [sic] will continue to bleat. What will die is the fantasy of the UN as the foundation of a new world order. As we sift the debris, it will be important to preserve, the better to understand, the intellectual wreckage of the liberal conceit of safety through international law administered by international institutions.”

In this larger plan to establish American hegemony, the Iraq war had an indispensable role. If the world was to be orderly, then proliferation must be stopped; if force was the solution to proliferation, then pre-emption was necessary (to avoid that mushroom cloud); if pre-emption was necessary, then regime change was necessary (so the offending government could never build the banned weapons again); and if all this was necessary, then Iraq was the one country in the world where it all could be demonstrated. Neither North Korea nor Iran offered an opportunity to teach these lessons–the first because it was capable of responding with a major war, even nuclear war, and the second because even the Administration could see that US invasion would be met with fierce popular resistance. It’s thus no accident that the peril of weapons of mass destruction was the sole justification in the two legal documents by which the Administration sought to legitimize the war–HJ Resolution 114 and Security Council Resolution 1441. Nor is it an accident that the proliferation threat played the same role in the domestic political campaign for the war–by forging the supposed link between the “war on terror” and nuclear danger. In short, absent the new idea that proliferation was best stopped by pre-emptive use of force, the new American empire would have been unsalable, to the American people or to Congress. Iraq was the foundation stone of the bid for global empire.

The reliance on force over cooperation that was writ large in the imperial plan was also writ small in the occupation of Iraq. How else to understand the astonishing failure to make any preparation for the political, military, policing and even technical challenges that would face American forces? If a problem, large or small, had no military solution, this Administration seemed incapable of even seeing it. The United States was as blind to the politics of Iraq as it was to the politics of the world.

Thus we don’t have to suppose that Bush officials were indifferent to the spectacular dangers that Khan’s network posed to the safety of the United States and the world or that the Iraqi resistance would pose to American forces. We only have to suppose that they were simply unable to recognize facts they had failed to acknowledge in their overarching vision of a new imperial order. In both cases, ideology trumped reality.

The same pattern is manifest on an even larger scale. Just now, the peoples of the world have embarked, some willingly and some not, on an arduous, wrenching, perilous, mind-exhaustingly complicated process of learning how to live as one indivisibly connected species on our one small, endangered planet. Seen in a certain light, the Administration’s imperial bid, if successful, would amount to a kind of planetary coup d’Ètat, in which the world’s dominant power takes charge of this process by virtue of its almost freakishly superior military strength. Seen in another, less dramatic light, the American imperial solution has interposed a huge, unnecessary roadblock between the world and the Himalayan mountain range of urgent tasks that it must accomplish no matter who is in charge: saving the planet from overheating; inventing a humane, just, orderly, democratic, accountable global economy; redressing mounting global inequality and poverty; responding to human rights emergencies, including genocide; and, of course, stopping proliferation as well as rolling back the existing arsenals of nuclear arms. None of these exigencies can be met as long as the world and its greatest power are engaged in a wrestling match over how to proceed.

Does the world want to indict and prosecute crimes against humanity? First, it must decide whether the International Criminal Court will do the job or entrust it to unprosecutable American forces. Do we want to reverse global warming and head off the extinction of the one-third of the world’s species that, according to a report published in Nature magazine, are at risk in the next fifty years? First, the world’s largest polluter has to be drawn into the global talks. Do we want to save the world from weapons of mass destruction? First, we have to decide whether we want to do it together peacefully or permit the world’s only superpower to attempt it by force of arms.

No wonder, then, that the Administration, as reported by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in these pages, has mounted an assault on the scientific findings that confirm these dangers to the world [see "The Junk Science of George W. Bush," March 8]. The United States’ destructive hyperactivity in Iraq cannot be disentangled from its neglect of global warming. Here, too, ideology is the enemy of fact, and empire is the nemesis of progress.

If the engine of a train suddenly goes off the rails, a wreck ensues. Such is the war in Iraq, now one year old. At the same time, the train’s journey forward is canceled. Such is the current paralysis of the international community. Only when the engine is back on the tracks and starts in the right direction can either disaster be overcome. Only then will everyone be able to even begin the return to the world’s unfinished business.

THE AUTHOR

Jonathan Schell, The Nation‘s peace and disarmament correspondent, is the Harold Willens Peace Fellow at the Nation Institute and the author, most recently, of the just-published The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People(Metropolitan).

Copyright ©2004 The Nation

Reposted from WorldOil.com.

Oil Outlook 2004

Matthew R. Simmons

The year 2003 was marked by a string of oil surprises. It is beginning to look as if “normal” is an oxymoron when used with the oil market. Perhaps 2004 will be the year when more answers than surprises occur.

Oil prices were the first surprise. For the fourth year in a row, West Texas Intermediate crude prices spent most of the year above $30/bbl, far higher than most “oil experts” had forecast, Fig. 1. The only time that oil prices took a sharp drop below this level was when the Iraq War broke out, spurred by the mistaken view that war in Iraq would soon be followed by a glut of Iraqi oil.

Fig. 1. West Texas Intermediate spent most of 2003 at its highest price level in years.

Surprise number two was the growth in oil demand, despite weak economic conditions around most of the globe. For a decade or more, oil observers have fretted about how weak global oil demand would be. This thesis turned out to be wrong.

Demand Growth Sources

Global oil demand grew 1.4 million bpd in 2003, or 50% higher than the 15-year average growth of 900,000 bpd. Over the last 15 years, global oil demand increased every single year, growing 13.5 million bpd over the period, despite decreased demand from the Former Soviet Union (5.3 million bpd). Had FSU demand grown as fast as the OECD’s rate, global oil demand would now be somewhere between 85 million and 90 million bpd!

Fueling this growth was China, but demand was also strong in the Middle East, parts of Latin America and throughout most of the rest of Asia. Only a few years ago, conventional energy wisdom assumed that it would be almost impossible for Asian oil demand to see any robust growth until Japan’s economic miracle returned. Today, Japan’s economy is still weak; its oil demand has barely grown over the past decade. Nonetheless, this did not stop demand growth in the rest of Asia.

Perhaps the biggest surprise regarding oil demand was the growth that happened in the US. For two decades, most forecasts assumed that growth in US oil demand was slowing each year and would soon stop. In the early 1990s, a widely circulated National Petroleum Report on the future of the US refinery industry envisioned in its base case that US motor gasoline demand would stay flat at 7.2 million bpd for 1996 through 2010. It projected little growth for other oil products.

This gloomy view of US oil usage turned out to be wrong. By 2003, US oil demand was setting new records almost every month. Leading the way was the backbone of US oil usage, motor gasoline, where total demand came close to averaging 9 million bpd for the entire year. Peak summer usage exceeded 9.4 million bopd. There was virtually no evidence, either, that surprisingly high oil prices had any impact on any aspect of US oil demand.

The world still seems to have an insatiable appetite for oil. Almost five billion people have very limited use of cars and other energy-consuming luxuries, but their access to global media is creating pent-up demand that could expand this usage.

In the 60 years since World War II ended, the only time there was any meaningful downturn in oil demand, outside the one-time collapse in FSU oil demand, was when usage of oil in any great quantities to generate electricity stopped from 1979 to 1983. This one-time change was triggered more by the advent of nuclear power coming on-stream than the explosion oil prices.

There were a few one-time reasons fueling the strong, global oil demand in 2003. Japan’s nuclear plant shutdown, when some cracks appeared, created as much as 100,000 bopd to 200,000 bopd of extra oil demand. The extremely high natural gas prices in the US caused about the same level of added oil usage, due to fuel switching. But these impacts were tiny compared to overall growth in global oil demand.

Oil Supplies

The third 2003 surprise was what happened to oil supplies. A widely anticipated surge never happened. As far as any good data now show, oil supplies barely grew in most regions, except the one area where demand also failed to grow, the FSU. Despite exceptionally high oil prices for the fourth consecutive year, no serious surge in oil supplies resulted.

There was a genuine glut of published oil supply forecasts that continually predicted that massive amounts of new oil were about to appear. The common theory was that these new volumes would bring oil inventories back into balance or even build storage until it was too full, but the surge never came. The only part of the world with any sizeable supply gain was the FSU. Elsewhere, output increases were modest, keeping inventories tight all year.

Supply did grow in some areas. Mexico added another 200,000 bopd offshore, as all the benefits of the $10.5-billion, Cantarell tertiary nitrogen injection program bore their fullest fruit. Now Cantarell’s output seems likely to begin a steady decline. Canada enjoyed growth in its production of synthetic crude and bitumen, which offset supply declines from conventional crude supplies. Equatorial Guinea added close to 100,000 bopd, and Exxon’s major oil project in Chad finally came onstream. Algeria added some new productive capacity, and Brazil still hopes its oil production will grow by 100,000 bpd, although the last few months of 2003 saw unexpected production declines.

Positive production surprises, however, were few and far between. Meanwhile, significant output declines were reported in countries like Oman – where its giant Yimal oil field is now in serious decline – and Colombia, whose oil production peaked at almost 800,000 bpd in 2000 but now struggles to stay above 500,000 bpd. Egypt also came close to hitting a record 1 million bopd as recently as 1995, but now the country struggles to stay above 700,000 bopd. A country reporting oil supply growth is becoming the exception to the rule as declining output from almost all older fields is offsetting most new oil projects.

Future of the North Sea

The North Sea, the single greatest new source of global oil supply in the past 30 years, has peaked. There are still a handful of positive supply additions like the UK’s Buzzard field (scheduled to come onstream in 2006) or the two significant oil projects in Norway that should add a combined 300,000 bpd in 2004. But none are big enough to offset the steady declines in most North Sea fields. All of the first- and second-generation, giant North Sea oil fields are now in steep decline. Almost all new fields are small, peak fast and decline even faster.

The North Sea still has the potential to become another Gulf of Mexico (GOM), where scores of small fields can be developed rapidly by utilizing the massive production infrastructure that runs up and down the North Sea’s spine. Making this transition happen will not be easy. North Sea exploration is at record-low levels. The issues of “fallow fields” and relinquishment of licenses lacking plans for development have yet to be resolved in a manner that ensures a new generation of exploitation and, hopefully, an era of new exploration in the region north of the existing North Sea. How quickly the North Sea evolves into a new era will be one of the biggest issues during 2004.

Deepwater Outlook

This dismal picture for reliable growth in conventional crude supplies moves deepwater oil onto center stage in importance. It is hard to envision how tight global oil markets might be as 2004 begins, had the miracle of deepwater oil not occurred, Fig. 2. This last frontier of new oil would not have happened, if various technology miracles had not combined to finally allow oil to be produced at depths reaching nearly two miles under the sea.

Fig. 2. If not for deepwater advances in offshore technology, world oil supplies would be tighter.

But even the deepwater oil miracle is showing some maturity. Most of the first-generation deepwater oil projects are in serious decline. The typical production profile for most new GOM deepwater projects is about 24 months to reach peak production, and then a steep decline occurs, unless new satellite fields can be found and tied back to buffer the declines.

Exploratory success rates for new deepwater fields also seem to be waning after a half-decade of robust successes. A few, new deepwater projects are running into tougher-than-expected reservoir conditions. Shell’s Brutus project in the GOM is a classic example. Brutus was designed for peak production of 110,000 bopd and another 150 MMcfgd. Actual peak rates were less than planned, and nine months later, production is around 35,000 bopd and about 44 MMcfgd.

Several exciting new deepwater projects are scheduled in Brazil for 2004, but maintenance and decline problems in the country’s current deepwater fields caused 2003′s oil output to miss planned targets. Angola’s deepwater story is similar. In second-half 2004, its massive Kizomba A project will finally come onstream, but 2003 production will be 15,000 bopd to 30,000 bopd less than planned. This will occur while Angola’s older fields experience normal production declines. Like the Gulf of Mexico, Angola has also seen a spate of disappointing dry holes instead of the promising new finds that were expected.

FSU Impact

The irony amid this litany of less-than-expected supply gains was how vital it was for FSU oil supply to suddenly grow once more. The FSU was once the world’s single, largest oil producer, Fig. 3. Soviet oil peaked at more than 12.5 million bpd in the mid-to-late 1980s. By 1996, FSU production had fallen to only 7.1 million bopd. It stayed at this low level through the end of 1998, and no one forecast any improvement. Suddenly, and to everyone’s complete surprise, production growth began. By 2001, FSU production had grown 1.5 million bopd. By the end of 2003, reported FSU oil production was up another 2.2 million bpd.

Fig. 3. The Former Soviet Union is one of very few counterweights to OPEC.

Because FSU oil demand has remained very depressed, a large portion of FSU production gains is exported. This became the unexpected source of supply that so many oil pundits had assumed would come from everywhere but the FSU!

Three key issues keep this FSU supply surprise cloaked in uncertainty. First is the accuracy of reported supply gains. Most of the gains are probably real, but some might also be simply “optimistic reports.” Second is the degree to which these production gains are sustainable. Most current gains come from workovers and more infill wells in old fields. Other than a handful of massive projects like Sakhlin I and II or the Caspian’s Kashagan project, little exploratory drilling is taking place. Third is whether FSU oil demand stays low, and whether the ruble stays as undervalued to the dollar as it has been since 1998. At some point, improving economic conditions must jump-start FSU oil demand, assuming the economy continues to improve. FSU demand was once more than 9 million bopd. Today, it is still mired at around 3.8-to-4.0 million bopd. Even a partial return to old demand levels could bring much of the FSU’s surprising exports to a quick halt.

An improving economy should also strengthen the ruble. Over the last three years, the strong dollar denominating oil prices, combined with a very weak ruble, gave a typical Russian oil producer the benefits of experiencing the equivalent of $50-to-$100 oil, as long as production expenses were paid in depreciated rubles. Any meaningful strengthening of the ruble would immediately offset many of the FSU’s one-time ruble/dollar cost advantage.

If FSU oil gains cease, or the region’s ability to export most of these gains is not sustainable (and any prudent planner should at least create a scenario that this happens), then OPEC is propelled back into a powerful role not enjoyed since the 1970s.

OPEC’s Influence

It then becomes extremely important to properly understand the degree to which OPEC’s oil production capacity is sustainable, along with the group’s ability to grow its oil exports.

Conventional wisdom had assumed for decades that OPEC producers, in general, can bring on massive amounts of added oil whenever it is needed. There is mounting evidence, however, that most OPEC producers are reaching, or have now reached, their limits to increasing oil output from existing, older fields. Iran, Kuwait, the UAE, Algeria and Libya are all seeking foreign capital and expertise to develop new fields, or capital and new techniques to halt declines that are underway in so many of their key oil fields.

Venezuela faces political, financial and geological problems. In the wake of massive firings of half of PDVSA’s workforce, the country faces a genuine risk of overproducing its eastern oil reservoirs and suffering steep declines in its heavy Lake Marcaibo oil output. Nigeria struggles with continuing civil unrest and financial woes. Indonesia’s oil production has clearly peaked. Libya and Algeria could both be positive supply surprises, but their base production is too small, relative to the rest of OPEC, to make a difference.

Because some OPEC producers are out of spare capacity, or will soon reach their limits, the spotlight is put squarely on Saudi Arabia, the world’s most important oil producer. The kingdom has worked diligently to maintain the world’s only meaningful amount of spare production capacity.

While conventional wisdom has rarely questioned whether Saudi’s ability to easily grow its oil might end, it is becoming a genuine question whether the country’s spare capacity can be sustained. For the first time in memory, key oil officials in Saudi Arabia are acknowledging that even they have to bring a range of 500,000 bpd to 800,000 bpd of new oil production onstream each year, merely to replace normal declines in key, old fields.

For four decades, Saudi Arabia has been a true oil miracle, Fig. 4. But this miracle occurred through the discovery of five remarkable, super-giant oil fields found between 1940 and 1965. These five fields collectively produced 85% to 90% of all Saudi Arabian oil output. They all maintained high well-flow rates through an extremely efficient water injection program to maintain high reservoir pressure and sweep oil from the flank to the crest of each field. All five of these giant fields are nearing the end of their primary and secondary recovery, because both phases happened at the same time. Later this year, I hope to publish a manuscript detailing the challenges that Saudi Arabia now faces to keep its oil miracle alive. The data I have reviewed is alarming, as it would be such a jolt to the world’s oil supply if Saudi Arabia’s flow of crude also began to decline.

Fig. 4. How long Saudi Arabia can keep its output elevated remains a pressing question.

Putting prices in perspective. In light of all these factors, high oil prices over the past several years should not have been such a surprise. The real surprise, when historians look back on this era, might be how long the price of oil was able to stay so low, Fig. 5.

Fig. 5. In retrospect, recent high prices should not be a surprise.

Few observers seem to have noticed that the cost to find and develop oil and gas production has essentially doubled over the past four to five years, despite most oil service prices being abysmally low.

Write-downs in proven reserves seem to be accelerating, even with prices remaining high. This, in turn, raises all costs per barrel even higher. Tanker rates recently increased to levels as high or higher than the early 1970s, and 2003 ended at rates almost five times what they averaged for most of the past decade. The cost of cheap energy might be nearing the end of a long run.

The 21st century oil markets, so far, have been very different than so many observers expected. These surprises might not be as random as many believe. A clear sea change may be underway.

Too often over the past several years, supply fell behind demand at various times. Each time that this occurred, oil inventories were used as a temporary method to bridge a supply/demand gap. With most OECD oil stocks now at unprecedented lows, this last, one-time supply bridge has almost run its course.

Thus, 2004 might well be the year when many of these key questions that made the oil markets so abnormal for so long finally get clear answers.  

THE AUTHOR

Matthew R. Simmons, Chairman & CEO of Simmons & Company International graduated cum laude from the University of Utah and received an MBA with distinction from Harvard Business School in 1967. He served on the faculty of Harvard Business School as a research associate for two years and was a doctoral candidate. After five years of consulting, he founded Simmons & Company International in 1974. The firm has played a leading role in assisting energy client companies in executing a wide range of financial transactions. He is a trustee of The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and The Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine. He serves on the boards of several industry and civic groups. He is past chairman of the National Ocean Industry Association, and he serves on the board of the Associates of Harvard Business School and is a past president of the Harvard Business School Alumni Association. Mr. Simmons’ papers and presentations are regularly published in a variety of publications and oil/gas industry journals, including World Oil.

Copyright ©2004 WorldOil.com Inc.

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Reposted from THE NATION.

Drains and Bathtubs

Matt Bivens

Here are some fun pictures and graphics from the website of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission: This one (a PDF file) is a cross-section drawing of how, while plant operators snoozed, acid dripping over a period of years chewed through the six-inch carbon steel lid of the Davis-Besse nuclear reactor vessel. This one is a photograph of the rusty, acid-charred hole itself. And this one is from the happy ending: A shot of workers and a huge blue truck that’s transporting a replacement lid for the reactor.

Taken together, they tell a neatly delineated success story: Machine breaks, problem identified, machine fixed — nay, improved! — machine roars to life, better than ever, everyone much wiser and more knowledgeable for the experience.

So if you want to complain, as I have in recent days, about how the Davis-Besse reactor came, thanks to outrageous negligence, within a fraction of an inch of disaster, fine. But doing so is also probably a waste of time, because the plant’s operators simply counter that they’re very, very sorry, and that they’ve spent two years and hundreds of millions of dollars on repairs and improvements, and that everyone from the NRC to the criminal justice system now has the plant and its safety culture under a microscope — so what’s the problem? Davis-Besse, like a late-night highway driver riding the adrenalin of having just narrowly missed a deer, is on full alert; so why not go hassle some other reactor?

There’s a lot of logic to that argument — especially when you look at some of the other problems Davis-Besse fixed quietly during its long idle.

Consider, for example, the story of how — shut down anyway to fix the acid hole in its reactor — Davis-Besse got together with the NRC to overhaul some emergency backup systems.

The plant’s operators reported to the NRC that key backup systems — a series of drains and pumps to keep a runaway reactor fed with coolant water — had been flawed ever since the plant opened 27 years ago. The company’s report admitted that in an accident, the pumps would probably not have worked properly. The NRC studied this report and declared it to be a code “yellow” finding, “one of substantial importance to safety.”

But as I reported in The Nation six months ago, this problem with the backup drains and coolant pumps exists at 68 other, similar-designed nuclear reactors across America. Yet only Davis-Besse has addressed it. And this is so despite a shocking study by the nuclear-industry-friendly Los Alamos National Laboratory, which suggested that this problem represents a one-in-three chance of disaster at an American nuclear power plant over the next three years. (The NRC’s response was that they’d fix the problem in … four years.)

The Los Alamos study went reactor by reactor across America, calculating a risk level for each plant — and back then, before Davis-Besse made any improvements, Davis-Besse was considered one of the least risky plants. One of the most risky was the Indian Point reactor complex outside New York city. Yet the NRC, which judged the problem at Davis-Besse to be a “yellow” alert, ignored calls to have the same problem tackled at Indian Point. What kind of logic is that? Answer: the best logic that money can buy, of course.

When you think about 68 reactors across the United States whose key backup systems have been fatally flawed for years, from the moment they began operations, you start to realize that to wrangle over whether Davis-Besse got off easy is to wrestle a straw man. Of course they got off easy, and of course it’s an outrage. But the real question is: What about all of the other reactors — and what about those government regulators, who let Davis-Besse skirt so close to disaster, and who now are sleep walking through similar dangers at nuclear plants from coast to coast?

* * *

We are approaching the 25th anniversary of the Three Mile Island accident. Twenty-five years!

In this context, let’s remember that the accident at TMI came in the plant’s first year of operations. Accidents at other plants, from Browns Ferry to Chernobyl, also occurred in the very early days of each plant’s operations.

This conforms with the Bathtub Curve, the classic engineer’s illustration of failure over time. The curve is shaped like a bathtub, because things are more likely to break down when they’re new, or when they’re old.

“All of the nuclear accidents [so far] occurred in the first year or two of operation, or on the ‘break-in’ phase. Plants are now out of that phase. They are in, or heading toward, the ‘wear-out’ phase where failure rates climb,” says David Lochbaum of the Union of Concerned Scientists. “It’s only a matter of time before we start populating the right side of the curve with plant names.” We can put Davis-Besse there already. Who will be next?

Copyright © 2004 The Nation

Reposted from Yellowtimes.

Why Good Things Happen to Bad People

John Brand, D.Min., J.D.

Let me define my terms. By “good things” I do not mean ideals valued among the noblest of human principles. Included among such majestic goals would be the dispensation of justice based on equity, the rightful distribution of goods, the pursuit of philosophy, the arts, and the profoundly spiritual.

By “good things,” in this column, I imply what our materialistic society values most highly: conspicuous consumption, tax evasion by the super rich, awarding non-competitive government contracts, golden parachutes, obscene stock options, off-shore companies, accounting finesses, and sundry other such exploitive gambits. In short, by “good things” I mean the advantage the favorite few exercise over the masses.

By “bad people” I do not mean those caught “in flagrante delicto” in extracurricular, sexual adventures. Heavens to Betsy, even a larger number of priests, ministers, rabbis, and imams than we are wont to admit would have to be called bad by that standard. “Bad people,” in this column, are folks who pontificate about petty, moralistic issues but are quite willing to eliminate the protection of the “Bill of Rights” for all those with whom they have serious disagreements. Bad people are those who crow about democracy but disregard and even undermine the constitutional balance of powers.

“Bad people” manipulate the system to satiate their rapacious appetites. They are folks amassing large bank accounts by devious means. They hold powerful, judicial positions based on passing a litmus test. They exert tremendous political influence flaunting any sense of social responsibility.

How does it happen that the above listed good things accrue to such bad folks? To put it briefly, the spin masters have been able to make three lies sound virtuous and cause the virtuous to sound evil.

The first mendacity is that the present form of capitalism has been sold as the elixir of the good life for one and all. However, it is beneficial only for those who prostitute themselves at the altar of selfishness, mendacity, greed, and rapacity. Those of us who tenaciously believe that justice and equity, decency and a sense of morality are the foundation of an enduring civilization find ourselves at odds with the prevailing debauchery.

We have been sold a bill of goods making us believe that when the rich get richer, a cornucopia of untold goodies will cascade upon the economic landscape. Let Kenneth Lay steal billions and uncounted benefices will descend upon the masses. The fact is that tens of thousands have lost their pensions and other thousands of creditors might be paid pennies on the dollar. Not much has trickled down. Kenny Boy’s billions are probably stashed away in Swiss bank accounts beyond the reach of the IRS. His conversion of funds has not found its way into the economy! At least, that is my view.

But how do the above listed good things happen to bad people? Mind you, it is all legal because America’s Caesars had their minions pass acts making these chicaneries to fall within the pale of the judicial system.

That brings me to the second lie the spin masters have sold America. We are made to think that we are governed by a Congress elected by the people. But is it not fact that many who are elected are but mercenaries in the service of the bad? Congressional toadies then enact legalisms cloaking corruption with the mantle of legality.

American pharmaceutical companies fleece the people. Surely that does not come as a surprise to anyone. Yet, are we seeking to control these vultures who enrich themselves at the expense of the sick? No, we make it easier for the bad to let their thieving fingers dig ever deeper into the pockets of the masses. Now it is even suggested that we allow insurance companies to get into the act of providing prescription drugs.

The Austin American Statesman on Jan. 25 informed that after passage of a tort reform act promising that malpractice premiums would be reduced, most carriers decided not to reduce these premiums. Bad folks running the insurance companies will have a lot of good things happening to their shareholders and executives. If you think that the insurance companies will decrease prescription drug costs, I think I can sell you the Brooklyn Bridge at a good price.

Did Congress really come down on such vultures who precipitated the Savings and Loan scandal a few years back? It does not seem so. “Respected” brokerage firms and mutual fund handlers are now found wanting. Some have paid fines for their acts of malfeasance seem large to the average person but to them are mere pocket change for the brokerage houses. They are the descendents of their voracious sires.

Most of us think a prostitute is a person who sells her or his body for sexual services. Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary has a second definition: “2. A person, as a writer, artist, etc. who sells his services for low unworthy purpose.” Selling one’s vote in Congress to benefit the bad is, in my opinion, selling oneself for an unworthy purpose. Of course, that assumes that worth embraces the values of a civilized culture. However, if worth is described as enriching the rich, etc., then our Congressional leaders are not prostitutes. However, I still hold that righteousness and justice are essential elements of worth. Accepting that premise, there is little difference between the woman who solicits Johns providing sexual favors for money and the folks who solicit corporate funds promising the votes demanded by the lobbyists in service of their masters.

The spin masters have us believe that we have a democracy to export to the world. How can we export what we do not possess?

Now comes the final lie. These three mendacities are not listed in any specific order. The three essentially goose-step to the same marching band blaring out tunes composed by “Corpgreed, U.S.A.”

America’s popular religion is the third leg of the tripod spelling out the coming doom of freedom. While a small number of religious leaders embrace the Biblical essence, the vast majority of American clergymen are nothing more than voodoo priests. Voodoo uses charms and fetishes to influence the gods so “the arrows of outrageous fortunes” will do no harm. Voodoo is not concerned about justice and righteousness, morality and the quest for truth.

The substantive Biblical message is its insistence that we walk “righteously and speak uprightly,” that we “despise the gain of oppression, who wave away a bribe instead of accepting itÖ” (Isaiah 33:15) I could cite passage after passage emphasizing that the Biblical tradition is concerned essentially with the large issues of righteousness and justice. Amos summarizes it so well, “But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream.” (Amos 5:24)

I am not suggesting that the Biblical God is not concerned about personal morality. But of equal importance, if not more so, is social righteousness and cultural justice. The voodoo priests of present-day, evangelical “Christianity” make people believe that if we eliminate abortions, end homosexuality, pray in public a few times each day, walk down the aisle and confess Jesus as Lord, and add a constitutional amendment about marriage, America will be a land overflowing with milk and honey. The only comment I can make is “Baloney!”

Not all the thousands upon thousands who ever walked down the aisle in response to Billy Graham’s invitation to accept Jesus have caused the enactment of equitable health care (not even for children), a fair minimum wage, or eliminated deals between the Pentagon and the defense contractors. I don’t think God is too pleased with that record. “Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not what I tell you?” (Luke 6:46)

Our egotistical, voodoo religiosity will only hasten the disaster foreshadowed in Ezekiel 7:23-27: “The king shall mourn, the prince shall be wrapped in despair, and the hands of the people of the land shall tremble. According to their way I will deal with them; according to their own judgments I will judge them.” (v. 27) It does not take a genius to figure out what end is in store when the triad of injustice, mendacity and greed engulf a nation.

So, “good” things come to “bad” people because they have perverted the very essence of humane values and organized a society of bestial values. However, history provides evidence that the alphas do not have the last word. Regretfully, bad people are not influenced by historical evidence.

John Brand is a Purple Heart, Combat Infantry veteran of World War II. He received his Juris Doctor degree at Northwestern University and a Master of Theology and a Doctor of Ministry at Southern Methodist University. He served as a Methodist minister for 19 years, was Vice President, Birkman & Associates, Industrial Psychologists, and concluded his career as Director, Organizational and Human Resources, Warren-King Enterprises, an independent oil and gas company. He is the author of Shaking the Foundations.  You are welcome to write John Brand.  

Read more fromThe Yellow Times.

Reposted from The Farm.

Shumei Natural Agriculture: Osamu Yoshino’s Experience

Lisa M. Hamilton

The fields appear to have been laid out by a survey crew. The raised rows are perfectly parallel, each packed tightly under plastic like ground beef at the supermarket. Young potato plants that are as unnaturally uniform as the trees lining sidewalks in Tokyo poke through most of the covers. Looking at the rows not yet planted, I wonder if they are perhaps growing the plastic itself; I imagine the farmers at harvest time walking slowly down the rows, pulling the new crop off the field and folding it into perfect square bundles.

Osamu Yoshino must drive all those farmers crazy. His field jogs out diagonally into a neighbor´s bare ground, then swings around in a half-circle rimmed with deep green grass almost defiantly curly. The rows are varied–three onions, three grass, two daikon. There´s a blue tarp here, a red basket there. Sticks and weeds are bundled carefully with twine and leaned against the trees, which in turn hang their longest branches back over the dirt. In fact, sitting in the corner of 30 acres of chemical farms, this field feels more similar to the neighboring forest–like a child raised by wolves. And yet Yoshino is the only human among all the fields; the rest appear to be managed by remote control.

Even without another farmer for comparison, this lithe, handsome man looks different. He has a pink hand towel tied around his head as a hat, a black warm-up jacket with the SUPERSTAR brand logo in red on the chest, and longish fingernails that reach past his fingertips. To me he looks so young and almost hip it´s hard to believe he is a native of this little village, the son of farmers.

To me he looks so young and almost hip it´s hard to believe he is a native of this little village, the son of farmers.

He grew up farming same as the rest: he didn´t like using chemicals, but figured there was no alternative. The difference: he was willing to experiment. One season he decided to forego using herbicides on a rice paddy. Proving the suspicious neighbors right, it was a disaster. There were far more weeds than Yoshino could remove himself, and the field went to pot.

The local Shumei center saw it as an opening. They coerced Yoshino into doing a Natural Agriculture trial that left the paddy free of not just herbicides, but all additives. Once again the weeds were tremendous, but this time Yoshino had an unexpected replacement for the sprays. When it came time for him to weed the field, he was joined by scores of Shumei volunteers.

The success that resulted convinced Yoshino to gradually convert all of his five acres to Natural Agriculture. He knew it would mean a loss in yields, but figured he would adjust his lifestyle; he could live leanly. The new approach would require more manpower, but he grew to trust his volunteers. There was only one problem he couldn´t solve: nobody would buy the food.

He had tried selling at the local Shumei center, but without much luck. The members were sympathetic, but still used to supermarket produce that was both perfect-looking and unrestricted by season. In the moderate climate east of Tokyo, Yoshino had customers only when the desirable vegetables were harvested–which was not often enough. When even meager survival became impossible, he told another Shumei member that he couldn´t continue without a market for his crops. Her response: ìJust tell me how many customers you need and I´ll get them.”

Keiko Domae never wastes time. No sooner does she confront a problem than she is already solving it. She had a long history of pairing people with food, so to her the solution to Yoshino´s market problem was a simple equation: all they needed was to establish within Shumei a food buying group similar to the co-ops she had helped form throughout Chiba prefecture.

ìThere´s no way it will work,” Yoshino remembers telling her. When she asked why, he said, ìBecause you buy what you want to eat. That´s the consumer way.”

He knew that as a Natural Agriculture farmer he couldn´t possibly satisfy the demands of a conventional palate. Because he understood the natural cycles, he could be happy eating stored root vegetables through the winter or solely greens in early spring; but he didn´t think Domae and the food-buying group she envisioned could.

Because [Yoshino] understood the natural cycles, he could be happy eating stored root vegetables through the winter or solely greens in early spring; but … He knew that as a Natural Agriculture farmer he couldn´t possibly satisfy the demands of a conventional palate.

For the moment he was right. Domae had long wanted to provide her family with safe food, but never once had she considered seasonality. For her, a pork cutlet was naturally served with cabbage and fresh tomatoes, 12 months a year. All of her co-ops had been successful, but she always ended up leaving because the objective shifted: they would go from providing safe food to providing convenience food cheaply.

ìEach one claimed to be supporting healthy attitudes toward food,” she says, ìbut really the relationship was no different from that in a supermarket.” Now it was clear that the missing link was the relationship with the farmer.

Once again, the solution seemed simple. Domae gathered 60 members for a direct farmer to consumer arrangement, or CSA (Community Supported Agriculture), who vowed to adjust their diets to the natural cycle, and Yoshino kept growing. But for the members to keep their promise, they had to understand what they were adjusting to. As she says now, ìThe only way to do that was to stand with the farmer in his field.”

Yoshino laughs when he remembers the first time Domae waded into the rice paddy to weed. ìI remember her screaming,” he says. She´s not a dainty woman, but the mud squishing through her toes was too much. Shaking his head, Yoshino told her to just go sit down or work elsewhere on the farm.

That time she did excuse herself, but she later returned, again and again. Today, after seven years, she can give a tour of the farm herself. The original buying group has grown into a network of CSAs that covers the Greater Tokyo area. It encompasses 24 groups of consumers and employs 86 farmers, 20 of them full time. A fax and e-mail system links the farmers´ surpluses to CSAs throughout the rest of the country, and a similar network allows Shumei members to buy processed staples like soy sauce from specialized Natural Agriculture producers. Of all the group´s achievements, though, Domae seems most proud of this: ìPeople have come and gone,” she says, ìbut those 60 original families are all still with us.”

Domae gathered 60 members … who vowed to adjust their diets to the natural cycle … But for the members to keep their promise, they had to understand what they were adjusting to. As she says now, ìThe only way to do that was to stand with the farmer in his field.”

* * *

Just down the road from Yoshino is the farm of Shigenori Hayashi, a non-Natural Agriculture organic farmer whose solo CSA feeds 60 families. We are here walking the fields in the spring rain–Hayashi pointing to everything he sees and talking excitedly, I spinning a bit from the shock of this place.

After a week on Natural Agriculture farms, I´m struck by how professional his operation is, how homogenous. The rows are long and narrow, each planted in a single crop from one end to the other, 120 meters away. (Hayashi knows this distance off the top of his head.) No weeds separate the rows. In fact, the only breath between crops is strips of bare soil, flat and neatly tilled and awaiting their planting. Despite the cool spring there are already maybe 20 things growing here, including parsley, wheat, and peas that arise from black plastic.

Standing in the greenhouse amidst a tidy sea of seed trays, I realize why this place is so strange: it looks just like an organic farm in the States. My perspective has been so skewed by the Natural Agriculture farms, that this order and planning–these eggplants and peppers in gallon pots, this lettuce planted in dirt free of weeds, these employees–it all suddenly seems sterile.

* * *

Reading this now, back in the States, I can say I´m no longer jarred by the sight of an organic farm. And yet as I walk through acres around me in Northern California, their differences from Natural Agriculture fields are glaring. Neither approach seems inherently superior, but that´s because they are trying to accomplish different things. One is a business; heartfelt, yes, but still a business. The other is a religion.

When I visited Japan in late April, Hayashi had started sweet potatoes in a deep bin in his greenhouse. Even in the rain the soil sat at about 90 degrees, which meant the vines were growing like mad, their purple veins threading through deep green leaves. Once planted out, they would be way ahead of the season. On the same day at Yoshino´s, the seed sweet potatoes grew in the field, shielded from birds by a mesh tunnel anchored with sacks of rice hulls. They grew slowly and would be harvested later than Hayashi´s–and pretty much everyone´s–but that didn´t bother him. He had chosen that approach to be closer to what happens in nature. Getting an early crop was unimportant, perhaps even antithetical.

…at Yoshino´s, the seed sweet potatoes grew in the field, shielded from birds by a mesh tunnel anchored with sacks of rice hulls. They grew slowly and would be harvested later than Hayashi´s–and pretty much everyone´s–but that didn´t bother him.

At least in the case of Yoshino and Hayashi, the difference between Natural Agriculture and standard organic farming is the way the market drives the choices. For instance, Hayashi grows udo, a traditional ìmountain vegetable,” in a pitch-black room with mounds of dirt on the floor–literally a walk-in cooler that has been unplugged. In the wild, the asparagus-like stalk would grow in natural light and turn green, but here the objective is an entirely blanched stalk–like the Japanese consumer is used to.

Needless to say, Yoshino wouldn´t dream of growing udo that way, but he has that luxury because of his customers´ commitment to the emulation of nature. Their role has become like that of the passive consumer in the wild. A deer, for instance, takes what nature gives it without demand or expectation and rolls silently with the vagaries of season and weather. Likewise Domae and the others are devoted to taking what Yoshino and the elements give them.

When times of trouble do come, Hayashi can fall back on sprays like B.t. and fortify tired fields with manure and compost. His customers don´t demand it, but his goal is to provide them food, and that seems the most effective way. When a crop fails for Yoshino, he can do nothing but watch and wonder how to manage it differently next time. ìUnless you´re prepared to do that physically, mentally, and financially you can´t switch to Natural Agriculture,” he says. ìIt gives you no safety net.”

* * *

The difference in technique would seem to separate the two ideologies, but Yoshino maintains that those differences are what they have to teach one another. While organic farming in Japan is part of an alternative culture, Natural Agriculture comes from a spiritual belief that is driving to change things within a conventional world. In Shumei, growers switch over directly from chemical farming and fast food consumers throw themselves into seasonal eating. Because the change is led by deep conviction in an abstract concept, the transition can be bumpy. Yoshino admits that many Natural Agriculture farmers follow the idea rather blindly; they believe in the concept, but struggle to translate it into successful farming technique.

On the other hand, organic farmers like Hayashi have very precise goals that are both practical and ideological: eliminate pesticide use, provide safe food, and serve like-minded customers. Yoshino argues that that experience, wherein motivation and technique are the same, is exactly what Natural Agriculture farmers need to make their approach work. Likewise, Yoshino admires Hayashi´s absolute conviction. Not that Natural Agriculture farmers don´t trust their goal, but it´s a more difficult one to wrap their heads around. Success is just plain simpler when you aim to eliminate pesticides than when you aim to create a heaven on earth.

But what organic farmers have in conviction, Natural Agriculture farmers have in devotion. They return their fields immediately and completely, rather than taking what they see as the slow road of holding onto things such as B.t. and animal fertilizer–which provide a safety net but seem to compromise core values. Domae would add that this absolute transformation extends beyond mere technique. She says, ìI had always thought, Yes, we have this great philosophy, but making a living is a separate thing. Now I know that if you really want to understand nature and the true meaning of living, you can´t separate them.”

ìI had always thought, Yes, we have this great philosophy, but making a living is a separate thing. Now I know that if you really want to understand nature and the true meaning of living, you can´t separate them.”

And so Natural Agriculture consumers make sacrifices to allow the farmers to join craft and spirit in a fashion unfettered by finances. Having been given this chance, Yoshino speaks of his non-Natural Agriculture non-organic neighbors almost with pity. In his eyes, farmers driven entirely by the market aren´t always free to make the best choices. ìFor them, farming has become a way of making a living, rather than a way of living itself. They can´t get out of the web they got trapped in, thinking this is the only way they can survive.”

Now Hayashi is hardly a slave to the grind; even in the steely rain he radiates such joy from his farm that it´s difficult to see him as a victim. He is somewhere on that continuum of what farming should be, just as the plastic farmers are, just as Yoshino is. For now Natural Agriculture and organics are distinct marks on that continuum, their objectives and the worlds they exist in so disparate. But Yoshino believes that they are converging into one practice.

ìYes, technically we´re different, but [we´re] both trying to get to the same goal,” he says. ìIn the future, our differences will be fewer. It´s almost like the practices that are meant to be will prevail. Some of it is what you do in the field, some of it is what you think while you´re doing it. What those should be exactly, we´ll only find out in time.”

In Memorium Staff members at NewFarm.org extend our sympathy to Mr. Yoshino on the death of his wife last spring following a difficult illness, shortly after the interview for this story. Seeing the need for new energy in the family, a brother-in-law left his office job to follow his heart´s leading into Natural Agriculture. He joined Mr. Yoshino´s sister in farming the family land with her brother.

©2003 The Rodale Institute^Æ