Spy webcasts

I've talked before about my enjoyment of the podcasts from the Pritzker Military Library.  But now I've listened to all of them that interested me, so recently I've been looking about for other options to listen to on long car rides and such.  I just found a great replacement:  podcasts from the International Spy Museum.  I have gotten into spy stuff recently thanks to a close childhood friend who's also into learning about spy history.  Sometimes these spy podcasts are shallow or too technical for my tastes, but a lot of them are really fascinating.  Plus, they're only a half hour long, which is a great length for massive consumption of various podcasts at one sitting.  Check out the site if you're interested.

Mothers' Day news from Colombia

We were at the farm this weekend for Mothers' Day, and I got a few more stakes driven to mark where I'll be planting shade trees in my future coffee plantation.  There were two dominant news items this weekend in Colombia.  One was the official sainthood ceremony in the Vatican for Mother Laura Montoya, the first Colombian to be named a saint.  I don't know anything about her, but according to this article she was an advocate for the marginalized indigenous population of our country.  I hope her example and recent newsworthiness will cause more Colombians to think about the poor and the marginalized.  On another note, and equally good news in my eyes, the infamous paramilitary leader Jorge 40 has been officially accused as the intellectual author of a horrible massacre in a town called El Salado in the year 2000.  He is already behind bars in the US for many other crimes, so I don't understand exactly if he'll be processed in Colombia or what, but it's good to see evil people called to trial for their sins.  At any rate, whether he ends up in the US or Colombia, I hope he gets a fair dosage of daily sodomy in his prison.

Adventure in Peru 9: Parque de la Papa

Finally towards the end of our trip to Peru, we arrived at the Parque de la Papa, a park set up in collaboration between a group of indigenous villages and a few NGOs, with the aim of preserving the agrobiodiversity of the high Peruvian Andes.  We received a musical welcome from costume-clad local residents and their impressive display of over 70 potato varieties:

 

After a brief explanation of the park's history and its geographical layout, we set out to see the sights.  We were treated to warm baked potatoes served with local cheese and a sort of chimichurry sauce.

First we visited the potato introduction center.  Here the park laboratory crew (all comprised of local peasants) receives in-vitro potato plantlets from CIP, the International Potato Center.  The park's communities have an agreement with CIP whereby CIP repatriates potato varieties that the center had collected from the area decades ago and that have since been lost (because farmers stopped growing them).  CIP offers these in-vitro plantlets, which also happen to be free from the viruses and fungi that inevitably accumulate in tuber-propagated crops, and the Parque de la Papa reintroduces them to the community.  It is a great example of peasants and research centers working together.  If the peasants and their ancestors hadn't created all these potato varieties, CIP wouldn't have been able to collect and use them.  But if CIP hadn't collected them when they did, they would have been lost, because the short-term profit motive of farmers led them to abandon many of these varieties over the last few decades.  As is, today the park houses something like 2000 potato varieties.

The park staff receives the plantlets in test tubes, and transplants them to pots in a sterile laboratory in the adobe shed at the right.

They then move these pots to the mesh-house at the left, which is kept free from pests and disease by a strict quarantine procedure whereby only certain people can enter, and they must change into lab clothes and disinfect themselves with quicklime in this anteroom.

The plants in the mesh-house produce a few tubers, and these are replanted to another, less sterile mesh-house for further multiplication.

In turn these pots produce more tubers, which are moved to communal fields in each village for another round of multiplication.  Finally, individual farmers can take varieties they like from this communal field for planting at their house.  The flow also goes in the other direction, as farmers and communal village fields donate interesting varieties to the multiplication center for distribution.

Later on we went up higher (to more than 4000 m altitude) and saw a little hamlet where members of a certain village (there are six villages contained in the park) sow Andean tubers.  Things are so chilly up here that the donkeys have evolved to be shaggy and warm.

 Here is a big reservoir that they've dammed to serve the intricate irrigation system that runs down the hills below. 

The hillside fields here in the background are not irrigated, though.  They farm them one or a few years, then let them regenerate for seven years or so.  The whole hamlet coordinates this such that they are all planting their crops in just one patch any given year.

 


 They have potatoes adapted to very high altitudes




Oca, which we call ibia in Colombia.

Mashua or cubio.

And even wild potato species that grow in uncultivated areas

We also visited a women's enterprise center, where they fabricate cosmetics from local herbs.

 Here is a batch of soap in process of packaging.

They also package powdered coca leaves in teabags.

In all of the villages we passed through in the park, I was impressed by their adobe construction and mud plaster, just like my house back in Colombia.  It appears there is a pool of local artisans who even do designs and figures in the plaster.

We also saw some women and men at work spinning wool (both sheep and alpaca, I believe) and weaving things, from these narrow bands to large shawls.

I also liked seeing the local pigs.  They are understandably woolly, but it's also impressive to see the long, strong legs and efficient gait of a peasant pig that lives by semi-independent foraging, as opposed to the stall-fattened pigs most of us know in the modern age.

Our formal tour was topped off with a delicious meal at the park's tourist restaurant.  A cooperative of local women served us alpaca in uchuva sauce, cooked quinoa, potato, and local greens.

 This was accompanied by a potato and quinoa soup,

And a sort of vinegary juice made from a local herb.

All the dishes used in the restaurant are locally-made pottery with designs and captions of different potato varieties found in the park.

Our visit was fascinating, though my two colleagues and I were woozy and weak through most of it due to the effects of gastric problems and the ridiculously high altitude.  So it was a relief to arrive at the houses we'd be staying at that night.  They too had decorated mud plaster, though the interior decorations were not bas-reliefs but rather painted words and animals.

 Here was the room I had a nap in that afternoon.

In the house's patio was the ubiquitous chaquitaclla, the foot-driven plow/shovel instrument indigenous Peruvian farmers use in the highland areas.

The people hosting us were Quechua-speaking natives, and only a few spoke Spanish.  They didn't introduce themselves as indigenous people but rather as peasants, and indeed, aside from the different language, many of their practices, their ways of organizing space, their homes, their fields, even their landscape, were very similar to the highland peasant areas of Boyaca, Colombia.  They don't deny that they are indigenous, and they maintain the pre-Spanish cosmovision of mountain spirits and community between humans and nature.  But I guess that in a region where everyone is indigenous, the description "indigenous" doesn't say much, while "peasant" says more about how you live your day-to-day life. 

Here I am in the low 2nd-floor corridor of the house I was to sleep in that night.

I of course did a fair amount of nosing about the local house-gardens.  The houses are at a lower altitude ("only" 3500 masl) than the drier, highland tuber row crops we saw above.  The house-gardens are planted more densely, managed more intensively, and generally everything is much greener. 

There were fields of fava beans and barley, both mixed and solo, that were used mainly not for their grains but to cut fresh as animal feed.

 Here is a barly plot that has been cut little by little as feed.  To the left is a new planting of quinoa.

 Here is some alfalfa, another feed crop that is common in this region, but that is inexplicably absent from most of highland Colombia.

What is all this feed for?  There certainly aren't many cattle around, few sheep, and the alpacas are all pasturing far away in the high heaths.  The answer is one of the most important animals domesticated in America:  the guinea pig.  One family I visited had a shed just for these little critters.

 But I think most families just keep them in a corner of the kitchen, where they can readily feed them scraps.

 Here are some filmed exploits of these silly little creatures.

This rascal was my favorite, all disheveled.

 

 Here is the adobe house amid non-native pines and eucalyptus trees.  Again, a scene that could be straight from central Colombia.

There is a garden of different herbs and medicines.

And a few plants of yacon, a sunflower (and Jerusalem artichoke) relative that, like its North American tuberous cousin, produces an edible root full in fact not of starch but of inulin, a long-chain carbohydrate that the human body can't digest.  As such, yacon is used in many processed foods as a source of soluble fiber and as a mild sweetener that doesn't hurt diabetics.

In the evening I took this photo of twilit quinoa (or maybe kaniwa amaranth, which looks very similar).





As night fell, my hosts treated me to toasted corn and tea.

 The kids took a picture of me looking silly in this special occasion attire.

Then the host mother gave me a delicious quinoa soup.  Again, save the quinoa, which we hardly use in Boyaca, the flavor and other components were very similar to what I know from Colombia.

The kids even use quinoa for their school projects.  Look:

Here's me again in a tiny room.

 



But lest I or any of the local Quechua inhabitants every think we're too big and lose sight of our minor place in the world, these ancient abandoned terraces are always present, watching over everything and reminding us that many have come before us and left their mark on the world with their work.

This is perhaps the major lesson gleaned from my whole visit to Peru, where the past is always present (it's not even past!).  We are all part of a history that is unfathomably deep.  We can and should work hard and be inspired by others that do so, but never make the mistake of becoming centered on how great one person or even one generation is.  We should never forget all that have gone before us, because they have much to teach.

Interesting video from David Foster Wallace

This is an interesting video based on a commencement speech by David Foster Wallace.  I haven't ever read anything by him, and frankly I have always had some inherent reticence to read him.  I guess I have the image of him as too navel-gazing, and certainly verbose with his multi-hundred-page books, though now I'd like to give his writing a chance.


This speech does a good job of pointing out the noble aspects of boring, everyday life, especially as lived in the US where cars and supermarkets and all the other trappings of our version of consumerist modernity can easily deaden human feeling and sympathy.  It is interesting that such insight and wisdom and love for life comes from a man who ultimately couldn't bear to keep living.  I will try to keep in mind the teachings of this video as my wife and I settle into a new life in the US this year.  I hope I can be a decent person amidst even some of the more boring, soul-crushing aspects of everyday life (while at the same time striving to really change some of those aspects for the better).

Milk and Marxism

As I've mentioned in past posts, last year I worked for a time giving sustainability workshops for dairy farmers.  I was very happy with this short-term job, because it allowed me to interact directly with farmers, and I felt I was doing them a good service.  Namely, I tried to help farmers to improve their profitability and environmental and social responsibility.  I was trying to find realistic ways of improving life for farmers, which meant promoting some things that were recommended by academia or government regulations, while quietly ignoring other suggestions that weren't feasible in the actual conditions of Colombian dairy farms.

In this job as in many agrarian issues, I tend to go for very practical, almost technical responses to social problems.  Whenever participation in my workshops devolved into discourse, into dramatic but unfocused denunciations of current political or market conditions, I always tried to steer the discussion back to small, practical measures that farmers could take to respond directly to the problem at hand.  Such measures ran the gamut from changes in milking or feeding practices on an individual farm, to banding together with neighbors to make demands of the local mayor's office, but I always insisted on concrete proposals over grandstanding and political discourse.   

Obviously I understand that you can’t fix a social ill with a new gadget or simply by following "best practices", and I realize that sometimes the only solution to a problem is to take grassroots political measures.  But I guess that more concrete proposals seem more realistic and sincere to me, while the social proposals (and especially the verbose denunciations) that come from civil society groups often seem like empty discourse that is pretty to hear but not to actually implement.   

I have been pretty firm in my conviction that this is the right way to proceed.  In the radical left-wing environment of the university where I work, where the walls are adorned by murals of Che Guevara, Salvador Allende, and even a Christ of the Sacred Heart wearing a Subcomandante Marcos-style balaclava, and many student groups are committed precisely to the type of big revolutionary declarations that sound noble but propose little in terms of practical change, I have stood strong in my way of doing things.  This has at times earned me the scorn or at least the misunderstanding of colleagues and especially students; in a real Leninist-Marxist’s view, I guess I’d be qualified as a petty bourgeois reformer as opposed to a revolutionary.

Recently for work I read the book "El Hombre y la Tierra en Boyaca", Fals Borda's seminal study of the social and economic conditions of peasant farmers in our region.  When I took it out from the library, I noticed that the subtitle to the 1957 edition translates to "Sociological and Historical Bases for Agrarian Reform".  It is a reformer book, not a revolutionary one.  The author is on the peasants' side, and uses his findings to support an agrarian reform to improve their life.  He is a bit condescending towards peasants, describing certain of their practices and customs as backwards and undeveloped; it is the position of a charitable interlocutor.  In the foreword, Fals Borda even justifies the need for reform by advise that, if the peasants' living conditions continue to deteriorate, the government and larger landholders will possibly face their revolutionary wrath.  He is trying to warn these large landholders and the government to avoid such a situation.

I understand that after publishing this book, Fals Borda was named Agriculture Minister or something in the national government, and along the lines of his book's proposals, he implemented the system of Juntas de Accion Comunal, which are citizen councils in urban neighborhoods and rural hamlets that bring some control of daily affairs and local government to the peasants and local people themselves.  He was also behind a very ambitious agrarian reform by the government in 1961, which took land from large landholders and distributed it to landless peasants, organizing these latter into strong popular political groups.

Perhaps it was the eventual sabotage of this reform by retrograde elements that terrorized and dispossessed the newly-formed peasant groups (which sometimes responded, rather effectively, by working militarily with the guerrillas), that disillusioned Fals Borda and turned him off of the reformer track.  Maybe it was his having worked since then at the National University with Camilo Torres Restrepo, the left-wing priest who eventually joined the ELN guerrilla group.  

At any rate, by the 1973 and 1978 editions of "El Hombre y la Tierra en Boyaca", Fals Borda was a raving revolutionary.  The subtitle of these editions changed to "the Historical Development of the Minifundia Society", and though he didn't make any major changes to the text itself, his new foreword calls for absolute change, radical revolution.  He is no longer warning the powers that be in order to avoid revolution, but rather calling on peasants to enact this revolution.  His new approach seems more full of hot air to me than his prior, practical solutions; indeed, he expresses frustration that peasants in Boyaca don't become as incensed and radical as he is, that they don't take drastic measures.  But what strikes me is that, even though I am not rationally convinced by it, the fiery revolutionary discourse will always seem much stronger and more admirable, while the reformer's approach seems complacent, bourgeois, compromised.   

At any rate, my sympathy with Fals Borda's first, seemingly naïve attitude of reform and compromise, made me wonder how I must look to a real radical.  I have said that in my dairy workshops and many other fora, I pride myself on shying away from discourse and focusing on concrete proposals.  Should I continue to be proud of my practical, anti-political approach, or should I be more self-critical?

I see the same conflict between fiery (yet ineffectual) discourse and practical (though uninspiring) solutions in the differing approaches of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.  Malcolm X was a discourser, with a very pure, internally-coherent vision and argument that threw blame clearly at the white man.  King was more realistic in many ways, as he proposed a peaceful coexistence as opposed to an African exodus or an empowered segregation that was never to happen.  So in practical terms, King was thinking more soundly.  Of course Malcolm seems more pure, more noble, less compromised, and rightfully so; racism in the United States was and is an unqualified evil, and it is coherent to make severe judgments of the racist establishment.  But King achieved the more concrete objectives through his mix of practice and moral reasoning.  Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam were not instrumental in passing any Civil Rights legislation, and frankly they weren't interested in that.  They didn't want to negotiate with white devils in order to mildly palliate the black man's suffering.  King, on the other hand, achieved dramatic changes in both written laws and in human attitudes in the South.

That said, in this respect, Malcolm was perhaps more realistic in the long term—he was protesting not the laws and social norms of Southern oppression, but rather the economic oppression that existed in the North and would remain even long after the end of legalized oppression.  It is arguable that the changes King and his ilk achieved were more symbolic, and didn't change the underlying fact of poverty and inequality.  In fact, behind the fiery rhetoric, the Nation had perhaps a more realistic program for economic liberation through local economic development.  They did propose practical measures like local ownership of businesses, neighborhood-based programs for social improvement, and the like (and the similarly radical Black Panthers after them had even more of a social program with their free breakfast programs and other anti-poverty measures).  It's just that, since Malcolm's and the Nation's vision didn't see a place for participating in national, integrated politics, their concrete proposals remained at the local black level, and never became nationwide programs.  King started to turn his sights on economic injustice toward the end of his life, but I don’t imagine his method of marches and prayer vigils (which were so effective in changing laws and human morality in the States) would be very effective in resolving with hard, faceless, amoral economics.

A very distantly related tangent--recently when we were watching Spike Lee's film version of Malcolm X, I asked Caro if she recognized who was singing "A Change is Gonna Come".  She did; it was that fellow I like who sings about mathematics!

Returning to the topic of milk, here is an interesting article from GRAIN about the transition in many countries from an informal system of milk provision, with few intermediaries between farmers and consumers, to a more formalized system involving big companies and packaged milk. It isn’t quite accurate for Colombia, because even the formal companies here tend not to be big multinationals but rather local companies with their base in peasant regions.  While the GRAIN report is right in pointing out that raw, direct-sale milk isn't the hotbed of infection and filth that the big companies try to convince us of, it is also true that direct-sale milk in Colombia has some problems that you need to watch out for.  Most people who sell raw milk don't do tests for tuberculosis or antibiotic residues, and it’s not unheard-of for farmers to give them their worst milk (since the raw milk buyers don’t pay as well as the big companies).  Luckily, a recent law was passed that at once recognizes the validity of direct-sale milk and their right to sell to consumers, while it also stipulates some basic sanitary measures that milk producers and sellers should take to assure the quality and cleanliness of raw milk.  This law overrides one that had stupidlly outlawed the sale of raw milk, despite its providing a majority of the milk supply for Colombians.  Again, this to me seems a sensible measure, a concrete action to assure a good milk supply for the people, while recognizing the existing system that has worked for so long.  It is a practical, concrete proposal instead of a big, extreme discourse (like that found in the GRAIN report), though in the Colombian case as in many cases, it took big discourses and grassroots political organization to bring about this law.

In short, I support those who produce and sell raw milk in Colombia, but it’s not quite the black-and-white, good-vs.-evil story the GRAIN report presents.  Maybe I’m sold out to the Colombian formal milk industry and that's why I'm not so hard on it as GRAIN is—but it's true that it's easier to make large pronouncements from an international NGO than to live with the nuances on the ground.  That said, they are largely right about the incursion of Big Dairy into many countries, which is an important adjunct to the issue of large-scale land grabs (a topic which I hope to address soon in a blog post).   

For now I’ve finally gotten in touch with my local raw milk seller, who comes around the neighborhood most mornings honking a horn to announce her presence.  I've been wanting to do so for some time, but I never was able to catch her when I was around.  Last week we bought a liter and a half from her for less than what a liter costs in the supermarket.  Neither we nor anyone else in Colombia is like the raw milk nuts in the US, who insist on drinking unpasteurized milk—we boil the milk, knowing it may have harmful bacteria.  And by boiling, we separate out the cream, which we can then mix with arepas or beat into butter.

On the same note of milk and pragmatism, I recently ran across a few articles that posit industrialized dairy farms as more sustainable than organic or other low-input farms.  This article claims that the use of recombinant bovine growth hormone in dairy farms has lowered the environmental impacts per gallon of milk produced, by extracting more milk from the same cow without adding any additional manure output or feed intake.  This is called dilution of maintenance energy; the base amount of energy needed just to maintain the cow alive, as well as the base amount of manure and farts and general pollution, comprises a relatively smaller part of the total energy and pollution needed to produce milk when you produce a lot of milk per cow.  

This other article more ambitiously lays out the ways in which today's high-input, high-output model of dairying has lower impacts per gallon of milk produced than the seemingly bucolic model practiced in the 1940s US. At first glance, their approach of looking beyond the discourse of low-input, supposedly sustainable agriculture to find what is really most environmentally responsible, seems like an objective, sensible way of doing things, very much in line with my preference for practical solutions over nebulous discourse.  

On reading them, their numbers seem sound, though there are a few problems to their approach.  First off, their methods a bit opaque, I believe mainly because the limitations of a short article don't allow for in-depth descriptions of your model.  Beyond this, in the bovine growth hormone article two of the authors either work for or with the producer of this chemical input, so I don't know how objective we can expect their interpretations of data to be.  Finally, the assumption in the second article that today's organic farms are basically throwbacks to the 1940s isn’t very accurate; organic farming is a fully modern, scientifically-informed set of practices, not just the absence of the past 70 years' worth of technological advances.  

But beyond these more or less superficial problems with the prior two articles, there is another report that has fundamentally opposed findings.  This other guide, which corresponds to a computer calculator for dairyfarms, is more considered and in-depth in its explanations of methodology, and comes to the opposite (thoughcommon-sense) conclusion:  that heavy use of synthetic inputs, crowding of animals into small areas, and storing liquid waste in airless lagoons is not as environmentally sound as a pasture-based approach to dairy farming.  It is not peer-reviewed in the same way as an academic journal article, but it is put out by a respected research center.  It takes a more nuanced look at conventional and organic dairy systems, and as such it takes into account (where the other articles don't) things like the difference in milk quality between high-yield Holsteins and lower-yield other breeds, which somewhat diminishes the apparently glaring difference in milk yield seen in the other articles.  And this report still hasn’t incorporated soil sequestration figures for methane under a pasture system, nor differences in carbon dioxide or nitrous oxide emissions, all of which would leave organic farming coming out even better on a per-gallon environmental footprint basis.  (According to this bit by Bill McKibben, methane and carbon dioxide sequestration may be very high on awell-managed pasture, though I don’t know if the FAO would agree given theircomments on extensive grazing and its methane creation).  It seems that the narrower you look at something, the easier it is to say it's sustainable, but as you consider more aspects, the story changes. 

The main point of divergence between the Organic Center report and the 1944 paper is the incorrect assumption in the latter that 1944 farms (or present-day organic farms) maintain the same high culling rate as modern conventional dairy farms.  In a modern dairy system, cows are kept at a high level of production that wears out their bodies, such that they are killed (culled, in technincal terms) after two lactations (lasting just over two years).  This means that the cow has spent two years or so as an unproductive heifer, and then two years or so as a highly productive cow, which in turn leaves about as many heifers as mature cows in the population.  The Organic Center report posits a longer life for lactating cows, such that they are milked over more than four lactation cycles before culling, as opposed to just under 2 cycles.  If this is accurate, there are fewer unproductive heifers in the population under a less intensive, pasture-based systems.  What accounts for the different findings are that while the 1944 study speaks of dilution of maintenance energy in a high-producing cow, the Organic Center shows a dilution of maintenance across the population, by having more cows in production and fewer heifers just eating and pooping without producing milk.

So in this case, the discourse of organic and sustainable advocates in favor of lower-intensity, pasture-based dairy systems seems not to be a noble-sounding but ultimately impractical ideology, but rather based on fact.  Sometimes discourse exists because it is what's true, not just what sounds nice.  And in any case, often to bring about practical, realistic change, you need an ideological lens and an eloquent discourse. 

Pitfalls of tradition

Here is an insightful discussion of how the idea of "tradition" is often hijacked to justify violations of basic human rights and human decency (child brides, rape, homophobia, etc.).  It is an important warning to people like me who often romanticize tradition as a stabilizing force whose rupture is to blame for many of modern society's ills. 

In my defense, I would say that tradition and collective values are indeed what have sustained through millennia any human community that has made it to the present, and as such traditions are usually a key manifestation of sustainability.  The problem is that the sustainability of cultures and peoples isn't always in line with an absolute respect for individual rights.  In other words, in the functioning, the machinery, the social logic of any successful (that is to say, still-surviving) culture, there are some people who suffer in the process of maintaining the collective.  This is unacceptable to our modern values of human rights, of respect for every single person as such. 

What I have yet to figure out (indeed, what we as a planetary population have yet to figure out) is how to balance the moral requisite of respect for the individual, with the continued existence of our nations and our species as a whole, which seem to be desintegrating under the weight of billions of individual choices and caprices that go against sustainability.

Article about my project in Nature magazine

My research project on achira was recently mentioned in an article in Nature magazine.  I am really honored and thrilled about this.  Here are two links to the article, one that gives it in html form, and another in pdf.

http://www.nature.com/naturejobs/science/articles/10.1038/nj7447-147a

http://www.nature.com/naturejobs/2013/130502/pdf/nj7447-147a.pdf