"Recovering the notion of the internal market"

This is an article on a topic near and dear to me, the focusing on Colombia's internal market for our economic development, as opposed to focusing on exports. The author rightly points out that Uribe framed things as if exports were the only way to favor Colombia's economy. He focused on a free trade agreement with the US, and the Free Trade Area of the Americas. Both of these projects failed. Colombia is still heavily dependent on exports though, and as our mining and oil drilling sector grows, we'll become more so.

Nevertheless, the author feels that Santos, the new president, has a healthy appreciation for farming, infrastructure construction, housing construction, and innovation as important sectors that should be strengthened and encouraged. That is to say that he realizes that meeting the needs of the national market is a viable source of economic growth. Mining exports will continue to be an important source of foreign exchange and taxes, but the internal sector is the key for job creation and generalized prosperity. I think this analysis is dead-on, and I hope that Santos and the government really will try to create a healthy, balanced economy based on strong internal dynamics, while continuing to recognize the unavoidable importance of the export sector.

Haiti 2010 vs. Ireland 1847

Here is a well-done if brief article discussing the need to balance short-term food aid, and efforts to build local food production capacity. It compares the Haitian case to the Irish famine. Food aid is needed in humanitarian emergencies, but if a country is flooded for a long period of time with cheap or free food from abroad, local farmers go out of business because they can't compete with donated food. This in turn creates the need for more food aid, since now there are fewer farmers producing, and more jobless people. On the other hand, if you only focus on long-term agrarian development in the midst of an acute crisis, lots of people will starve or suffer in the short term. The author's conclusion (which I agree with) is that the best solution is to source food aid from the recipient country's own farmers. That way you're providing food for the hungry, as well as supporting the country's food sovereignty.

Pollution dilution

This is an article from the Discovery Channel website. The author argues that regulating concentrations of toxins released into nature isn't good enough to keep our water pure and our people healthy. This approach leads too often to the practice of simply diluting a known toxin to a "safe" level before releasing it. It doesn't disappear, it just is diluted to a hard-to-detect concentration.

The problem is that many experiments to determine "safe" concentrations of different toxins look mainly at acute effects of contact with the substance tested. There aren't many experiments to determine the effects of repeated low-level dosages of toxins, or the effects of exposure to a combination of low levels of various toxins.

That said, the article's claim that pollutants never go away isn't quite right either. Granted, for elements like mercury or lead that are inherently toxic, there is no way to break them down further to less-toxic forms. But for many of the most nasty toxins, like organic pesticides, the problem isn't the elements composing the substance, but rather their particular arrangement. In cases like this, over time the offending molecule will indeed break down to less harmful or totally harmless molecules.

A few articles

The paper I submitted to the ISDA 2010 conference has been published online in a more official format. It deals with the fallout when participatory development projects are left hanging in the middle of things.

On another note, for those of my readers who enjoyed my Goodeater bit on double-digging a garden, here is the follow-up piece, on square-foot gardening.

"Global agribusiness: Two decades of plunder" from GRAIN

Here is an article from GRAIN on corporate incursions into agriculture. It's a bleak picture, though the end of the article gives us some reasons to continue hoping for and working towards a food system based on small, autonomous producers using socially and environmentally sustainable methods.

Agrarian philosophies and the Morrill Act

Almost a year ago, I traveled to the US to receive an award for a paper I'd written. I took advantage of this trip to visit my alma mater, the University of Illinois. I had long felt sort of ambivalent about my agricultural education there. At UIUC I had learned a lot about the technical side of farming, but it was a very industrial focus, and there was something missing that I couldn't put my finger on. As I prepared for my trip, I thought more and more about this, and I realized a few things about the problems in my country's and my university's approach to agriculture.

The main problem with the agriculture education at UIUC was the lack of farmers. It seems that the UIUC goal was to increase gross agricultural productivity, and not necessarily to improve life for farmers. We looked at agriculture in terms of plants, soils, insects, fungi, pollution, economics, international trade, but never in terms of the farmers. During my four years studying agriculture at U of I, I never talked to any farmers, never analyzed a real farm. Even when we talked about farming systems, or sustainability, it was always in terms of plants, soil, the ecosystem, and sometimes large-scale economics, but never about the viability of a given farm.

On my visit last year, one professor said that we never talked to farmers because many of the students had grown up on farms and already knew farmers, but he conceded that as more and more agronomy students were coming from non-farming backgrounds, it would perhaps be good to visit a farm or two. But that wasn't my point. I didn't want more contact with farmers because they're swell guys or because they're cuddly or cute or something, but because they are the pillar on which all agronomy rests. If I had studied zoology and never worked with a live animal in four years, or if I had studied medicine without ever seeing a patient, I would have the same complaint, even if I'd had experience with these things before college. It's truly a sickly science that doesn't ever come in direct contact with its subject.

Some at my university might argue that farming in the US is so modern and industrial that the farmer is just an operator of technical processes. If this were the case, it wouldn't be important to study the farmer, just those processes. This is of course more a dogmatic modernist fantasy than an objective observation, but above all it's not true. Even our most technologically advanced farms in the US are run by people, usually families, and these people make farming decisions based in large part on their values, priorities, and social realities. There is more to farming in the US than just plants and chemicals and yields. There are people too.

My master's degree filled in what I'd missed in my undergraduate years. In my four years at UIUC, I'd always longed to learn about the human, the social side of agriculture. In my MSc courses, especially during my second year at SupAgro in France, this is exactly what I got. We studied farming systems, and moreover we learned how to study them in any context. The French definition of a farming system is not like in the US, where one would study a given crop rotation and its effects on local waterways or something like that. No, the French definition of farming system revolves around people, around the farmer that makes decisions within a given set of ecological and economic circumstances, and consequently the French way of studying farming systems involves a mix of observation, agronomic knowledge, and above all talking with local farmers. I think the SupAgro approach could really add to the US agricultural education system. At UIUC I received a great education about all the technical aspects of farming. I can speak with authority on plant diseases, soil structure, herbicide action, nitrogen ecology, you name it. So I'm really happy with most of my UIUC education, except that one point—there were no farmers in our discussions, in our studies. If we were to fix that one problem, it would greatly strengthen the agricultural education offered in the US.

At the same time I was visiting my old university last year, I was reading a book by Wendell Berry called “The Unsettling of America”, about farming and industrialization and ethics in our country. It was odd to read something so polemical or values-based, because I feel like the French, and particularly my farming systems education, try not to mix too much moral speech with political or practical programs. Mazoyer's masterwork on farming systems in history ends with a moral argument in favor of small peasant farming, but this argument is based entirely on economic efficiency, not on culture or morality itself. In contrast, Berry makes a condemnation of capitalism and modern industrial farming from a very values-based viewpoint. It's funny because in theory we in the US are more practical, economic thinkers, and in Europe they're more into the intangibles, the grand discourses. But in contrasting Mazoyer and Berry we see precisely the opposite. And it makes sense, because we in the US are also passionate about our values, our culture, our tradition, just as Europeans have their practical, efficiency-based side. Still though, after such a long time of my trying to distance myself from bombastic, confrontational discourses, it was odd to enter once again into the charged, extremist atmosphere that I remember from my undergraduate university education. I feel like university culture in the US revolves around a lot of radical, absolute arguments. Israel vs. Palestine, Classics vs. Postmodernism, religion vs. secularism. I don't want to readopt that way of non-dialoguing, dogmatic positions, etc., but it's important to read those who do. And I think Berry's moral arguments can help in my advocacy for small, responsible, sustainable farming, even if I prefer to focus on the more practical, non-discursive arguments.

During my years in college and living in the States, I was always frustrated that everything in our agricultural system and our very culture seemed so flawed, so problematic, so corrupted and anti-natural. I always felt impotent and angry, with an apocalyptic vision. In part my masters studies in Agris Mundus, especially the concepts we worked with in France, helped me to overcome this. But more than anything my knowing and learning from my wife changed how I view many agricultural and ecological and economic problems. With her I have spent years now forging a new ethic, one that recognizes flaws in the world agricultural system, and certainly urges us to work to change these problems. But our ethic is above all positive, empowered, with humans front and center in the quest for meaningful change. We focus not on the daunting wall of suffocating norms and the status quo that surrounds us, but on the autonomy, the protagonism of each person to live his or her life so as to promote the good, the right. So Wendell Berry coincides with me in that the US and modern agriculture in general should put the human farmer and his family at the center of any progress or change, but his worldview is very dim, pessimistic, almost impotent.

Quite a few former professors that I visited on my UIUC trip last year are very conservative in their view of agriculture and the world. I don't think they've ever decided if they are supposed to promote agricultural productivity or the quality of life for farmers. Implicitly, most seem to be tending toward productivity. Their research objectives are industry-focused, and researchers consult with ag input supply companies and not with farmers. These professors see their goal as improving crop productivity, and not necessarily improving farmer income or well-being. It doesn't matter if the farmer isn't living well, because the goal is to produce more and more from our farms in order to provide cheap food and raw materials for the rest of society. But this goal is only implicit, and is not total. There is no university mandate saying, “We value productivity over the producers”, but most of the teaching and research implies that. It would be better if this were made explicit, because then there could be debates over whether this is the proper path to take, or if the university should really be trying to serve farmers. But as is, there are no debates, because everything is sort of ambiguous, unspecified.

In fact, the US land grant universities (of which Illinois is one) would do well to look at their original mandate as expressed in the Morrill Act of 1863. This law declared that the federal government would provide land in every state in order to found a university dedicated:

“to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts, in such manner as the legislatures of the States may respectively prescribe, in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life”

This language indicates to me a clear desire to raise the living standards of the “industrial classes”, that is to say farmers themselves. Nowhere does it speak of increasing agricultural production or promoting the migration of rural people to cities. If only our agricultural universities in the US had taken this to heart, we might have a very different rural landscape today in our country. As is, the universities created by the Morrill Act have presided over 150 years of ever-decreasing farm viability, soil erosion, increasing obesity, and the replacement of the vocation of farming with exurban Walmart jobs. The universities have failed in the mission laid out in 1863.

Even progressives in the US sometimes suffer from an excessive focus on the technical side of farming. Miguel Altieri is one of the foremost thinkers in the field of agroecology, and one of the few professors at the big US ag universities that isn't toeing the corporate agriculture line. Altieri teaches at the University of California, but I believe he's Chilean by background, and consequently he talks a lot about agriculture both in the US and in Latin America. In this article he lays out some reasons that people in the US should be concerned with preserving small family farms in the Third World. Altieri demonstrates the role of Third World farmers as custodians of traditional techniques, and guardians of food security and biodiversity. I agree with most of his points (indeed, I've often made pronouncements along the same lines in my blog), but his attitude seems patronizing to me. He posits the peasant agriculture of the Third World as some sort of millenarian inheritance. This is true in some ways, but I wouldn't want people to fall into that old trap of thinking that Third World farmers are somehow museum pieces, stuck in a timeless past. Farming in the developing world is always changing and evolving, as it is in the developed world. In fact, the intensive farming methods used on some small farms in Asia or Latin America employ more pesticides per acre than do more extensive systems, or farms in the wealthy world!

Most importantly, for all of its benefits, in some respects small, intensive peasant farming goes hand in hand with poverty. People farm land intensively and create a lot of value per acre above all when land is very limited. Peasants with small parcels of land must make the most of it. Yes, they squeeze a lot of value out of every square foot, but they often have so little land (sometimes less than an acre) that their family still lives in misery. In economic terms, per acre productivity is often opposed to per-man-hour productivity. A Colombian peasant farmer that earns $3000 a year from his only acre of land is still in poverty, while a farmer earning a few dozen or a few hundred dollars per acre can have a high income if land availability, capital, and traction (animal or motorized) allow him to farm hundreds of acres.

Hence Altieri could be understood as arguing for maintaining Third World farmers in an ecologically-friendly poverty. He posits US farmers as “trapped” in an industrial system, in which the blessing of high income is paired with inherently destructive practices. This vision somehow justifies or takes responsibility away from First World farmers to improve the sustainability of their own practices, and puts the responsibility for ecological sustainability on Third World farmers that maintain biodiversity and the planet in general. In this vision, First World consumers can repay the priceless planetary services that peasant farmers provide us by purchasing their organic bananas and Fair Trade coffee to keep the peasants just above the poverty line.

I understand that Altieri is writing to convince a First World audience of the value peasant farms represent in their personal lives. Many of his readers likely have little concrete experience with peasant farming. I don't think Altieri means to say that we should favor “green” poverty in the Third World as an antidote or an enabler to the wealthy world's profligate lifestyle, but he can easily be misconstrued this way. Though Altieri's attitude is certainly different from the “productionist” religon of the major US ag universities, he seems to share with them a focus on abstract goals divorced from basic human wellbeing. So again, I feel like I need to reiterate the importance of remembering that farming is above all dependent on farmers. If we focus on other things, even good, progressive things like the ecological merits or the per-acre productivity of small-scale peasant production, then we risk ignoring the priorities of peasants themselves, as US universities have done for a century and a half.

Amazon burgers

This is an article about how the startling growth in Brazil's cattle herds has been the prime factor in increased deforestation rates in the Brazilian Amazon. It's not logging, slash-and-burn farming, or even the dreaded soybean farms that are felling the Amazon; it's the cattle. And most of the increase in Brazilian beef production goes for export. So the rest of the world's hamburgers are made from what was Amazon rainforest, much as happened in Central America in the 1970s and 80s.

Today's Kunstler post, on hubris

I know I've been linking a lot recently to stuff from James Howard Kunstler. Well here's more from him. Here he talks about techno-hubris and organizational hubris. Techno-hubris is the well-worn belief in the US that technology can and will solve any current or future problems we have. I have long been aware of and opposed to this mentality. But organizational hubris is a new concept for me. It describes a belief that we can organize our way out of problems. I don't know if Kunstler is referring to organizing in the sense of changing infrastructure or management, or of grassroots organizing. Perhaps both. Ever since my college days, I was sort of taken aback when people advocated grassroots organizing as the solution to problems that seemed to me to be over all a question of objective facts. Of course many things, even seemingly technical problems, are in fact best solved by grassroots and political organizing. Promoting agricultural production and food security is best achieved through pressuring governments and aid groups to favor farmer access to land and inputs, as opposed to researching new, cutting-edge ag technologies. As a way to address our fossil-fuel dependent society and global warming, Kunstler himself often recommends political measures such as favoring investments in trains and densely-planned cities as opposed to cars and planes and suburban sprawl. Another example of a successful organizational effort to address a problem is this campaign to outlaw toxic substances in personal care products.

But "organizing" to find a cure for AIDS or cancer or even poverty always seemed a silly exercise to me. I just didn't have a language to describe the folly of this type of thinking. Now "organizational hubris" gives me the term I was looking for.



April 11, 2005
Over in Vermont last week, I ran into a gang of biodiesel enthusiasts. Biodiesel is oil extracted from vegetable crops that can be used to run engines and do other things as a replacement for petroleum. They were earnest, forward-looking guys who would like to do some good for their country. But their expectations struck me as fairly crazy, and in a way typical of the bad thinking at all levels of our society these days.
For instance, I asked if it had ever occurred to them that bio-diesel crops would have to compete for farmland that would be needed otherwise to grow feed crops for working animals. No, it hadn't. (And it seemed like a far-out suggestion to them.) Their expectation seemed to be that the future would run a lot like the present, that bio-diesel was just another ingenius, innovative, high-tech module that we can "drop into" our existing system in place of the previous, obsolete module of regular oil.
Their scheme seemed misconceived in the same way as the ultra-high-mileage "hyper-car" that has been pushed for years by Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute -- the main effect of which would be to promote the idea (especially among environmentalists!) that we can continue the suburban life of easy motoring. Lovins' even compounded this inanity by locating his institute's new headquarters (a green building!) way up a mountain road in Snowmass, Colorado, where all the employees have to drive cars to work (in four-wheel drive vehicles!).
I notice lately that there are two kinds of hubris operating among the "forward-thinking" classes in America (which is to say, those who are thinking at all). One I call techno-hubris. It represents the idea that there are really no limits to our powers of innovation and it is obviously the product of our experience in the past century, especially of our victory in World War Two and of the 1969 moon landing. The other kind is organizational hubris, the certainty that we can organize our way around the oil bottleneck, global warming, and population overshoot. What both modes of thinking have in common is that neither recognizes the probability that we are moving into a period of discontinuity, turbulence and hardship. Both modes of thinking assume that we can negotiate a smooth transition from where we are now to a new-and-improved human condition.
There is a remarkable consistency in the delusional thinking at every level of American life these days. When Americans think about the future at all, they seem to think it will be pretty much the way we live now. The buyers of 4000 square foot McHouses think that they will be able to continue heating them with cheap natural gas, not to mention commuting seventy miles a day. The stadium builders assume that major league sports will continue just as it is today, with chartered jet planes conveying zillionaire athletes incessently back and forth across the continent. The highway engineers and the municipal planners are focused like lasers on providing more roads and more parking spaces for evermore cars. The architects are designing more skyscrapers, despite the decrepit condition of the electric grid and the frightful situation with our depleting natural gas supply. We're so confident, so sure of ourselves.
When you combine the seven deadly sins with high technology, you get some really serious problems. You get turbo-sins. It's dreadful to imagine what goeth after turbo-pride.

Four short movie reviews

This weekend my wife and I saw 3 movies (or at least parts of them) on TV, and watched one movie on DVD. I wanted to comment on their merits and other thoughts they inspired in me.

First is "Before Sunrise", which follows Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke as a young pair that meets on a train, get off in Vienna on a whim, and spend the night talking and falling in love. This has long been one of my favorite movies, though I'm glad I saw it when its sequel, "Before Sunset", was already out. That way I didn't have to wait ten years to resolve the ambiguous ending! Anyway, I think that this is one of the finest, realest depictions of two people getting to know each other, from superficial conversations to deep connection.

Second was the last X-Men movie. I had never seen the other ones, and frankly we saw less than half of this one, since we tuned in late. I'm not big on action movies with lots of posing, cool lines and facades, and magical finger-waving and facial expressions of profound superpower exertion. But this was a good flick. I especially liked how it imagined the plights superhuman mutants would face in modern US society. There was a mix of apprehension and awe on the part of the general public towards the mutants, and the movie posited a US Agency for Mutant Affairs, as well as the dilemmas arising when a "cure" for super mutant powers is discovered. Many mutants considered it an affront to their identity, and didn't feel they needed a cure for what wasn't an illness. But others, fed up with not being able to lead a normal life, jumped at the opportunity to rid themselves of their powers. Anyway, a nerdy movie, but I felt it did what science fiction does best--use a fantastic premise to explore real-world societal issues.

The third TV movie we saw was Rocky IV. Beyond the bad 80s synthesizer music, and the Cold War propaganda, it's got an interesting message. Basically Rocky, in this film, as well as in the original and the last films (I don't remember parts II, III, or V), represents what I think the US used to stand for, and should still strive for. He is a guy with some special ability, but moreover with a good work ethic, who makes a decent life for himself by working hard in his chosen field. In the first movie as well as the most recent, his great achievement isn't an improbable victory over the reigning champion, but simply lasting 15 rounds against him. He fights honestly and with great determination, and in the process gains the respect of those he comes in contact with, including the arrogant champions in the two films. In the fourth film his opponent is an arrogant, evil Soviet, and Rocky eventually beats him. But Rocky doesn't gloat, and again he teaches the Soviets and his boxing opponent a lesson about humility, endurance, hard work, and tolerance. When Rocky starts making for a hard fight, the Soviet (played by Dolph Lundgren) doesn't comment on his skill or his punches or anything. He exclaims, "This is not a man. He is made of iron!" His surprise is at Rocky's tenacity, his resistance to adversity and abuse.

So I feel like the Rocky films, as formulaic as they often are, represent a good ideal: excellence through hard work, without arrogance. Rocky avoids two ugly phenomena that are prevalent in popular culture in both the US and the world. One is the glorification of fame and wealth, which justifies dishonest means of reaching them, and an ugly gloating in the unlikely event that you do achieve them. The other ugly trend is a cowardly celebration of mediocrity, saying that just trying is good enough. Rocky avoids this too--he reaches the upper echelons of his field, never giving up or being happy with mediocrity.

The film we watched on DVD was "Paris, Texas", a Wim Wenders film from 1984. I was reluctant to watch it, because it looked to be one of these depressing, bleak German-directed films my father-in-law seems to favor. But I was wrong. It turned out to be a touching portrait of a father trying to connect with his son after years apart. It also had a lot of striking panoramas of the 1980s southwestern US, scrubland and desert interspersed with prefab buildings and general postindustrial decay. It made me nostalgic for a time when the consumerization of US culture wasn't as far advanced as it is today.

Jennie Smith on Haiti

This is an article written in the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake by Jennie Smith. She stresses the importance of working with Haitians as opposed to proposing big new projects from outside. Jennie Smith wrote an excellent book detailing the traditions of collective work in Haiti, called When the Hands are Many.

Agrarian debates in the Colombian Congress

I am directly translating this article from the magazine Semana. It discusses the challenge of taking land from criminals, and returning it to the displaced. A tangential element that I find interesting is that Congress and politics in general seem to be livening up again. While under Uribe there was little debate among the growing uribista bloc of politicians, now that almost everyone claims to be uribista, they are starting to debate amongst themselves. This is a good thing, though it's a shame that uribismo is like the new baseline everyone starts out at.

The Complex Challenge of Land Restitution

León Darío Peláez - SEMANA The ministers of Agriculture, Juan Camilo Restrepo, and of the Interior, Germán Vargas Lleras, during the debate on land that the House of Representatives undertook Wednesday

POLITICS--Recovering 2 million hectares (5 M acres) and returning it to displaced people, an objective that promises to be very complex, is the commitment the government has made. The first task will be to reveal who today possesses the land appropriated by mafias and illegal groups. How will the government do it?

In his inauguration speech, president Juan Manuel Santos promised the peasants of the country that they wold become the true owners of the most productive land, and those in charge of exploiting it.

That promise also included the decision to take aware ownership of the most productive land from agents of violence, and return it to the families of displaced peasants who, due to narcotrafficking, guerrilla groups, and paramilitary terror, have been forced to abandon almost 5 million hectares (13 M acres) in the past three decades.

In concrete terms, the challenge of the government during the next four years will be to recover at least 2 million hectares that were usurped by the mafias, according to the Minister of Agriculture, Juan Camilo Restrepo.

But the objective becomes a real challenge for the government, at least that's how it seems after the revealing debate on land that the House of Representatives carried out Wednesday night, in which Congressmen from the Liberal Party and the Alternative Democratic Pole examined the complex problem that the Executive has in his hands.

The government itself, through the Minister of the Interior, Germán Vargas Lleras, recognized that in Colombia there is "a shameful concentration of rural property in the country", while the Agriculture Minister admitted that in Colombia the displaced population "surpases 3 million", which was the very first time that a government representative didn't refer to the figure of 2.5 million that the prior government insistently cited.

A "subtle legalization"

In the House session, Congressmen Ivan Cepeda (Pole) and Guillermo River (Liberal) demonstrated that land concentration in Colombia is so marked, that only 4 percent of owners control 61% of the best land, obtained in many cases through the forceable clearing of land undertaken the paramilitary offensive in the two past decades.

They mentioned that 5.5 million hectares (14 M acres) were abandoned, invaded, or transferred in "shady dealings", from which 385000 families were expelled. Of this land, 1.2 M hectares (4 M acres) were farmed before being cleared.

Representative Ivan Cepeda revealed that behind the legalization of these divested lands there are large businessmen that even "counted with help from the State" to acquire the property.

Because of this, explained Cepeda, many of the properties seized by demobilized paramilitaries have not been returned, because according to his investigations, the title to this property has been legalized through "subtle" mechanisms.

Cepeda mentioned cases for which he requested urgent investigation by the authorities. For example, he indicated that brothers of the president of ECOPETROL [the Colombian state oil company], Javier Gutierrez, obtained a farm that, according to his knowledge, "was stolen by men under Jorge 40" [Jorge 40 is a famous paramilitary boss].

The Congressman also requested that Eder Pedraza alias "Ramon Mojana", a demobilized paramilitary, not be extradited. Jairo Castillo Peralta, alias ‘Pitirri’, one of the star witnesses of the trials involving paramilitary links to politics, claimed that Pedraza followed the recommendations of the ex-Senator Mario Uribe to "find cheap land" in the lower Cauca valley.

"Eight years in debt"

The Representative Guillermo Rivera also made various denunciations in the agrarian report that he presented to Parliament, especially the way in which many "paramilitary front men" were benefited by the agrarian subsidy policies promoted by Alvaro Uribe's government and its Agriculture Minister, Andrés Felipe Arias.

"The will and the role of President Uribe's government, and especially of his Agriculture Minister, was far from starting a process of restitution. In fact, the security measures for victims and the guarantees for them to reclaim their lands were enormously limited."

Rivera mentioned the case of ten palm planters and palm oil refineries that contributed 29.5 million pesos ($15000 US) in 2002, and 27 million pesos for the referendum [for Uribe's reelection] and have received 8 billion pesos ($4M US) in subsidies and 279 M pesos ($140000 US) in low-interest loans.

He even revealed that the extradited paramilitary chief alias "Macaco" returned the Las Margaritas farm in Putumayo, together with 160 M pesos ($80000 US) that corresponded to a debt for low-interest loans with the FINAGRO program [a government ag financing program].

Because of this, the Congressman warned the Juan Manuel Santos government that its first challenge in consolidating the proposal of returning 2 M hectares to the displaced peasants would be to establish who holds the title to this land today.

Furthermore, said Rivera, it is urgent to carry out a census of "Land and property", as was ordered in a Constitutional Court decision in 2009, to determine "the real numbers" with which the government should work to take on this "inheritance left by the Uribe government".


The formulas

The government accepted the Congressional analysis and considered formulas to accomplish its goal of land restitution, which will be included in the in-progress Land Law, which will be created in the Congress.

This project, as the Agriculture Minister Juan Camilo Restrepo said, will have as its purpose the development of policies that allow "a break in the front man chain" that took over the land of displaced peasants.

Restrepo also explained that the Land Law that is proposed would be complementary to the Law of Victims. And he announced that the "spurious decisions" undertaken by INCODER [the Colombian rural development institute] would be reversed.

But the principal tool with which the government hopes to sink its teeth into the land problem will be the creation of a "special jurisdiction" for the nullification of title to property held by illegal groups. This property would be given to victims of forceable displacement.

And in that context, as the Interior Minister Germán Vargas Lleras explained, one of the new developments will be to "reverse the burden of proof" to demonstrate title to land.

This means that it would not be the responsibility of displacement victims to prove the property of their land to the authorities, but rather the State that assumes this function.

And how will it do so? For the procedure to be expedient, Vargas Lleras explained that it would be obligatory for businessmen to demonstrate to the authorities that their ownership and property rights are legitimate.

Representative Guillermo Rivera, who applauded this measure, said that it would give more agility to judicial processes, which could last less than two years

A trip to the Chivor reservoir

Last week I was with my wife again in the Tenza valley, so I'm including more photos. Here is one of the huge artificial lake created by the Chivor dam.

The main road runs along the lake, and there is even ferry service across the lake in various points, especially here, where the municipality of Macanal is cut in two by the lake.



We also went to Santa Maria, a town just below the lake that I've talked about before in my blog. It's not old; the town was constructed by and for workers on the dam, maybe in the 1960s or 70s. The setting is amazing, set in the tropical forest at the foot of high mountains. Can you imagine seeing this as you looked out the window of your grammar school?



Santa Maria is also an environmental innovator. It has a really progressive recycling program. People separate all household waste into different buckets, and each day's garbage pickup is only for a given waste type. If you put out poorly-sorted garbage, they simply don't pick it up! They have a big worm composting operation in the town, and the recyclable and non-recyclable waste is compressed into cubes and sold to processors in Bogota once a year, as I understand. In Santa Maria they're even experimenting with green roofs, without any pushing from high-tech firms or green nonprofits:





Look at the size of that squash! I'm surprised the roof's not caving in.


On the main plaza of Santa Maria, there is a couple that serves excellent arepas (corn pancakes) every night from 5pm to 8pm. This woman shapes pre-cooked corn dough into a little bowl:


Then she fills the bowl with grated cheese


Before closing it up and patting it into an arepa shape on top of a square of banana leaf:


Her husband then cooks them. First they sit on a hot griddle with their little bit of banana leaf underneath to keep them from sticking.


Once they're well-cooked, he puts them on a grill inside his contraption, right on top of the flame:



The griddle is wood-fueled.


And here I am enjoying the final product:


It's filled with melted cheese

Violence in Venezuela and Colombia

This is an article from the New York Times about Venezuela's soaring homicide rate. They compare it to Iraq's rate, though I'm not sure what the statistics qualify as civilian deaths as opposed to military deaths. For example, I wouldn't agree if a murder by a neighborhood death squad in Baghdad were qualified as "military" while a gang killing in Caracas weren't. To me they're the same thing.

Though in the past I've complained about the paper's shallow, biased coverage either of negative or frivolous stories on Venezuela, I think this is an important issue to report. I don't think a soaring murder rate implies an existential flaw in a given government, as this article seems to imply, but it certainly does cast doubt on the policing and judiciary of that government, as the article rightly points out.

Anyway, we can compare this to Colombia's murder rate, which dropped a lot this decade, though it seems to be rising again. At the beginning of the decade our murder rate was even higher than Venezuela's now, though it's been cut about in half. Even after adding in another four thousand annual deaths due to our war (this graph doesn't depict civilian war deaths), we're still better off than Venezuela, for now. In Colombia lately we have about as many people murdered per year as in Venezuela, but our population is 1.6 times that of our neighbor, so they're in much worse shape than we are. Anyway, I'm glad Colombia is less violent than it used to be. However, this drop in violence has occurred at the same time as an increase in state power, economic inequality, and human rights violations (plus a lot of forced disappearances, which I'm not sure if they're accounted for in our statistics). So we may be in for a new, Venezuela-esque rise in murders in the near future, if the methods we've used to "solve" our murder problem end up favoring more violence in the future.

Article about Benin

This is a good little bit from Angelique Kidjo, a famous singer from Benin. She doesn't say anything profound, but I appreciated reading about Benin's history. The country is near to my heart, as I spent a summer doing research on farming there.

Responsible gold

Here is an article from the Independent about sustainably mined gold. I like the idea of favoring small-scale mining practices as opposed to the destructive, murderous standard here in Colombia. The question is how to replace the large mining projects here with smaller, more responsible alternatives. Also, the monthly income the article cites for miners is only 250000 pesos, less than half the minimum wage. I know cost of living is low in the Choco region, but I hope this isn't the entirety of sustainable gold miners' income.

More from Kunstler on the origins of the suburbs

October 24, 2005,
Readers of my stuff and audience members at my college blabs have been complaining lately that I wrote The Long Emergency as a wish-fulfillment fantasy because I hate suburbia. So perhaps it's a good time for me to clarify my thoughts on suburbia.
First, we need to recognize its origins. Even the Romans had suburbs, and the wish to inhabit the borderlands (to borrow John Stilgoe's term) of the largest cities is not a new thing. But in America the pattern evolved to an extent never before imagined. America's cities emerged hand-in-hand with industrialism, and by the mid-1800s the industrial city was regarded as undesirable. As soon as the convulsion of the Civil War was over, railroad suburbs were created for the very well-off, and systems for designing them were innovated by the likes of Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted, creators of New York's Central Park. There were very few of these special places, and they formed the basis of what would be known as the American Dream.
The idea behind these suburbs was simple and straightforward: country life as the antidote to the horror of the industrial city, with its moiling slums, its noise, congestion, bad air, disease, and obnoxious industrial operations. One could access the city by day for business and be back in a rural villa for dinner thanks to the railroad.
The suburb of the streetcar era was an elaboration of this pattern for a growing upper-middle class (and the streetcar era was relatively brief). It allowed a finer grain of suburban development because the stops could be much closer together.
The Model T Ford was introduced in 1907 and built on assembly lines in 1913, which made them cheap and affordable. When the disruption of the First World War was over in 1918, the automobile permitted an extenstion of the suburbs far beyond (and between) the streetcar lines. The great boom of the 1920s was largely a result of all this activity. This project was interrupted by the Great Depression and the Second World War, and then furiously resumed when the war was over. Up until the 1970s, suburbia was a kind of accessory to America's manufacturing economy. But as industrial production moved overseas, the creation of suburbia itself insidiously replaced it as the engine of the US economy.
This brings us to where we are today, with an economy driven by a land development pattern and a system for delivering it that is hugely destructive of terrain and civic life. Since it depends utterly on reliable supplies of cheap oil, we can assert that it has dubious prospects as both an economic enterprise and as a living arrangement. The obdurate refusal to recognize its limitations begins to have tragic overtones for our society.
Having directed so much of our post-war wealth to constructing the infrastructures of suburban everyday life, we are now trapped in a psychology of previous investment that makes it impossible for us to imagine letting go of it. This is expressed in Dick Cheney's tragic phrase that the American way of life is non-negotiable. Now, circumstances will negotiate it for us.
It is true that I hate what the suburbs have done to my country. But the assualt on our landscape and the withering of our civic life was an obvious evil before the specter of peak oil signaled an absolute end of suburbia. What I certainly despise as much as suburbia itself is the stupid defense of it by people who ought to know better, such as columnists for the New York Times. I also believe that this stupid defense will continue and spread and become a tremendous, tragic exercise in futility for a people who could be putting their minds to a much better purpose in finding other means to carry on the larger project of civilization.

Las Vegas

Here is a good, acid-tongued treatment of Las Vegas and its history from James Howard Kunstler. I used to have family there, and I must admit that my mother and I had a good time once driving down the Strip, laughing at how horrid and ostentatious and fat and unhealthy and wasteful everything was.

This is one of several writings by Kunstler that I've linked to lately. The guy is bitter and apocalyptic, and I'm not sure if I'd like spending much time around him. But he's right on in his condemnation of what's wrong with US urban environments (sprawl, domination by chains, lack of personality), and his common-sense prescriptions for reclaiming a liveable country (more compact cities, a return to economic activity that actually produces tangible things, less reliance on our cars).

Getting away from computers

I have written before on the ill effects that excessive electronic use can have on your mind. Here is a recent NYT article about a group of scientists who study these issues, and their restorative rafting trip in the wilderness, far away from email and electronics.

Anyway, it reminded me of that Vonnegut short story, "Harrison Bergeron". It's about a future world of rigid equality. Beautiful people wear masks to make them ugly, and agile ballet dancers are fitted with weights so they dance no better than their peers. Most strikingly, intelligent people wear earpieces that emit a shrill screeching sound at irregular intervals in order to interrupt their thoughts. How ironic that Vonnegut's dystopian vision has somewhat come true, although in typical US fashion, it is people themselves who have elected their burden through free choice. The most intelligent among us tether ourselves to distracting, blinking, beeping machines that make us stupid and dispersed!

Haitian election and Wyclef Jean

Well Haiti's getting ready for its presidential elections in late November. Here is an article detailing some of the legal cloudiness surrounding many of the candidates. And anyone who's been paying attention is aware of singer Wyclef Jean's candidacy.

Here's word from a Haitian-American who seems to think Wyclef Jean is the best thing since sliced bread. I think the silliest thing in the article, and a summary of the entire post, is his claim that Jean's 29 years living in the US somehow suit him best for being president of Haiti. Hell, if that's the case, why not send in Rudy Giuliani, or General Petraeus, or my mom's neighbor in Chicago? They've lived in the US all their lives, and would be sure to effectively jam US norms onto Haitian society, as has worked so well in the past!

And here is another Haitian-American with an admonition for Wyclef not to run for president. I was going to go on a whole tirade in this post about how the Haitian Diaspora often thinks it knows better what Haiti needs than do regular Haitians, and how Wyclef's candidacy is the archetypal manifestation of this thinking. But this article, a measured critique of Wyclef Jean's presidential bid, said what I wanted to, and in a much better, calmer, more erudite way. Basically the author points out that Wyclef is a singer that has hardly lived in Haiti (never in his adult life), which does not suit him well to lead the country as president. More importantly, Wyclef seemed to voice tacit support for the war criminals that ousted the president in the 2004 coup d'etat, which definitely puts him on the bad-guy list. In fact, I think the biggest piss-off of the whole Haitian election is that the Fanmi Lavalas party, the principal, most popular party in Haiti and the party of the still-exiled president ousted in 2004, is banned from participating.

And to close, here's a rather acid-tongued (but dead-on) article comparing Wyclef Jean to Sarah Palin.

The ruse of vertical farming

This is an NYT article I've been meaning to comment on for some time, for almost a year in fact. It proposes vertical farms as a solution to food security issues.

First off, Mr. Dickson D. Despommier's initial premise is false. In spite of climate change and population growth, farming as we know it will still be around, in forty years and beyond. The only way it wouldn't be is if humans were no longer around. Despommier echoes the common lie that farming is inherently damaging to the environment, but this is simply not true, as I've explained in other posts about urban bias and about the care rural people usually give to the resources on which they depend.

A vertical farm would be a heavy consumer of fossil fuels. The materials used to build a vertical farm would be energy-intensive things like steel and glass. In addition to this, hydroponically-grown plants get all their nutrients from synthetic fertilizers that use a lot of energy to produce or to mine. Lastly, heating a transparent glass-and-steel structure uses huge amounts of energy. This is the main reason why carbon-emissions studies consistently find that produce grown in greenhouses in cold winter climates use more fossil fuels than warm-climate-grown produce shipped in from far away. All this means that vertical farming would not only not be a green, climate-friendly option for food production, but that it wouldn't even be that feasible in a world of decreasing fossil fuel resources.

The economic viability of vertical farming is impaired by this energy-intensive nature, but also because a vertical farm would have to compete economically with high-rent offices in the types of dense urban settings Despommier proposes it for. Part of the reason farming is done in rural areas with low land value, and high-rise offices are built in places with high land value, is the differential economic returns to agriculture vs. commercial office activities.

The big logical and physical problem that Despommier isn't mentioning is that we live on a flat surface, with a sun overhead. There's only so much sunlight falling on any given square meter of the earth, and if a plant intercepts that light, it's not available for other uses or plants. A vertical greenhouse could ostensibly work by capturing the morning and afternoon light that would hit vertical surfaces when the sun is in the East or the West, and even at noon in the temperate zones the building could get light from the South (or the North, if you're in Argentina). But in a downtown area, you're likely to have towers crammed together, shading each other on every side. In such a setting, the only viable greenhouses would be on the top floor of each building, which is to say that it would no longer be vertical farming but rather just horizontal greenhouses on the tops of buildings (which I think is a fair idea). In no case, even if it weren't shadowed on its sides by surrounding buildings, could a vertical building capture more light than the amount of area covered by its maximum shadow. So if you've got a vertical farm that's 100 meters high by 20 wide, you'd be better served by a horizontal greenhouse that measures 100m x 20m on the ground.

This point starts to give the lie to Despommier's claim that vertical farms would be uninfluenced by seasons and weather. In wintertime there's less light available from the sun, so many plants don't produce as well or at all. Cloudy or snowy days impair crop growth. The water used in a hydroponic system comes from somewhere, and weather affects its availability. It is possible to overcome weather limitations in a greenhouse by things like recycling water or heating the space in winter, but this always implies an expenditure of yet more fossil fuels.

Despite the author's assertions of the clean, pesticide-free nature of a vertical farm, the fact is that greenhouse agriculture uses a lot of pesticides. By assuring warmth, abundant plant growth, and humidity, you're basically creating a paradise climate for most pests, and there's no killing frost to wipe the slate clean every year. As a result, most greenhouses spray lots of poison on their plants, and both consumers and workers in greenhouses suffer the health consequences.

Even if we were to pursue the project of producing more of our food in greenhouses as opposed to open fields, the most sensible thing would be to build normal, horizontal greenhouses. These have the potential to maximize production per unit area, with fewer capital expenditures than a vertical farm tower. Despite his ignoring the fossil fuel and pesticide use of greenhouse production, Despommier is correct that it would be a good thing to produce our food more locally. But building a horizontal greenhouse in low-value vacant lots just outside of downtown areas would mean that food would still be very close to the consumer, and probably closer given that most urban dwellers don't live in the central downtown areas.

If vertical farming were ever to catch on, it would have to be for vegetables and maybe fruits (though I'm not sure how you'd cram a bunch of trees into a tower). But most land use, and land abuse, comes from large-scale grain production, which under no circumstances would be viable in urban towers. If a large share of our fruit and vegetable consumption were to move to urban vertical farming, this would mean more competition for one of the most viable, sustainable sectors for rural small farmers (and one of the friendliest agricultural land uses possible). Given that Despommier seems to envision a vertical farming dominated by large investors, with "managers and workers" as opposed to farmer-owners, this amounts to further replacing small farmers and the rural communities they support with large capital and low-wage jobs.

The author seems to be caught in the future fantasy, positing a world of unlimited synthetic resources that we can use to overcome nature. We can farm in towers, and even if this implies burning more coal, it doesn't matter, because we will no longer rely on the natural world for our well being, just on our own totally controlled, synthetic world.

Essentially Despommier is proposing factory farming for vegetables. He is applying the same philosophy as confinement animal operations do, of cramming production organisms together in industrial buildings and feeding them industrial inputs plus lots of biocides to stabilize the unhealthy ecological balance that's created.

Home gardening, windowpots, and even rooftop gardening on existing structures make sense in order to green a city, to produce local-grown, good-quality food, and to connect people with nature and one another. But industrial towers built expressly for veggies would be at best a gee-whiz oddity, and at worst the expansion of anti-rural, synthetic, industrial food production, greenwashed with a novel, vaguely ecologically-friendly patina that would make it more palatable for society.

Despommier posits a future world of reduced resource availability and increased pollution. It is precisely for this reason that I am against the promotion of more energy-intensive, polluting technologies like vertical farms.

Haiti and the fantasy job market

In the immediate aftermath of the Haiti earthquake, I participated in a very cool volunteer program. A phone company had set up an emergency hotline, to which people could send free text messages communicating their location and their needs. Volunteers then translated the messages from Kreyol into English, and this way emergency responders could know where there were urgent needs for certain things (food, medicine, water, tarps, etc.). I was one of the volunteers translating from Kreyol to English. I have to assume that many of the calls for help that I translated were never responded to. There would be thousands of similar requests: "I'm in such and such a place. I'm hungry. There are many children here too. We need medical help". Knowing where one such request was coming from wouldn't be too helpful when emergency responders could have simply walked out on the street and encountered pressing need wherever they turned. Furthermore, we see that more than 6 months after the quake, many basic needs are still not being met!

This experience of translating text messages made me think about a lot of things. After the first few days and weeks, most people were not asking for food or water, but rather for jobs. This would make no sense to the emergency responders, but it was certainly a logical request. If you're offering me material aid, the best help would be to give me work. There were also people who wrote in offering their help as volunteers, or writing to thank some aid group, or even those who wanted to know European soccer scores. It was cool to see people's vitality, their insistence on a return to normalcy. But it was also distressing to see people asking the hotline for jobs, as if it were a magical oracle. It made sense though, as I imagine local people were kept in the dark as to how the service worked, and what it could and could not provide.

The whole magic oracle mentality was not some vestige of Vodou. It was mainly the urban, more professional classes that wrote begging for a job from the magic text message service. This confirmed a suspicion I've long had, that people in a post-agrarian economy are really the superstitious ones. Their livelihood depends not on real things they can create here and now, but on moving to the city, studying the same thing as thousands of others who will end up unemployed, praying someone will "give" them a job, sometimes even setting off for other countries. The Third World is filled with people who squander their scarce resources on "get-rich-quick" solutions like going to the capital city to study typing, or catching a boat to Miami, instead of investing those resources on the less glamorous but very real business opportunities in their immediate surroundings. In short, there's a whole class living in a fantasy world, meanwhile scorning the real world before them and hence losing any possibility of actually improving it. And it's not just Haiti--much of work culture in the US is founded on such delusions.

Slums

Here's a good video from Robert Neuwirth about slums and their importance in the world. Right now a billion people live in squatter settlements in the world, which represents a sixth of the population. In the future this population promises to grow to 3 billion, or a third of the future world population.

Right to Food

This is a brief discussion by Raj Patel of the right to food.

I believe, and think many others do too, that food is indeed an intrinsic right. If you have no food, no other supposed liberty or right means anything. That said, I don't know how one ensures this right in the real world. In a small group of people, it would be fairly simple to make sure that no one went hungry, even if one family or another had a bad hunt, harvest, or income flow for a period. But in a larger society, it's not so easy to keep track of the needy, or to convince those that have food to share it with others, especially with strangers. Furthermore, in either a small or large group of people, there is an important hypothetical question: does someone who doesn't work have a right to food? For children the answer seems to be yes, because they're dependent and can't provide for themselves. But what if an adult were to decide that he or she didn't want to work for food? I don't think this situation truly presents itself that often in the real world. Though we seem to have a constant fear of "free riders", neither hunter-gatherers, farmers, or urban dwellers are wont to sit around, even if they were able to subsist despite their laziness. I think most people want to work, want to create, and feel a natural link between work and food. But it seems that even a tiny minority of lazy bums, or even just the fear that in the future such people would present themselves, often throws a wrench in the thinking about the right to food.

So if a society were to make the right to food a reality, it would have to deal with free riders in some way. I imagine a small group could provide food for the needy, with the tacit understanding that those who don't even work for their own sustenance forfeit their right to the sustenance generated by the work of the rest of the group. Again, in a larger society that's harder to enforce. Once you separate work and the production of food, how do we decide if someone is legitimately working? In a food-producing society, it's simple. If your work normally produces food (crisis notwithstanding) or other valuable things for society, it's valid work. But if you live in a city, and have not found work, or work in something that doesn't produce sufficient income, how do we determine if you're working "hard enough"?

Peace Brigades International in the Cimitarra valley

This is a cool video from Peace Brigades International, an international NGO that accompanies grassroots groups that are threatened by violence.

Two Chinas from the World Policy Institute

This is an article about the labor situation in China. Aside from its main point about the difference between inland, Chinese-owned factories (lower pay, more repressive) and coastal, foreign-owned factories (more beholden to workers), the article outlines some interesting trends. It says that industry in general is paying more heed to workers' demands, because there is a nascent labor shortage in China. Fewer young people, and rising living standards in the countryside, mean that urban employers have to please their employees to attract and keep them. In addition, the article hints at a change in Chinese business policy to favor local production and consumption. I think this is ultimately a good thing, as only by favoring the national market (and hence a rise in national living standards) can a country truly become developed in every sense of the word.

Detroit agriculture

This is an article about soon-to-be-released prisoners that tend an urban garden. Since my days coordinating a community garden in the Altgeld Gardens housing project of Chicago, I've come to appreciate more and more the therapeutic nature of gardens. It seems that there is a lot of urban agriculture going on in Detroit. Here's an article about a guy who wants to become Detroit's urban farming tycoon, buying up large tracts of land from city government at bargain-basement prices, and turning it into large commercial farms. I applaud the guy's vision and initiative, but I don't think it's ever a good idea to deliver large amounts of resources to one person, even if those resources are in disuse or decay at the moment. If Detroit is to become agrarian, a fate I would celebrate, I prefer it be through many smaller-scale initiatives, as opposed to one big monopoly.

Walmart and Clusterfuck Nation

These are two re-posts from the archives of James Howard Kunstler's Clusterfuck Nation blog. They give an idea of the timbre of his blog, as well as giving a good argument why the discounts one enjoys at a place like Walmart are not worth the social cost they entail.

October 24, 2002
Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan's vaunted "productivity feast" purportedly tells us everything we need to know about the US economy. In fact, it tells us quite the opposite: that statistical analysis conceals the truth at least as often as it informs us.
"Productivity" is another way of describing efficiency, and efficiency is understood to be an unequivocal social benefit. But the triumph of economic "efficiency" has done more to destroy American communities than anything. WalMart is the best example. Americans love WalMart. Everything you need in life can be found there under one roof at bargain prices. WalMart's ability to move vast quantities of merchandise over huge distances and distribute it around the nation in a "warehouse on wheels" is considered the last word in retail trade efficiency. Their ability to destroy rich and complex networks of social and economic relations has also been remarkably efficient. Everywhere WalMart landed in America small business districts died, and with them died millions of occupational niches and local interdependencies that added up to communities.
American communities at their best were not efficient. Retail trade was a multi-layered system carried out by retailers, wholesalers, warehousers, jobbers, and independent distributors, as well as manufacterers, who were participants in their communities, who employed their neighbors, who owned property locally, and took care of it, and in short composed an important strata of every community's middle class. The quixotic quest for efficiency put them out of business.
This process of corporate colonialism, which has been implaccable and insidious, left America socially and civically impoverished and ought to be viewed as a fantastic swindle. Americans were conned into surrendering all the social, civic, and economic infrastucture of daily life just so they could save ninety cents on a giant bag of Cheez Curls. What kind of people would allow this to happen to them?
If one follows the Greenspan view of ever-increasing efficiency, what further bargains await down the line for America? Are we going to surrender due process of law because our failing suburban environments can't support norms of decent behavior? Will we elect maniacs who promise to keep the Happy Motoring experience in operation by conducting military adventures for oil?
The law of diminishing returns casts a dark shadow over our foolish quest for efficiency and Americans sleepwalk in its darkness.

November 3, 2002,
The New York Times reported Saturday that car sales fell 30 percent in October, commenting that "strong auto sales this year have been a key contributor in propping up consumer spending, which in turn has been the main impetus of economic growth."
This ought to raise several troubling issues, the most obvious one being: is that all our economy is about? Buying and selling cars? In a way, the anwer is yes. The US economy is now based on the creation and maintenance of suburban sprawl and all its furnishings and accessories. Cars happen to be major accessories. So are suburban houses (Realtors call them "homes" to try to instantly invoke an emotional connection to what is, after all, just another consumer product).
What keeps the cycle of car-buying and house-buying going? Easy credit. Loans. Often with little-to-no collateral involved. Often to people with poor records of repaying loans.
What happens when the pool of all potential borrowers (even the most marginal) shrinks to near zero and even deceptive gimmicks, like "zero-percent financing," fail to bring in new ones? Then there is no more economic activity in the United States because we don't do anything else here (except make movies, TV shows, and pop music and only a tiny percent of Americans can be in show biz, though practically everyone wants to be). We've outsourced the actual making of most mundane products to distant nations where people work for peanuts. Everyday retail trade is conducted through "efficient" national chain stores, not through local networks of complex, fine-grained economic relations. We subsist on Caesar salads the components of which travel an average of 3000 miles from field to table (unless you belong to that segment of the population who get by solely on chicken McNuggets, Hostess Ho-Hos, and Pepsi Cola, which travel the same truck routes as the Caesar salads).
These elements point in the direction of a system unwinding. More tragically, as it unwinds, we will be stuck with all the unsustainable furnishings -- the farflung commodity housing, the redundant chain stores, the countless miles of blacktop in need of continual repair, the gazillion cars that we can no longer afford to replace (not to mention the unsold inventories of no-longer affordable new cars). We'll be stuck living in places that are not worth living in, and not worth caring about, with no networks of local economic interdependency, far from any food supplies.
These are our prospects even without probablity of international military mischief, Jihad, de-stabilized oil markets, and terrorism.
There's really only one reasonable way out of this predicament: the re-scaling of America and the reconstruction of local economies.
We are not prepared.
On the same page in the business section as that Times story on car sales, was another stpry about the fantastic success of the Humvee, the military super-car that has become a status symbol among the hyper-suburban rich. A marketing consultant named Dr. Clotaire Rapaille was quoted as saying: "People told me, 'I can protect my family [in a Humvee]. If someone bumps into me, they're dead.' People love this feeling."
Now that's marketing savvy!

Gay black people in the US

This has nothing to do with my normal blog posts, but I thought this list of famous gay blacks in the US was kind of cool.

Early Haitian subsistence

This is an interesting article by Bob Corbett, who maintains an encyclopedic website on Haiti. In this article, he basically argues that the subsistence farming system adopted by peasants under Petion, the first ruler of independent southern Haiti, was not a calamity but rather a very good option for Haitians at the time. They had recently won independence from brutal slavery, and did not want the plantation system the new northern rulers were trying to push. So peasants retreated into a simple but satisfactory life in the countryside. According to Corbett, this satisfactory subsistence lifestyle became an unsatisfactory life of misery in the 20th century, when the system's very success led to increased population and resource demands, hence reducing abundance per person.

Slum tourism

This is a measured take on slum tourism from a resident of Kibera, a slum in Nairobi. I agree with his aversion to poverty porn, a voyeuristic marveling at the misery of others. But I ask myself where we draw the line between voyeurism of people (unacceptable) and honest inquiry into a place (acceptable and even desirable). What is the difference between watching Italians going about their daily life in a plaza in Rome, or Kenyans going about their daily life on a streetside in Kibera? This may seem like an academic abstraction or an unfair conflation of two very different situations, so I'll bring it closer to home.

When I take tourists around Colombia, I show them the lovely colonial architecture of our cities, the finest restaurants, the urban bazaars, the rural areas. Many of the places we go are predominantly peopled by the poor. In fact, one of the most interesting features of our trip to Medellin is a ride in the Metrocable, a suspended public transit cablecar that passes over some of the city's slums, which have been revived and improved by the increased mobility brought by the Metrocable. Medellin and Colombia are rightly proud of the social transformation brought about by enlightened infrastructure investments like the Metrocable, and they highlight it as a tourist destination. As my groups ride in the Metrocable, we see poverty below us, but also small commerce and industry, well-kept neighborhoods, and an avant-garde public library building in the middle of the slum.

I don't want to show poor people to my visitors as if we were in a zoo, but I don't want to perpetuate the government's myth that Colombia is a shiny, bourgeois, perfect place, a safe museum for historic architecture and high-end shopping. So does my tourism fall into the acceptable category, like a trip to Rome, or the ugly, voyeuristic category, like a trip to Kibera?



A photo of the author, either appreciating traditional artisanry or posing voyeuristically with an oppressed neocolonial pawn

Composite swidden agriculture

This is an article about composite swidden agriculture in Vietnam. The authors describe composite swiddening as a mix of paddy rice in lowland fields, with a swidden rotation in hillside forests. They vindicate the environmental sustainability and economic sensibility of such a farming system.

Dystopia

Here is an old New Yorker article about people who believe the collapse of the US is imminent. I agree with many of James Howard Kunstler's assertions that US culture has been really messed up by consumerism and irresponsible business practices. The US has way too many ugly houses, ugly neighborhoods, ugly people, eating ugly foods, consuming ugly products, and acting ugly towards one another. In fact, in college I was so embittered by the flaws I saw in the society around me that I was pretty unbearable to be around. But I no longer believe that things are so bad. In the US there is still a substantial amount of people living what I consider a decent, well-grounded life. Many people still eat good, homemade food with their families, value old, beautiful houses, fix their own things and do their own work, contribute to their communities.

A separate, technical note is that I don't think we'll ever have a peak oil crisis as many of the article's subjects predict. As oil becomes more expensive, we'll shift our use to other fossil fuels like coal and natural gas. The real problem will be that our addiction to fossil fuels will continue to have severe climate effects, and it's likely that the people most impacted by this won't be in the US but elsewhere.

Underdevelopment and overdevelopment

Two days ago, my wife and I were driving through the Tenza valley and talking about some of my friends from back home in Chicago. It wasn't my intent, but this situation juxtaposed two sorts of extremes of economic and social development.

The horrendous roads of the Tenza valley make me think of desperately poor countries, like Haiti or Sierra Leone. When we drive over these roads, it's a hassle, and we're aghast that national and local governments could allow major roads to fall into such disrepair. But we don't live in the Tenza valley with its horrid roads, so they are basically a momentary annoyance in an otherwise comfortable life. Even for people who live in the valley and have to deal with the roads every day, life is not so bad in general. A resident of the Tenza valley may have to put up with bad roads, but he or she has access to good healthcare, healthy, abundant food, reliable electricity, decent schools, and many of the other things we expect a government to assure for us.

However, life can really verge on the intolerable for someone in a dirt-poor country. For a typical Haitian, the awful condition of roads is just one in a series of daily insults. Food is scarce, as are jobs, so hunger is a constant threat. Water and electricity are not reliable, so you can't be sure if you'll be able to wash yourself or your dishes, see at night, listen to the radio to know what's going on in the world. If you or your children get sick, you just have to bear it, and risk dying. And on top of it all, the roads are often flooded, pock-marked with holes, or non-existent. Life is undignified.

On the other hand, the subject of our conversation that day made me think of another unpleasant extreme of development. In the US we have somehow allowed market domination and consumerism to advance to such a point that we've lost certain simple things. Few people in the US have the pleasure of driving a manual transmission car, because companies have decided that everyone wants the "ease" of an automatic transmission. It's rare to be able to buy a loaf of fresh bread in a local store, because most food goes through supermarket chains. But the direct connection you feel with a manual transmission, or the convenience and delight of having a real neighborhood baker, are worth something. Maybe to people who've never had these pleasures, or to those who've always had them, it's difficult to understand their value. Indeed, when I talk to my wife about how special things like a manual transmission are, she doesn't quite understand what I'm getting at, because she's had them all her life.

Anyway, what we were talking about specifically during our drive was how I've known my Chicago friends most of my life, and how many of them still hang out with the same people as always, or date the same people we went to high school with. For my wife, this seems odd and incestuous. Admittedly, there's some truth to this. But I really value that my Chicago group still maintains a sense of community. Many people my age living in Chicago didn't grow up there. For them, it's a bright new city to move to, to enjoy, to develop as an individual. This fits into a common narrative we have in the US that disdains community, disdains the influence that one's place of upbringing has on one's character. How many movies and popular stories glorify the girl or boy who leaves behind a boring, small-town, Midwestern life, for the lights of a place like Chicago or Manhattan, where they can recreate themselves, unfettered by their past or their local culture? Anyway, the people I grew up with in the Chicago Public Schools have sort of fostered a dynamic of a tight-knit neighborhood, though we didn't grow up in the same neighborhood. I know certain people in a way few others do, because I've known them since we were 6 years old!

To my wife, who grew up in a Colombia that still has strong family and neighborhood ties, my Chicago group seems unremarkable, even unhealthily bound to the past. But I feel that in a US where people rarely finish high school in the same house or even the same town they were born in, it's important and beautiful that many of my childhood friends still form a tight-knit group. Again, it's something you don't value if you had it and took it for granted, or if you never had it, but I feel like I'm able to value it, having had it in the midst of a larger society that didn't.