Salt!

Here's an NYT article on processed food companies' efforts to resist lowering the heart-endangering amounts of salt in their products. I hope I don't piss off my processed food-industry cousin, who is quoted in the article, but it seems to me that if a company is marketing a product that tastes like wet dog hair, straw, or cardboard unless they pack it with dangerous amounts of salt, then their business model is deeply flawed.

A little bit on drug transshipment

Here's a pretty good article analyzing drug transshipment routes from South America. Crackdowns on drug violence in Peru in the 1980s moved the problem to Colombia, crackdowns in Colombia moved the trade to Mexico, and now the Caribbean is taking part in all the fun. It seems that the illicit drug trade is much easier to move around than it is to stop.

Election results

Yesterday was the presidential election here in Colombia. No one one a majority of the votes, so it will now go to a run-off vote June 20 between the two top vote-getters, Juan Manuel Santos and Antanas Mockus. Basically the incessant polls that came out every week or so before the elections made it seem like Mockus would get at least 35% of the popular vote, with Santos getting the same. But in the end Santos got like 46% to Mockus's 20-something percent. I don't know what went wrong with the pre-election polls, but my wife suggests that Colombia's rural machine politics likely had a lot to do with Santos's success. His Union party has a large amount of Senators and Representatives in the Congress, and a sizeable presence in local politics, so it's likely that the run-of-the-mill voter in much of Colombia was strongly encouraged by his local politicos to vote for Santos.

Anyway, Santos hasn't won the presidency yet, but in all likelihood he will, because the people that voted for the other two crypto-Nazi candidates will probably vote for him in the run-off election, which would give him more than 50% of the popular vote. Granted, there was only a 47% voter turnout in the whole country, so in this first round it seems that only 20% or so of the Colombian populace of voting age thought Santos was the best candidate, and I'm sure that at least half of these voters didn't put much thought into their vote, simply going with the candidate their local representatives suggested. But such is Colombia's democracy that a lukewarm support from less than a fifth of the populace is enough to give a guy control of the presidency.

This is really a shame, because Santos is a horrible candidate and a horrible person. Santos is the scion of one of Colombia's most wealthy and politically powerful families. He looks like an inbred, beady-eyed factory-farm pig that has had extensive facial surgery. Santos is the designated heir to Alvaro Uribe, Colombia's current crypto-fascist president, and even at Santos's almost-victory celebration last night, people were chanting Uribe's name. This makes sense, because Santos doesn't really have a platform other than his association with Uribe. In fact, I'm not aware of Santos's ever having done or said anything original or intelligent in his life. The only area in which he has shown real initiative and innovation is in human rights violations. He was the Minister of Defense during a period that saw Colombian army units kidnapping and killing civilians, in order to dress the corpses up as guerrilla fighters and claim promotions and prizes for the good "kill statistics" of the unit. Where Uribe combines a nominally cosmopolitan, urbane sense of governance with a brutal, monstrous tendency towards state and paramilitary terror, Santos is mainly versed only in the violent terror angle. As for his agrarian proposals, he recently claimed in an interview that every Colombian peasant should become Juan Valdez (the guy on the Colombian coffee logo). I don't know what the hell this means.

As a temporary resident and non-citizen, I am not legally allowed to participate in Colombia's politics. This is a real shame, because if I could I would go around trying to educate voters and convince them that it's not in their best interests to vote for murderous, wealthy oligarchs. What I can do is foment critical thought in the people I come across in my daily life and especially my work in rural areas. I believe that if people are thinking in a progressive, pro-people, pro-agrarian manner, they will never vote for such a horrid, mediocre criminal as Santos.

Quirky photo essays

And here are two quirky photo essays, one about Mexican immigrants in New York City, and one about Afghanistan in the mid-20th century.

Articles on developing country meat consumption

Here are three articles in the same series as the piece on Chinese pork production that I posted a few days ago. They focus on India, Brazil, and Ethiopia, three developing countries where food and meat consumption patterns are changing.

China on my mind

I've been thinking a lot about China recently. The impressions I get of China from news media and other sources are often shaded by a barely-hidden hostility towards an aspiring hegemon. This is especially acute in media from the US, which I feel often manifests a fear and uncertainty towards a country that might dethrone us as the world's major power (or at least share our heretofore-undisputed throne). In any case, I'm never sure how much of what I hear or read about China is based on fact, and how much is heavily biased. Since I've never been anywhere near China, nor have I known many Chinese people, it's been impossible to get first-hand impressions of the country. And because its language is so different from any other I know, there's no way to access most media coming directly out of China, that I might compare and contrast different sources. To this end, I've been fooling around recently with the BBC's online Chinese courses. Little by little I'm learning a few characters, and some phrases and general grammar. I've always loved learning languages, and Chinese is certainly a formidable challenge and a useful language to learn, if I actually have the fortitude to stick with it.

Anyway, a big part of my interest in China relates to its rapid economic development in the past decades. I'd love to know more about how the process happened, what policies the government has or hasn't implemented to favor development, and especially what's going on on the agrarian front. The article on pigs in China that I linked to yesterday has particularly sparked my interest, because it refers to a number of changing agrarian policies that the Chinese state has implemented over the years (rationing of meat in the 60s, present-day subsidies to industrial pork producers, increasing promotion of dairy and beef, etc.). Particularly fascinating is that the government tries to maximize pork production and minimize price, because the labor that fuels China's industry consumes a lot of pork, and if this prized meat were to decrease in availability, there would be grave social unrest.

Basically it's interesting to me that on the one hand China is a big, powerful country that implements policies to favor or discourage certain agricultural and social trends. This is much like the US or European countries that try to improve life through directed domestic policies. But on the other hand, China seems to have lax regulation of environment and labor standards, and rampant corruption, like many Third World countries. So my impression is that China is an odd mix of wealthy country and developing country.

Another Third World-ish aspect of China is that I don't get much sense of a national project, a code, an ethics. Countries like the US or France implement policies and make political decisions, both domestically and internationally, based on certain values, certain perceptions of who they are as a country and what they stand for. But in most modern descriptions of China's domestic and international policies, there seems to be no guiding principle to Chinese government. On the international stage, China makes deals with horrid regimes like Sudan or Zimbabwe, while investing or even exploiting other poor countries with no pretext of altruistic or humanistic principle. It's pure self-interest, with no moral concerns. Some may assert that this is little different from the US, but when we interact with or even exploit other countries, it usually comes with a noble-sounding justification, like extending prosperity or democracy. China offers no justification for its international actions, other than its own interests (access to resources, markets, etc.). Once again I posit that this may very well be due to a lack of in-depth, unbiased coverage of China in world media. Maybe when China makes oil-for-arms deals with Sudan, Chinese leaders are explaining and justifying this decision, but it merely isn't reported. Likewise on the domestic front, China's policies, from agriculture to industry to environment, seem to come with no justification proffered. Granted, these policies may raise living standards or clean up a river, but at least outside of China we are not offered a narrative of why and how certain decisions are made as opposed to other possibilities.

All this said, it is clear that many of China's domestic policies have had beneficial effects on the general populace. In the past decades, China has reduced hunger, improved incomes, modernized transport, improved education, stabilized population growth, etc. Granted, many Chinese policies have had bad secondary effects (abandonment of female babies, environmental destruction, a growing gap between rich and poor), as do policies in any country, but in many areas China has improved quality of life for its people. But I have never seen an explicit justification, a philosophy or ideological underpinning, to the policies enacted in China.

The opposite seems to have been the case in the days of Mao. There was lots of discourse, lots of dogma, but often little improvement in life for the people. It seems that we no longer hear much about the Communist ideals or any ideals motivating the Chinese state and society. I have read that since the 80s the government has made the conscious decision of cutting down on Communist rhetoric and winning the loyalty and acquiescence of the people through increasing prosperity. I think this is a fair decision, to prioritize wellbeing of the people as oppose to dogmatic ideological rhetoric. But it also means that Chinese justification for its actions has become increasingly nationalistic as opposed to ideological, which is to say that there are no moral underpinnings to its national project other than promoting China and the Chinese, whatever that means.

I suppose an effective though quiet administration is preferable to bombastic illusions and dogma. China is one of the few countries in the post-Cold War world that can quietly dedicate itself to social policies. Poor countries in today's world are often beholden to wealthy countries that give them development aid and provide market opportunities. So if a country like El Salvador were to try to implement some inward-looking social policies like agricultural subsidies or tariff protection of local industry, they would get walloped by the rest of the world's withdrawing of aid and trade, and generally scolding them. Rich countries, on the other hand, are often wholeheartedly dedicated to an unregulated market and small government, the neoliberal paradigm, and so social programs are shouted down or lobbied to death, in this case from within the country (think of how hard it's been to get a relatively modest healthcare reform bill into law in the US).

But China is so big and powerful that it can do whatever it wants. A case in point is its control of its currency, the yuan. For years we in the US have been crying and scolding and blustering about how China unfairly keeps the yuan cheap so as to encourage Chinese industry and exports. If it were El Salvador maintaining its currency at a rate we didn't like, we could sanction them or stage a coup or any number of things. But no one can really make China do anything it doesn't want to do.

So China is in a really great position. It is developing rapidly, it is no longer handcuffed to a single rigid political doctrine, but neither is it beholden to other countries that are able to meddle in its internal affairs. As I've said, it seems that China has put its position to good use, putting many positive social policies into play. Ironically, things like controlling one's national currency, favoring national agriculture and industry, implementing a social safety net, were until very recently considered the purview of the government of any normal, reasonably self-sufficient country. During the Cold War, countries from the USSR to the USA to European countries on both sides of the Iron Curtain implemented policies to improve life for their people. Things like subsidized housing loans, guaranteed agricultural prices, and an active monetary policy were not at all considered radical. But as I've pointed out above, it seems that in today's world most governments are unable or unwilling to legislate in favor of their people. The few governments that do want to implement moderate social policies (and that are not blessed with China's size and clout) have to bellow out radical-sounding rhetoric (think Hugo Chavez making an ass of himself on an almost daily basis) and separate themselves from a good chunk of the world, just in order to do things like controlling oil drilling contracts in their national territory, or providing school lunches.

What I worry about is that if China doesn't have at least some semblance of a set of national values to guide and justify policy-making, then it will be hard for the country to continue doing what good things it has been doing. If providing cheap pork to the Chinese populace is merely a political calculation by bureaucrats trying to avoid social unrest, then people's improved wellbeing is not assured. For one, the policy of cheap pork for Chinese workers is already leading to increases in cardiovascular disease, obesity, and pollution in China. But furthermore, if the only goal of current social policies is to pacify and control the people, then the improved wellbeing these policies bring about can be set back if ever policymakers discover an alternative way of pacifying and controlling the people. Another problem that has been happening since China's foray into capitalism in the 90s, and will continue if not actively denounced and resisted by the Chinese, is that elites, corporations, and economic oligarchs can hijack the country's development to favor pro-business, anti-poor policies. Since there's no longer a firm doctrine like Maoist Communism in place, the Chinese state has been all too happy to favor the big businesses that catch its ear most effectively.

Only if there is an explicit commitment by the government and by Chinese society in general to improve wellbeing of all people, can China be assured that it will continue on the right path. Such a commitment to social progress and wellbeing could for instance respond to the problems arising from increasing pork consumption in China by changing what foods are subsidized, hence guiding people back to less reliance on meat and more consumption of traditional vegetables and whole grains. The alternative is to continue grinding forward on a course of development without principle or priority, increasing pork production, favoring electronics factories, welcoming Kentucky Fried Chicken into the country, without considering what is really best for the people.

Balú or Chachafruto

I wanted to introduce my readers to a wonderful bean called balú or chachafruto (Erythrina edulis). You can read about it here. It's a huge bean, like the size of an egg, that grows in a huge pod. You can eat chachafruto beans raw with salt (they're cruncy and have a green bean-like flavor), you can cook them like regular beans, and you can even make a sweet cake from them. I guess they're in season now, because a few weeks ago they had them at the local mini-mart. I made a puree with a bit of butter and salt. It looked and tasted a lot like mashed potatoes, but with much more protein. I'm attaching photos from the experience, with my hand in some of the photos to give a sense of scale.



Also note the passionfruit in the photo, which happened to me exceptionally huge that day as well.

Here's what chachafruto looks like in the pod:



And here are the shelled beans before cooking, peeling, and mashing.




Okay, I just wanted to share this fun and exotic bean.

Grameen bank in Colombia

One last note before I tuck in for the night. Yesterday Grameen-Aval bank opened in Colombia. It's a joint operation between a Colombian finance group and the Grameen Trust, the microcredit system founded in Bangladesh by Muhammad Yunus. I'm excited that such a thing is coming to our country, especially since Colombia often wants so much to believe that it's a prosperous, bourgeois country that it neglects its poor. Here's a press item from some law firm describing the joint venture.

Chinese pigs

Here's an interesting article I ran across that discusses the increasing production, consumption, and industrialization of meat in China. For the more adventurous, here's the FAO's report on global impacts of meat production. I've been meaning to read this one for years, but haven't gotten around to it. Do yourself a favor though, whether or not you read these reports--eat less meat. I'd say a good goal is eating like a quarter pound (that's 4 ounces) of meat every other day. That would put your annual meat consumption around 50 pounds a year, less than a quarter of the US average of 220 pounds a year. Also, if you want to see an interesting proposal my friend put together about creating a Chicago red meat tax to lower consumption, write me and I'll send it to you via email.

Articles on war

In light of frequent smallscale violent demonstrations here in Colombia (students throwing rocks and homemade bombs at the police and things like that), I've been trying with my wife to decipher why violence is accepted as a mode of expression here in Colombia but not in the US. At least in my idealized vision of the US, we respect the police and other government actors because we recognize them as the instruments of a society of which we are a part. Of course we are vigilant about police brutality, we write down badge numbers of officers we think are acting inappropriately, we stage protests against government policies we view as unjust. But all of this is usually done in a nonviolent fashion, and our natural instinct is to consider invalid the use of violence. None of this is the case in Colombia, where state actors and the state itself are often viewed with hostility.

So anyway, I've been pondering this lately, and I happened to run across R. Brian Ferguson, an anthropologist who works a lot on war. You can hear an interesting interview with him here, in which among other things he discusses the history of the New York police. He talks about how until the early 20th century the police were basically hired strikebreakers, and then an organized crime racket. More importantly for me, and recalling Howard Zinn's depictions of US history, Ferguson points out that until the creation of police departments across the US and their widespread deployment to beat the hell out of mobs and protesters, the violent riot was a common tool of political expression in the US. Weekly or monthly riots were the norm in most 19th-century US cities. Even our Revolution basically started as a bunch of mob actions. If this is all true, then what I perceive as US citizens' reticence towards violent uprising is not an inherent cultural trait but rather one that was developed in the past century or so, through the effective use of nonlethal police repression, and the gradual inclusion of working people in the common project of US society. The lack of these measures would explain the violent civic habits of Colombians, and suggest methods to change these habits (though hopefully without repressing civic engagement).

Here are two more articles on war by Ferguson. One discusses his findings from a lifetime of studying war, and the other talks about war in ancient human history. Hope you enjoy them as much as I have.

Modern pig farming

Here is an article from Harper's magazine. It describes the modern US pork production chain. I think it's a pretty fair treatment, describing modern pork production on its own terms, while not endorsing the agro-industrial status quo.

Bogota and CIVETS

This past weekend we were in Bogota on some errands. I like Bogota less and less. Granted, it's got great museums, great restaurants, availability of lots of consumer goods. Sometimes when we go to Bogota we really enjoy it, because we can eat foods that we can't get in our town, or we can see movies that don't make it to our local multiplex. The movies in our town tend toward stupid action, bad comedy, horror, and kid's cartoons, all of which are usually dubbed into Spanish as opposed to subtitles as in the rest of the country. It seems that the managers of our branch don't have a very high opinion of our townspeople's tastes or reading ability.

But this past weekend, as on other recent visits, I was overwhelmed and depressed by many things about Bogota. It's crowded, polluted, noisy, inconvenient to get around. Streets are clogged, public transport is crammed to the brim, and everything is more expensive than in other Colombian cities. I literally got dizzy from walking around in the polluted air of Bogota, something that hasn't happened to me since I first arrived in Colombia over a year ago. Above all, I marvel at and am disgusted by the fact that so many people have chosen to live in Bogota, 8 million to be exact. People crowd into Bogota to do the same things they could have done elsewhere, but now in a much more unpleasant environment, where the cost of living is higher and earnings aren't much higher than in the provinces. Worst of all is the fact that Bogota sucks resources from the rest of the country, because it's the capital and the largest city. So basically Bogota deprives other regions of government funds, infrastructure, and business investment, but for all the resources pumped into Bogota it's still basically ugly, polluted, and unpleasant to live in. And the people who live there are so frantic and harried trying to get through each day that they don't have a moment to stop and consider that life might be better elsewhere.

Despite all of this, I have always noted and appreciated the flourishing of diverse small businesses in Bogota. This past weekend I was walking through a somewhat dilapidated-looking neighborhood that was surprisingly home to various upscale small businesses. There were stretches of styrofoam art design places (they do things like make painted 3D cutouts of Mickey Mouse or Tinkerbell for kids' parties), high-end kitchen decorators, and arts-and-crafts supply stores. All of these businesses are founded on producing or selling real, tangible goods. Even though the cited examples are sort of luxury items whose demand might ebb and flow, they meet real needs for consumers, and production and sales are visibly linked. Growing up in the US, I never got much of a sense of this. I don't know if it's because many of our needs are supplied by large, faceless businesses, or because so much of the real production of US-destined goods occurs outside of the US, but I always felt like our consumer economy was at least one step removed from real life, real needs. Maybe it's because most of our basic needs are already met, so a large share of jobs are simply services that maintain life without producing anything new (teaching, nursing, firefighters). And perhaps this is why new businesses in the States are often predicated on inventing some obscure little gadget that really isn't that necessary. For instance, a friend of mine in Chicago once remarked admiringly about a little plastic clip sold via infomercials that pinches women's bra straps together in the back so their breasts are better supported. He marveled that whoever thought of that idea must have made a lot of money. That might be so, but essentially we're talking about an invention to "improve" the performance of an apparel item that to begin with is totally unnecessary in the majority of cases. Not exactly an inspiring addition to the economy.

I don't know if this tangible, productive nature of the economy, which I detect in Bogota and not in the US, is due to Colombia's being a developing country that still has a lot of unmet basic needs. I think that's part of it, but I also think that what gives me a good impression of Colombia's economy is that it's not as dominated by big corporations. Most of my wife's and my shopping is in small, owner-operated stores, and in the rare occasions we have to deal with big corporations, we notice the difference. When you have a problem in a corporate chain store, there's no one to talk to about it except an unqualified teenage kid that can't change anything anyway. In a small store, if you need something special done or changed, you can go straight to the owner. This aspect of Colombia's economy may be due in part to its being a developing country, but I also noted the same prevalence of smaller, owner-operated businesses when I lived in Europe.

This brings me to another point. In a recent speech, the CEO of HSBC bank coined a new term, the CIVETS. These are the countries that he thinks will drive the world economy in the new decade--Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey, and South Africa. This is in contrast to the drivers of last decade's growth, the BRICs--Brazil, Russia, India, and China. The BRICs are the biggest developing countries, with huge potential for growth based on production and processing of raw materials. According to the CEO of HSBC, the CIVETS are more like middle-sized countries, with the common features of a young populations, a growing middle class, political stability, and a diversified economy. I'd also venture that the CIVETS countries produce in large part for local and national markets, as opposed to export markets. I'm not sure I'd describe any of those countries as politically stable except for Vietnam, but that's what this CEO says.

While I'm honored that Colombia was classified as a CIVETS country, I wonder what that forebodes for us. Granted, I think that much of the business world's coining of new terms and inventing new trends (think Asian Tigers) is perhaps more hype than anything else. And this article from our daily business newspaper lists Colombia as the 45th most competitive country out of 58 graded by the IMD business school in Switzerland. Not exactly high on the list. But investment hype is often self-fulfilling, so I am a little bit worried that multinational corporations will try to implant themselves more and more in Colombia, as this editorial suggests they should.

The problem is that much of Colombia's economic dynamism is thanks to its diversified, production-heavy economy of small businesses. This would be altered if more multinationals came here. In the past Colombia has been dependent on export markets, and there are still many voices in the country that want to promote that model of growth. But I believe that much of our recent growth and the best potential for future growth lies in local businesses' supplying our own local markets. We are a country with a large middle class that has a growing appetite for consumer goods. Bogota is a market of 8 million consumers, while Medellin, Cali, Barranquilla, and Cartagena add another 8 million or so. I believe that the most sensible economic model is for Colombian businesses to provide goods for those consumers, as opposed to exporting to far-flung countries or importing to sell foreign stuff to Colombians.

If multinational corporations come to dominate more of our economy, we will lose our dynamism, and increasingly resemble the uglier aspects of the US economy--domination by large companies, loss of production and manufacturing, increasing dependence on global markets to absorb our production and provide for our consumption, endless subcontracting, and business models based on superfluous products and services of doubtful utility.

So let's hope that our designation as a CIVETS country doesn't lead to the destruction of the very bases of our economic success.

Video about biodiversity

This is a video I got from the Farming First website. I haven't quite decided yet what I think of Farming First. It calls itself a coalition of multi-stakeholder organizations concerned with "improving farming and farmers' livelihoods". This goal is fair enough, and its blog often has interesting news pertaining to farming. Its members include various farmers' organizations, but there is also a heavy presence of agribusiness corporations. Actually none of the Farming First members are private corporations, but rather the international lobbying groups and not-for-profits that they create, with names like International Plant Nutrition Institute, whose website states that they are "funded by member companies that are dedicated to the efficient and responsible use of fertilizers in plant nutrition". I am not inherently opposed to private companies' operating in the agricultural sphere, but I don't like it when these private companies create supposedly neutral, objective campaigns or organizations that are really fronts to advance their industrial ag agenda.

Anyway, the video I'm posting today comes from the International Seed Federation, via the Farming First blog. It is beautiful and slickly-done, and rightly points out that all life depends on biodiversity. What isn't so cool are the silly, vacuous claims explicitly and implicitly linking the crop seed industry to conservation of biodiversity. The seed industry is private business aiming to maximize its profits. It does so by selling farmers and gardeners seeds that are interesting to them (thanks to higher yields, disease resistance, etc.). Private seed companies are indeed reliant on crop biodiversity to make their living, because the new varieties that they breed come from older varieties (landraces) or wild relatives of crops. But these landraces and wild crop relatives do not exist thanks to the seed industry, but rather thanks to nature and generations of farmers.

Much of the present-day genetic diversity of the major crops is stored in an international network of seedbanks. For instance, the US keeps a huge collection of corn varieties in Ames, Iowa, wheat varieties in Aberdeen, Idaho, etc. Most countries of the world have similar seedbanks for their major crops, and there are also international centers in the CGIAR network, each one specializing in certain crops and maintaining a germplasm collection of those crops. Here in Colombia, for instance, is the CIAT center, which holds stocks of cassava, bean, and forage grass varieties for the CGIAR network. Obviously the US seedbanks are government funded, and the international CGIAR centers operate thanks to donations from major world governments and international bodies like the World Bank. None of this important work of conservation of crop genetic diversity is carried out by private seed companies, despite the video's claim that private companies have supported seedbanks for more than a century.

In fact, while seed companies are reliant on the international supply of crop diversity to carry out their business, private companies and industrial agriculture in general tend to promote a narrow focus on relatively few varieties of any given crop. For instance, in the US, most of the corn varieties sold by seed companies descend from about four major parent lines. These are inbred and mixed and matched to create new varieties, but this is not exactly a flowering of diversity. Commercial corn breeders keep using the same set of high-yielding lines year after year, occasionally introducing pollen from exotic varieties so as to imbue disease tolerance to the inbred, high-yielding lines. Again, though I don't like this model of agriculture, I don't blame seed companies for operating the way they do. I just don't want them telling me that they're these enlightened custodians and creators of biodiversity.

My last point of contention with the video is the reference to mankind's scarring the land. To me, this posits humans as some scourge on nature, and seed companies as a means of saving and restoring nature. The fact is that for most of human history, over 100000 years, people have lived sustainably off the land, without "scarring" it. To the extent that much land is scarred today, it's due precisely to the industrial abuse of land promoted by agribusiness. Note, by the way, that all the cultivated fields shown in the video are industrial monocultures, and the video draws an explicit line between agricultural land and "habitat", as if farming automatically eliminates natural habitat. What supporters of the "industrial high-yield agriculture minimizes the land necessary for farming" view don't recognize is that farming doesn't have to totally erase natural ecosystems. There even exist high-yielding farming systems that fit into the surrounding ecosystem as opposed to replacing it, but of course these are not the farming systems that agribusiness is interested in.

So to summarize, the video is pretty and I'm glad they're promoting consciousness of the importance of biodiversity. But private seed companies are by no means stewards of the world's biodiversity.

Quick article on sweatshops

Here's a well-written short essay on the inviability of the sweatshop development model for Haiti. It goes along with many things I've written on this blog.

Las Gaviotas

I've been intending for a while to talk about Las Gaviotas, a sustainable rural community located here in Colombia. Here's an NYT article about the village. Basically it's a village started by a man named Paolo Lugari, where they've planted 8000 hectares (almost 20000 acres) of Caribbean pine in the Colombian eastern plains. From this plantation the villagers harvest resin that they sell and process for paints and other industrial products. They cut down pine trees occasionally to thin out the forest, and they use these trees for paper pulp and lumber. The plantation has also increased rainfall in the area and allows the extraction of drinking water for local use and for sale in Bogota. The village is in the process of expanding its model of ecologically-benign development to another village called Marandua, where a collection of displaced people and ex-members of armed groups will live and prosper in the shadow of a socially responsible airforce base. The eventual aspiration is to extend Gaviotas-style forest villages across the 6.3M hectares of plains in Vichada department.

It seems that a big part of the business model to fund such an expansion is through selling carbon offsets to companies in the rest of the world. Carbon offsets are when a company that wants to limit its carbon emissions (either due to a sense of corporate responsibility, or because the law obligates it) buys credits from a project that is actually absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Hence between the two companies there is a net zero emission. It's an interesting concept, though at best a compliment to on-site emissions reduction strategies. There are some valid concerns about fraud in the offsets market, i.e. some phantom project in India selling false offsets to gullible or corrupt Western companies, but Gaviotas's offsets program seems like a valid model.

Sounds good, right? (Except for the sort of reptilian appearance of Gunter Pauli, one of the project's European fans). I certainly would like the creation of stable rural communities in the sparsely-inhabited plains of Colombia. But I've a few concerns. First off, I don't like the project's characterization of the eastern plains as a barren wasteland wishing it could be a forest. The plains aren't a cut-rate version of tropical forest, they're a different ecosystem altogether. Supporters of the Gaviotas plantation claim that the area used to be a forest, but they're talking about one million years ago. The Andes mountains didn't even exist back then! To put it another way, in the past million years my home region of Chicago has cycled between near-tropical conditions and glacial ice cover, and everything in between. We don't describe the forests of southern Wisconsin as a bastardized version of the rightful, one million year ago vegetation.

This brings up another point. If the plains aren't a degraded forest but rather an ecosystem in their own right, then converting the area into a forest implies a major ecological tampering. This isn't necessarily bad--replacing relatively unproductive plains with forest that houses endangered wildlife, produces economic products for people, captures carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and increases rainfall, can certainly be justified on many levels. But let's acknowledge that we're proposing a major ecological alteration, justified as it may be.

The Caribbean pine that is the foundation of the villagers' reforestation plan is not native to the plains of Colombia. It's not necessarily invasive, and is actually native to an area relatively close by, but planting thousands of acres of non-native trees in a strict grid pattern is not usually what I think of as an ecological project. That said, according to the claims of the project supporters, an unexpected but welcome effect of the plantations is that over time other, native trees begin to grow under the canopy of pines, eventually resulting in a diverse tropical rainforest. So if we accept that it's desirable to turn vast swathes of the plains into tropical rainforest, plantations of Caribbean pine seem to be a decent path to attaining that goal. In newer plantations the Gaviotas project adds oil palm, rubber trees, and cashews into the mix. This seems to me a sensible diversification, and both rubber trees and cashews are in fact native to the Amazon region that borders Vichada. Oil palm is not native to America and is usually associated in Colombia with large monocrop plantations whose owners terrorize entire villages to steal their land. Presumably there would be no forceable land-clearing in the Gaviotas project, and they have an explicit philosophy of devoting no more than 15% of their plantations to oil palm. The reasoning is that since various palm species represent no more than 15% of a natural Amazonian forest, palms shouldn't comprise more than that proportion of the villagers' "reconstituted" forests.

Basically the Gaviotas model seems sound to me on an ecological level. Obviously I have some misgivings about the plantation mentality of the project, but I respect what they're doing. There's only one remaining thing that worries me about the project, and it's a big issue. According to all the articles I've read, Las Gaviotas is home to 200 people and 8000 hectares of trees. That means that there are about 40 ha for each person, or 150-200 ha per family. I assume this proportion is what's necessary for each family to have a decent income, and hence for the community to be economically viable. 150 hectares is a lot for one family, almost 400 acres. In the States that isn't so much, and in fact on the sparsely-settled plains of Colombia it's not that outrageous of a figure either. But if the desire is to expand the Gaviotas model of development across the plains of Colombia, this represents a problem. If the model doesn't allow for an increased population density than that already present in the plains, that means it can't accept any newcomers. Perhaps it would raise the living standards of the current residents of the plains by allowing a better income from forest plantations than that obtainable from the traditional regional vocation of ranching, and it would certainly be attractive to the rest of the world if the Amazon rainforest with its carbon-absorbing nature were expanded beyond its present boundaries. But in a country with a huge population of internally displaced and landless people, I think that any viable model for large-scale development has to include the landless of other areas.

In light of the low population density accommodated by a Gaviotas-style model, the prospect of expanding the project to 6 million hectares takes on a rather foreboding prospect. If each worker in Gaviotas requires 40 ha, then an expansion of the model to all of Vichada would only create 150000 jobs or so. That's paltry considering the amount of land involved, and even more so considering that the conversion of grasslands to forest would eliminate thousands of current jobs in ranching. And what if some current residents of Vichada want to keep their grasslands, and not convert them to forest? Throw in the Colombian president's enthusiasm for the idea, and participation of big foreign companies, and it takes on the sinister foreboding of so many prior agro-industrial megaprojects promoted by the government. Millions of hectares with plantations instead of people, producing industrial products for export (even if they are green products like carbon offsets or natural resin). And nothing done to improve the situation of millions of landless Colombians who look longingly to the eastern plains as a possible new home.

I don't want to be one of these progressives that finds fault with everything, but the prospect of a government-mandated plantation project for an entire department does scare me some. Of course I should make it down to Gaviotas someday to check out the project and to learn more about it. In the meanwhile, I've been working for months now on a different project for the plains, this one more agrarian. I hope to post that plan in the next few days.

More Haiti articles

Here is a good, common-sense proposal to make sure that donations for food aid go to buy Haitian-produced rice instead of imported rice. And here is a book, available free online, that I have yet to read. It is by Beverly Bell, a knowledgeable friend of Haiti, and outlines some ideas for Haiti's redevelopment based on her extensive reporting in the aftermath of the earthquake. I'm looking forward to digging into it.

Agrarian Ideas for Colombia's presidents?

Starting with the February Supreme Court decision that current president Alvaro Uribe will not be able to modify the constitution in order to run for a third term, this election season has been very eventful. We've seen candidates rise and fall, differentiate themselves from the crowd, debate, campaign, and even commit borderline legal infractions. But all the candidates, and most concerned commentators, are coming from an urban context, and haven't even touched agrarian issues. This is sad and silly given that Colombia's long-running civil war, its narcotraffic problems, its poverty, its inequality, all these are profoundly rooted in the country's rural reality. Honestly, only one candidate, Rafael Pardo, has in my opinion acted at all as if he has a clue of what's really going on in Colombia and its countryside. And he's stuck firmly with about 5% of the electorate, according to polls! The situation is so bad that the head of the farmer union of Colombia claimed in a recent article that "the candidates have no idea what to do with the farming sector".

So in this light I was very happy today to see an astute analysis of Colombia's rural issues and the candidate's total avoidance of them. It comes from Razon Publica, an excellent blog on Colombian politics (which has until now also been very urban-focused, in my experience). I summarize the article as follows:

• Colombia's agricultural sector accounts for 11% of the economy, while receiving only 0.4% of public resources. (I would personally dare to say that the agricultural sector is even more important than the 11% cited in the article. Many rural people consume their own produce, which means that the production of farms is usually undervalued in macroeconomic statistics. Aside from this, the illicit drug trade that is so important for Colombia's economy is entirely dependent on raw agricultural products)
• Due to this neglect for farming, Colombia has gone from food self-sufficiency to importing 50% of its food needs (luckily my geographic area is not subject to this trend, as we produce lots of food for ourselves and for other regions). What little support the government gives to agriculture has been in the form of promoting large plantation crops for export like oil palm, bananas, and cacao. This means that less of Colombia's production is actually food for Colombians, and the crops that get support don't feed anyone, they employ few people, and they strengthen the power of oligarchs. In fact, many large plantations are created or expanded when a wealthy landowner or a corporation hires paramilitary thugs to drive peasants off of their land.
• This all amounts to a self-perpetuating development model that impoverishes peasants, enriches elites, and hence allows those elites to strengthen their hold on government processes. Land becomes increasingly concentrated, and the country becomes less prosperous and less self-sufficient in food.
• Many academics and farmer groups (which are often controlled by large oligarch producers) have discounted the idea of agrarian reform as an antiquated notion, and no present candidate to the presidency will consider land redistribution. Despite some progressive proposals, no candidate is willing to acknowledge the relationship between land distribution and peace.
  
• All past efforts at agrarian reform in Colombia have more or less failed in the face of powerful ranchers and large landowners, who have a disproportionate representation in Congress. This situation will not change unless lawmakers and the general public are aware of the need for agrarian reform and active in the legislative process.
• Colombia has appalling numbers of people internally displaced by the war, almost 2.5 million between 2003 and 2009, according to some figures. From 1999 to 2007 about 5.5 million hectares (almost 14 million acres) were illegally taken from these displaced people by the armed groups that drove them off their land. There must be a program to return displaced people's stolen land to them.
• The article proposes a policy of rural planning based on equal distribution of land and promotion of small farmers who produce in an ecologically sustainable way in order to assure Colombia's food security and internal market (sound like anything I've written about in my blog?).
• Colombia's rural people are poor--64% are below the poverty line, and 29% live in extreme poverty. Almost 70% earn less than the legal minimum wage, and services like schools and clinics are lacking

In light of all this, the article's author poses five questions for the presidential candidates:

1--What would you do to halt the concentration and monopolistic control of land by legal and illegal entrepreneurs?

2--How would you assure a balanced diet for the population and a rational, productive use of land?

3--What do you propose to halt forced displacement, return land to those who have had their property taken, and allow the return of displaced people to their homes?

4--What measures would you adopt to ensure that rural employers pay the legal minimum wage, with benefits?

5--What do you propose to expand coverage of schooling, basic services, and healthcare in rural zones?


I am really thankful that someone in such a prominent Colombian publication is touching on these themes. I hope (though I doubt) that the candidates will think a little bit about the issues facing rural Colombia, which ultimately have repercussions on the country as a whole.

Art preservation in Haiti

And here's another article, this one about restoring and conserving Haiti's artistic heritage.

News from Haiti

In my World Policy Institute blog yesterday, I lamented the recent lack of news coverage of Haiti. Well today the coverage is back with a vengeance, as protesters in the streets of Port-au-Prince call for the president to step down (his term will end next February, and in the event of an absence of elections he has decided to stay on as president for another 3 months). Here's a post from the Haiti Relief and Reconstruction blog that summarizes the news coverage of this event. It seems that another bone of discontent for the protesters is that Aristide, the twice-elected, twice-coup d'etated ex-president of Haiti, has still not been allowed to return to Haiti in the 6 years since his last ouster, and his extremely popular party, Fanmi Lavalas, has been barred from elections in Haiti.

Post on World Policy Institute blog

Here's a link to an article I wrote recently for the World Policy Institute blog. They forgot to put in my photo, but I'm just happy to be on such a distinguished blog.

Paper I wrote for a conference on innovation in sustainable agricultural development

Okay, here's the final abstract for the paper I submitted to a conference in France. The paper touches on a potential negative side effect of participatory approaches to research-development projects.

Article on Cathar country

This article has nothing to do with agrarian issues, but it is about Languedoc, the region I spent a year studying in for my masters degree. I lived in the capital of Languedoc, Montpellier, but I took a number of trips with my now-wife to other areas of the region, including Carcassonne, the cartoonish overly-reconstructed medieval city that the author talks about.

A few corrections to the article:

If you do go to southwestern France, watch out for cassoulet. The author says most towns have delicious cassoulet. I guess it tastes alright, but this regional specialty dish of beans, duck, and pig sausage left me up all night once vacating my entrails in various ways. I reeked for more than a day afterward as my pores slowly secreted distilled pig essence, and I had violent rash and allergies for maybe a week.

The Cathars (or Albigensians) weren't just a puritanical Christian sect. I would in fact count them as a different religion altogether. They had a Manichean worldview whereby all flesh and worldly existence was evil, meaning for example that they regarded suicide as an honorable act. I don't think many modern-day Cathar aficionados are that into the religion, but rather the heroic resistance that they offered to Europe's first real politico-religious coalition, as the author points out. Also, people in Languedoc are committed to preserving their unique language and culture, and the Cathars are a real historical legacy that differentiates Languedoc from the rest of France.


Anyway, I enjoyed seeing a nice treatment of a beautiful and underappreciated area of France. The images of Spring's warmth and the growing seasonal tide of tourists also made me miss the temperate latitudes in general. Here in my part of Colombia there's a dry season and a wet season, but the temperature stays the same year-round, so we don't get to enjoy the first crocuses coming up after a long winter, or the giddiness of planting a summer garden, etc. I sure don't miss the long, bleak Chicago winters, but I do miss the slow, majestic change from season to season.

A letter I wrote to Steven Spielberg in 2008

12/V/2008

Dear Mssrs. Spielberg, Lucas, Ford, and everyone else in the Indiana Jones production team,

My name is Greg, and I am a huge Indiana Jones fan. I was born in 1982, so I was seven when the last film came out in the theaters in 1989. I remember that my parents' friends went to see some adventure movie that I was too young for and had little interest in. However, a few years later, when I was nine or ten, I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark on TV, and from then on I was hooked. Indiana Jones became a fixation in my life, one in the series of transient fixations that young kids are wont to have—dinosaurs, Superman, obscure zoo animals, etc. Except I never got over Indiana Jones. I wanted to be a hero like him. He was better than any superhero, because he was a normal person, a guy who used his intelligence to solve riddles and get out of tight situations (barely). On top of that, he had a more plausible version of the superhero's alter-ego. He was a professor, an absent-minded, bookish type in his everyday life. And he saved the world on numerous occasions from a more plausible version of supervillains—Nazis, the ultimate evil, one of the only real historical groups of people that it's okay to shoot up with no remorse in a film.

My mania for Indiana Jones knew no moderation. I named my dog Indy (he died just last week, 15 and a half years old!). I was Indiana Jones for a number of Halloweens, with a plastic fedora, a worn leather jacket, and even a kid-sized bullwhip I got at one of those living-history farms.

But my devotion to Indy went beyond childish, passing things. I longed to know as many languages as he knew, I wanted to live a life doing good, saving the world while having adventures and seeing new cultures. Through Indiana Jones (and later the young Indy series, which expounded on his origins and how he got to be such an amazing person), I was inspired to learn about the 1930s, the Second World War, Germany, Biblical artifacts and the Fertile Crescent, Latin America and pre-Colombian peoples, India, Venice—basically I became a geography and history nut. I was long tempted to become an archaeologist (even more so than most kids' typical archaeologist phase that falls between phases of fireman, paleontologist, and veterinarian), and I observed the ethnographic and archaeological artifacts at the Field Museum in my native Chicago with more concentration and understanding than the typical ten-year-old.

And this love for the Indy movies hasn't faded with time. Today, sixteen years after my first exposure to the series, I have probably seen each movie over a hundred times, and I continue to enjoy them. I am one of those nuts who has noticed things like the fact that in the musical scores of the three movies no theme repeats itself between movies, except for the main theme, and a brief snippet apiece in the second and third movies (towards the end of the second when Indy reaches for his revolver to shoot a swordsman as he did in Cairo in Raiders of the Lost Ark, and in the Venice catacombs of the Last Crusade when he sees a graffito of the ark of the covenant).

But now as in my childhood, this obsession with Indy has imbued me with more than trivia facts and entertainment. I still have a fascination with archaeology. In the end I didn't become an archaeologist, but I have maintained a radical people-focused life philosophy. For me, my interest in Indy and archaeology came after a phase of wanting to be a paleontologist, but it was watching Indy that convinced me that as important and interesting as old bones and pure science may be, the human world and its difficulties and glories were what I wanted to dedicate my life to. I wanted to learn about and intervene in the human drama, always on the side of good. And in fact I took it one step further—instead of studying ancient artifacts, I decided to become an agronomist/anthropologist, to study the traditional practices and lifeways of current societies. I wanted to work with people in the here and now, to learn directly from them how they live and why they do what they do, instead of piecing together evidence about past societies from their cryptic traces. In the end it was also sort of a practical choice—if I wanted to have adventures and save the world, it seemed like it would be difficult to do so in the field of archaeology. There are no more Machu Picchus or Valleys of the Kings to discover, much less any Arks of the Covenant or Holy Grails, and there were certainly no more Nazis to defend these finds from. In a growing, hungry world, I figured agronomy would be more promising as far as yielding big adventures.

After many childhood, schoolday years of dreaming and scheming about being a new Indiana Jones, and four long years of college to become an agronomist, I found myself sort of lost. I had always had a plan for the big picture, but I didn't know in the short term exactly how one should get started with being a modern-day adventurer/do-gooder. Finally I found a masters program in Third World Agricultural Development, and I studied for two years in Spain and France. I was finally on my way to my dreams! Just like Indy, I was seeing the world, balancing between the academic and the adventurous, Old World and New, learning new languages (by now I speak three fluently and two more passably, though it'll take considerable effort before I can fall out of a plane in an air raft in a random part of the world and be sure I'll speak the local language). As the final step of this masters I am currently doing a four-month internship in West Africa, and that done I will present my thesis and hopefully really begin my life as a professional, do-gooding adventurer.

And that is how I find myself in the town of Kandi, in far northern Benin, doing an investigation on the collateral social effects of various development projects. I'm all grown up, and miraculously I'm actually doing what I've always dreamed of. I've gotten an education in Europe, and now I'm pursuing adventure in far-off, exotic locales. And I still think of Indy. In the past few hectic years, when I'm reluctant to uproot myself from some place where I've stopped long enough to catch my breath and feel a bit settled, I sing Indy's theme song in my head and get inspired by seeing myself in my own adventure movie. When I'm zipping down dusty savanna roads on my motorcycle or scrambling up termite hills, notebook in hand, to get an idea of the lay of the land, I think that Indy would be proud of me. And when I'm hot, sweaty, exhausted, lost in a strange new culture, I think, “Well, this is what you've always wanted, right?” Indy never got tired or gave up, so why should I?

So I'm very happy with my life now. I'm thankful to you, the makers of Indy, for having inspired me in part to be here, and I'm thankful for having gotten the opportunities in life to follow my dreams. There's only one thing that could stand improving...

I've never seen an Indiana Jones movie in the theater. As I said, I was seven when The Last Crusade came out, and I didn't really get into Indy until I was nine or ten. I had never dreamed of actually seeing Indiana Jones on the big screen—I assumed that the Last Crusade really was the last, and almost twenty years without a film seemed to confirm my suspicions, despite the occasional rumor of a fourth film in the works. My friends and I have been ecstatic ever since a year or so ago when we heard of the new Indy movie, and when the trailers came out in February, I couldn't wait until May 22nd.

However, there's a problem. Because I'm in Benin right now, I don't think I'm going to be able to see the new Indiana Jones movie in the theaters. There are almost no movie theaters in all of Benin, even in the capital (the DVD pirates have devastated the cinema industry here). Ironically, the very lifestyle that I've been inspired to lead thanks to Indiana Jones prevents me from seeing the newest film in his series. Sometimes I feel sorry for myself, remarking that I'll never have the chance again to see Indy in his bigscreen glory. But then I think to myself that now I'm living my own adventures, so it's not a big deal if I miss Indy's latest. So it's not a terrible fate, after all. In fact, it's sort of a poetic irony.

That said, I would still be thrilled to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in a theater. That would be the best of both worlds for me—to live my real-life adventures and also enjoy Indy's on the big screen.

And that brings me to the ultimate point of this letter—a favor I ask of you. I have fantasies of your flying me to LA for the grand premier, a special invited guest, “the biggest Indiana Jones fan in the world”. Or holding a special Benin screening for me, as well as to expose French West Africa to this hero they've been denied for 27 years (almost no one knows Indy here). But given time and budget constraints, as well as the fact that I realize that for the rest of the world I'm neither Indiana Jones nor as big of a VIP as I am in my own head, I have a more humble request. Could you inform me as to the nearest theater in West Africa showing the new Indiana Jones? Are there indeed any theaters in West Africa that are going to show Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull? If not, could you tell me of any theaters in France that will still be showing the film in mid-late August? That's when I'll be returning from my research in Benin. I imagine that somewhere within your reach must be a database of all the theaters in the world that have bought first-run rights to the film.

Thank you very much for your attention, and for having provided me with some of the stories and images that have most shaped who I am today. I'm sure that even if my introduction to the Crystal Skull is via a rented DVD, it will be a cherished addition to these stories that have entertained me and inspired my dreams during the better part of my life.

A good legal use for coca

Here's a BBC article about a coca-based soft drink. Apparently Bolivians are trying to think of creative legal ways to produce and utilize coca. There are similar soft drinks produced in Peru and in an indigenous area of southern Colombia.

Vertical gardens and more joys of living in the tropics

Here's a cool NYT article about vertical gardens. Apparently in Manhattan and elsewhere people are going to great lengths to recreate rainforest conditions in tight spaces.

A friend who was visiting us recently was amazed at the floral abundance in rural Colombia, even in our relatively cold-weather part of the country. The friends was amazed to see exotic things growing wild everywhere, plants like orchids and bromeliads that his grandfather had had to carefully tend and pamper in an elaborate greenhouse to get them to grow in Nebraska.

So here's one more reason I'm thankful to live where I do.

Meatpackers and zorreros : victims of anti-agrarian delusions

Warning to readers: this is a long, link-heavy post. Also, most of the links are in Spanish.

I read an article today in our local newspaper that our state, Boyaca, is set to consolidate and shut down many of its meatpackers. In most towns of Boyaca there exists a municipal meat processor. These are plants that are semi-publicly owned, that is to say that they were financed and built by the mayor and the people of the town. They buy local animals and process them, hence serving as a source of employment, a buyer for farmers, and a way of keeping the food supply under local control.

However, a law that will take effect soon insinuates that sanitary conditions are insatisfactory at such meat plants. Of the 132 meatpacking plants that existed in Boyaca in 2000, only 45 survive today, and under the new law there would only be 12 by 2012. I'm all for control of food-borne diseases, but this law seems suspiciously favorable to the few large private conglomerates that can meet its demands for capital investment. The law also mandates a government inspector for every lot of animals that is sacrificed, which obviously creates a motive for the government to reduce the total number of plants so there's no need for an inspector in every town. Despite the claims that bigger plants can better control sanitary conditions, the US example shows that consolidating and centralizing the food supply can lead to more grave food-borne illnesses, not less. I would posit that smaller producers and processors may not be able to comply with certain lofty technical norms, but they are likely to be more conscientious about providing a safe product to their neighbors.

If sanitary conditions were really the prime concern, wouldn't it make more sense to provide the means for the many existing plants to improve conditions, as opposed to putting the control of the meat supply in a few private hands? But the main motivation of the law seems to be to favor the beef export market. According to the article, Boyaca's meat does not meet standards for export. This is odd to me, because the meat I eat here in Boyaca is better than the meat I've eaten in any of the other countries I've lived in. As with many other products, the Colombian government seems to be prioritizing a system to provide meat to other countries instead of a well-functioning system that supplies Colombians. They still haven't figured out that there's a burgeoning national market that will pay higher prices and promote national prosperity better than the fickle global marketplace.

We see here that a local food system that for all intents and purposes seems to be functioning just fine is to be swept away in the name of that chimera of modernity. 3500 jobs would be lost in Boyaca due to the closure of local meatpacking plants, and the resulting oligopoly of only 12 large processors will surely lead to lower prices paid to farmers and higher prices charged to consumers.

This is an example of an anti-agrarian prejudice I see all the time, in Colombia and the rest of the world. In the name of modernity, or urbanity, or exports, or the global marketplace, or any number of other silly, irrational idols, functioning economic systems based on human beings and nature are intentionally destroyed.

What to do? In this case, I'd very much like to work with Boyaca farmers and meat processors so that they can comply with the new regulations, and hence maintain more market share and a better portion of the consumer's peso. There are plenty of initiatives like this in the US and Europe, but the difference is that in those places the consolidation and monopolization of food production and processing is already well-advanced, so people have to recover a lot of lost ground. Here in Colombia, it would be great if we could fight against these negative trends as they're barely getting started. I am currently talking with an agricultural policy research institute about their possibly hiring me to do work on improving farmer access to markets. The Boyaca meat supply chain would be a very timely subject for me to focus on.

This brings me to another theme, which on the surface seems different. But the thread of anti-agrarian thought, that is to say a fundamental disconnect from the real world of people and nature, is common to both cases.

The second theme is the movement to get zorreros off the streets of Bogota and other major Colombian cities. This article (from a Colombian journalist who worked a day in the trade) gives a bit of background on zorreros. "Zorreros" is the term given to the men and women who drive flat horse-drawn carts around the city of Bogota and other Colombian cities. I will mainly use the term "carreteros", because "zorrero" has a negative connotation. As I understand it, Bogota's carreteros used to pick up recyclable items left in front of houses, or they would even scavenge garbage bags to find recyclable items. They would then load these items onto their carts and take them to sell to recyclers. Many carreteros even belonged to a highly-organized recycling cooperative. This activity was prohibited when the sons of Colombia's current president founded a recycling company that was given exclusive rights to recycling for the city of Bogota. Now it is illegal to open garbage bags that people leave out. The municipal garbage truck picks up people's unsorted waste, and on the way to the landfill it stops at the president's sons' plant, where garbage is sorted through for recyclables. Obviously neither the old or the new system are as efficient as one in which people pre-separate their recyclables and non-recyclables, but at least with the old way the economic benefits of recycling were evenly distributed among thousands of poor people as opposed to concentrated in the hands of a few elites.

Nevertheless, there still exist from 1000 to 14000 carreteros in Bogota (depending on which source you consult). This vocation has often passed from grandfather to father to son. They now dedicate themselves to picking up and recycling cardboard (which people still leave out separately from their garbage), hauling construction waste, recycling or reselling discarded electronics and appliances, or contracting out their services to transport goods or to help people move. The carreteros are a sustainable, natural, poor-centered way of disposing of certain waste products in Bogota. Horsecarts emit no CO2, their only fuel is other garbage (corn husks, paper, grass clippings, potato peels, rotten fruit), and their only waste product is horse poop, which doesn't smell and has no toxic chemicals. Horsecarts provide a dignified, self-sufficient livelihood to some of Bogota's most marginal, vulnerable people. This is a true accomplishment in a city and a country where there exist so many destitute people displaced by the war, surviving only by begging or selling plastic trinkets on the street.

Now the city and national governments want to get carreteros off the streets of Bogota and all other major cities. They claim that they hold up traffic and represent a danger for drivers and pedestrians. If traffic were the real concern, the governments could enforce sensible, pre-existing laws to restrict horsecarts from using certain busy streets, or operating at certain hours, though obviously Bogota's jammed traffic and danger to pedestrians is due almost exclusively to cars, not to horses. The government proposal is to replace horsecarts with mini-motorcycles that have a truck-like back end. These would hold up traffic just as much, pose more of a danger for pedestrians than do horsecarts, and contribute more smog to Bogota's choked gray skies. And it goes without saying that a motocart, which has trouble hauling two people's weight, would not be able to haul the heavy, large loads that a horsecart can. Most importantly for me, outlawing horsecarts would destroy the livelihoods of some of Bogota's most vulnerable citizens, adding these independent businesspeople to the mass of the destitute displaced by violence (in this case violence not of the guerrillas or paramilitaries, but of bourgeois, urban renewal-touting politicians). The motocarts would not be given to them, but rather bought with a loan. As a carretero says in this article, this would mean taking away their horses and carts, which are paid-for free and clear, in exchange for a motocart that would be taken away from them within months because it would be impossible for carreteros to pay off the loan.

So it's really impossible to justify the outlawing of horsecarts on any practical, environmental, or social grounds. I am not alone in my belief that the Colombian State and the wealthy see carreteros as an ugly reminder that theirs is a country of the poor, a rural country. These actors presumably see the physical work of the real world as undignified, and wish for something more in line with Colombia's 21st century image of comfortable, bourgeois, urban modernity. Even David Luna, a highly-regarded House Representative from the Liberal party, implies in a letter to Bogota's mayor that carreteros are an undignified, animal-abusing lot that should be erradicated. He gives empty lip service to respecting the humanity of horsecart people, talking vaguely of "integral improvement for carreteros and their families, through which productivity and permanent capacitation will be improved; through accompaniment by programs that promote learning about other jobs and strengthen the care for animals". What the hell does that mean?

Here is an article about police and security guards harassing carreteros at the major market in Bogota. This includes not just people who drive horse-drawn carriages, but people who pull a human-drawn cart themselves. According to the article, the forces of law and order try to find any reason to pull over a carretero, take his cargo, and even confiscate his vehicle until he pays a heavy fine. This other article describes an animal defense organization that confiscates horses on shady grounds.

This is a positive article in English about carreteros. The author, a foreigner in Colombia, can see certain things that Colombians might not. She recognizes that the carreteros are a marginalized group, one that by luck and hard work has found an economic niche that allows them to support their families. In 2002, when now-presidential candidate Antanas Mockus was mayor of Bogota, he tried to get the zorreros and their carts off the streets. He wanted to create a neat, bourgeois city, which apparently implied getting rid of horses and their poop so cars could move faster on the congested Bogota streets. (This measure would not have affected the genteel carriages that carry tourists about the city.) The zorreros successfully fought the city's attempt by citing a law that protects people's wellbeing and livelihood.

Here is another well-done article. It is from just a few days ago, and fairly treats both the problems of horse traction in Bogota as well as the livelihood of the carreteros. The article reasserts that motocarts would be costly and undesirable for the carreteros, but presents another alternative that is in the works: a cooperative recycling plant, whereby ex-carreteros could work in a legal truck fleet hauling recyclable materials from the city. The catch is that no one knows if such a plant and its associated activities could absorb the thousands of carreteros that will lose their current source of employment.

Here is another rare Colombian article that recognizes zorreros as human beings. The bloggers specifically rode with carreteros to get over the common stereotypes that they are thieves or vagabonds, and to understand the vital role they play in the city, specifically the pickup and recycling of certain solid waste. The bloggers map out major routes of horsecart recyclers, recommend alternate routes to reduce congestion, and design a modification to horsecarts so they can capture and store solar energy in batteries! The bloggers even expand their vision to recognize the importance of the informal sector in general. And they recommend that carreteros be considered as potential contributors to Bogota's sustainable development, as opposed to scorned as backwards elements of the city. If objectors to the presence of horsecarts on the Bogota streets are really interested in solving specific problems (street congestion, manure, etc.) and not simply animal rights nuts or haters of the poor, these types of solutions are what they should be looking at. However, judging by the comments written by readers of the blog, citing zorreros as criminals who mistreat noble horses and even rob puppies (!?!), it seems that the innovative bloggers are fighting a difficult battle.

Here are an article and a news video about the census of carreteros that Bogota undertook earlier this year. On the one hand, the census is supposedly the first step in incorporating horsecart drivers into various social welfare programs. According to the article, the census-takers and even some carreteros see it as a way of incorporating them into the city's development (as if they weren't already an integral part). However, the census is also the first step in the definitive prohibition of the carreteros' professional activity. The point of the census isn't to integrate their current activities into the new plans of the city, but rather to illegalize zorreros and channel them into another livelihood. A transport minister interviewed in the video says that "for environmental, traffic, and quality-of-life reasons, we want to erradicate this activity," formalize zorreros, and improve their productivity, whatever formalize and productivity mean in this context. Once again, it seems that the State sees carreteros' work as undignified, and thinks it would be better to integrate them into patriarchal charity programs or to "give" them another job. Though I disagree with the implicit scorn for the work that carreteros do, I wouldn't object to such a measure if it resulted in their being compensated for any capital they're supposed to give up, and provided with new jobs that pay as well as the old. There would still be the stupidity of replacing a nonpolluting means of transport (horses) with other means (whatever new vehicle assumes the old work of the carreteros), and moving Bogota one step further from a sustainable agrarian society. But at least you wouldn't be robbing a vulnerable population of its livelihood. That said, usually things like the zorrero census end up being a nice show of social concern before the machinery of the State rolls over people. My suspicion seems confirmed by a provision in the law mandating the census. The law allows a few months to carry out the census, after which anyone not counted will not be entitled to the supposed social benefits the State will provide after outlawing their livelihood. This stinks of a symbolic inclusion that justifies posterior exclusion. Also, in the video the interviewed carreteros all seem to believe that the census process is to help them maintain their horsecart livelihood. If this is the case, the census-takers are profoundly violating the trust of the horsecart drivers. The carreteros adamantly oppose the replacement of their carts with motocarts--one woman in the video says she only knows how to drive a horse, not a motor vehicle. Aside from all this, the implantation of computer chips in censused horses seems a little Orwellian to me!

I cannot understand very well the mindset of people who would propagate the laws criminalizing carreteros, but I will try to put forth some theories, based on the tone of certain bloggers and web commentators. I must make the disclaimer that most professional journalists I have read treat the issue quite fairly, recognizing carreteros' humanity and their right to a decent livelihood. But if the laws to outlaw horsecarts in the cities aren't attracting a huge public outcry, I have to assume that they are supported by a good number of people. My way of understanding the thoughts of these people is through consulting online responses to articles on the subject, as well as facebook pages calling for the elimination of zorreros in Bogota. My wife makes the good point that many of the people who post online might be minors or other people that rely on the internet and other unreliable media for a disproportionate share of their information, so they may not represent public opinion. But in any case it's the best source I've found to decipher some possible motivations of the anti-zorrero camp.

I will try here to explain the anti-zorrero prejudice in terms of a larger, anti-agrarian bias. This expresses itself in two ways: a slavish fetishizing of modernity, and a mix of anti-poor and pro-animal rights sentiments.

Modernity: Many posters and bloggers on the internet scorn the carreteros because having people and horses pulling carts in the streets is supposedly primitive. There are comments to the effect of, "other countries got rid of these practices 100 years ago, why can't we?" First off, this is a silly argument, because there is plenty that other countries have done in the past 100 years that is not to be copied just because it's modern. I'm thinking of rampant pollution, manufacture of atomic arms, things like that. Furthermore, what is primitive about using your body or a horse to do work? Humans and horses exist in the same form as we did in the past, and we can do the same work as our forebears did, so pulling a cart in 2010 is no more or less modern than doing anything else in 2010. Obviously there now exist other machines and methods we can employ to do work, but these are only preferable when they are better suited to a given situation. The existence of new ways of doing things doesn't mean that other ways are bad or should be eliminated. In fact, given that the world is trying to reduce its carbon footprint, using horses or humans instead of other gas-guzzling, polluting vehicles seems entirely appropriate and even, dare I say?, modern.

This issue of worshiping modernity is a symptom of a society removed from reality. It's what I call an anti-agrarian prejudice. Presumably people who decry the existence of non-motorized transport in the modern age assume that if motors exist, anyone who doesn't use them is simply being contrarian or ugly. Obviously the wealthy dweller of Bogota that rarely leaves the city (and is perhaps more familiar with other cities of the world than with his or her own rural backyard) can allow himself the illusion that the entire world resembles his little corner of the world. Food comes from supermarkets, work is done by machines or invisible poor people, garbage disappears when you leave it outside your door, etc. Of course this type of existence is an aberration in human history and even in today's world. Bourgeois urban existence is not possible without a real, agrarian world to maintain the cities' lifestyle. Even as our world becomes more urbanized, even when rural dwellers are statistically a minority (by some counts), the fact remains that food comes from a real, dirty field with real, dirty animals; work is done mainly by humans and animals, not by machines; garbage has to go to a real, dirty place after it leaves your doorstep. The illusion of a sanitized city separated from the natural world is precisely that, an illusion. No matter how modern we become, no matter how little our urban dwellers know about the functioning of the natural world, we are a part of the world. We can't eat jet planes or computer programs; cutting-edge cellphones can't treat our drinking water or dispose of our feces.

Animal rights over the rights of the poor: Another effect of the urban modern fantasy is that most commentators on the issue decry zorreros as criminals and animal abusers. Unless they have specific evidence to support this claim, I see no reason to assume that zorreros abuse their animals any more or less than the millions of other domestic animal owners in Bogota. In fact, there are a few points in the carreteros' favor here. First off, since they depend on their horses for their livelihood, I would think that they must treat them well enough. Secondly, a carretero's horse is doing basically what horses are meant to do--be outside and work. Conversely, a cat or a dog in an apartment in Bogota is robbed of the possibility to be outside, where it belongs, or to exercise as it is naturally inclined to do. As with the modernity claim, it seems that there is sort of a scorn for work operating here. The assumption is that making an animal work is cruel. The counterargument would of course be that submitting an animal, especially a horse, to a sedentary life would be the true cruelty. Work dignifies, occupies, and exercises to animals, just as it does for people. Perhaps the urbanite critics of carreteros believe that the good life consists in being sedentary and consuming things, and they transpose that bizarre worldview onto animals. But it's wrong to equate animal needs and wants with human needs and wants. A striking example of this ridiculous thinking is a blog commentator who says that horses shouldn't haul heavy loads, because a person couldn't or wouldn't want to haul them. A contrary but equally stupid train of thought is that horses suffer in the middle of the stress and pollution of the city. If this is the case, presumably cats, dogs, and even human children similarly suffer. Should people be prohibited from having pets and children in the city?

I also wonder if the people who criticize the use of workhorses by carreteros would criticize leisure riding of horses by the wealthy, or cowboys' use of horses to round up cattle. I would imagine that in the former case a critic might associate a person's leisure with the horse's, and thus feel that leisure horses are not subjected to undignified work. And in the latter case I can imagine an argument that cowboys "really need" horses to do their job, while carreteros presumably use horses out of perversity or backwardness. Cowboys can be classified as residents of an exotic, outside world where animals and nature still count, while zorreros simply impinge on the leisurely, modern, shopping-mall reality of citydwellers.

The real stunner here is that the very people who seem to have a great deal of empathy for animals, lack any semblance of empathy for fellow human beings. The majority of posters on the subject express a disdain for zorreros as criminals, animal abusers, dumpers of garbage in wetlands, and even puppy stealers! This is similar to the general disdain that the upper classes in any society have for normal people. I imagine that to justify one's unfair privilege in society, it helps to demonize those who don't enjoy that same privilege. But because we are in the progressive, egalitarian 21st century, society's elites don't like (or know it isn't acceptable) to scorn the poor simply for their poverty. So in this case we see the creation of a zorrero bogeyman who beats and even kills his horses out of pure malice. It is easy to hate an abuser of defenseless animals, and there exist plenty of uncited photos of dead horses on the internet that one could attribute to zorreros if one weren't too concerned with sources and context. The shocking thing to me is that it can be so easy to demonize normal people that you share a city with. I understand when a bigot who's never seen a Jew invents awful stories about them, or when someone who has never met a gay person imagines gays as monsters. But in this case, all Bogotanos see and interact with zorreros every day. How can someone hold such a false, negative image of his very neighbor?

A fascinating example combining a modern, anti-natural worldview with great empathy for animals, is a blogger's claim that we're already removed from nature, which can't be avoided, but we should be sensitive enough to nature to remove its last traces (animals) from the city, where it has no place.

My post has given two awful of idiotic, anti-agrarian thinking leading to the State's inflicting tangible damage on the most vulnerable members of society. It's pretty grim, and there are many more examples of this type of oppression in Colombia and in the rest of the world. I want to end on a positive note, so here is a wonderful article from 2007 about a veterinarian and his association, Refugio Animal, that work with carreteros and their horses. The vet claims that the rate of horse abuse among carreteros is only 5 to 10 percent, though poverty often prevents carreteros from accessing needed medicine and care for their horses. The vet's organization holds field days where the horsecart men and women bring in their horses for checkups and advice on how to care for them. This veterinarian has even trained 13 carreteros in horse medicine, and these go among their peers healing horses. It is a rare example of someone in Colombia doing something constructive about a hot-button issue, instead of intolerant polemicizing or working to impose one vision on a weaker group. In fact, the veterinarian tells a story in the article of a time when he was fighting to save a horse from rolling on the ground and killing itself. The horse's owner and the vet kept slapping the horse so it would stand up and get better, but bystanders saw the spectacle and started yelling that the brutish zorrero was beating his horse, and the veterinarian wasn't doing anything to help. It is disheartening to see that one of the few people who is making a positive contribution to carreteros and their horses is cried down by an ignorant public, but I am convinced that pragmatic, compassionate people like this veterinarian can play a role in solving Colombia's problems and winning over those who would impede progress and justice.

Nice farmer photos from around the world

Here's a link to a photo essay in Foreign Policy magazine showing farmers from around the world doing their daily work.

Corn syrup and crack, and then there's panela

Here's an article from the New York Times about the backlash against high-fructose corn syrup. It states incorrectly that high-fructose corn syrup essentially has the same composition as table sugar. This is not quite true. Corn syrup is a mix of glucose and fructose, two monosaccharides, while table sugar is sucrose, a disaccharide composed of chemically-joined glucose and fructose. I imagine that much of the demonization, founded or not, of corn syrup is due to the fact that it is even more processed and refined than is table sugar.

In any case, I think that the article ends on the right note, pointing out that if you're eating horrid, highly-processed foods, it doesn't matter that much if you switch from one refined sugar to another. It's like making the change from crack to powder cocaine. Sure, there is probably some benefit, but you'd be better off avoiding the stuff in any form. Another article condemning the junk food industry in general appeared in Scientific American recently.

For my part, I use panela. Panela is a unrefined evaporated sugar cane juice, and is a staple here in Colombia. Check out a wikipedia article on it here. Apart from sugar, panela contains vitamins, minerals, and even a touch of protein, which is why it's considered a food product (that is, something that nourishes) and not just a sweetener (something that gives you blubber and diabetes). Think the old pioneer days in the US when blackstrap molasses (unrefined evaporated sorghum or sugar cane juice) was used as a general health tonic and multivitamin. In Colombia panela is regulated such that it can only be made artisanally, by the thousands of small farmers that depend on the product for their livelihood. Producing panela industrially, or even worse, dying sugar brown and selling it as panela, are grave offenses in Colombia, because panela is an important source of energy, vitamins, and minerals for many people, especially the poorest people in the country. It's still not as healthy as eating fresh fruits and vegetables, but your body does have to work some to digest panela, and I assume the body absorbs it a bit more slowly than white sugar.

Continuing my prior analogy, if corn syrup and white sugar are like crack and cocaine, horrid vices with no positive side, panela is like chewing coca leaves. It gives your body something more nourishing than a quick high, is not that detrimental if consumed in moderation, and is a base of culture and tradition. My wife and I only use panela in the fair-trade jams we produce and sell here in Colombia.