Two articles on cancer

Here are two articles from Nicholas Kristof, from a few months ago. One discusses the Presidential Cancer Panel's report warning about various environmental carcinogens. The report went beyond the mainstream recommendations of personal diligence and screening, to suggest more active personal and policy moves to limit human exposure to carcinogens in things like pesticides and plastics. My household is lucky in that we can find and use non-synthetic products (glass and pottery containers as opposed to plastic, glycerin soap, no makeup, etc.). Nevertheless, I'm always trying to improve the environment for my family, especially for my wife and our unborn child. For instance, the house that we're rehabbing and hoping to move into before 2011 will incorporate garden and livestock space so we can eliminate more pesticides from our food.

Just a month after writing the prior article, Kristof had a cancer scare. Here's his account of it.

Not extracting oil

This article talks about the Yasuni natural park in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Apparently a huge amount of oil, 850 million barrels, underlies this rainforest. But the government of Ecuador, at the urging of the indigenous inhabitants of the reserve, has decided not to exploit this resource. In return, the international community will pay half the oil's value to the Ecuadorian government, as an indemnification from the rest of the world for not adding 410 million tons of CO2 to the atmosphere.

Concrete in Haiti

I'm not a big fan of block-and-concrete construction. It's ugly, costly, and the production of the building materials is environmentally destructive.

Nevertheless, I recognize that in Haiti much of the construction today is in concrete. In the countryside, many houses are built with wood framed and wood paneling, and in Port-au-Prince and other earthquake-affected cities it seems like buildings in wood and/or brick held up much better than concrete buildings. However, I don't think it's ecologically feasible for Haiti to rebuild destroyed homes in wood, especially not in densely-populated cities. In light of this, I thought these two articles were interesting. One article acknowledges that concrete is the most "indigenous" construction material in Haiti right now. The second gives recommendations on how to improve the existing concrete production process so it is safer and of better quality.

The whining/angry/super rich

There has been a recent flurry of blogging and thought regarding the super rich in the US, and I wanted to post a summary of it. Here is the original post from U of Chicago professor Todd Henderson that sparked the whole debate. He claims that despite his family's earning well over $250k a year, he doesn't consider himself super rich. A Michael O'Hare responded to this with a post that mixes number-crunching and sarcasm. Next a Bradford DeLong made some very insightful and sympathetic comments to the effect that, though O'Hare is right and Henderson is solidly super-rich, the expanding gap in wealth has left even those at the bottom end of the super-rich feeling like they're small potatoes compared to those at the top end. Next Felix Salmon gave a good summary of the back-and-forth. He talks about Henderson's priorities. One of them jumped out at me--Henderson considers private school tuition as an indispensable cost, because he cares about his kids. First off, I and most of my friends are products of the Chicago Public School system, and to be honest, we're smarter than almost anyone I know! Secondly, I salivated to think that with the 20 or 30 thousand dollars Henderson must be spending every year on each child's schooling, my family could live the good life for a year in Colombia!

Lastly, Paul Krugman gets away from the details of the Henderson affair to describe the rage and entitlement of the super-rich as a societal phenomenon.

And to finish things off, here's another summary of the whole affair, perhaps better than my own.

Sylvio Rodriguez on the Cuban revolution

"I believe that the Cuban Revolution dignified our country and our people. And that the Revolutionary Government has been the best of our history": Silvio Rodriguez (famous Cuban singer)

It's true: before the Revolution Havana was much more showy, potholes were rare, and you could walk for blocks and blocks of well-lit stores full of merchandise. But who shopped in those stores? Who could walk freely on those streets? Of course, those who had money in their pockets. The rest had to look at shop windows and dream, like my mother, like my family, like the majority of Cuban families. On those famous avenues only the "respectable citizens" (easily distinguished by the color of their skin) could go out for a stroll. The beggars, the rag-clad, almost all black, had to dodge about, because when a police officer saw them in a "decent" neighborhood, they chased them out with their billyclubs.

I saw this with my own eyes as a boy of 7 or 8, and I saw it until I was 12, when the Revolution triumphed.

On my corner there were two bars. In one of them, we sometimes drank porridge instead of eating dinner. On many occasions US Marines passed by, falling-down drunk, looking for whores and messing with the women from the neighborhood. One young neighbor of ours was thrown to the ground by Marines when he tried to defend his sister. When the police arrived, who do you think they took away? The abusers? No. The police kicked around the young university student, who of course was later active in the student uprisings.

We all know the photos of a Marine pissing, sitting atop the head of Marti's statue in Havana's Central Park.

That was Cuba before 1959. At least such were the streets of central Havana that I lived daily, the streets of San Leopoldo neighborhood, near Dragones and Cayo Hueso. Now they're destroyed. It shakes me o walk around there because it's like seeing the ruins of my own childhood. I sing about it in the song “Trovador antiguo”. How could we arrive at such deterioration? For many reasons. There's a lot of guilt on our part for not having seen the forest for the trees, but it's also the fault of those who want the Marines to return to defame Marti's statue and his memory.

I agree that we should fix our errors, get rid of authoritarianism and construct a solid, efficient socialist democracy, ever improving so as to ensure its own future preservation. But I refuse to renounce the fundamental rights that the Revolution won for the people. More than anything, dignity and sovereignty, but also health, education, culture, and an honorable old age for all. I would like not to have to find out what's going on in my country through the foreign media, whose focus often confuses me. I would like to improve many things I've mentioned, and others that I haven't.

But above all I don't want a return of that ignominious misery, that falsehood of political parties that would gain power only to deliver the country to the highest bidder. All that happened under the tepid watch of the Declaration of Human Rights and the Constitution of 1940. The Cuban experience before the Revolution, and the experience of many other countries, shows what consideration representative democracies give to human rights.

Many of those who attack the Revolution today were educated by it. Professionals who have left the country always compare the ideal conditions of "civilized Europe" to besieged Cuba. Others, a bit older, were perhaps able to "be somebody" thanks to the Revolution, and today they parade about like capitalist ideologues, learned in Law and History, disguised as humble workers. Personally I can't stand the fervent change-mongers, those new converts with their little courses in Marxism, who were the most zealous Revolutionaries and now they are the exact opposite. I don't wish them or anyone else ill, but such incoherence drives me crazy.

The Revolution, like Prometheus (I owe it a song by that name), gave light to the forgotten. Because instead of telling the people to believe, it told them to read. For that, as with the mythological hero, others want to make the Revolution pay for its insolence, tying it to a remote mountaintop where a vulture (or a bald eagle) eternally devours its viscera. I don't deny the errors and the excesses, but I can't forget the popular vocation of the Revolution in the face of aggressors that have used all manner of arms to hurt and kill, as well as the most powerful and sophisticated methods of diffusion and distortion of ideas.

I have never said that the US embargo bears all the guilt for our problems. But the existence of the embargo has prevented us from measuring ourselves fully.

I would love to find out clearly someday the responsibility for all our problems in Cuba.

For this reason I urge all those who love Cuba, and who desire dignity for Cubans, to yell with me today and tomorrow, all over the world: "Down with the embargo!"

Immigration reform

Here is video from Stephen Colbert's testimony, in character, during Congressional hearings on the AgJobs bill. I'm not sure why Colbert has chosen to champion this of all causes, but I'm glad he has. Here is an article from an Evangelical lobbyist praising Colbert's intervention. And here is the Take Our Jobs site from the National Farm Worker union. I'm not sure if the NFW is really encouraging people to take farm jobs, or trying to draw attention to the difficult conditions faced by farm workers, or what. In any case, it's good that this issue is in the spotlight right now.

Pig parts

This is an amazing video on the industrial uses of pig parts.

Confusing times in Colombia

Today it was announced that Piedad Cordoba, famous Colombia senator, would be banned from running for public office for 18 years. She was accused of treason (which was apparently dropped) and overstepping her duties. I believe she was also accused with promoting and sharing the FARC's ideology of just distribution of resources. Sounds like a crime for the thought-police, or a "crime of opinion" as one opposition politician fears.

Basically, Cordoba had been appointed some years ago by then-president Alvaro Uribe to hold hostage negotiations with the FARC insurgent group. It seems she was successful in this endeavor, because over the years numerous hostages have been unilaterally released by the FARC. However, the polemical, right-wing inspector general in Colombia decided that she went beyond her duties in her dealings with the insurgent group.

A major problem for me with this is that they are charging her based on evidence allegedly acquired from a FARC leader's computer years ago. But I assume this computer is classified evidence, because they aren't presenting the bases of the charges. This is always a problem with secret accusations, and the reason why we in Colombia and the civilized world insist on open judiciary processes. Furthermore, this is not going to lead to a trial. It is a decision that the inspector general is entitled to take, and there's no higher court to appeal to.

Anyway, I understand that Cordoba is considering suing the inspector general in the Constitutional Court. I hope she's successful.

Cordoba has been one of the few voices in Colombia in the recent past insisting on a negotiated end to our long-running war. While Uribe (and to a lesser extent his successor Santos) have always focused on military solutions, Cordoba and a few others have advocated dialogue. I think Cordoba's approach is right. To attempt a purely military solution to the Colombian conflict is to deny that there are deeper-seated reasons for it. It's as if there are a bunch of crazy guys who decided one day to put on fatigues and take up AK-47s and mount an insurgency, so all you need to do is get rid of the baddies and everything will be fixed. We in the US have seen that this doesn't work with religious terrorist groups, and in the case of an economically-motivated insurgent movement like the FARC or the ELN, such a purely military approach is all the more ineffective. If there remain persistent conditions of concentration of land and wealth, lack of respect for human rights, and corruption, then you can never get rid of unrest and anger in the population. Granted, in times like the past few years when the heavy-handed approach seems to be working, the voice of dialogue and reason may seem silly, ineffective, and even a conjurer of future ills. But I believe that if you look at a long enough timeframe, it will always be evident that pure force can only resolve social conflicts temporarily.

Sure, it might be possible to eliminate the FARC group through purely military means. Indeed, the recent blows to the FARC make it seem possible that they might be eliminated as a coherent organization. But if there remains a huge gap between rich and poor, and peasants and slumdwellers are desperate and destitute due to a system they know is unfair, you will never get rid of the unrest that was originally behind the FARC or any other leftist group.

What I foresee if Colombia continues on its current path is that we may "eliminate" the FARC and the ELN, just as a few years ago the AUC paramilitary coalition was officially disbanded. In the case of the AUC, a huge proportion of the ex-members simply re-formed into criminal groups with names like the Black Eagles, and now these so-called "emergent groups" are as bad as the AUC, possibly worse because they no longer have a guiding structure or political ideology. This isn't likely with the leftist groups, because despite their criminal dabblings, they remain at heart wholly ideological movements. So if the FARC were disbanded, I wouldn't expect a resurgence of smaller, freelance leftist groups. Certainly some ex-members would get into crime, but there wouldn't be a wholesale migration to new criminal groups.

However, if the economic, social, and even legal injustice that plagues much of Colombia isn't resolved, the frustration and anger and suffering of the common people will remain. Maybe FARC won't rise again, but we could easily see small-scale, local manifestations of discontent, either through legal channels or through insurgency. This could even coalesce someday into larger groups like the FARC or ELN of the past!

The other possibility would be that without leftist groups to provide some protection from the excesses of right-wing militias and powerful landlords, the peasantry would be so assailed by massacres, threats, forced displacement, land robbery, and the like, that no leftist response would re-form. This seems to be the case in northern Colombia, where injustice persists, but the paramilitary groups are so powerful that people don't voice their dissent, out of fear.

Neither of these possibilities--freelance leftist anarchy, or an obedient, terrified citizenry--is acceptable for me. Again, if we enacted real reforms to decrease the innate injustice in Colombian society, we might avoid these ugly scenarios. Indeed, Santos's ambitious land policies hold the promise of addressing the root causes of discontent and violence in Colombia. But many are skeptical that these policies, as progressive as they seem, can make a major change if wealthy oligarchs and criminals continue to hold lots of the strings of Colombia's government.

Maybe in the longer term we might become a society like Argentina or Chile. These countries, after undergoing years and even decades of murderous rightist dictatorships (which nobody hailed then or now for their progress against leftist insurgents or street crime), are today run-of-the-mill liberal democracies. People are more or less comfortable economically, inequality isn't obscene and suffocating for the masses, and mainstream politics tends toward the center-left. There are even frequent European-style protests by farmers and workers, demanding this or that benefit. I don't think this was the dream of any radical leftists in the Southern Cone of the 1960s and 1970s, but it seems like a decent-enough life. However, the overwhelming concentration of wealth in Colombia, our continued ostensible democracy despite left-wing insurgency and right-wing terror, and the distinct economic structure of our country make me think that the Southern Cone's boring but benign present is not in store for us. I fear what might be.

Water in the Southwest

Here is an article about the decreasing availability of water vs. the increasing demand in the Colorado River basin. It's not a new topic, but it seems, as the title implies, that we're reaching a real moment of reckoning. The arrangement of having millions of people living in a desert is no longer only theoretically nonviable, it seems that now those people are really going to be facing the absolute limits imposed by a desert.

Transforming integrated cash crop chains for food security in Africa (my essay for the World Policy Institute contest)

Food producers in Africa have insufficient access to inputs, information, and capital. Ironically, in the past many African countries possessed a robust system of agricultural support services for cash crop production. This essay proposes that African governments (possibly aided by donors) provide inputs, extension, credit, and improved marketing channels for food crops, using the same integrated chain that was established in many countries for export crops. This would comprise a state-funded support to the production and marketing of food, while allowing government to collect taxes to finance this and other state services.

In most African countries agriculture is the predominant sector, so taxes raised from agriculture are crucial to pay for government services and infrastructure. This was initially the logic behind the vertically-integrated production chains that francophone African governments implemented for cash crops like cotton, peanuts, and cacao. The state encouraged production of the export crop (mainly by providing agricultural inputs on credit), bought all national production at a guaranteed price, and sold it on the world market for a profit. The revenue was used to fund roadbuilding, industrialization, and general government functions. Even in the best scenarios, reliance on a cash crop undercut food security at the same time as it created national wealth, and when commodity prices began to trend downward, as they have consistently done in the past decades, the system entered in crisis. Today countries like Benin maintain this vertically-integrated system for production of crops like cotton, but the channels for provision of inputs and payment to farmers do not function effectively. Many farmers want to transition away from cotton, but the state provides inputs such as pesticides and fertilizers only if farmers plant cotton. Benin's government is left with accounting problems, as the subsidized inputs it provides for cotton are often applied to corn or other food crops, which are more useful and profitable for farmers.

Such countries could surmount this impasse if they were able to incorporate food crops into the vertical integration systems originally set up for cash crops. If the state were to retool its apparatus slightly, it could manage food crops in a similar way to the cash crops it has long relied on for revenue.

There are two options for accomplishing this retooling. The first would be a copy of the vertically-integrated cash crop system. The state would buy food crop production at a higher price than middlemen offer the farmers, store the crop, and sell it on national and regional markets when prices rise. This would be similar to Benin's treatment of cotton, with the state receiving revenue not from outright taxation but from managing price fluctuations. A welcome difference from cotton or other cash crops is that regional food crop prices, sustained by demand from burgeoning cities, will likely not experience the type of downward trend that cash crops have seen on the global market. At the same time, by buying massive quantities at harvest time (when prices are low) and selling when prices rise, the government would serve as a de facto food reserve and price stabilizer.

If governments are uncomfortable with participating so directly in the market, there is a second option based on farmer cooperatives. As was done in the 20th-century US, farmers can be encouraged and supported in forming cooperative grain elevators to buy and store production. These cooperatives would function in the same way as the government in the previous example. They would buy grain from farmers at harvest time, and sell it when prices rose. Part of the profits thus gained would be taxed by the government, and the rest invested as the cooperative saw fit.

The proposed system of large-scale buying and storing of food crops could be applied not only to the major grain staples of corn, sorghum, and millet, but also to beans, soy, palm oil, rice, and peanuts. Even perishable cassava, plantains and yams could be processed into meal or flour in government plants, and thus held for storage during long periods. Eventually meat and milk could also be managed in this way, though their short shelf-life would change the specifics of the process.

The strengthening of the farm-government-consumer nexus would allow for new expressions in the future. As cities implement and improve waste and sewage treatment facilities, the sludge and organic waste coming out of the cities could be transported to the countryside as one of the inputs offered to farmers through government channels. This would close the nutrient cycle in the country, build organic matter in impoverished soils, and lessen economic dependence on imported fertilizer

There are obviously a few potential pitfalls to address in this proposal. The government or cooperative would have to assure higher prices than independent middlemen, because otherwise farmers would sell preferentially to the latter. But the size and storage capacity of the large institutional buyers should assure their ability to outbid middlemen.

Also, storage of crops like corn or sorghum creates an incentive for standardization. A typology would be necessary to separate different classes of a given grain, much as grain elevators in the US separate soft red wheat from hard red. The centralization of marketing channels would encourage a focus on a few standardized varieties of each crop. This is good for industrial purposes, but a plan should be developed to avoid the loss of crop diversity and local varieties.

Perhaps the biggest challenge to the present proposal has to do with gender. Most cash crop farmers in Africa are men, and the government channels for agricultural support and marketing are male-focused. However, most food in Africa is produced by women. For this proposal to be successful, the farmers and farmer groups with which the government deals would have to be composed predominantly of the women who produce Africa's food. This presents logistical as well as social difficulties, as the government would have to create or link up with a new network of producer groups, while men are sure to resist the economic empowerment of their wives and female neighbors.

Many African governments have systems in place to support cash crop production, which generates revenues for the state. These systems are currently in crisis due to low world commodity prices, but could be retooled to promote food crops for national and regional consumption. If farmers of staple crops were eligible to receive inputs, extension, and credit to increase their production, and storage and marketing assistance to maximize their received prices, this would greatly improve food security in most countries of Africa. Farmer income and access to food would improve greatly, which is especially important considering that it is in rural areas that most poverty and hunger occurs. Rural life would become more viable economically, so the incessant flow of migrants from the countryside to urban slums would slow and even reverse itself. Cities would enjoy abundant, nationally-produced staple foods at low, stable prices. Replacement in cities and the countryside of imported food by indigenous products would decrease reliance on food imports, as well as rejuvenating traditional food culture and the use of locally-adapted crops. In short, the state would drastically improve food security by favoring food crops for local consumption over cash crops for global markets.

Runners up to the African Food Security essay contest

Here are the three runners-up in the African Food Security essay contest. One essay talks about rainwater harvesting for irrigation, one is sort of general and urges more investment in agriculture, and the last discusses the One Acre Fund's development model.

March against a Free Trade Agreement

A few months ago, during a summit of the European Union with various Latin American countries, the Colombian government signed a long-anticipated Free Trade Agreement, or TLC in Spanish, with the European Union. This was welcomed in many sectors of Colombia for the new markets it would open for Colombian products. However, in my region of Boyaca, this TLC was met with concern and protest. You see, Boyaca is one of the few areas of Colombia that has a high-value agriculture based on small family farms, without many large plantations. Most of the department is in the highlands, around 8000 or 9000 feet altitude, so the major agricultural products are potato, vegetables, and dairy, none of which lend themselves to mega-plantations. Furthermore, our history as the seat of the Muisca culture means that from before the time of the Spanish Boyaca was densely populated by small peasant farmers.

Anyway, the Trade Agreement with the European Union will be good for certain sectors of the Colombian farm economy, like cocoa, coffee, rubber, bananas, palm oil, and sugar, but bad for others like dairy. Even supporters of the agreement acknowledge this, but argue that the gains to certain sectors will outweigh the losses to dairy. The problem is that the farms that will gain are largely plantations in the hands of oligarchs, with lots of hired labor. Cocoa, palm oil, sugar, these are plantation crops, so better export prospects for them will strengthen the unjust division of Colombian in big landlords and peons. Dairy, in Boyaca and in other parts of Colombia, tends to be practiced by small, independent farmers, precisely the kind that any prosperous, relatively egalitarian society depends on. The flood of subsidized (and thus artificially cheap) European milk derivatives like whey, powdered milk, cheese, etc. will drive milk prices way down in Colombia, hence putting a lot of small dairy farmers out of business. And because Colombia does not meet certain sanitary certifications required by the European market, Colombian producers will not be able to export their products to the EU.

In the negotiations leading up to the TLC, the European Union promised to pay 283 million euros over ten years to the Colombian dairy sector, which the Colombian government will match with 30 million euros, to offset the losses resulting from the trade agreement. The money would go to projects that could ostensibly improve Colombian dairy competitiveness, such as genetic improvement of dairy herds. This is an unprecedented sum in such a trade agreement, but nevertheless it adds up to 70 euros per Colombian dairy family per year. Hardly enough to offset the loss of one's livelihood. A dairy federation in the north of Colombia put the loss to Colombian dairy farmers at about $1 billion US per year! And apparently the EU subsidizes its dairy farmers to the tune of 180 million euros a year.

As I understand it, the drop in tariffs will not occur immediately, but rather it will be phased in over the course of 15 years or so. Another part of the Colombian response to the flood of European milk products is that the government plans to increase dairy consumption in Colombia by 40%. This is not only unrealistic, but I have to wonder what the health effects would be of increasing dairy consumption in a population that already has a sufficient, well-balanced diet. Supersize Me, anyone?



This sign says: "The signing of the Free Trade Agreement with the European Union will bring ruin to more than 400000 dairy farming families. No to the TLC, yes to Colombian milk!" Indeed, by some estimates 80000 families in Boyaca make a significant part of their living from the dairy chain, and the department produces over a tenth of Colombia's milk.

So a few months ago, when I was in Tunja, our department's capital, I saw a big anti-TLC rally in the town's center. It was organized by the Boyaca branch of the federation of milk producers. There were also rallies that day and thereafter in other major towns of Boyaca. In Chiquinquirá, dairy farmers dumped 15000 liters of milk into the main plaza in protest of the TLC.

There were lots of reporters in Tunja for the rally.



Here is a poster from the rally, designed to look like the funeral announcements that get posted in the town plazas of Boyaca.


It reads: "The national government and the minister of development invite all to the burial of the Boyaca dairy sector."

In my teenage years, I bought into the watered-down, pop version of classical economics that seems to be almost a religion in the US. I guess that, surrounded by professionals working in teaching, textbook editing, computer programming, and other things not very directly related to basic subsistence, I could buy into the idea that different jobs, different economic activities were interchangeable. If it was more profitable to ship certain jobs or activities overseas, then so be it. I didn't realize that the accounting of comparative and absolute advantage is only one part of value. Economic activity, like any activity, isn't just about the bottom line, but it also touches on jobs, community cohesion, sovereignty, security. So the destruction of a given economic activity in an area, even though it may make economic sense for a country, always brings negative effects as well. Sometimes these negative effects outweigh the economic benefits. In the Colombian case, I would much rather see dairy farmers remain in business and plantation oligarchs lose clients, because the former create social fabric in our communities, and the latter fund perverse laws and illegal private armies.

Even after getting over my dimestore understanding of the Wealth of Nations, I always used to think it was silly when people protested against the increase in the cost of living or the effects of free trade. Wasn't the government one thing, and the economy another? What could the government possibly do to affect trade and the cost of living? Well in this case of the Colombian Free Trade Agreement, we see clearly that the government does indeed have to capacity to affect livelihoods and the economy, depending on the laws it makes and the market rules it allows to operate.

Anyway, the rally had this guy at the head, with a typical horse-drawn milk cart.


The problem was that that day there was also a celebration of schoolkids in the town's main square. I think they were commemorating the anniversary of some great leader.




So the protest's milk cart and the truck with a loudspeaker had to detour around the main plaza.


But the protesters were allowed to march through the plaza.


Eventually the marchers reunited with the vehicles on the other side of the plaza, and they kept marching (note the lovely semi-rural hills to the west of Tunja).

African Food Security essay contest

Here are the two winners of the World Policy Institute's African Food Security essay contest. The prompt was to offer an innovative initiative to improve food security in rural Africa. One essay suggests the promotion of Moringa oleifera- and peanut-derived food products to improve nutrition. The other prescribes micro-insurance as a help for Africa's ills. I submitted an essay to the contest as well, but it was not selected.

I have to say that I'm a bit disappointed by the winning essays. They are both technical fixes to hunger, which is fine, but I'd expect a little more creativity and complexity in such a competitive contest. More importantly, neither is a new concept.

Peanut-based and moringa-based nutritional supplements are nothing new. In fact, NGOs like Partners in Health in Haiti, as well as socially-responsible private companies like Valid Nutrition, have taken this model of RUTF (ready-to-use-therapeutic food) to the next level, so that it not only helps the families and children consuming it, but creates local industry and demand for local farm produce.

Crop insurance has been recommended for small peasant farmers for a long time, and indeed the essay here points to pre-existing programs. I wrote about crop insurance (citing two original articles on the topic) a few months ago.

Anyway, I guess it's understandable that the contest, co-created by a Peace Corps alumni group, would go more for simple technical fixes. But it seems to me that outsiders have been trying quick technical fixes for a long time now in Africa, and they never gain much ground. I would have liked to see winning proposals based on systems thinking and use of existing indigenous resources.

Guerrilla leader killed

I've just learned that this morning the Colombian armed forces killed alias "Mono Jojoy", the FARC's second in command. With the violence from the FARC welling up again, I'm not sure what to expect in the coming months. The war seems to be getting hot again.

Food and health

Here's another article for today. This one talks about a doctor who is trying to encourage good eating among doctors and patients. I think it's really good that doctors like him are taking a more holistic look at health and nutrition. In fact, when I was in school and everyone told me that I should be a doctor (because I got good grades), I always held that being an agronomist was like being a doctor, because food is what keeps us well and prevents many of the diseases that a doctor would be necessary for.

Ethiopia on my mind

This is the website for a really cool French NGO working in Ethiopia. It's called Ethiopia on my mind. The group focuses on two complementary areas. One is sustainable development projects to improve incomes and restore the natural environment. The other area of action, and the most unique of any development NGO I've ever seen, is the preservation of Ethiopia's spiritual heritage. The Ethiopian Orthodox church is an ancient institution, with countless riches in the form of architecture, art, and even intangible things like songs and improvised poetry. The church also serves as a major channel for helping society's poorest members, for schooling, and even for preservation of natural areas in the form of sacred groves and forests. To strengthen and preserve Ethiopia's spiritual heritage is thus to strengthen the cultural basis for the country's future development.

I translated EOMM's site into English. If you like what you see, hire me to translate your site! (I can translate to or from English, Spanish, French, and Haitian Kreyol).

Alejandro Reyes on Colombia's new land policy

This is a video (in Spanish) from Alejandro Reyes, the assessor to the government's new program of land redistribution. He lays out the major points of the new land policy:

• closing of the agricultural frontier, i.e. setting aside of all forest areas as natural reserves
• elimination of illegal armed groups and peasant colonists from indigenous and Afro-descendant reserves
• access to land for peasants that leave natural areas and stop planting illicit crops
  
• end to the chemical war against illicit crops
• shift of focus from large-scale livestock grazing to smallholder farms through intensification of livestock raising and redistribution of pasture land
• restoration of violently-cleared lands to the people displaced from them
• formalize land titles for peasants
• prevent acquisition of land by illegal groups for money-laundering purposes
• legally revoke title to idle farmland
• promote the creation of Peasant Reserve Zones by improving government investment in infrastructure for these zones
• reconstruction of two government institutes--the National Council and the National Unit on Land
• retooling of the National Institute for Rural Development
• survey of stolen land to reconstruct pre-displacement land titles, and government indemnization to current landholders who can prove that they didn't know the land they bought had been stolen
  

Uribe 2.0

A month and a half ago I mentioned that Alvaro Uribe, ex-president of Colombia, had been named to the panel investigating the Israeli attack on the Gaza flotilla. Here is an article written around that time that gives a point-by-point argument of why Uribe's history of contempt for human rights, international law, and courts in general makes him an awful candidate for the Gaza panel, and calls into question the panel's validity.

In addition to his UN commitments, Uribe will be guest-teaching classes at Georgetown this year. Here is an article describing a movement that is protesting Uribe's hiring by the university, claiming that his history of human rights abuses is totally antithetical to Georgetown's Jesuit mission.

Who is oppressed, who the oppressor?

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Working Stiffed
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

This is a funny and damning video from the Daily Show. In it, a correspondent interviews a real-life union in Nevada that hires low-paid, non-union temp workers to stage protests against Walmart. It's always been shocking to me that the Daily Show, a comedy show, often offers more insightful political analysis than real news shows, but now it seems it's doing thoughtful, hard-hitting investigative journalism!

Anyway, this bit struck me because it is indicative of a problem that Wendell Berry often discusses, namely the mental compartmentalization often seen in civic and personal life in the US. I mean, how can a union demanding better working conditions for one group of people justify hiring other people under the same working conditions the union is protesting? The answer is that it can't, not in good conscience at least, and I think the Daily Show does us (and the union profiled) a favor by making this clear.

Sort of on the same topic is a New York Times article I saw yesterday. It is entitled "Coming out of Wall Street's Closet", so I expected it to be something really drastic and interesting, like a top Wall Street executive admitting that his sector is a sham, more often extracting wealth from others in a zero-sum game than actually financing productive enterprise.

But no, it was just about some Wall Street leech that happens to be gay. The article earnestly tried to explore the implications and ramifications of this, giving a brief history of discrimination against Jews, gays, and women in the world of high finance. Maybe part of the story, transpiring before the 1980s, might be interesting, because it seems that at some point in history Wall Street actually contributed to the US economy in a productive way. But given that Wall Street as we know it today is basically a Ponzi scheme, I have a hard time seeing the drama or the interest in the struggle of minority groups to claim their part of the fleecing of America. As an astute comment on the article puts it, "In 21st century America, anybody can grow up to be a blood-sucking parasite! I feel inspired."

War in Colombia

Here are the translations of two articles, from the excellent news translation site Lo de allá. They remind us that the war here in Colombia goes on, and that a purely military solution is insufficient to resolve it.

Freedom

Recently Amazon.com recommended the novel "Freedom" to me. I don't read a lot of new novels, but the title seemed interesting to me. Anyway, today I read an article by David Brooks criticizing "Freedom". I've said before that I think of David Brooks as sort of a simp without a very accurate grasp of reality. But his critique of the novel intrigued me. Apparently the novel touches on suburban malaise, in the tradition of Revolutionary Road or the film American Beauty. Brooks claims very coherently that the novel never gets beyond a bland, superficial, imbecilic version of characters or the culture of the United States in general. Readers are left with a perhaps accurate portrayal of what's ugly in our society, but none of the redeeming qualities, none of the depth or nuance of real people, what Brooks refers to as that which is "lofty and ennobling". Anyway, it looks like an interesting read. Maybe I'll get my hands on it somehow.

Inequality in Haiti

Here's a post from Carla Murphy's blog. She talks about the glaring inequalities in Haiti. As I've gotten to know various places and looked into poverty around the world, a shocking revelation is that the idea of a totally primitive, impoverished place is just a fantasy, as such places don't really exist. Every place has elites. So when we hear about basketcase countries like Haiti or Chad, it's important to remember that those places don't represent some entirely different way of organizing humanity, where everyone is living in a backwards state of abject, primitive poverty.

No, it seems to me that everywhere, from Haiti to the US to Colombia, and probably to Papua New Guinea, has poor people and wealthy people. And those wealthy people aren't just wealthy by local standards, i.e. they have a few more goats than their neighbors or something, but wealthy by any standard. If this is indeed the case, we need to stop thinking of poor countries vs. rich countries, because all countries are then a mix of rich elites and poor people, in varying proportions. Obviously certain countries have a larger percentage of their populace in poverty than others, but it's good to recognize that the societies of Europe or the US are only different from countries in Africa or the Caribbean in degree of poverty, and not in their very nature.

This realization allows us to overcome the fiction that poverty in the US or even middle-income countries like Brazil or South Africa is inherently "better" than poverty in other countries. In the 21st century, when resources are abundant and the entire world is opening new horizons of possibility, poverty everywhere is more a question of lack of access to resources than lack of resources themselves. A ghetto-dweller in Chicago, a farmer in the Congo, a street vendor in Vietnam, all are surrounded by resources, and if they go hungry, which they do more often than they rightly should, it is simply because they lack the money and the power to obtain these resources. Likewise, the poor of Chicago or Ghana often have access to certain amenities like motorized vehicles or televisions, which I suppose is a good thing, but hunger persists in the world despite the increased availability of consumer goods. Certain countries like the US, France, or Cuba have programs to mitigate or eliminate hunger and poverty more or less successfully, and these are to be commended and their example followed. But I want people to be clear that poverty in a "rich" country is not inherently more comfortable than poverty in a "poor" country, and efforts to argue otherwise are silly. How do we compare the lower income of a Beninois farmer to the high risk of violent death of a poor young man from Chicago? Is a Colombian peasant better off than a Malawian because he has a longer lifespan, or does the constant risk of massacres and displacement from his land make the Colombian worse off? Instead of asking these stupid and unresolvable questions, I prefer to acknowledge that being poor is a bum deal wherever you are, and to work towards creating a dignified society without poverty.

How to deal with drug abuse in a society

This is an article from the Boston Globe decrying the epidemic of drug abuse in Massachusetts. I think the tone of the article is right on; it doesn't dwell on the moral failings of drug users or how they should just quit, but rather assumes the problem as one that the collective must address together. After all, even if I have no problem resisting the temptation of drug use, if too many of my neighbors are using, there are consequences that I'll have to bear--higher crime, widespread death, existential despair, breakdown of values, and the failing schools, dilapidated infrastructure, and flight of local businesses that result from an imploding tax base and the collapse of community. Furthermore, there is a good chance in a drug-ridden society that some of my family members will turn to drugs, which will of course be something that I would want to address, even if I'm not a user. So the pitiless stance of either incarcerating drug users or waiting for them to OD and die just isn't very viable, at least not if I want to live in a somewhat pleasant, functional environment.

This other blog, the Ghetto Intellectual, bitterly notes that the article describes white drug use as an epidemic, while blacks continue being punished for their part of the drug epidemic. This is a fair observation (though the Boston Globe article doesn't specify what color the drug users are, and I'd wager that there is a fair amount of black folk taking Oxycontin and shooting heroin, too), but I think the bitterness is unproductive. Ideally every state should be looking at the drug epidemic as Massachusetts does. Only if we recognize that drug use is a problem that affects us all (and implicitly that we are all part of a collective, whether or not we're the same color as our neighbors) can we effectively address it. Perhaps this is what the blogger is really getting at--that it would be a mistake to regard white drug use or any problem prevalent among white folk with a sympathetic eye, while casting only blame and hostility toward black problems. Like it or not, we're all in this together, and even if we're loathe to admit it, the problems affecting one ethnic group in the US affect us all.

Creative accounting at the Gates Foundation?

Here is an article from the peasant movement La Via Campesina denouncing the purchase of Monsanto stock by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. While La Via Campesina predictably (and rightly, in my opinion), decries the Foundation's dogmatic pushing of transgenic technology as an effective tool for poor farmers around the world, something else bothers me more. The Foundation promotes, among other things, an increasing use of industrial inputs in agriculture. A sizeable share of these inputs (seeds and chemicals) come from the Monsanto corporation. With the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation holding Monsanto stock, it stands to profit from an increased purchase of Monsanto products by aid and development donors as well as poor farmers. How can the Foundation be said to offer objective advice for the well-being of poor farmers when it has a vested economic interest in their adopting one system and one set of industrial products over another? If the Foundation weren't a non-profit, I'm sure there would be some potential fraud charges here.

The article cites Gerald Steiner, VP of Monsanto, talking about the new US program for international food security, Feed the Future. "Feed the Future is exciting not least because it recognizes the entrepreneurial imperatives that Monsanto and other companies operate by. We want to do good in the world, while we also want to do well for our stockholders." It is understandable that a company executive should want to please private stockholders. It is neither effective nor ethical for publicly-funded development programs or nonprofit foundations to do so, especially when these institutions have a large impact on different countries' national policies.

Fair trade bananas

Here is a Canadian article about some of the social and environmental problems behind the bananas Northern consumers get in the grocery store. The article recommends that consumers demand fair trade bananas, at least as a first step in making banana production more just.

Agricultural slavery

Here is another article courtesy of Raj Patel's blog. It details the legal proceedings against an Israeli (alleged) human trafficker operating in the US.

A funny way of articulating a damning reflection

Here is a short blurb by Raj Patel about capital investment in agriculture. He cites David Ricardo, early economist, who claims that since the appetite for food is limited, the capital that can be profitably invested in food production will have an upper limit, whereas the appetite for trinkets and novelties is limitless, so the potential for capital investment in them is limitless. However, if food become a trinket or a novelty, it seems that capital investment in agriculture would become limitless, fueling what we have today: a world where commodity markets are played with just like any other investment opportunity.

Two articles on from the excellent World Policy Institute blog

This is an article about Mexico's woes with the drug cartels. As the author points out, Mexico today has much in common with Colombia a decade or two ago. I marvel though that for all its involvement in the cocaine trade, Mexico actually produces none of it. Almost all the world's cocaine is still produced in Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia. It seems that once again farmers and producers of goods are getting a raw deal. Mexico's cartels, which merely transport and market cocaine, are reaping huge profits, while coca farmers and cocaine processors get very little of the final price of cocaine in the US. One bright spot for farmers is that I don't think Mexico's profits are at the expense of farmer incomes, but rather that Mexican gangs are capturing parts of the value chain that Colombian and US gangs used to control. And of course I imagine the final consumer is paying more for cocaine.

Anyway, this issue reminds me of a conversation I had recently with my wife, who did her masters thesis on opium production in Laos. There in Laos opium has longed served as a sort of social safety net. Subsistence farmers that consume most of their food production can get a bit of cash from selling opium. This cash serves to improve housing, buy hand-tractors, pay for medicine, etc. In addition, the opium produced or bought by farm families goes in large part to the elderly, who smoke opium as a way of soothing the pains of old age and the hunger of poverty. But now, as the Lao state cracks down on opium production, farmers lose this source of income, and seniors lose this source of solace. Incidentally, as opium production and consumption in Laos goes down, consumption of synthetic drugs like ecstasy and amphetamines is rising. So we see a natural product that benefits farmers and the most marginalized people in society, being replaced by more dangerous synthetic products that benefit foreign producers, criminals, and chemical companies.

Here is an article on a totally different topic--the suffering of Cuban's during the "transition period" of the early nineties, when the fall of the Soviet Union rocked Cuba's economy. The article was written in 1996 and so is a bit dated, but I know that the gap between what the Cuban government provides and what people need continues to be a big issue in the country. It seems to me that the Cuban government would do well to loosen control over the majority of economic sectors, while aiming to focus its centralized planning on a few key areas.

If anyone were to ask me, I would sit down with Cuban officials and recommend that they decide what areas are so central to well-being and the Cuban Revolution's mission that they don't want to entrust them to the market. I'm thinking things like food, medicine, and schooling. The government could continue to provide and regulate these services to the populace, or at least guarantee a base level for everyone, and leave the sale and provision of other things (like the guitar strings cited in the article) to individuals operating their own enterprises. This would free the government of the burden of trying to provide people with all their desired goods, while freeing the citizenry from the shortages and frustration of daily life. If the government were to remain in charge of certain basic welfare areas, it could continue to advance its socialist vision and remain in power, while garnering more support among regular people. Even in these basic areas, the government could allow certain free market aspects, as I believe is already the case with farmers markets where producers sell their own produce.

Environmental taxes in China

Here is an article on the possible introduction of various environmental taxes in China. If they actually do it, it would seem to me to be an important inflection point for China's economic development, from a dirty, low-wage model to a more environmentally sustainable and high-value model. Could it be that the rapid economic and social change in China, as well as the undemocratic nature of its government, will make possible a more responsible development trajectory than that in many other countries? (I'm thinking of the US, where we have been unable to pass far-reaching climate change legislation recently).

Michael Pollan on food and genetics

NYT articles on the Recession and a way out

Here is an article by the usually silly David Brooks, on the redefinition of our morality vis a vis materialism. He argues, citing others, that we in the US will have to rethink our attitudes toward wealth and excess in the coming years.

Here is one by Thomas Friedman denouncing the get rich quick mentality that has plagued US society for the past decades.

I find it odd that these two cheerleaders of consumerist globalization are now criticizing the side effects of the type of suburban, gluttonous lifestyle that they have spent decades promoting. But if this marks a genuine change of heart on their part, I guess it's welcome. The problem is that I don't believe they really see a logical connection between the merciless capitalism and consumerism that they plugged in the past, and the sad state of economic and cultural life in the US today.

And here is a more serious article detailing the simple measures that make for a prosperous society--a focus on national production, welfare, and markets, and a leveling of vast gaps in wealth. It's a shame that such common-sense ideas seem new and odd after decades of voodoo experimental economic thinking.

Pigs, Chinese factories, and tilapia fish in Haiti

Here's an article about an upcoming limitation on antibiotic abuse in US livestock farming. This is a topic I've discussed before, because when antibiotics are overused in agriculture, they become less effective for treating human disease.

Here's an article about a change in Chinese manufacturing toward producing higher-value products. I think this is a good thing; as some of the article's quotes point out, any country that really wants to develop as a good place to live needs to move beyond a focus on low-end manufacturing. However, as this report on small-scale low carbon innovations points out, the Chinese and the rest of us would be mistaken to equate high-tech with high-value. Often the best innovation comes from regular people and farmers combining old technologies in new ways.

Here's a video and article about an Ivorian who promotes tilapia fish farming in Haiti. I like to see what's called South-South cooperation, which is when people from different poor countries help each other with development issues. I also think it's funny that the African guy speaks English with a Haitian accent. I'm a bit worried about the ecological effects of releasing a non-native species in natural lakes, because sometimes that can lead to a collapse of other species (which ultimately affects the well-being of people that rely on those other species for livelihoods, clean water, etc.). But I think a lot of people operate in Haiti under the assumption that the natural ecosystems are already so degraded that there is no need to be cautious with things like species introductions.

Labyrinth

I just got back from ten days in my home areas of Chicago and central Wisconsin. I certainly have a lot of thoughts inspired by the trip, as well as things I've been meaning to write about for weeks, but today I'm going to talk about the film Labyrinth, which I just saw tonight for the first time in perhaps two decades.

Labyrinth is the story of an imaginative young girl who has to rescue her baby brother from the Goblin King's labyrinth. Jennifer Connelly is excellently cast as a beautiful girl, wise beyond her years, who catches the attention of the Goblin King, played by David Bowie. She gradually matures and takes on new strengths and responsibilities through the course of the film.

I love this film for a number of reasons.

First off, and least objective, is that I grew up with the movie. My parents and those of my two best childhood friends used to drop us off at the local gym every few Friday nights for the gym's regular pizza parties for kids. These were always a big event for us. We swam in the pool, then watched a movie while eating pizza. Probably about 70% of the time the film shown was either Labyrinth or The Princess Bride, both of which are excellent works blending reality and fantasy (Neverending Story is another great film in the genre).

But beyond my sentimental connections, tonight's viewing reminded me of many other merits of the film. Most obvious is the amazing muppetry, care of Jim Henson, George Lucas, and Frank Oz. There is a stunning array of goblins, scenery, mythical lands. The artistry is apparent in every scene. And the special effects are mainly done through actual puppetry and stagecraft, not some computer animation, so they don't at all look dated.


I also love the weird, psychedelic songs written and sung by David Bowie. They add one more layer of surreal content done by real craft. However, here is a differing opinion from a reviewer who loved the movie's effects but hated Bowie's singing.

Most of all I feel that Labyrinth is an honest, mature film for kids. It doesn't dodge around any issues it thinks are too tough for kids to deal with. The movie is scary in parts, and is imbued with certain palpable but nebulous adult tensions that kids can sense without necessarily understanding. This is exactly what the world of children is often like. The film's goblin world is delightfully detailed and fanciful, and does away with many of the more complex moral codes of the adult world. Again, this lack of established morality seems to me to be a real nod to the world of children, which is new and confusing and without as many givens as the adult world. Even the nascent romance between underage Sarah and the Goblin King, which is clearly inappropriate to the adult eye, isn't played with any heavy-handed morality. There are latent sexual tensions that erupt in the pleading and blind rage of a spurned lover at the end of the film. Here is a photo of the lovely couple dancing as Sarah is in a spell-induced stupor.


So all in all I feel that Labyrinth is a mature treatment of profound issues, but from a child's viewpoint. This type of high quality in children's entertainment is much more impressive than many of the winking, ironic Pixar films, which more often than not are merely adult-oriented films dressed up with animated characters. Labyrinth brings a sincerity and complexity that doesn't take kids for fools.

Latino like me

My wife and I are on vacation this week, which is why I've hardly posted anything in the past few days. We are visiting my hometown of Chicago, for my first time in a year and her first time ever. There are obviously a lot of sights and ideas inundating me from this visit, going from love for my beautiful city, to concern for friends that I know are going through hard economic times, to annoyance at the occasional excesses of consumer life in the US (my mother's washing machine is three times the size of the one we have in Colombia--who has that many clothes!?). I've been trying to think of clever, or eye-opening, or borderline treasonous things to write about the experience, but what has most jumped out at me is my newfound status as a Latino.

I am not originally from any Latin American country, and I do not look particularly "ethnic". I have been a fluent speaker of Spanish for about the past four years, but even when I would go to restaurants in Chicago where I knew the waiter would be more comfortable speaking in Spanish, I felt awkward about speaking it with strangers in this our Anglophone city. In fact, many times I would go places in Chicago with friends who'd lived in Spain with me, and if we would order Latin food in Spanish, the servers would understand and respond in English.

But my experience has been totally different this time with my wife. From the moment we got off the plane in Fort Lauderdale, we've run into Spanish speakers most places we've gone. We went through the non-citizen line in Immigration, and the officer there, by the last name of Ortiz, made pleasant smalltalk with us in a mix of English and really bad Spanish. The other officers in charge of corralling the non-citizens barked affably, mainly in the same grammatically-poor Spanish as our friend Ortiz.

One of the morals of this for people like Lou Dobbs who are terrified about the "Latin takeover" of the US is that they shouldn't worry too much. These customs officials, as well as most of the Latinos we've encountered in our stay in the US, speak pretty rusty Spanish. Even people who were born in Latin America end up speaking Spanish poorly after years in the States. At my 10-year high school reunion yesterday, we even saw a group of my former classmates that speak mainly English amongst themselves, and pure Spanish to their kids, because they want their kids to be comfortable in Spanish in a way they never were! A neighbor from my mother's block speaks English with what we'd call a heavy Puerto Rican accent, but she barely knows basic words in Spanish. Her accent in English is just that--not an indication of a different mother tongue, but a regional or ethnic accent, like the particularities of my speech by dint of my being from Chicago. The bottom line is that people who spend much time in the US become English-speaking Americans above all else. To a non-immigrant, many of these Latinos may look like exotic, non-US people. But to us who come from Latin America, we see them as totally Americanized. I'm sure a similar thing happens with Pakistanis or Nigerians or Croatians who visit US relatives.

That said, my wife and I have also run into many more recent arrivals to the US during our visit. When we walk down the street, we often overhear others talking in normal, correct Spanish, like us. As we carry on conversations in Spanish at stores, often the person at the counter automatically rings us up in Spanish. Even at the Indian restaurant we went to the other day, our South Asian waiter attended us in English, but the Mexicans that brought us the food confirmed our order in Spanish. At the renowned Byron's Hot Dogs in my neighborhood, we ran into an Ecuadorian working the counter. When I told him in Spanish that I wanted "everything" on my hot dog, he almost threw ketchup onto it, so I had to clarify that I wanted the "Chicago everything" (tomato, pickles, sport peppers, celery salt, mustard, etc.), and not literally everything. This wouldn't have happened if I'd said it in English, because in Chicago "everything" on a hot dog has a circumscribed meaning.

This has opened up a new world for me, a new Chicago underlying that which I already know so well. I get to listen in on the more frank thoughts and reflections of the Latinos working service jobs, or going to the park with their families. Even those ethnic Latinos that have lost the nuance of Spanish seem to feel more comfortable, to open up in a special way to my wife and me when they hear us speaking Spanish between us.

In the airport I was even mistaken for a Latino. The innumerable succession of officials, security guards, and bureaucrats addressed us in Spanish for their harried requests for passports, tickets, customs forms, etc. They always seemed a bit more relaxed when I responded in English. And by dint of our scary Colombian origin, my wife and I were automatically funneled into the X-ray inspection line for customs.

One funny anecdote doesn't have to do with the language we speak. My wife is almost six months pregnant, so she didn't want to go through the metal detector. In Bogota this wasn't a problem, but in Fort Lauderdale it meant she had to get a personalized frisking (like me in the high school dances of my Chicago Public Schools upbringing!). There was a guy in charge of the frisking giving his professional instructions in a mix of English, Spanish, and Jamaican patois, as best he was able, but he was relieved when I spoke to him in English. He told us we'd have to wait for a female security guard, because he couldn't frisk a woman. I told him not to worry, that he could do it himself. "We aren't Muslim or anything," I said, which gave him a hearty laugh, though I wondered afterwards if in the tense climate of "Ground Zero Mosque" America (which is in fact neither a mosque nor in Ground Zero) my comment was fuel for the fire of the generalized antipathy against Muslims.

Anyway, the woman security guard eventually came, and gave a detailed prep talk to us. She would be passing the wand over my wife's body, part by part. If the wand sounded, she would touch the area with the back of her hand, and if she felt something odd, she would touch with her fingers. Did my wife have any sensitive areas? This all seemed excessively careful to me, and all that talk, which was supposed to ease the experience for my wife, just made her nervous as the first barrage of rapid-fire English in her visit! In the end my wife said the shake-down was actually pretty thorough, so it was good they prepared you mentally for it, and that it wasn't a man administering it. But to me it seemed like the epitome of the early-21st century USA. On the one hand, terrorism scares have us bordering on a police state, at least in airports. But our concern for personal, civil rights is such that we have sensitivity training for the security guards of this police state.

I can imagine how this particular routine came about. Some people at some point were surely concerned about the effects of metal detectors on their body, so they refused to go through the detector. Not wanting to violate their right to not enter the detector, the aviation authorities provided the option of a personal frisking. But surely some woman objected to a man's touching her invasively, so there was a rule that only women would frisk women. But even then some woman must have still been taken aback and felt violated by the intimate nature of the body search, so they instituted this long preparation talk before the frisking. So we're left with this whole intricate spiel, when in the end the razor blades used by the World Trade Center bombers could still pretty easily be snuck through security!

We've had some other revelations and reflections related to language and culture, and the relationship between the US and Latin America. In the parties and get-togethers we've attended, I've of course introduced my wife around to everyone I know. Many people are surprised to hear that my wife had never been to the US before, and in fact had little interest in visiting before meeting me. It seems that even the most open-minded among us in the US find it hard to believe that not all Latinos are just dying to come and work here. So it's enlightening for my friends to learn that, at least in our part of Colombia, those who leave for the US tend to be less educated and are seen as uninterested in the development of their own country. They want to go somewhere where they think they can get rich quick doing menial labor. My wife's parents, on the other hand, always encouraged her to get a good education, and to use that knowledge and ability to work for the betterment of her own country. The part of her family that did go to the US confirms her stereotypes as superficial people mainly interested more in boob jobs, consumer junk, and the Miami lifestyle.

So my wife was never that interested in visiting or living in the US, not out of some Hugo Chavez-style anti-imperialist discourse, but simply because it seemed like better, more important things were going on in her homeland, and she wanted to be part of the construction of her own country. Granted, this is perhaps particular to Colombia. From what little I know of Mexico, I feel like the culture of emigration is much more widespread and powerful there, so a natural tendency for many people, both educated and uneducated, is to look to the US for work, income, culture, etc. It's hard to believe in sticking around and working on local development if no one else is thinking along the same lines. Even this though is sure to change over time, as Mexico's economy improves, the US economy tanks (in our conversations with my unemployed or precariously-employed friends, my wife has been amazed at the "Colombianization" of the US job market), and Mexicans realize the drawbacks of a national economic development model based on people's leaving the country. Anyway, I think that for the friends we've seen on this trip it's an interesting insight to learn that many Latinos are perfectly content to stay in their own country and try to make life better there, as opposed to going to the US.

Hands that Feed

A little over a month ago I wrote about a documentary on Haiti that my friend was trying to raise money for. Anyway, I'm now working as the Research Director for the film, which is called Hands that Feed. I'm in charge of a team that looks into questions central to the film's argument, namely that policies in Haiti and other countries dealing with Haiti have crippled the country's agriculture in the past decades. Here's the official website for Hands that Feed.

Video on Haiti

This is a well-done video overview of the conditions behind the explosion of shantytowns and food dependence that plague Haiti.

A farm in Chivor

Let's take a trip to a farm in Chivor, in the Tenza valley. Buckle up your life vests for the ferry crossing!



This lake used to be a river running through the valley bottom, but the Chivor dam made it into a long lake (and a huge money-maker first for the State and then for the series of companies they sold it off to).



Since the lake cuts through many municipal zones, the company running the electricity generation from the dam is legally required to provide regular transport for people, animals, and cars across the lake. Here's where you load your car onto the ferry.




Once we get to the other side of the lake, it's maybe a half-hour drive over unpaved road. Despite the lack of pavement, the road is actually in pretty good shape. The Tenza valley's roads remind me of Anna Karenina--all good roads are the same, but each bad road is bad in its own special way. In parts of the Tenza valley the roads are paved but with occasional potholes. I like these the best, because I've gotten accustomed to swerving to avoid the potholes, so it's a smooth ride. Other roads are paved without holes, but there are occasional abrupt dips where a faultline or landslide occurred, and they either paved over it or it never broke the pavement surface. I hate these, because it's hard to tell how deep the dip is, so you think you're going fine, and then there's a violent down-and-up. Often the potholes coincide with these dips, so there is a deep crevice crossing the road, filled with water and mud, and you have to slow to a stop to cross it.

Anyway, eventually we get to the town of Chivor. This is one of the newer towns in the Tenza valley, and consequently the architectural style is "bricks and ugly". Check out the monstrous church.


New as the town is, I believe there once stood a more dignified, adobe church here, which of course had to come down in the name of ugly brick and horrid colors. Progress! This devouring, demolishing philosophy never quits. The relatively new priest's residence adjoining the church eventually had structural problems (surely due to sloppy, careless construction), so instead of righting these, the parish decided to do a sloppy, careless teardown and build a new residence. That was two years ago. Apparently they didn't ask themselves beforehand if there was actually money for a new construction, so now the ugly church is complemented by a wall that looks like a dinosaur took a bite out of it.


Chivor's general architectural ugliness notwithstanding, I enjoyed seeing people hard at work maintaining, building, and improving their town.


And here's a lovely, fragrant orchid planted in the town's main plaza.



Ironically, despite the modernness of today's Chivor, the area has a lot of pre-Spanish history. My wife's tourism project is focusing on this angle to attract people to the town. There are many archeological sites and ancient trails in the area. Here is a monument in the central park showing the Muisca chief that controlled the emerald mines here.


For hundreds of years Chivor has been a major emerald mining region. This of course attracted lots of attention from the Spaniards, who were accustomed only to the small, rare emeralds found in the Old World. Today Colombia produces a little over half of the world's emeralds, and I believe Chivor produces about half of Colombia's emeralds. So we're talking perhaps about a quarter of the world's emeralds produced right here!

The emerald trade has not been an unqualified boon for Chivor. Much of the wealth mined from the area profits Bogota and world markets more than the town itself, which can't even get decent paved roads. Also, the lure of easy money has created a culture where people neglect their crops in favor of a stint at the mines, or a stint digging for Muisca remains and riches to be illegally sold to the highest bidder. The region was one of the most violent in Colombia in past decades, as mine owners (and their private armies) jostled for rights to different mines, paramilitary groups came up from the eastern plains to get a piece of the action, and even narcotraffickers flirted with the idea of entering into the emerald business. Residents of the area recall days when dead bodies would periodically show up floating in the lake, and a given town would hope the bodies would float a bit into another town's territory, so they didn't have to deal with the process of fishing out the body, identifying it, etc.

Luckily, all this has changed a lot. Mine owners and their crews have arrived at an agreed peace, the narcos have taken the message that they're not wanted, and the government presence keeps out paramilitaries and guerrilla groups. People are even starting to rededicate themselves to farming, to a legal, slow-paced pursuit that provides a sure source of sustenance, as opposed to the slim, thrilling prospect of a big find.

From the town of Chivor we meet up with local tourism boosters to go to a nearby farm. We park at one point on the side of the muddy highway, and hike maybe a half mile to the farm. It is not a long hike, but the up-and-down of the narrow, muddy footpath is tiring. I worry especially about if my pregnant wife should slip and fall.

The walk and the countryside remind me of Haiti. Numerous footpaths running to remote farms, far from any major road, cultivated hillsides, and the endless vistas of mountains beyond mountains. It is absolutely stunning.



Finally we arrive at the farm, where we are greeted by the owners with a cup of fresh panela lemonade. My wife sits down with everyone else to talk about different tourism prospects for the area, while I sort of meander about the farm, checking everything out. I am delighted with the diversity of this farm.

It has fruits like lulo. Check out the pretty flowers.





There is a fat, happy pig.


There are tomatoes climbing up the house.


There is a grove of banana trees entangled with vines.


The big-leafed vine is passionfruit (though without any fruit at this time of year), and the avocado-looking thing hanging above it from another vine is guatila. I believe in the US guatila is known as chayote, and you can get it at Mexican grocery stores sometimes. Here's a close-up look of chayote, which in the Tenza valley is a lighter green than elsewhere I've see it.

There's even a coffee bush in amidst everything. Though I don't believe anyone harvests this coffee--there's just not enough to justify it.



Have you seen a banana tree up close before? Actually it's not a tree, but a giant herb, the world's largest. The "trunk" only lasts for one season, and dies back after producing bananas. A shoot grows up and out of the middle of the tree, with a flower at the end. Its purple leaves unfold one by one, leaving female flowers that will produce bananas (or plantains, in this case). After a few layers of these, the purple flower bud only releases male flowers, which give no bananas, hence the bare stretch between the bananas and the flower.




Aside from the small garden around the home, and a few chickens and pigs, often farmers focus only on one major crop in their larger fields. But this farmer has a few activities going on. He grazes cattle on different types of pasture, as well as producing panela and guarapo from sugar cane.

Here is a mosaic of planted pasture for cutting, sugar cane, and natural vegetation.


I am amazed at how steep the planted pasture is in places. Our hosts told us that usually they cut the grass themselves to serve to the cattle, but sometimes they'll tie a cattle to a stake on the hillside to graze.




Here are the cattle grazing a flatter field planted to a different grass species.


You'll notice they're zebu cattle, unlike the cattle in most of the US. Zebus have a hump on their shoulder, a lot of loose skin on their neck, and tend to be longer-legged than European cattle.



Zebus are also very docile. Most of the cattle pictured here are uncastrated males.



European bulls are obnoxious, skittish, temperamental, vicious, so if you're raising them for meat you castrate them. But these zebu bulls are all grazing together peacefully, and don't mind if people pass through their pasture. In Africa I've seen little boys beating on them, climbing on them, yelling at them, and the cattle don't really mind. I can understand why in India they're considered sacred, contemplative.

Next we'll check out the farm's sugarcane. I don't know why in the Tenza valley they plant their cane so far apart. I don't think it's very efficient, because you don't get as much production in a given area. It would be different if they planted other crops between the cane, but I don't think they do.



Here is the mill for squeezing out cane juice. At harvest time, the farmer yokes an ox to either end of the big wood beam on top, and they walk around in a circle, driving the crushing wheels inside the machine. You feed sugar cane in one end, and it comes out the other end, squeezed dry of its juice, which runs down a channel to an evaporation furnace.


Next to the mill of course is a pile of squeezed cane stalks, called bagasse in English.


These stalks serve among other things to fuel the evaporation oven.


You channel the juice getting squeezed from the cane into the cauldron-like depressions on top of the oven, and it thickens to a syrupy consistency. At a certain point you dip a long dipper in and take out dippersful of syrup to pour into molds. When they cool, you have blocks of panela, the unrefined solid molasses we use in Colombia for eating and drinking. Of course you can also just leave the syrup to ferment, thus making guarapo, a sort of cane beer that farmers and workers take along to the fields to refresh themselves.




And what is our host doing with that banana tree and a machete?



Looks like he's cutting leaves, but for what?


Maybe it has something to do with that pot his wife is cooking, with firewood above and below.


Here the wife is searing the banana leaf to make it into a good serving plate.


Turns out she's cooking carne a la caldera for us. This is a typical dish of the Tenza valley. You marinate meat (in this case pork) for a day or so with lots of vinegar and spices, sometimes even beer or guarapo. Then you cook in in a cauldron over (and under) a wood fire for about an hour.

Here is carne a la caldera, all cooked and ready to serve.


With envuelto (corn flour cooked in a purple corn leaf), potatoes, and cassava, served on a banana leaf, with plentiful guacamole on the side.




In case you weren't already convinced that everything on this farm is done with great care and thrift, check out this plastic measuring cup used to serve guarapo. Looks like this cheap plastic cup's handle broke, but instead of throwing it away to buy another, the farmer repaired it with a bit of wood and twine.


The farmers' house is made mainly of tapia pisada, which I believe we call rammed earth in English. It's made by building a mold of wooden boards where you want your wall to be, then ramming in layers of earth to form the wall, after which you remove the wooden mold and go on the the next patch.


There's also a fair amount of adobe in the house. Adobe is pre-cast uncooked mud blocks that you assemble like bricks


The ferry service stops at 6pm, so that night we'll drive miles and miles over unpaved roads in pitch black and driving rain. We barely have gas, so I coast most of the way downhill in neutral, halfway between thrilled and terrified at the urgency of everything. But eventually we get to the main road, and then to Garagoa, where we fill our gas tank and stay for the night. We've had an amazing day!