fair use... (Then again, they could put them in the MRE's that they are dropping, well at least the first ones that they dropped. That way, a laxative would be there with the food which bottled them up!)

Link

Excess of Prunes Prompts USDA Offer to Pay for Tree Removal

WASHINGTON (AP) - California farmers are producing more prunes than they can sell, so the government is proposing to pay them to remove some of their trees.

Farms would paid $8.50 per tree under a program intended to destroy 20,000 acres of plum trees, under a program requested by the industry.

Farms have been planting more trees in recent years and acreage is expected to soon exceed 100,000, said Ken Clayton, associate administrator of the Agriculture Department's Agricultural Marketing Service.

"They just didn't get the market they thought there was going to be," Clayton said Friday. "You had a lot of fruit that was in excess of the market that was available."

The industry earlier won approval from the Food and Drug Administration to market prunes as "dried plums" after research showed that women liked that term better.

The tree-removal program would cost $17 million. Trees could be replanted in two years. But since it takes six years for a tree to start bearing fruit, that means the industry will have up to eight years to find new markets, Clayton said.

California produced 220,000 tons of prunes last year, 21,000 more than were consumed, according to the department.

Earlier this year, USDA paid potato farmers to get rid of some of their crop.

-- Anonymous, December 14, 2001

Answers

Why should they get paid for trees that they planted?

This does not make any sense at all. And those potatoes should have been used for something. Seems like we're rubbing the starving peoples faces in it, dontcha think?

-- Anonymous, December 15, 2001

Why can't we just take the excess and donate it to some starving country? I'm sure North Koreans would prefer prunes to tree bark...

-- Anonymous, December 15, 2001

The way I was raised, wasting food is a sin, in this hungry world of ours. Couldn't we have put those prunes in some food distribution program for the poor?

-- Anonymous, December 15, 2001

thank you, thank you.........my thoughts exactly when I read this but was afraid to mention it. We continue to call ourselves a "Christian" nation and do stuff like this.

-- Anonymous, December 15, 2001

It’s not nice to question the insanity of government. It’s beyond amazing how much money the government spends to pay people to not do something.

Remember a few years back they were paying medical schools not to accept students?

-- Anonymous, December 15, 2001

"The industry earlier won approval from the Food and Drug Administration to market prunes as "dried plums" after research showed that women liked that term better."

OK, that helps clear up why one day I couldn't find any boxed prunes at the store, only "dried plums". Somehow I thought prunes were dried dates, but I see now I was wrong.

Pitted prunes are one of Dad's staples, so I have to stockpile.

-- Anonymous, December 17, 2001