Being green in Colombia

I would like to argue that if you're a middle-class person looking to live sustainably in the world, there's no better place than a mid-sized city in the Colombian high plains. Here's a few reasons why:

• No heating or AC. The temperature is about 65 degrees F year-round, so houses aren't even built with the capacity for climate control. No need for insulation, fans, energy audits, or anything like that, either.
• No clothes dryers. There's no need for them, either. Every house is built with an interior patio for line-drying clothes, which takes less than a day here in the high altitudes.
• Low electric bills. Since the fridge doesn't need to work that hard, there's no climate control, and all light bulbs are mini-fluorescents, you really don't consume much electricity when you live here. My current apartment is an exception because it's got an electric water heater, but once we make the switch to gas that cost will disappear for us.
• Fresh, varied fruits and vegetables year-round. Because we're in the tropics, most produce is in season all year. Since we're in a cool climate but only a few hours away from hot tropical zones, our weekly shopping can include strawberries, potatoes, plantains, lettuce, and passionfruit. It's all locally produced, so no qualms about food miles. There is of course Chilean produce available too, but who would want those plasticized apples and grapes? Much of what we eat is de facto organically produced as well, so that's nice. An exception are potatoes and certain other chemical-heavy crops, but that's no worse than in the States. Furthermore, we can easily get in contact with farmers to see what methods they're using and buy from the most responsible producers.
• Meat is great. Beef here is all local and mainly pasture-raised. When I go to my local butcher and ask for ground beef, he cuts a few slices off of a hunk of loin or flank, then grinds it in front of me. That means that instead of a burger made from hundreds of cows mixed together industrially, as I'd get at a US supermarket, my burger is coming from one cow, one cut of meat.
  
• If you need stuff for your house (baskets, furniture, etc.) it's easy to find a local artisan that produces it, or will custom-make it for you. This is of course from local, natural materials, which are abundant and responsibly regulated in Colombia. Even our swivel office chairs were assembled in a shop in our neighborhood, to my tall-man specifications!
• Clothing is similar. Most clothes you can buy are made right here in good old Colombia. This ensures a modicum of worker protection and fair pay, at least compared to if it were made in some far-flung place like Bangladesh. Chinese products are making an inroads here, but they are by no means dominant.
• Public transport is easy. Actually, in a megalopolis like Bogota, public transport trips can be long and hellish, though they do offer good coverage of all zones. But in our small city, you can walk almost everywhere, which keeps you in good shape. Intercity travel is no problem either. There are at least hourly buses from any town to any other town you might need to get to, and they're cheap.
• If you do plan on driving, you can be sure that your fuel is locally-produced. Colombia has huge oil reserves, so your driving isn't supporting any oppressive Wahhabi monarchy.
• Lots of tourism opportunities. Whether by bus or driving your own car, there are a million places to go in Colombia. Tropical beaches, ancient ruins, mountain lakes, colonial architecture, dense jungle, cosmopolitan cities, they're all just a few hours away by well-maintained, safe roads. So you and your family don't need to spend lots of money and spew out lots of carbon dioxide for jet travel to far-away destinations.
  
• No urban sprawl. Granted, Caro and I cringe at the sight of new construction going up in the cow pastures fringing our town. But most of this is mid-rise apartment complexes. Even the luxury subdevelopments of our town are in the form of rowhouses arranged around a central park. This would be a dream for US proponents of responsible suburban development, and would be considered high-density even in Chicago.

Okay, so it seems that you can live with a low environmental impact here in Colombia. But what about social issues? Isn't Colombia known for its inequality?

• This is sadly true. There is a huge gap between rich and poor here in Colombia. Even we in the middle class are always sort of hustling, on the verge of falling into poverty. But it seems that this is not much different from life in the States.
• That said, Colombia has universal health care and free university education available to all citizens. Of course the poor have until now stayed poor, but the society is making certain strides to integrate the poor into the prosperity of the nation as a whole. Even your electric, water, and gas bills are graduated depending on your income!
• Many of the cheap prices we enjoy here reflect the low earnings of those who make things, and the low buying power of those who buy them. I don't want to sugarcoat this, but I feel that it's good that at least prices here in Colombia correspond to general income. In Chicago, on the other hand, if you live in the ghetto and have low earning power, you still have to pay a price for everything that represents what wealthy superconsumers can pay, not what the poor can afford.
  
• This also means that work in Colombia has a measurable, recognized economic value. In the States I was brought up to feel that certain things aren't worth doing, namely things in which my physical labor is a major part of the value of the final product. Because we disdain and underpay real work in the States, it is hard to earn enough to live with dignity unless you're speculating, using machines, or otherwise artificially ramping up production (the latest form of "increasing worker productivity" is by outsourcing jobs, which is counted in the States as increasing production without increasing US workers). Here in Colombia the work I do with my hands represents a real value, and if I earn something from it, that something is enough to buy other things.
  
• This brings us back to the issue of Colombian wage differentials. Many middle-class people here do hire women to clean and maintain their houses, because they share the US attitude that manual work is not worthwhile or is beneath them. But unlike in the US, where the difference in wages between a professional and a cleaning woman is so great that the professional can hire out housework without batting an eye, here in Colombia the wage gap between the middle class and the "cleaning woman class" is not as great. The middle class people I know that hire others for housework are often spending beyond their means. The positive side of this is that my decision to clean my own house and cook my own food, which rests in part on a moral conviction that no one is too good to take care of his own home, also ends up saving my family an appreciable amount of money. That is to say that my housework, my manual labor, has a real, measurable value. On the other hand, if we did decide to hire someone to do our housework, we would know that what we paid that person is an amount sufficient to contribute to sustaining a household in a dignified manner.
• Poverty is certainly bad in Colombia. In fact, because life is so good for the more or less middle-class among us, and infrastructure is great everywhere, it's often easy for people to forget or be unaware of the poverty in our country. My state is less than two hours away from Colombia's capital, but it has the highest rate of child malnutrition in the country! We look around and see good roads and electric lines and assume that issues like malnutrition are behind us, but they're not. But once again, for my wife and me, this also means that there is important work to be done in terms of food and development, which we are happy to contribute to. And the concentration of resources and professionals in Bogota means that we professionals who live in the provinces have a lot to offer. Our work is valued, our ideas are listened to, and we can really make an impact in places where no one else has either cared enough or known how to put together good projects and effect change.

Okay, that's all I can think of for now regarding the environmentally and socially sustainable possibilities of life here in Colombia. If I think of more I'll add them. But it's probably best that you just come and set up house here yourself. You'll soon see what I'm talking about.

More thoughts on cocaine

Last night was the presidential debate here in Colombia, with 6 candidates vying for the hearts and minds of average Colombians. It seems that the more progressive candidates (Pardo for the Liberals, Petro for the Polo Democratico, and Mockus for the Greens) came out looking pretty good, while the until-now leading candidate, Juan Manuel Santos, was shown to be the murderous crypto-Nazi that he always has been.

Various candidates, Petro chief among them, referred to taking the 2 to 5 million hectares of land that has been confiscated from narcotraffickers, and redistributing it among people displaced by the war. I had and have a few questions about this: Are there really that many hectares that have been seized from narcotraffickers? Would this amount of land be sufficient to provide the estimated 2 to 4 million displaced people in Colombia with productive, viable farms? The idea of giving criminals' land to the people they have victimized is attractive, but I don't know if the numbers work out.

Also, by referring to the criminals whose land has been confiscated as "narcotraffickers", I fear that the candidates are missing an important component. The term "narcotrafficker" evokes individuals or criminal organizations driven by the profit motive, but there is no political overtone to the term. Some narcotrafficking is indeed undertaken by such mafias with little political orientation, and these mafias are indeed a source of violent urban crime that we would do well to suppress. But many people who are being investigated in the Colombian criminal justice system are in fact members of paramilitary groups, that is to say illegal, violent political organizations. Yes, they usually finance their activities with narcotrafficking, but much of the illegal armed seizure of land from hapless peasants isn't directly tied to narcotrafficking. These paramilitary groups massacre civilians and terrify them to get them to forfeit their land. This is sometimes done so the groups can plant coca on the illegally seized land, but as often as not this illegal seizure of land by paramilitary groups is done in order that local oligarchs may plant oil palm or other crops, or simply for the paramilitaries to gain strategic military control of an area. The massacres, the rural violence, the terror, the forced displacement of people that is perpetrated by armed paramilitary groups, these are the most pressing problems in Colombia right now, much more so than simple mafia violence. So when the government confiscates the land of these heinous people, I fear that calling them narcotraffickers gives the false impression that they are purely profit-motivated mafias, as opposed to organized politico-military groups with an explicit agenda (which often coincides with that of the Colombian right wing politicians). An inordinate focus on narcotrafficking depoliticizes the issue of rural violence in Colombia, which is inherently and above all political, and which is a far graver threat to the Colombian polity than is the street violence directly linked to narcotrafficking mafias.

In contrast, most left-wing insurgent groups in Colombia would not be qualified as narcotraffickers, but this doesn't mean that society shouldn't be or isn't just as concerned about them as it is about paramilitary groups. The left-wing guerrillas usually don't displace people from land or themselves plant illicit crops. These groups (the largest of which is the FARC) take part in other crimes like executions and kidnapping, and they profit from the drug trade, but they do not directly participate in narcotrafficking. No, their profit comes from taxing coca growers and drug traffickers that operate in the areas under their control. The DEA says as much in a report from 1994. So focusing on "narcotraffickers" as the main problem in Colombia confuses the issue here too, because it would seem to imply that left-wing insurgent groups, which are not narcotraffickers, are somehow less dangerous to Colombian society. This view overlooks the fact that Colombia's major political and security problems come not from narcotraffickers, but from illegal armed political groups, be they right-wing paramilitaries or left-wing insurgents. Often narcotrafficking provides these groups, directly or indirectly, with a major source of funds, but the narcotrafficking is just a means to enable the operation of violent extralegal armies, which are the real problem facing Colombia.

All this has me thinking once again about the drug trade in Colombia. Honestly, so many problems would just disappear if coca growing and cocaine processing were simply legalized or at least tacitly permitted in Colombia, as I discussed in my last post. That said, this article points out that a country that doesn't conform to the US priorities in the drug war will suffer sanctions, such as lost preferential status as a US trade partner. In this case it seems that the US felt that Bolivia was turning a blind eye to illegal cocaine production by allowing more acres of coca plantation than were necessary for the local demand for chewing-coca. This tacit allowance for illegal cocaine production by accepting on good faith that inordinately large areas of coca are destined for legal production, is essentially what I proposed in my last blog post. So it seems that even my sort of sneaky, passive formula for a de facto legalization of cocaine would draw the ire of US authorities.

In any case, I have two more ideas for measures that could benefit Colombia and its coca growers, but they really wouldn't work unless cocaine production were legal.

My main idea is for a greener production of cocaine. As you can see in this DEA report on coca growing and processing, the procedure for turning coca leaves into powder cocaine (what they call cocaine HCl) involves a lot of toxic chemicals. At least in the initial, farm-level steps of the process, many of these chemicals, such as kerosene, concrete, gasoline, ammonia, and hydrochloric acid, are dumped into nearby waterways after their use. This can be devastating for local ecosystems and sources of drinking water. The report indicates that in the final stages of processing, which require more expensive chemicals, these are often recycled. This is a good thing for people and nature--I'd like to see the practice of recycling toxic chemicals generalized throughout the entire cocaine industry.

This brings me to my second, related idea. What if there were Fair Trade cocaine? If you were to buy such cocaine in the US or Europe, you could be assured that it was produced by and bought directly from small family farmers, and that the methods used in its production were ecologically sustainable. Since cocaine is essentially a luxury product consumed by the wealthy, this label could really catch on--the growth of the Fair Trade industry indicates that the wealthy of the world are concerned about where their products come from and how they're produced, and I imagine that many wealthy cocaine users would be interested in this progressive idea.

But again, both to promote green practices in the cocaine industry, and to trace and label Fair Trade cocaine, the drug would need to be legalized, at least in both the producing and the consuming countries. Without such legalization, the production and commerce of cocaine are doomed to remain in the shadows, with no oversight or regulation.

Sort of legalizing cocaine

This is an article by Daniel Bruno Sanz proposing the legalization and taxation of hard drugs as a means of curing many social ills in the US. With drugs legalized, the price would fall, which would lower the appeal of the drug trade for the criminal elements that plague our society. This would make our cities better places to live, and reduce the unprecedented amount of prisoners in US jails. Lower drug prices would also weaken international bad guys that rely on the high profits of drug production and smuggling to support their nefarious activities. And all this while tax revenue from hard drugs would reduce government budget shortfalls and increase resources for drug rehabilitation programs. The ideas are nothing new, but the author articulates them well and more or less succinctly. Skip the long-winded financialese first part and start reading at the heading, "Where Will the Money Come From If All the Banks Are Insolvent?".

Understandably, Sanz writes from a US point of view. I have also been thinking about this issue, but from a Colombian perspective. Of course it would be great for many Colombians if the US were to legalize cocaine, because it would remove the violence from large swathes of the Colombian countryside. World cocaine prices would fall, so the armed groups that plague us here would no longer have a lucrative source of funds by taxing the drug trade, and this would weaken them and in turn return many areas to a peaceful normalcy. The drop in prices would also lower profitability for those farmers currently growing coca, but I think many of them would gladly plant other crops, or even continue producing cocaine but at a reduced price, in exchange for peace and security for their families. Likewise we could save vast areas of natural ecosystems by ending the eternal cat and mouse game whereby farmers plant coca, the government sprays it with herbicide after a few months, and farmers move on to cut down virgin forest and plant more coca.

The problem is that Colombia can't wait on policy changes in another country to solve the woes caused by the drug trade. The ideal would be for Colombia's government to simply say, "We're tired of a civil war created by foreign addictions that are not under our control. We will unilaterally legalize cocaine, and if that causes problems in other countries, then so be it." However, like many governments, Colombia's is inextricably linked to the United States. Such a drastic policy move by Colombia could easily result in economic and political sanctions from abroad.

But there might be a loophole. What if Colombia could effectively legalize production and commerce of cocaine, without making an explicit, radical stand? The Netherlands has a liberal drug policy without suffering repercussions from the UN or other countries, but Colombia is not in a position to openly implement such a policy. But the UN and most countries that I know of provide for a limited, regulated traffic and use of narcotics for medical purposes. For instance, cocaine is used as a local anesthetic in certain surgeries. The shipping of this legal cocaine from the Andean producer countries to the medical consumer countries presumably follows some standardized legal procedure.

I propose that Colombia declare all of its coca fields to be destined for medicinal use in other countries, or rather that the government not prosecute growers and sellers of coca and cocaine who claim to be supplying the legal global medical trade of the drug. Obviously the amount of cocaine produced in Colombia far exceeds the real medical demand in the world, but that doesn't have to be Colombia's concern. This way cocaine could be legally moved within Colombia and shipped from its ports as long as there were a certificate affirming the medical destination of the drug. The Colombian authorities would ingenuously accept any such certificate on good faith. International shipping companies and criminal organizations could dedicate themselves to fabricating falsified medical documents, which would allow them to move the cocaine out of Colombia and to consumer countries. The problems in a consumer country like the US would remain the same--high prices due to the smuggled, illicit nature of the drug, and all the violence, suffering, and addiction that go with high prices and illicit trafficking. But Colombia would have effectively shut itself of those problems, by transferring the criminal part of the supply chain to other countries.

Such a policy of seemingly naive acceptance of all Colombian cocaine production and commerce would allow the government to do a few wonderful things. It could tax cocaine like any other export product, hence bolstering government revenues. Granted, the illegal armed groups operating in the Colombian countryside could continue smuggling cocaine without paying taxes, and indeed if the amounts produced and marketed from Colombia remained the same, cocaine's illegality in other countries would maintain a high price and hence an incentive for armed groups to keep producing and profiting from it. But a legalization of the drug would allow the government to permit and in fact encourage widespread production even in areas of Colombia under government control (as opposed to now, when cocaine is mainly produced in areas controlled by illegal armed actors). Such a widespread, legal production would effectively flood the world market with the drug, hence lowering prices despite its illegality elsewhere. Lowered prices would mean less revenue for the armed groups that currently finance themselves with cocaine, and hence the Colombian government would be able to advance in its fight against illegal insurgency. Legalizing cocaine might eventually lower crime in Colombia as well as lowering armed insurgency, because the mafias that participate in drug smuggling would no longer have a coveted prize to fight over. Hence Colombia's major problems of armed insurgency and mafia violence could be in large part resolved by my recommended policy of de facto, turn-a-blind-eye cocaine legalization. In the event of other countries' complaining or withholding aid or trade from Colombia, the government could insist with an honest heart that all cocaine production in Colombia is slated for legal medical use.

Another idea of mine related to this is more small-scale. It would consist in creating a recreational drug farm here in Colombia. Even without the government's declaring all cocaine legal, Colombian law permits the carrying of a personal dose of marijuana and cocaine. I think you're allowed something like a gram of cocaine and five grams of marijuana. Under such a law, possession and consumption of small amounts of narcotics are legal. So I could start a farm for visitors, but in addition to the typical agrotourism routine of milking goats and preparing food from garden-fresh ingredients, guests could pick coca or marijuana leaves for chewing or smoking. We would have small plantations of cannabis, coca, and perhaps opium poppies. There could even be a workshop where guests distill a bunch of coca leaves into a personal dose of cocaine, using the disagreeable mix of acetone, gasoline, and hydrochloric acid typical of the process. Following the procedure that peasants of remote regions employ to produce cocaine would be a learning experience for guests, and perhaps even a deterrent to future drug use!

Great article on Ronald McDonald

If you haven't yet heard, some progressive groups are calling for the retirement of Ronald McDonald as an advertising figure. Here's a link on the subject from Raj Patel's always-great blog. And another link to participate in the campaign to retire old Ronald. This is my biggest act of anti-McDonald's insubordination since 1990, when my buddy smacked Ronald McDonald on the butt at a Halloween kids' festival at Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo!

A Modest April Fool's

For those of you who didn't notice the date for my last posting, "Rumen-Nations", I want to make clear that the idea is a joke. My blog is dedicated to social solutions to agrarian problems, and "Rumen-Nations" is an extreme satire of those who would propose an amoral, quick technological fix to the inherently moral, social problem of hunger.

Rumen-Nations

From the very dawn of civilized life, hunger has haunted humankind. The transition from hunting and gathering to settled farming implied heightened vulnerability to famine, from both natural and human-made causes. Over the millennia, advances in agriculture have permitted higher levels of production, but the hungry have remained with us. The Green Revolution, which started in the wealthy countries at the beginning of the 20^th century and arrived in the developing world in the 1960s, was the latest agricultural advance to increase world food supply, but today there are more hungry people in the world than at any time in our history.

The Golden Rice project was a new stepping stone, with a different approach to helping the hungry poor. Seeing that higher food production does not necessarily alleviate hunger, a Swiss-German team of scientists created a variety of genetically-engineered rice that bore the gene to produce vitamin A. This meant that even people who, due to extreme poverty, had to eat a meager and unvaried diet of rice would be able to obtain sufficient amounts of vitamin A from their food, hence resolving a major nutrient deficiency without any radical upheavals in society. Since then, other scientists have worked in the same line of “biofortification”, enriching staple crops, naturally lacking in vitamins or protein, with new genes that will permit them to provide a more complete food source for people. We are at the verge of a great breakthrough: poor people in Africa or Asia may soon be able to eat nothing but rice, or millet, or corn, and nevertheless achieve a balanced nutritional intake.

The only problem is quantity. Even if the Indonesian family that eats little other than rice can now obtain a full suite of vitamins, minerals, and proteins from their staple food, if they cannot produce or buy a certain minimum quantity of rice every day, they will be malnourished, consuming an insufficient amount of daily calories.

This is where my colleagues and I at the Ruman Institute took up the problem. While the Green Revolution increased production of food, and the new Gene Revolution will gradually improve nutritional quality of many foodstuffs, the fact remains that the poorest of the poor simply cannot access sufficient food, no matter how abundant and nutritionally-balanced that food is. What are we to do for these people?

Our proposal provides a novel and pluridisciplinary answer. We take inspiration from the Gene Revolution and the Transhumanist movement, as well as the latest advances in the field of cellulosic biofuels. Our goal: to equip needy human beings with rumens. A rumen is the multi-chambered stomach common to the class of animals known as ruminants: cows, goats, sheep. It is what allows these animals to digest and thus benefit nutritionally from such things as grass, straw, and even paper and sawdust. Ruminants can convert into useful calories the cellulose and fiber which would pass rapidly and uselessly through the digestive tract of most animals. From time immemorial, humankind has harnessed these ruminant animals to convert grass and kitchen scraps, which we can't eat, into meat and milk, which we can. But for every 10 calories of grass eaten by a ruminant animal, only 1 calorie reaches us in the form of meat. By cutting the animal “middleman” out of the process and allowing humans to directly eat grass and other cellulose-rich foods, we are realizing an exponential gain in efficiency. Most importantly, we are helping those poor who have long been denied access to the world's food, by opening up an entire planet's worth of nutritious grass and even paper waste for their nutritional benefit!

The process of integrating rumens in human beings must of course be a gradual one. Our science is simply not yet up to the challenge of merging organs from lifeforms so divergent as humans and ruminants. So we have designed a three-part research and development program to achieve the eventual goal of inserting genes in people that will allow them to form a cellulose-digesting rumen as part of their normal anatomy.

• Step 1: No-waste nutrition education

• Step 2: Rumen transplants

• Step 3: Definitive integration of the rumen-forming genetic code into human beings

What follows is a brief explanation of each step.

Step 1: No-waste nutrition education

In the United States and in the world, almost as much food is wasted as is consumed. Food is lost to rot, to insect attacks in storage, to expiration dates in supermarkets, and with the final consumer when he or she throws away part of a meal. This is ridiculous when we consider the number of people who go without food. The logical conclusion is to join both ends of the problem to create a solution. If the hungry poor can take advantage of thrown-away food, we can make a serious dent in world hunger. This involves two major components. First off, the poor have to be reeducated to get over an indoctrinated aversion to food waste. With the exception of food damaged by mold or bacteria, most thrown-away food is perfectly edible and nutritious. The second component is to engineer efficient channels such that disposed-of food reaches needy people. In many developed countries there already exist channels for day-old bread, soon-to-expire grocery produce, etc. to reach soup kitchens. It would be very easy to integrate the organic waste stream into such channels. In the developing world, where there is the most need, these channels are unfortunately not as developed. In addition, most hungry people in the developing world live in the countryside, where it is hard to reach them. Despite these obstacles, we are already seeing promising results in our programs to channel waste disposal from large Third World cities so that thrown-away food reaches the neediest areas.

Step 2: Rumen transplants

Obviously step 1 is a stopgap measure, to be carried out as we advance on the ultimate project: integrating rumen-based digestive systems into the human body. Step 2 is the first major step toward the final goal. We are currently at work designing the logistical and medical procedures for implanting a rumen into the human digestive tract. We have two work models. One is based on actual llama rumens. Llamas are the all-stars of ruminants, because their three-chamber rumens can digest rough scrub and the nutrient-poor plants found in the arid high plains of their native Andean habitat. They are even more efficient cellulose-processors than goats or cattle. However, because llamas are so different anatomically from humans, it is a great medical engineering challenge to perform direct implants. The second line we work on involves an artificial, silicone-based rumen, modeled after the llama rumen but with some important modifications. The engineering issues associated with this synthetic rumen are less daunting, but we have not been able to attain the throughput efficiency of the natural llama rumen. Nevertheless, work continues on both fronts, and we hope to be ready for our first functional transplant in early 2013. We are currently in talks with the government of United Arab Emirates to line up potential recipients for our first transplants.

Step 3: Genetic engineering of “Rumans”, human beings with naturally-formed rumens

This is our final goal, and is understandably some years in the future. Step 2 involves a relatively expensive surgery to endow disadvantaged human beings with a functioning rumen. It raises a financial question: perhaps the money spent on a transplant would be better spent on direct economic help for the individuals chosen to benefit from the procedure? Obviously scaling up the effort to provide implanted rumens to all chronically hungry people on the planet would be a very costly undertaking. That's why the eventual goal is to insert genetic code into needy people such that they, and more importantly their future children, can form their own rumen naturally and free of charge. Though it sounds easy enough, it is actually a formidable undertaking. Most genetic engineering until now has affected one or two genes that produce a given protein in the body. What we are proposing is to enable the production of an entire organ, which involves inserting hundreds of genes. On top of this, the discrepancy in the genetic codes of humans vs. llamas is immense; we must overcome all manner of natural hurdles to the process.

When we started our work at the Ruman Institute, many thought that our aspirations belonged to the realm of science fiction as opposed to real science. With our diligent work and rational, gradual program, we are proving the critics wrong. Some may feel that the costs for such a project are unreasonably high, or that there could be more effective social as opposed to technological fixes for world hunger. But when technology gives us the possibility of ending hunger without disturbing the social order, what cost is too high? What solution can be better than cutting-edge technology?