Haiti donors' conference

Today is a big UN donors' conference to fund Haiti's reconstruction.

Here is an article by Grassroots International criticizing past trends of international development aid to Haiti, and fretting about whether future efforts will continue the same misled policies of export-led, anti-agrarian economic development. At the end of the article you'll find an 8-point plan for Haitian development, laid out by Haitian progressive leader Camille Chalmers.

Here is an article by Beverly Bell discussing examples of spontaneous people-people displays of solidarity in the aftermath of the earthquake, and here is a follow-up article discussing more institutional manifestations of communal solidarity in Haiti. The latter of the two makes reference to a joint statement by a coalition of Haitian progressive organizations, which you can read in its entirety here.

Despite exclusion of grassroots organizations from many official planning sessions for Haitian reconstruction, it seems that at today's UN donors' conference Haiti will make the point for more involvement of its government in the rebuilding of the country. If the Haitian government is actually given a central role in the rebuilding process, that will be a great advance, because the elected government has been marginalized for so many years in the history of Haiti. It seems that they've got a pretty well-thought plan for creating new urban and rural spaces. Though the Haitian government's plan is a top-down, technocratic affair, it's better that it be planned and undertaken by them than to leave reconstruction in the hands of unelected foreign bureaucrats and self-proclaimed development experts. Furthermore, even if current development plans do not include much input from the people and grassroots groups, if the Haitian government is responsible for reconstruction, there is a good chance that normal Haitians will be able to make their priorities be heard and respected by the government.

So I'm hopeful right now, perhaps ingenuously so.

Respuesta para Caro a mi "Important Caveat"

No, casi el contrario--no debería haber un "sea cual sea el tamaño". Sin una redistribución de la tierra para que todos tengan una parcela de tamaño funcional (o sea, suficiente para alimentar y vestir una familia dignamente), toda ayuda con extensión agrícola, nuevas semillas, acceso a fertilizantes, incluso crédito, no va a ayudar mucho a los más pobres. No lo van a acceder tanto como los más ricos, y además hay cierto límite debajo del cual los insumos no te aumentan mucho tu producción en términos absolutos (aunque quizás en términos relativos).

Sería como ofrecer una buena tasa de interés bancario sobre los depósitos de los que sólo tengan 20000 pesos. Si tienen tan poca plata, no la van a poner en el banco para empezar, pero aunque lo hicieran, 100% interés sobre 20000 pesos sólo te dan 20000 pesos más. Y en cualquier caso, seguramente los con más plata encontrarían una manera de tener esa tasa de interés, lo que les daría tanta plata más que podrían manipular y abusar a los más pobres.

De igual modo (pero no lo hablo en este artículo), una redistribución de la tierra sin otro apoyo agrario, tampoco sirve de mucho, porque dentro de poco los grandes y poderosos acaparan de la tierra redistribuida.

Tu comentario va más al segundo punto que argumento. Más allá de la inadecuación de apoyo agrario sin redistribución de la tierra, una dependencia desmedida sobre métodos agrícolas industriales, que son a la vez caras, importadas, y dañinas a la tierra en el largo plazo, acaba empeorando la seguridad alimentaria, no ayudándola.

Trade liberalization leads to food insecurity in West Africa

Here's another article responding to the 2008 food crisis, this time written by knowledgeable researchers instead of that hack Collier. It's a long article, but check out the discussion on pages 11 and 12. The authors argue that lowering tariff barriers for rice imports in the 1980s really compromised food security in West Africa, by favoring low food prices for urban consumers instead of supporting the domestic farming sector. This is obvious to anyone that hasn't drunk the agricultural free-trade kool-aid. But the authors go one step further, claiming that the programs many countries have implemented since 2008 to bulk up domestic rice production merely continue this urban bias. I had never thought of it this way, but I think they have a point. The latest move of West African countries to increase local rice production (in large part through promoting new high-input rice varieties) is motivated not by a desire to improve rural livelihoods or even to improve national food security, but rather to lower rice prices to avoid urban unrest (for more on this, see my last post). If it were otherwise, argues the article, governments would be more inclined to invest in increased production of better-adapted, low-input, widespread staples such as sorghum, cassava, and plantains, instead of new, high-input rice varieties.

Finally, the article insists that in order to strengthen national food security, as important as providing improved seed are levying tariffs on food imports, providing support to farmers, improving infrastructure, and giving farmers better access to credit. It's all just common sense, but it's nice to hear it from someone other than myself.

The romantic giant that must be confronted and slain is Paul Collier (figuratively speaking--I'm not advocating violence against this goofy guy)

Here's an article by Paul Collier about the food crisis of 2008, with his prescriptions to increase world food supply. The title promises to talk about the roles of greed and illusion in the crisis, but he really only discusses some supposed illusions (though he's actually the delusional one, as we'll see below). As for greed, he doesn't touch on it, except when he's condoning it in the form of corporatization of farming, and land grabs by English lords and Brazilian strongmen alike.

Collier starts off with a disputable premise--that food prices must come down. I say it's disputable because, by Collier's own admission, the main people to suffer from high food prices are the urban poor. They are reliant on bought food, as they have ceased to produce food for themselves. But most of the poorest people in the world are rural dwellers. For many rural people, again by Collier's own admission, fluctuations of the world food market do not affect them much, as they are reliant on their own production and local markets that are not integrated with world markets. (An exception to this might be the sizeable numbers of landless rural dwellers, who in certain situations might be heavily reliant on bought food, as are poor urbanites.) In any case, if by all measures most of the world's poorest people are rural farmers, and rising food prices either don't affect them or in fact increase their wellbeing, I don't understand how Collier can confidently claim that reducing world food prices is an imperative. Third World urbanites are usually materially better-off than their rural counterparts, so why should we aim to lower food prices to maintain their wellbeing at the expense of rural livelihoods?

Collier actually gives us an answer to this question of why we would favor the wellbeing of already-advantaged urbanites over the rural poorest of the poor. By his own admission, the big concern with rising food prices is the possibility of urban riots. From the Roman empire onward, most central governments have been faced with a cyclical conundrum. Low food prices cause rural stagnation and migration to the cities, where new arrivals are presumably better-off than they were in the countryside. This trend creates cities bloated with the urban poor, who demand cheap food. Even if this urban poor is actually less needy than the rural poor, the urbanites exert more force on decision-makers, because they live near the centers of power and can threaten with riots in the face of high food prices. So to appease the urban poor, decision-makers do what they can to maintain low food prices, which in turn fuels even more rural desperation and migration to the city. Within a few generations you get an obscene centralization of population, as seen in ancient Rome, 19th-century London, Mexico City of the 1950s onward, or Mumbai today. Collier decries the decision-making that leads to such a state of affairs as Peron-style populism, but he is essentially proposing the same thing: keeping food prices low to appease urban slumdwellers.

In any case, I think I've made it clear that Collier's point of departure, the assertion that food prices must come down, is debateable. It is not the exclusive, self-evident option, but rather an election of certain priorities, in this case urban wellbeing over rural livelihoods. One could easily (and probably more justifiably) focus on alleviating the worst poverty in the world, which would imply a strategy that would in fact aim to maintain high food prices to improve rural income, in the meanwhile making land available to the rural landless and the urban poor so they might benefit from high food prices as producers, instead of suffering as consumers. In fact, the urban poor in the developing world are usually recent emigres from the countryside, which they left precisely because low food prices made farming unviable for them. The long-term effect of higher food prices might be a return of some of these urbanites to the countryside, which in many cases would not be a bad thing.

Beyond his disputable opening premise, Collier uses an almost entirely fallacious line of reasoning in his proposals for increasing world food production. He obviously knows little about real farming (as opposed to the fantasy vision presented in agribusiness companies' glossy brochures), because two of his three prescriptions have been unequivocally shown to have no positive effect on food supply.

First of Collier's fix-alls is the replacement of peasant agriculture by commercial agriculture. He claims that the middle and upper classes of the developed world have a romantic attachment to peasant agriculture, which ultimately harms food production. While I am also too-often prone to caricature and criticize the world's comfortable classes, I must take issue with this claim. I think as many urban bourgeoisie scorn rural life as romanticize it, and in any case I don't think that the personal attitudes of the First World's urban wealthy are a major driver of agrarian development policy, either on the world stage or within individual poor countries. In fact, I would say that a large part of the failure of many countries to pull their people out of poverty has been due precisely to an anti-rural, anti-agrarian vision on the part of policymakers, a refusal to accept the value and the centrality of peasant agriculture to the society. An omnipresent spectacle in African countries is that the government insists on a modern fantasy of a society based on cities, industry, and machine-laden agriculture, despite the reality that the majority of the population is rural, factories are scarce, and few farmers have the means or the desire to save labor (which is abundant) by sinking their scarce capital into unproven, expensive technologies. In many poor countries there are urban universities that turn out scores of accountants, lawyers, and agronomists, who then have trouble finding a job because there exist few large companies, a malnourished legal infrastructure, and no government agricultural extension agency! Poor countries are often poor precisely because leaders have followed Collier's scorn for peasants and his fetishizing of technology, thus implementing policies that are totally irrelevant for the society.

Commercial agriculture, as I've explained in prior posts, produces less food and income per acre of land than does small-scale peasant agriculture. This is because as you mechanize agriculture, each farmer farms more land and thus can't afford to put as much work and care into each acre. And the focus on monocropping inherent to export-led commercial agriculture means that instead of the land's producing an abundant array of many products, it only produces a high yield of one product. The net result, in terms of real production of food, as well as the wealth created by each acre, is less production per acre under commercial farming systems. So while Collier's bogeyman of romantic bourgeois attachment to the "simple life" may have some basis in reality, the preference for peasant agriculture over industrialized commercial agriculture is firmly founded on real agronomic and economic results. Even the status quo thinkers at the World Bank have my back on this one.

Examples can be seen in the large sugar estates of northeastern Brazil. In land planted only to cane, profit per acre is very low, and only by possessing hundreds or thousands of acres can a company be profitable. In the meanwhile, within the vast expanses of almost-worthless cane, there occur tiny family plots that workers have planted to a mixture of cassava, corn, beans, fruit trees. The value produced by one of these small peasant plots (often not even held in property by their landless inhabitants) is much greater than that produced by an equivalent area of the cane surrounding them. Unfortunately, the model of agriculture that Brazil has chosen to expand to its broad tracts of virgin land in the interior, corresponds more closely to the sugarcane plantation than to the peasant plot.

Collier's anti-peasant tirades are merely self-fulfilling cliches. When government decision-makers enact policy to make peasant farming inviable, for example by requiring or favoring a certain minimum size of farm to be able to access credit, subsidies, or market chains, of course the excluded peasant farms will become less viable. This has less to do with anything inherent to peasant farming, and more to do with the dogma of policymakers. In fact, most of Collier's assertions about the economics of scale in farming are merely ideologies and cliches, with little foundation in fact. In most contexts, a peasant farm will always outperform a commercial farm if they are given access to the same resources. This is because a commercial, capitalist farm uses wage-labor and looks mainly at its return on capital. If profits fall below a certain level, the investor in a commercial farm will put his capital elsewhere, and the farm will fold. Peasants, on the other hand, have little capital and look mainly at their return on labor. If suitable wage labor is not available elsewhere (which it usually isn't), the opportunity cost of peasant labor is effectively null, and peasants will keep working, keep their farm going, even after a point where a commercial farm would have folded. Conversely, if the sons or daughters of a peasant farmer returns to the land, their labor can always be used to intensify production and create value. A commercial farm with a rigid business model can't and won't absorb any more workers than they need for their core operation. A marvelous treatment of the economics of peasant farming is given by Chayanov, a Russian agrarian economist that died in a Stalinist gulag.

Peasant farms are wholly compatible with technology and innovation, despite Collier's typecasting. In fact, most small family farms in the world do employ many modern technologies, as well as ever-changing personal innovations to improve efficiency. Most peasants in the world don't have tractors, but they can and do employ some mix of fertilizers, pesticides, improved seeds, rototillers, draft animals, and any other technology that suits their situation. Even US farmers, which Collier presumably thinks of as modern and commercial, operate largely on a peasant logic. The labor on most US farms is family labor, capital is scarce, and farmers have an emotional as well as an economic attachment to their land. In the US case, great expanses of land and the loss of surrounding farms makes large operations and heavy machinery necessary for farmers, and decent access to credit makes it possible to obtain these machines and expand operations. But despite large capital investments and the production of grains for commercial sale, a US family farm is not some capitalist operation, where the farmer might just as well fire his son or wife to raise profits, or invest his capital in a Payless Shoe Store franchise instead of in machinery and equipment for his land.

Finally on the point of the supposed efficiency of commercial agriculture, Collier's use of the English enclosure of the commons as a positive example of economic growth is ridiculous. Basically enclosure was the appropriation by aristocratic lords of what had been public lands. Peasants were no longer able to graze their herds and flocks from commonly-held pastures, or farm commonly-held land, or obtain wood and nuts from commonly-accessible forests. The land barons saw that it would be most profitable to exclude peasants from this land and to devote it exclusively to the grazing of sheep, whose wool they could sell to the burgeoning new textile industry. Thomas More discussed it in his Utopia:

"'But I do not think that this necessity of stealing arises only from hence; there is another cause of it, more peculiar to England.' 'What is that?' said the Cardinal: 'The increase of pasture,' said I, 'by which your sheep, which are naturally mild, and easily kept in order, may be said now to devour men and unpeople, not only villages, but towns; for wherever it is found that the sheep of any soil yield a softer and richer wool than ordinary, there the nobility and gentry, and even those holy men, the abbots not contented with the old rents which their farms yielded, nor thinking it enough that they, living at their ease, do no good to the public, resolve to do it hurt instead of good. They stop the course of agriculture, destroying houses and towns, reserving only the churches, and enclose grounds that they may lodge their sheep in them.'"

This was by no means a demonstration of the inherent inefficiency of peasant agriculture, but rather of the fact that by appropriating other people's land, the aristocracy could produce an important cash flow for themselves. I don't know where Collier gets his numbers regarding the productivity gains created by this robbery, but I'm sure that any ostensible gain would only be in fungible cash income, which in any case flowed principally to the moneyed few. Surely the production from a diversified peasant agrarian system integrating crops and livestock, public and private land, would have been greater than the wool of a few sheep, though if much of this peasant production were consumed or traded locally, without a cash transaction, its value would have been severely understated. On top of this, the net social effect of enclosure in England was to create a huge pauper class in the cities. So enclosure was good for the land barons who kicked peasants off land, and for the factory owners that could pay a pittance the newly-minted paupers, but most people suffered greatly. For most of the early modern age, London was a net consumer of human lives. The average lifespan of a peasant newly-arrived in London was but a few years before poverty, pollution, disease, and horrid factory conditions killed him or her. It was only because conditions in the countryside were so desperate that London could maintain its population, as peasants continuously flowed in only to die within a few years. So Collier's assertion that enclosure increased production is disputable, his claim that it led to English economic development is laughable, and his prescription of something similar for the rest of the world is criminal. His admiration for Brazil, where new land barons steal land from the government, from the commons, and from smaller farmers, is likewise criminal.

Collier's second fix to increase food production is to roll back a supposed war on science that he has detected. He claims that Europeans are afraid of scientific agriculture, and for this reason they have regulated GM crops more heavily than the US. First off, European agriculture is arguably more "scientific" than that of the US. Some of the world's foremost agriculture research is done in Europe. Europeans farm land more intensively, which usually means more use of technology and chemicals, and higher productivity per acre. An example according to FAOSTAT, the Food and Agriculture Organization's useful database on all things agricultural, is that in 2008 average US wheat yields were about 3 metric tons/hectare (45 bushels/acre), as compared to Germany's 8 tons/ha (125 bushels/acre).

Flowing from Collier's claim of European bias against technology is that this has led Africa to shun
GM crops for fear of being shut out of European markets. This might have some truth to it, but it rests on an assumption that African nations and farmers are unable to think and decide for themselves if they want to adopt a given technology. It places responsibility for Africa's rejection of GM crops solely in the hands of Europeans.

My final point with respect to Collier's lauding of GM crops as a great new technological frontier for agriculture is that GM crops have yet to raise food production anywhere in the world. By far the most widely-planted GM crops (practically the only ones, really) are corn, cotton, and soybeans resistant either to certain insects or to an herbicide that kills everything else. These traits, while potentially useful for reducing use of agrichemicals (though this doesn't always happen in the real world), do not increase production. Increasing yields is still left to traditional breeding, as no single, easily-isolated and inserted gene is likely to have an appreciable effect on yield. So Collier's insistence on GM technology to augment world food production is yet another fantasy. It seems he has trouble coming to terms with the real, empirical present, existing instead in commonplaces and cliches, or in those appealing "next 15 years" that are always sure to see an inconceivably better world.

I agree with Collier's final assertion that a US obsession with biofuel made from corn grain is economically and ecologically silly, and that it bore a significant responsibility in the food price spike of 2008. The amount of energy required to produce a gallon of corn ethanol for cars is almost equivalent to the energy released by that gallon when it is burned in your car. The same is more or less true of costs vs. earnings on a gallon of US-made biofuel. This means corn ethanol is not a good replacement for oil, but rather just a change in its form. There can be made a case for US subsidies to corn ethanol, if they are used as a temporary incentive, geared toward a gradual transition to more efficient ways of creating fuel from farm production. That said, there exists of course a sort of moral dilemma when we start putting food into our gas tanks, but this dilemma has more to do with the commoditization of food than with anything else. Since food is not considered a right for all but rather one more product to be bought and sold, even without biofuels we are already privy to the obscene spectacle of providing more food for the world's livestock than for its people.

A few final asides, because Collier sneaks in a few dubious claims amidst his three major points.

First off, just so you know, the amount of arable land available to African farmers is still very extensive, which means there is a lot of potential to increase production by expanding cultivation. While it's of course important to respect and protect Africa's natural areas, the continent is if anything underpopulated, not overpopulated.

Secondly, notice in the penultimate paragraph of the article Collier's assertion that the US tax system burdens people's work. I agree that workers are given a disproportionate tax burden as compared to the wealthy, and also that we should disincentivize energy profligacy through our tax codes. But the natural solution for a tax code that burdens work more than capital and investment is to tax earnings from investment more, not to tax energy consumption.

This little slip perhaps betrays a general pro-business, pro-capital bias on Collier's part, which in turn must lead us to question the objectiveness of his touting of big, commercial agriculture. It seems he is all too willing to recommend wide-reaching global changes, to overturn functional, longstanding farming practices, to overlook sovereign people's concern with manipulating nature's genetic order. Indeed, he is willing to rework the world, but he can't even fathom mild changes in the relationship between rich and poor. It's a convenient blind spot. In his very ambitious, overarching recommendations to increase world food production (ostensibly to help the poor), not once does he mention any form of downward redistribution of resources (though implicitly he sanctions the appropriation of land and resources by large commercial operations, an upward redistribution).

In the end, we can clearly see that it is Collier who is the irrational romantic, the ideologue committed to advancing a certain order of things, whether or not it is beneficial to the majority of people. He paints himself as a pragmatic bearer of truth, dismissing reasonable objections to his points as irresponsible romanticism, but it is he who lives in a fantasy world. Or maybe he truly is as pragmatic and rational as he claims, and the fantasies he spins are a cynical attempt to steer his readers towards an acceptance of an agenda Collier knows would not serve the common good.

In case I haven't convinced you, here's a good response letter to Collier's article, published in Pambazuka news.

Creative ways of fighting wealth inequality

These are exciting times for progressives. We've passed a decent health bill, Obama and Russia are negotiating down our collective nuke supply. Nevertheless, the lack of a public option in the healthcare reform bill, and in general Obama's seeming deference toward corporate interests, has had me doubting if our nation is well beyond the possibility of really progressive legislation like we saw in the New Deal and the postwar period. I was wondering if we were at a point where no president would take on thorny, real issues. Even the beacon of hope that Obama was a year ago wouldn't dare represent working people, wouldn't dare challenge the complacent Washington world view that encourages us to associate corporate prosperity with our own well-being.

But I feel better after reading two NYT articles' analyses on recent legislation. Whether it's with the healthcare bill or in housing, it seems that Obama really is taking aim at some of the causes (or at least the effects) of wealth inequality in our country. I had long thought that in our new gilded age of widening gaps between rich and poor, ever-increasing job insecurity, and corporate impunity, wealth inequality was the elephant in the room that no politician would touch for fear of seeming too leftist. The political discourse in our country has become so neoliberal and class-blind that merely pointing out inequality, not to mention attempting to decrease it, smacks of wild-eyed socialist zealotry. But perhaps we may yet have another age of progressive legislation. Yes we can.

On the subject of ripping apart the longstanding tenets of neoliberalism, here's an article on the limits of the usefulness of the study of economics. It's by David Brooks, whom I normally think is a cocksure, pedantic crypto-fascist, but I like the gist of it.

We've always known it, but now it seems Bill Clinton does too

This is a great AP article on how cheap rice imports (and unfettered free trade in general) have undercut Haitian farming. A highlight of the article is Bill Clinton's recognition of this obvious fact, which stands in stark contrast to longstanding US policy on international development aid. This US aid policy follows the US farm lobby's party line, as expressed in the last sentence of the article, "The productivity of U.S. farmers helps feed countries which cannot feed themselves."

This is of course a self-fulfilling (and self-serving, for US farmers) diagnosis; if you undercut a country's local production, it will not be able to feed itself, which means it will rely even more on imports, hence further undercutting local production. I seriously doubt farmers and citizens in the US would consider it a boon if the situation were reversed, and we were flooded by cheap Brazilian grain and soybean imports. We would accurately see it as an affront to our sovereignty, not as a great humanitarian gesture from Brazil.

An important caveat to my incessant plugging of government-led agrarian reform

This article by GRAIN reminds me that merely increasing farmer access to agricultural inputs, like seeds or fertilizer, leaves much to be desired in terms of improving well-being of small farmers. First off, if land is so unequally distributed that small farmers have barely enough to feed their families, and large farmers have so much land that they can unduly influence policies and markets, then input subsidies are likely to benefit large farmers, while doing little good for smaller farmers (and in some cases leaving the latter with more debt from buying the inputs than income from increased production). Secondly, inorganic fertilizers, while not bad in themselves, can really screw up farming systems if you're not careful. Basically synthetic fertilizers are inorganic, acidic salts that provide certain important nutrients for a plant, while doing nothing to improve long-term soil health. If you're not constantly adding organic matter to the soil through manure or compost, using inorganic fertilizer destroys soil life, which in the long term leaves the soil more vulnerable to erosion and less able to provide a good environment for crop plant roots. Finally, a dependence on expensive imported synthetic fertilizers leaves a country very vulnerable to the fluctuations of international markets, which from one year to another can drastically affect the country's economy, food security, and government budget.

So the moral of the story is that, if agrarian reform programs don't include land redistribution as a major component, then other reforms, like improving access to credit or inputs, can end up hurting small farmers instead of helping them.

Land-grabbing, enclosure of the commons, and social and environmental disaster

I am reposting from Raj Patel's excellent blog an article by Arundhati Roy about the Indian government's intended land-grab of resource-rich tribal areas. It sounds very ugly. I am also posting an interview of Iain Boal from Counterpunch magazine, in which he argues that much of the ecological deterioration on the planet is due precisely to this type of outside grabbing and intervention in local areas. He describes it as enclosure of the commons, that is to say the appropriation by powerful groups of resources that used to be shared in common by a local community.

Basically Boal's argument is that people that live in and make their living from a given landscape are not likely to deteriorate the ecological base upon which their existence depends. This means that no matter how arid or seemingly unproductive the land, and no matter how the population may grow, people usually find a way to live sustainably in their local environment. They live within their ecological means, because they've no other choice. According to this argument, the environmental disasters we're seeing today in much of the world are less a result of local people's misuse of their own land, and more a result of outsiders' unsustainable extraction of resources from landscapes that are not their own. These outsiders can be corporations, wealthy individuals, or a government (as we see in the case presented by Roy).

On the other hand, maybe the insatiable forces of land-grabbing, resource extraction, and urbanization aren't so bad after all, as we might conclude from this frivolous little article from the New York Times.

A good urban-focused article

Here's an article by David Harvey from the New Left Review on urbanization and capital. It is urban-focused like an article I recently criticized on this blog. However, the point of this article is not to naively advance the urban model of living as the best way to live, but rather to analyze the economic and social processes that drive and are driven by the city. And in a context of increasing worldwide urbanization, the processes Harvey describes stretch beyond the city and affect the entire planet.

Obviously the historical and economic trends described are too wide-reaching and complex for me to be able to comment too intelligently on Harvey's treatment of them, but it seems like the author paints an interesting, coherent picture of urbanization processes in the modern era. I can certainly say from my childhood in the most rapidly-gentrifying area of 1990s Chicago that I have seen firsthand many of the realities that Harvey describes--displacement of workers and low-income people from neighborhoods, construction of ever more homogeneous spaces with the illusion of ever-increasing variety and niches, a business-driven attitude in local government.

I also like about the article that it ends with some practical recommendations for action, namely democratizing control over capital.

Vodou art in Haiti

This is an article about Haitian religious art. It ostensibly has little to do with the central agrarian theme of this blog, but there is a personal connection. The 1995 Vodou art exhibition mentioned in this article came to the Field Museum in Chicago in '95 or '96. I practically grew up in the Field; it has always been my favorite museum in the world. Seeing this exhibit when I was about 13 sparked my interest in Haiti. In my young life I'd always looked for the underappreciated, the different, the unknown. I never liked doing what everyone else was doing. This, combined with a nascent interest in the Third World during my preteen years, predisposed me to take a real interest in Haiti. Its language, its religion, its culture were unique in the world.

I had hardly even heard of Haiti before that museum exhibit. Frankly, even after seeing the exhibit, it's not like my life changed drastically; I didn't begin diligently studying Haiti from that point forward. But it seems that a seed of fascination had been planted in me, that would manifest itself in occasional papers on Haiti for class assignments, in my paying extra attention whenever a news story came out of Haiti, in my reading books on Haitian history when the opportunity presented itself.

Eventually in college, when I was in dire need of a break from studying abstract agricultural concepts, I decided to take a semester off to work and learn farming in a poor country. I considered many destinations for this short sabbatical, but Haiti was always the strongest contender, and won out in the end. I spent the school year studying the Kreyol language obsessively, and then it was time to actually go to Haiti to work with an organized peasant group in Fondwa, in the south of the country. Since then I have returned a number of times to Haiti, and the country has played a subtle but ever-present role in my career choices, in my education, in my interests, in my beliefs, even in my decision to start this blog.

None of this would have happened had it not been for that art exposition in the Field Museum, fifteen years ago.

A naive, pro-urban article

Here's an article by Stewart Brand. It's sort of rambling and poorly-written, in my opinion, jumping from urban density to slumdweller frugality to the economic and cultural superiority of urban life. Basically though I would summarize that it praises the ecological benignness of dense cities vs. less-densely populated areas, and this is the main argument I'm going to take on. It's a valid argument when comparing one city to another, or even when comparing one group of profligate US-style consumers to another. Manhattanites do indeed consume fewer resources per capita than people in a spread-out city like Juneau, Alaska. But in the end, Manhattanites, as all urbanites, live a much less sustainable lifestyle than do rural-dwellers in most of the world.

A big problem of Brand's article is that he conflates the relatively low (when compared with rich world levels) levels of resource consumption of slumdwellers, with the inherent benefits of constructing denser cities. Slumdwellers consume less not because they live closer together than rich world urbanites, but because they are desperately poor and do not have the money to consume more resources. Desperate poverty can hardly be advanced as a realistic recipe for lowering resource use. And I would argue that even given the poverty-derived frugality of slumdwellers, a slumdweller in a given country still consumes more resources than his rural compatriots. I can give the concrete example of my city in one of Colombia's poorest regions. We have our share of miserable hillside slums where people scrape by doing whatever they can to earn a living. They have little money, so they consume little, and hence they produce little waste. But even what little they consume is pure consumption--they aren't growing much food or fiber for themselves. And when our city's slumdwellers buy a bushel of potatoes or some onions, these come in plastic bags, and are shipped in from the surrounding countryside. The people of this countryside, on the other hand, neither consume nor throw away a plastic bag every time they eat potatoes or onions, they don't have their food trucked to them, they eat and use fewer processed, packaged items than their slumdwelling cousins, and they have less access to things like natural gas and water, which means they consume less of these utilities.

So I would insist that in a poor country, rural-dwellers are as frugal, recycling-focused, and resourceful as their urban counterparts, with the added ecological credentials that their organic wastes go back to the land, and they rely little on others to produce their food and their basic necessities. In fact, farmers in a poor country, and even in a wealthy one where farmers use a lot of industrial inputs, essentially subsidize the existence of urbanites with the food they produce. Hence any environmental damage seemingly caused by farmers should really be credited to urbanites as well, because the practices of farmers produce the food that we all rely on.

Rural dwellers have a productive, symbiotic relationship with the natural environment. They are nourished by the land, as they nourish the land. Their work can potentially leave a harmful ecological footprint, but this is not the norm; most farming, by necessity, produces more resources than it consumes, and returns to nature what it takes from it. In the long-term this means that farming doesn't irrevocably draw down the natural capital stored in the form of soil fertility, water, and sunlight. It can in fact add to this natural capital, building soil fertility or improving plant use of water. Even in countries like the US where farmers often deplete the natural resource base in the process of production, this environmental impact must be credited to all people, because it is the consumption of urban and rural alike that drives this depletion.

Urbanites, on the other hand, have an almost purely exploitative relationship with the natural environment. The urbanite's ecological footprint is a result of his consumption, and he returns little benefit to the natural environment. Urbanites can strive to reduce their consumption, but ultimately the urban lifestyle is a net drain on natural resources. City life is always subsidized by the produce of rural dwellers; urbanites consume the produce of the environment without putting anything back. Frankly, from an environmental standpoint, the only useful thing most of us city-dwellers produce in our life is our shit, and even this is often not channeled to a practical use as fertilizer.

Seen in this light, urbanites will almost always come out worse than rural dwellers in terms of ecological impact, because urbanites are responsible for their own consumption plus the ecological effects of the farming that feeds them, while rural dwellers mainly consume what they themselves have produced, and this production and consumption is tied to ecological cycles of regeneration. This is where the thinking of people like Stewart Brand falls way short when he implies that an empty countryside is a more ecologically healthy countryside. This assumes that humans can only consume, only degrade the land, which is patently false. In fact, in rural areas the world over, the more populated zones are more ecologically healthy, because people take better care of the land, and are more reliant on its health for their survival. It is often in the "emptied-out" rural areas where environmental abuses take place, because land is abundant, unproductive, and undervalued, and there are fewer watchdogs to report land misuse.

When he discusses the potential ecological impacts of humans, the author of the article clearly thinks only in terms of efficient "service delivery" and an ecological footprint driven by consumption, while ignoring the fundamental reliance of all humanity on agriculture, and the ecologically regenerative relationship of many rural people with the land. The author betrays this point when he lauds the urbanization-driven change from wood or dried dung for cooking, to diesel generators and grid electricity. This change implies a move from using natural materials with a neutral net carbon effect, to a reliance on fossil or nuclear fuels. Using cooking gas and electricity for one's energy needs certainly has its advantages in terms of health and convenience, but it is undeniably a step towards more, not less, environmental impact.

As for the fantasies Brand alludes to of producing most of cities' food in urban Xanadu farms, this is more flawed thinking. It displays the arrogant tech-religion of someone removed from an organic relationship with the land. It assumes that all those farmers taking up space in the countryside could really be producing food for all of mankind in much less space if only they knew better. Farmers just haven't figured things out that well yet, nevermind all those farming practices that have sustained humanity and nature for millennia. (Beyond this obvious scorn for rural farmers, there are many scientific impossibilities and oversights in the fantasies of urban vertical farms, but I will discuss these in more detail in another blog).

In addition to the article's flaws in reasoning, I find it to be arrogantly anti-countryside. It derides rural values and culture, and lauds the supposed cosmopolitanism that results from city-dwelling, as if the ghettos that blanket much of Chicago were bastions of sophistication and progress. I seriously doubt that life in the Altgeld Gardens housing project is more enlightened, civil, and chic than life in a typical village of the rural Midwest, or that the warzone-magnitude murder rates of Medellin's slums are a sign of higher civilization when compared to western Colombia's coffee-farming villages. In its orgasmic promotion of cities as places to which people gravitate naturally after a rational consideration of the unsophisticated, backwards country life, the article also fails to take into account the violence that has driven the growth of many cities. In the US, most of our cities swelled with people fleeing oppressive serfdom and terrorist violence in the South, while in Colombia much of the migration to the cities consists in people fleeing a vicious civil war. Yes, these people certainly calculated that living in the cities would be an improvement on their prior situation, but this could hardly be considered a freely-made decision, and it was not in response to the boring provinciality of country life, but rather in order to flee intolerable violence and oppression.

So basically I think this article is a poorly-thought argument coming from someone who naively, arrogantly regards urban living as the desirable norm. The only good takeaway is the article's implicit point that, from slumdwellers' ingenuity, we all could learn ways to have a smaller ecological footprint, even if we don't ourselves wish to be slumdwellers.

Three articles on Haiti

Here are some good articles on Haiti. The first one is about food aid's role in undercutting local farmers' production. This one deconstructs some of the magical thinking surrounding the idea of a Haitian rebirth through sweatshops. And this one talks about some of the politics and conflicts in the humanitarian aid racket.

Heads up on a new book

Here's a link from Raj Patel's excellent blog. It is a repost from another site, a review by Mark Winne of a new book on school lunches in the US. The book, Free for All, is by Janet Poppendieck. By the way, Mark Winne wrote a book called Closing the Food Gap, which I really liked. I look forward to reading Free for All when I can get to a US library.

Howard Zinn's prescription for the US

When I was in college (and perhaps inspired by its mention in the film "Good Will Hunting"), I bought or was given Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States". I started it numerous times, but other things always got in the way. It sat on my bookshelf for years, save for a few times I loaned it to friends who actually read it (and one who dropped it in a bathtub). I brought my water-damaged and taped-up copy of the book to Colombia with me sometime this year, where it resumed its role as shelf dressing.

But recently, spurred by the death of its author, I finally picked up the book again, determined to read through it this time. It's been a fascinating read, and has caused me to reconsider my attitudes on violence and on anti-system type movements. I still can't justify violence, but I see from the book that there have been many occasions in US history when violent resistance to injustice has been the only effective way that people have been able to gain certain rights. I'm thinking of occasions when local and even national authorities have sided with large companies or landholders, and common people have resorted to violence or outside-the-system tactics after exhausting their legal options (citing of laws and ordinances, appeals to the courts, etc.). Oftentimes this has been the only way that rights, even those rights already guaranteed in our laws, have been won for regular people.

If this is true, that our authorities often side with the wealthy and corporations, and that violence or at least nonviolent questioning of the government is often the only viable way to get the authorities to right wrongs, there arise a number of questions. Essentially the questions arise because the functioning of revolt and resistance is inherently opposed to the system of government in play, and in fact to any system of government. Often the cry of those seeking redress for injustice has been the cry of anarchy, that is to say the abolition of organized, centralized government. The claim is that even our ostensible democracy stifles the will and the rights of the people, so it must be taken down in order for everyone to be truly happy. The problem is that I don't see how a modern society can function without some organized government. An informal anarchy can be an effective way of life in small groups, but an autonomous, tribal lifestyle is not a realistic possibility for most people in the modern world. We live in densely-populated, agrairo-industrial societies in which large numbers of people interact with and depend on one another economically and politically. Even successful revolutionary movements set up centralized governments of their own. Of course the new government is often different from the old, but it is still a centralized form of rule, that almost necessarily places certain limits on freedom, favors a certain status quo, for the smooth functioning of the system.

When I refer to the questioning of the government as a bad thing, I don't mean the debate and criticism of current rulers and policies. This criticism and debate are our right and our duty as citizens and human beings. No, I'm talking about the questioning of the very foundations of our government, the entertaining of the idea that it is somehow permissible or desirable to want or try to tear down the system. Because in the end, I think it's good to have a Constitution. I like the idea of having a system of laws that everyone can refer to. It provides an evolving framework for defining what is or is not permissible, for voicing grievances, and for working to address those grievances. Of course it is possible for people to manipulate the laws, and often the wealthy and powerful have more resources and knowhow to use the law to their advantage, but I prefer having a framework to refer to and to build upon, as opposed to starting with a blank slate. Any new system would have its own inherent problems, might not possess the mechanisms we have now for the constant change and improvement of our society and its laws, and would obviously have 200 years less of insight and debate behind its provisions than does the present Constitution.

I don't know if this is a conservative stance or not. I just think it's operative. When, for instance, the new Teapartier masses work themselves into an anti-government froth, I think they're being shortsighted and stupid. Of course they claim that what they really want is a return to our roots, a newfound, elemental respect for the Constitution. But despite their fixation with the Constitution, these people are really questioning the legitimacy of this or any government. Even if their explicit arguments show a reverence for our founding documents, the logical conclusion of their attitudes and assertions is a sort of anarchy.

Here in Colombia, for instance, people have been messing with the laws or ignoring them or rising up against them for decades. From all sides of the political spectrum there come regular attacks on civilians, on common decency, on ethics, on the validity of the very legal underpinnings of Colombian life. The most coherent, fair way my wife and I have found of trying to make a society that's more tolerable for everyone is by trying to inculcate a respect for the Constitution drafted in 1991. Perhaps before this latest Constitution certain groups were justified in feeling that the system was illegitimate, and thus that their only recourse was to rise in insurrection. But the Constitution of 1991 was drafted in collaboration with many of these insurrectionist groups, to include them in the system, along with oppressed minorities and any and all political parties. Zinn might describe such a process as defusing revolutionary movements through a cynical inclusion in the oppressive system, but I don't know what other alternative there is for a country, short of constant, brutal civil conflict with no overarching rules.

On this note, yesterday my wife and I saw Gustavo Petro when he visited the university we work at. Petro is the presidential candidate for the Polo Democrático Alternativo, a party formed some years ago from the fusion of the Colombian Communist party and other more mainstream, progressive parties. Petro spent many years as a guerrilla insurgent, until a peace process in the 1980s that led to the incorporation of his insurgent group as a legal political party, and that eventually led to the 1991 Constitution. We like his party, and his proposals as a candidate are the most progressive, realistic, and sensible of all the presidential hopefuls. He acknowledges that there is an armed insurgency still going on in the country (a topic most other politicians avoid) and proposes doing something about it, and he proposes massive land redistribution and repurposing of unproductive cattle ranches (often owned by criminal bigwigs). However, it is odd to think of electing someone to lead a government that was formerly dedicated to the liquidation of that government. Of course in theory it's a different government ever since the new Constitution that Petro and his ilk helped to create. And in all fairness, Petro has paid any penance or debt he owed society for his guerrilla activity. He is a citizen in good standing. Still, it's an odd situation, his running for president, and he will surely be haunted by his past in these elections.

Anyway, he visited our university yesterday. Right now we're in the middle of Congressional elections, so Petro was legally forbidden from explicit campaign activities. He couldn't make a speech or anything, but he walked around the Quad, shaking hands, greeting students. I was stricken that this man, who has is the target of numerous active threats on his life, was walking around calmly, with only a few unarmed bodyguards strolling 10 feet behind him. In the States, I feel like even the most insignificant little candidate for anything goes around with a full security detail.

Okay, back to Zinn. I have to say that in the end, despite my admiration for Zinn's well-supported, integral treatment of the lives and movements of ordinary working people throughout US history, I have to ask myself what model of society is proposed by many of the movements he depicts. Because if the proposal is to tear down the current society and build a new one, there's a big possibility that the new society would be little better or more just than the old. Perhaps this is idle rumination, because most of the worker movements in US history didn't possess an explicit model for society, or didn't expect to gain power to implement their specific model. No, most worker movements seem to have been spontaneous, punctual, focused on making life a bit more dignified for people. Those with a strong anti-government rhetoric didn't seriously expect to overthrow the government and build anew. Even if they did, it's never been a realistic possibility.

And maybe there is my answer. It probably doesn't matter what model of society is proposed by most radical movements, because it will never be realized. In that case, the utility of radical movements in our society wouldn't be the overarching but impossible changes they propose, but simply the existence of alternatives to the current system. Can I subscribe to a program of ripping down US government to create a new system? Probably not. But are movements that do call for such a revolutionary ripping necessary? I think so. It seems that the status quo and revolutionary fervor can (should?) exist in a sort of yinyang counterplay, one thing necessary for the other. Indeed, without the status quo, revolutionary movements would have no reason to exist. And without revolutionary movements (be they violent, organized, anarchistic, or simply a laundress refusing to stand up on a Montgomery bus), the status quo would never change, never improve, never right its wrongs.

Okay, I feel that I've touched enough on that whole argument, for now at least. But there's another thing that bugs me, and it may be pretty related. I keep asking myself why the US government has adopted such cynical policies so many times. I mean, things like the Vietnam war, or the McCarthy-led witch hunt, or privatizing public services. Obviously I understand that big businesses have an inordinate amount of influence on those who govern, and I understand that sometimes elected officials adopt policies that may hurt the public, if they feel it will aid their political career. But why is this so prevalent? I mean, I feel like a lot of the country's problems might be solved if just a few honest legislators decided they weren't going to worry about what their corporate suitors wanted. Corporations don't vote anyway. If there were a critical mass of such legislators (maybe such a president, too, though in theory he's not the one responsible for making laws), they might do things like halving our military budget, dedicating massive amounts of money to international agrarian development, restoring high tax rates on the super rich (Zinn reports that during the Second World War, those earning over $400000 a year were taxed at 90%!). I think the general public would like such changes, and they'd support such legislators, even if big companies and the rich and the military bigwigs were pissed off. And the type of honest, straightforward legislator I'm imagining wouldn't worry too much even if he were to lose his seat due to corporate lobbying against him. He or she would know that there is life after Congress, and would just be happy to have done some useful things.

I know I'm rambling here, so I'll finish up soon. Basically reading Zinn has informed me about a lot of stupid, despicable things our government has done in the past, even beyond the stuff I already knew about. And it is often in the interests of so few as to seem silly and parochial, and certainly not that hard to change. To give an example, why support all the dirty wars and oppression in Central America just to protect the interests of a few US fruit companies? Those companies can't have been worth so much as to warrant the expenditure of human life and public economic resources, even if they were occasionally threatened by local governmental changes in one country or another. Again, corporations don't vote, so why all the kowtowing to their interests?

I'm not talking about changing US policies through some huge revolutionary, anti-system movement, but rather just saying simple things like, "Hey, you know how in the Constitution it says the president can't declare war without Congressional approval? Why don't we start respecting that again, as we did before Vietnam?" or "You know, there seem to be some violations of human rights going on in our US prisons. Why don't we fix that?" or "Speaking of prisons, why don't we have our government run those, instead of contracting them out to private, for-profit companies?" Nothing wild, nothing polemical, just common-sense stuff.

But maybe that's where my first discovery comes in. Maybe making common-sense suggestions with little bombast, little discourse, isn't what changes things. Maybe that's the role of extremist, revolutionary movements--not to achieve their wild-eyed, radical goals, but to push and pull enough to get the status quo to make the little changes that it is unwilling to pursue on its own.

Two good videos

I haven't written for a while. Sorry about that. In the meanwhile, I'm posting two good videos for you. The first is from Witness for Peace, about coca eradication in Colombia.

Shoveling Water from Witness For Peace on Vimeo.

The other video is a well-done Al Jazeera report on Haiti, from about a month ago. I feel it gives a good insight into the realities of post-earthquake Haiti. It talks to people you don't see in other news reports, and it presents Haitians as normal people, who are trying to deal with what life throws them, just like the rest of us. It's refreshing to be reminded that Haitians are protagonists in their own lives, and should be the chief players in the reconstruction process. It sounds obvious. It is obvious. But somehow in the context of the Haitian earthquake, between press conferences with Bill Clinton, military deployments, a swarm of NGOs, and big donor money flying around, we haven't seen much of Haitians themselves, thinking about their situation and proposing solutions. They certainly are doing so, but they are often overlooked.