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By JOSH GERSTEIN, Staff Reporter of the Sun | April 21, 2008
MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIF. — MANY PARTS OF AMERICA, LONG CONSIDERED THE BREADBASKET OF THE world, are now confronting a once unthinkable phenomenon: food rationing.

Major retailers in New York, in areas of New England, and on the West Coast are limiting purchases of flour, rice, and cooking oil as demand outstrips supply. There are also anecdotal reports that some consumers are hoarding grain stocks.

At a Costco Warehouse in Mountain View, Calif., yesterday, shoppers grew frustrated and occasionally uttered expletives as they searched in vain for the large sacks of rice they usually buy.

“Where’s the rice?” an engineer from Palo Alto, Calif., Yajun Liu, said. “You should be able to buy something like rice. This is ridiculous.”

The bustling store in the heart of Silicon Valley usually sells four or five varieties of rice to a clientele largely of Asian immigrants, but only about half a pallet of Indian-grown Basmati rice was left in stock. A 20-pound bag was selling for $15.99.

“You can’t eat this every day. It’s too heavy,” a health care executive from Palo Alto, Sharad Patel, grumbled as his son loaded two sacks of the Basmati into a shopping cart. “We only need one bag but I’m getting two in case a neighbor or a friend needs it,” the elder man said.

The Patels seemed headed for disappointment, as most Costco members were being allowed to buy only one bag. Moments earlier, a clerk dropped two sacks back on the stack after taking them from another customer who tried to exceed the one-bag cap.

“Due to the limited availability of rice, we are limiting rice purchases based on your prior purchasing history,” a sign above the dwindling supply said.

Shoppers said the limits had been in place for a few days, and that rice supplies had been spotty for a few weeks. A store manager referred questions to officials at Costco headquarters near Seattle, who did not return calls or e-mail messages yesterday.

An employee at the Costco store in Queens said there were no restrictions on rice buying, but limits were being imposed on purchases of oil and flour. Internet postings attributed some of the shortage at the retail level to bakery owners who flocked to warehouse stores when the price of flour from commercial suppliers doubled.

The curbs and shortages are being tracked with concern by survivalists who view the phenomenon as a harbinger of more serious trouble to come.

“It’s sporadic. It’s not every store, but it’s becoming more commonplace,” the editor of SurvivalBlog.com, James Rawles, said. “The number of reports I’ve been getting from readers who have seen signs posted with limits has increased almost exponentially, I’d say in the last three to five weeks.”

Spiking food prices have led to riots in recent weeks in Haiti, Indonesia, and several African nations. India recently banned export of all but the highest quality rice, and Vietnam blocked the signing of new contract for foreign rice sales.

“I’m surprised the Bush administration hasn’t slapped export controls on wheat,” Mr. Rawles said. “The Asian countries are here buying every kind of wheat.”

Mr. Rawles said it is hard to know how much of the shortages are due to lagging supply and how much is caused by consumers hedging against future price hikes or a total lack of product.

“There have been so many stories about worldwide shortages that it encourages people to stock up. What most people don’t realize is that supply chains have changed, so inventories are very short,” Mr. Rawles, a former Army intelligence officer, said. “Even if people increased their purchasing by 20%, all the store shelves would be wiped out.”

At the moment, large chain retailers seem more prone to shortages and limits than do smaller chains and mom-and-pop stores, perhaps because store managers at the larger companies have less discretion to increase prices locally.

Mr. Rawles said the spot shortages seemed to be most frequent in the Northeast and all the way along the West Coast. He said he had heard reports of buying limits at Sam’s Club warehouses, which are owned by Wal-Mart Stores, but a spokesman for the company, Kory Lundberg, said he was not aware of any shortages or limits.

An anonymous high-tech professional writing on an investment Web site, Seeking Alpha, said he recently bought 10 50-pound bags of rice at Costco. “I am concerned that when the news of rice shortage spreads, there will be panic buying and the shelves will be empty in no time. I do not intend to cause a panic, and I am not speculating on rice to make profit. I am just hoarding some for my own consumption,” he wrote.

“There is no arbitrary limit on this so it could well go higher,” King told reporters in London today. He said the plan aims to restore confidence to the banking system and the most important aspect of the scheme is that “everyone needs to know this is there for them to access as needed.”

The banks will retain responsibility for losses from the assets they loan to the Bank of England. The swaps will be for a period of one year, renewable for up to three years. Only assets existing at the end of 2007 can be used in the swap.

The measures, backed by Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s government, mimic a similar swap of $200 billion of securities by the U.S. Federal Reserve last month. Policy makers are attempting to encourage lending after a surge in borrowing costs prompted British institutions to withdraw their best mortgage offers, threatening to exacerbate the worst housing downturn since 1992.

The oil carrier named Takayama was hit at 4:40 a.m. Yemeni time by a “rocket-like weapon”, the Japanese Coast Guard said today in Tokyo. The vessel, which carries a crew of 23 and is able to steer on its own, left the South Korean port of Ulsan on April 4, Nippon Yusen said in a statement on its Web site.

The attack may spur crude oil prices to records, said Hidetoshi Shioda, a senior energy analyst at Mizuho Securities Co. Crude rose above $117 a barrel for the first time in New York after OPEC said it will maintain production, rejecting calls from the U.K. and Japan to boost output.

“Shipping companies may refrain from their operations in the Middle East depending on the seriousness of the attack,” Shioda said in Tokyo. “Any adverse impact on shipping operations could disrupt oil supply to North Asia.”

The tanker was attacked when it was in the Gulf of Aden heading for the port of Yanbu, Saudi Arabia, to load crude oil. The crew found a hole the size of a finger in the fuel tank, which is leaking, the Coast Guard said at a briefing in Tokyo. The crew has not been able to inspect the exterior of the ship.

Crude for May delivery rose as much as 71 cents, or 0.6 percent, to $117.40 a barrel in after-hours electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange, the highest since futures started in 1983. Oil traded at $117.27 at 9:13 a.m. in London.

“When you use raw, unpasteurised milk, the taste is nice and fruity,” Durand mused as he inspected the smelly contents of his ripening rooms. “You can taste what the cows have been eating at different times of year.”

Durand is the last dairy farmer in the tiny Normandy village of Camembert still making traditional, raw milk Camembert cheese. But the farm’s visitor book hints at the bitter cheese wars that have poisoned the air of the surrounding hills and dales. “Be brave!” urges one scribbled French entry. “Keep up the fight! Thanks for defending real cheese.”

For months, small cheese producers and Camembert connoisseurs have been engaged in a battle of David and Goliath, dubbed the “camembert wars”, which have captured the French imagination and seen Normans take to the streets to defend their cheese’s pungent tang.

“Camembert is a subject that unites all the French,” the former president Francois Mitterrand once said. But when small, traditional producers are pitted against France’s industrial dairy giants the divide seems vast.

Camembert, whose sharp aroma was once likened to “God’s feet”, was made fashionable by Napoleon III and popularised as part of rations to soldiers in the first world war. It is France’s best-selling cheese after Emmental, so it is not surprising that French industrial diary giants moved in to mass-produce it, buying up small producers and delivering vast amounts of cheaper, machine-produced camembert to supermarket shelves. There are only five remaining small, traditional producers of the prized “Camembert de Normandie”.

Last year, the two industrial giants that produced 80% of the exclusive Normandy Camembert that carries France’s famous Apellation d’Origine Contrôlée (AOC) stamp of approval, tried to change the rules. Until then, all prized AOC-approved Normandy camembert had been made with raw milk.

The big groups decided instead to make most of their Camembert with pasteurised milk, saying they wanted to protect consumers’ health because, when manufacturing large volumes, they could not ensure raw milk was free of dangerous bacteria.

Pasteurising their milk – a process which was cheaper and better suited to mass-production – meant the dairy giants could no longer carry the prized AOC label. But they began a fight to win back the precious AOC stamp, arguing that pasteurised cheese should be included in it.

Last month, Camembert aficionados breathed a sigh of relief when, after a long public battle, cheese authorities said they would protect small producers by reserving the AOC only for Normandy Camembert made in the traditional way with raw milk.

But small cheese-makers say the war is not over and the fight could be turning dirty. In recent weeks, the biggest industrial producer, Lactalis, snitched on a smaller, traditional competitor, telling authorities that dangerous bacteria was found in a batch of AOC raw milk Camembert produced by Reaux. Coincidentally, Reaux happened to be one of Lactalis’s biggest critics. The smaller company said there was no evidence of contamination. “This was an operation to destabilise us, it’s a new episode in the camembert war, that’s for sure,” said Reaux’s director Bertrand Gillot.

“The camembert war is a symbol of the wider cheese crisis in France,” warned Véronique Richez-Lerouge, founder of France’s Regional Cheese Association, which lobbies to protect traditional raw-milk varieties.

Nicolas Sarkozy has vowed to apply for Unesco world heritage status for French cuisine. Yet, while French leaders have long promoted the ideal of French countryside produce, small, regional cheeses are under threat from intense-production and its food industry giants.

France produces 1,000 cheese varieties, and its huge consumption is second only to the champion cheese-eaters of Europe, the Greeks. But the problem for French purists is the type of cheese that the French are wolfing down. Raw milk cheese makes up only 15% of the market. Dozens of traditional cheese varieties have disappeared over the past 30 years as small producers die out or are bought up by industrial giants.

The new types of cheese created in France now include squeezable, spreadable, and artificially flavoured varieties which strike horror into experts who worry that French teenagers can no longer recognise a proper goat’s cheese as their palettes have been numbed. Around 95% of French cheese is now bought in supermarkets, where even cheesemonger counters are disappearing as people prefer their fromage packaged and ready sliced from a fridge unit.

“If it continues like this, in 10 years’ time traditional raw milk cheese will be over,” Richez-Lerouge said. “France defends its terroir, its great chefs, but that’s just window-dressing, in fact France is the nation of Carrefour [the world’s second-biggest supermarket giant] and a vast density of McDonalds. Consumers in France aren’t aware of the disaster that’s happening.”

She said even Britain where, like the US and Spain, raw milk cheese is currently in fashion, traditional makers were held in more esteem.

At a table on Durand’s Normandy farm, Gérard Roger, a camembert historian and president of the newly-created Defence Committee for Authentic Camembert, reluctantly agreed to taste-test a mass-produced, big-selling supermarket camembert.

“Wow, it stinks,” he says sniffing the pale, uniform cheese. “It’s dull, it tastes of nothing.” Roger’s group, which has organised street demonstrations, see themselves as “guardians of the temple”. Now they have won a victory in the AOC battle for raw milk camembert, they are lobbying to protect authentic production methods, encouraging more small farmers to make cheese using milk from local Normandy cows.

Francis Rouchaud the group’s secretary and a former marketing expert, said the big industrial producers wanted to put out a maximum number of Camembert products: “It’s Coca-Cola thinking”.

Lactalis, the world’s second largest dairy processor, countered: “We are not trying to kill off the small people, that doesn’t interest us at all. We’re a global dairy company in 20 countries. We’ve got better things to do.” A spokesman said that although the risk from raw milk was very small, for the company’s big brands it preferred not to take it. He said there was nothing malicious in alerting the authorities to a bacteria-risk in competitor’s cheese.

Charlie Turnbull, an exclusive cheesemonger from Dorset and judge at the world cheese awards, was visiting Durand’s farm to pay homage to the “cathedral” of camembert. “The French put art before enterprise,” he said. “Whereas the British put enterprise before art.”

The HI-MEMS program is aimed at developing tightly coupled machine-insect interfaces by placing micro-mechanical systems inside the insects during the early stages of metamorphosis. These early stages include the caterpillar and the pupae stages. Since a majority of the tissue development in insects occurs in the later stages of metamorphosis, the renewed tissue growth around the MEMS will tend to heal, and form a reliable and stable tissue-machine interface. The goal of the MEMS, inside the insects, will be to control the locomotion by obtaining motion trajectories either from GPS coordinates, or using RF, optical, ultrasonic signals based remote control. The control of locomotion will be investigated using several approaches. These include direct electrical muscle excitation, electrical stimulation of neurons, projection of ultrasonic pulses simulating bats, projection of pheromones, electromechanical stimulation of insect sensory cells, and presentation of optical cues with micro-optical visual presentation. The intimate control of insects with embedded microsystems will enable insect cyborgs, which could carry one or more sensors, such as a microphone or a gas sensor, to relay back information gathered from the target destination.

The probe by customs officers suggests that at least seven Britons have been defying sanctions by supplying the Iranian air force, its elite Revolutionary Guard Corps, and even the country’s controversial nuclear ambitions.

Officials say they are perturbed by the number of British dealers who appear to be trading with Tehran, despite a third round of restrictions being recently imposed by the United Nations on exporting arms and components to Iran. However, investigators argue that it is the generous riches being offered by Iran, not any shared ideology, that is seducing the dealers.

Among the examples uncovered is the case of a UK businessman caught smuggling components for use in guided missiles through a front company that proved to be the Iranian Ministry of Defence. Another case involves a group that included several Britons which, investigators alleged, attempted to export components intended to enhance the performance of Iranian aircraft.

Other examples involve a British millionaire arms dealer caught trading machine-guns used by the SAS and capable of firing 800 rounds a minute with a Tehran-based weapons supplier.

These factories, Marston said, are dark, since no lighting is needed for the robots, and run 24 hours a day, picking and moving goods around.

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.

Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves. But collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration’s war on terror. It is a furious competition, one in which inside information and easy access to senior officials are highly prized.

Law-enforcement agencies in Tennessee, Mississippi and Arkansas took part in what was described by local media as “an anti-crime and anti-terrorism initiative” involving officers from more than 50 federal, state and local agencies.

Given the military style name “Operation Sudden Impact”, the initiative saw officers from six counties rounding up fugitives, conducting traffic checkpoints, climbing on boats on the Mississippi River and doing other “crime-abatement” programs all under the label of “anti-terrorism”.

WREG Memphis news channel 3 reported that the Sheriff’s Department arrested 332 people, 142 of whom were fugitives, or “terrorists” as they now seem to be known.