A website for direct sale of meat, poultry, and cheese

This is a cool website of a company based in Wisconsin that links consumers with producers of animal products. I'm happy it exists, proud it's from Wisconsin, and interested in participating someday when I'm living back in the US.

Homage to Wendell Berry

This is an article by Michael Pollan paying homage to Wendell Berry. Since the 1960s and 70s, Berry has been insisting on the need for an agrarian ethic that links the way we eat to the way we farm to the way we live and die. Pollan rightly points to Berry as the spiritual father of those of us who have become concerned about food and farming in the past few years. And to think, if I found it difficult to be an advocate for sustainable food systems in the early 2000s, when our nation was more concerned with dot coms and terrorism than with the ecological and social ramifications of how we farm, or if I was often frustrated in 2005 when I was trying to run a community garden a year or two before the public at large knew or gave a damn about urban farming, how patient must Berry be to have been a voice in the wilderness for forty years before anyone paid much mind?

A return to our old model of farm price supports

Here is the link to a new report by the National Farmers' Union outlining new policy directions for future farm bills. Essentially they call for the government to support and stabilize commodity prices, instead of paying farmers the difference between market price and fair price. This is something I've advocated in past posts; such a change in farm policy would stabilize price and supply of commodities for the US and for the rest of the world, which would be good for consumers and producers. Those who would suffer are the grain traders, who thrive on volatile prices, and the food processors that profit from artificially-low commodity prices. I wouldn't shed many tears for these last two groups.

Legacy of the Alliance for Progress

Here is a quick article discussing the Alliance for Progress, a well-intentioned and initially effective US plan in the 1960s to invest in economic development in Latin America. The article laments the corruption of the plan in the 1960s that converted it from an ambitious Marshall Plan-type affair that left countries with political autonomy, into a tool to fight Communism in the hemisphere. The article rightly points out that nowadays much of the US diplomatic and development presence in Latin America is dedicated to ineffectual efforts in the War on Drugs (though it is incorrect to point to Plan Colombia as a current example, as it ended some years ago). I also like the shout-out to Bogota's Kennedy neighborhood, which was set up as a build-it-yourself neighborhood with infrastructure contributions from the US. As I understand, families were given parcels of land on a grid of streets and infrastructure, and each family built its own house with its own labor and resources. My wife's parents met there as children.

Blows against impunity

Recently a major player in the administration of ex-president Alvaro Uribe was sentenced to 25 years in prison. Jorge Noguera, ex-head of the DAS (like Colombia's FBI), was convicted of working with illegal paramilitary groups and illegally wiretapping Colombian citizens (human rights advocates, union leaders, even judges). Noguera is only the latest in a growing chain of officials in the Uribe government who are being sent to prison. This is aside from a number of imprisoned paramilitary bosses who claim to have worked with Uribe in the past. Until now, Uribe has not been tried for anything, but the legal decisions are touching people closer and closer to the ex-president.

In similar news, here is an article about the legal basis for prosecuting Donald Rumsfeld and other Bush administration officials for crimes against humanity perpetrated in the course of the War on Terror.

Greg's Colombian house part 2

Here is the long-awaited next installment of my guest post series on my buddy's blog, Nickhaus. In it, I write about the process of sealing the deal on the purchase of our new house in Colombia last year. If you missed the past installments, here's Nick's intro of me, and here's my first post on our getting the idea to buy the new house.

Eyes Wide Shut

I just watched Kubrick's film, "Eyes Wide Shut". Of course the film bears Kubrick's crisp, hard-hitting visuals and cuts throughout. But what surprised me is that I actually liked it. I'd often considered Stanley Kubrick a sort of pedantic director, more interested in stunning cinematography and experimental, unorthodox storytelling than in interesting his audience. And the subject matter of "Eyes Wide Shut" is a bunch of malcontent rich New Yorkers, never a topic that grabs my attention. Indeed, I often found myself wondering as I watched the movie how much natural gas or heating oil the characters must be using to keep their apartments at comfortable temperatures in the middle of winter.

But between its scenes of satanic sex cult orgies and Tom Cruise's spending most of the movie with his signature look of confused intensity, like an Irish Setter that's just caught a whiff of pheasant, the movie did a good job of depicting some elements of real human relationships. Uncertainty, jealousy, boredom, love, lust, they are all shown as they happen in real life, not in some souped-up phony movie world. And the stumbling, deliberate dialogue (often augmented because the characters are under the influence of estupifacients, feels real and leaves the viewer impatiently waiting to see what the next word, the next phrase will be.

The movie ends with a sweet (if somewhat out of the blue and glib) affirmation of love, of marriage, of forgiveness and acceptance of certain frailties in those we love. And a recognition of the importance of lovemaking in the whole equation.

Article on economics and culture

This is an article in Spanish calling for more consideration of culture and morality in our economic life. The author reminds us that, in addition to the mechanisms of a market economy, Adam Smith also wrote a book on the moral values necessary to create a decent life for everyone. Most interestingly, the article's author differentiates economically productive jobs from destructive, or perverse jobs. For instance, a hitman is paid to provide a service, but whatever wealth and wellbeing he (or his patron) acquires by killing another is always far less than the wealth and wellbeing lost by the victim and his or her family. Hence we see an example in which a job or an economic sector doesn't contribute to society's net wellbeing, but rather detracts from it.

Third World Green Daddy 23: National matters

The past few weeks have brought me in very direct contact with both the difficulties and the little joys of a life and an identity forged between two nations.

Back around March, I had to run a number of errands relating to nationality, visas, migration, etc. Most importantly, I had to register my son Sam as a US citizen. He was born here in Colombia, which means he'll never be president of the US (though he can become Senator or President in Colombia, which seems like a more lucrative proposition anyway). But by dint of his father's being a US citizen, he has a right to citizenship too.

After some research on the US embassy website, I learned that I had to file for something called a Consular Report of Birth Abroad for Sam. This entailed my signing some formats, and somehow proving that I'd lived in the US for more than five years since the age of 14 or something. I could have proven this by showing my old passports, which would give an idea of when I was and wasn't in the US. I packed the passport I'd had since the age of 17, but the day of our appointment at the embassy, I couldn't find the damn thing! I searched and searched frantically, and cursed my forgetfulness. Well after our embassy visit, I discovered the passport just where I thought it had been. I guess in my frenetic search I'd overlooked it.

Aside from this passport, I'd brought to Bogota some old college transcripts and things like that, which allowed me to account for four years spent in the US in my adulthood. I hoped they wouldn't give me problems for that fifth year, but in any case I was prepared to present my heavy Chicago accent and knowledge of local Chicagoland television (ITT technical institute, Victory Auto Wreckers, Empire carpets) from the early 90s as proof that I'd endured a long childhood in the deep Midwest.

The procedure at the embassy was pretty pain-free. We presented all the forms we'd filled out, plus Sam's birth certificate, our marriage certificate, and a few other things. That was enough to get Sam's citizenship certificate, his US passport, and his social security card. They told me to come back in a week for the certificate and passport, and the SS card would arrive to my US address in the mail. We're still waiting for the Social Security card after 7 months, though by the time Sam's 60 the Republicans will most likely have tied the system to offtrack betting results or something, so it won't be worth much.

I was really happy to make Sam a US citizen. Despite the best efforts of our businesses and our politicians during these three decades of my life, there remain some things about the US that are worth believing in. It's my homeland, with a history filled with things to be proud of, and also plenty of shameful things that good people fought to change. In my handling of all the paperwork to make Sam a citizen, I recalled some people I'd met while I was living in Spain, people I'll refer to as the elite supernationals. These are that set of (often European) kids who've grown up between about a million nationalities. I grew up in a pretty well-educated, middle-class environs in Chicago, but before going to Madrid, I'd never met this type of person before. What's a typical supernational elite? Her dad is a Czech educated in Britain, her mom a Frenchwoman of Moroccan descent, the kid grew up in Marbella in Spain, while the parents shuttle between EU offices in Brussels. They speak a bunch of languages, know a lot of places, but don't feel profoundly tied to any one culture. Such people might even be hard-pressed to define what their culture is. They have a perfect US accent when they speak English, but don't get references to "What's Happening Now" or deep dish pizza. I don't want my son to be like that. I want him to know his two homelands, not just a standardized understanding of a regionless bourgeois construct of the US or Colombia, but specifically I want him to know, to be a part of the Midwestern US and Boyaca. I want him to know local cultural quirks, eat our food, pray our prayers, sing our songs, etc. Sam's not going to any private Alliance Francaise school or something to be around a bunch of other rootless, effete supernationals.

As part of my program to sufficiently Americanize Sam, I've been singing him lots of classic pop songs from my mother's time.



I grew up with Lollipop and Mr. Sandman from the Chordettes, who were a staple of my mother's youth and consequently of the rural Wisconsin bar we frequented when I was a kid. I've also recently learned the lyrics to My Prayer by the Ink Spots. In newer fare, I'm endeavoring to master the words to this modern country song by Josh Turner.



I was exposed to this song during a year of college in which my work at a grain elevator exposed me to lots of pop country music, and my living in Central Illinois afforded me plenty of opportunities to be around that scene if I so chose. I really love Turner's basso profundo, his earnest lyrics, and his acoustic instrumentation, which is surprisingly rare in most of the trite shit on country radio these days.

At the same time I was getting Sam's US nationality in order, I also had to renew my Colombian visa. Since I married Caro, I'd been on what's called a temporary spouse visa. It was valid for two years, so it was now time to renew it. Normally I'd renew it for another year, then I'd be eligible for what's called qualified residency. After being a qualified resident for a few years, you can apply for Colombian nationality. Initially I'd never considered becoming a Colombian national. What would the benefit be? Increased strip searches at the airport, more direct exposure to corrupt politicians and organized crime? But as I've come to love this new country, I've changed my position slightly. Indeed, if the US undergoes a few more hearty rounds of credit default scams and massive breakdowns in the political process, a US passport may be the one that draws suspicion and sideways glances at airports abroad.

Anyway, I had to renew my visa. Thanks to my having sired Sam, a Colombian national, I had the right to leapfrog directly to my qualified residency. I thought this was kind of cool. I had contributed one more (brilliant, beautiful) head to the strength of the Colombian nation, so I think it's right I should be recognized as more than just a transient passing through. But because in the next few years my wife and I are thinking of moving to the States for a while, I didn't start the qualified residency process. I understood (perhaps mistakenly) that my leaving Colombia for a few years would interrupt my residency period, so I figured it wasn't worth it to start the process.

As I flitted about Bogota making these diplomatic rounds, I felt really excited, special. For one, the visa office is located in one of the lovelier, more upscale neighborhoods of the city, and I was admittedly dazzled by the tree-lined streets, the sleek skyscrapers, the delicious restaurants. I often pooh-pooh these rich, pretentious, insulated neighborhoods, but they really are well-planned, nice places to live. I also combined my errands with a meeting at a potential employer's office, a national agrochemical company. In the end not much came of this meeting, but again, I felt like a bigshot to be meeting with a CEO. Now that I think of it, I don't believe I'd ever met a CEO before that!

But more importantly I was exhilarated by the assertion of these different parts of my identity. Proud to confer my US citizenship on my son, with plans of one day introducing him to my place of birth and showing him a place he'll always belong, by mere dint of who his father is. But I was also proud to be accepted and recognized in this other country I've decided to make my home.

Land reform not happening in Colombia

Here is a disheartening article by an important progressive Colombian senator, detailing how, despite grand claims and much fanfare (and an admittedly ambitious and inspiring set of proposed laws), the current presidential administration in Colombia has actually done even less than its predecessors in terms of granting and titling land to small farmers. What a shame.

Priest murdered in Colombian gold-mining town

A while ago I posted a video about gold mining in Colombia, and the video focused a fair amount on the town of Marmato, where a big mining company wanted to buy out all the artesanal miners and level the town by mountaintop removal mining. A few days ago, a priest from that town who'd been a vocal opponent of the big company's project was murdered. The mining company, Gran Colombia Gold, has spoken out against the murder, and presumably claims that it had nothing to do with the pressure the company had allegedly been putting on the priest.

"The war on Africa's family farmers"

Here's an article from Joan Baxter on the mercantilized, foreign-run future that some large international development agencies and lots of corporations have in mind for Africa. Her writing is essentially a condemnation of the vision of the World Bank, AGRA, and the institutional and sovereign wealth fund investors that are increasingly interested in massive grabs for African land.

Baxter makes a point (though in language that could be misconstrued as overly romanticizing African peasant life, which is admittedly difficult and deprived of many material comforts) that I've often made--the autonomous family farming life is in almost all cases vastly superior for a farmer than the wage laborer's life. A farmer-landowner has control over his or her local resources, which include water, farmed food, gathered food, firewood, herbal medicines, etc. The economic value (not to mention the social safety net, cultural traditions, and ecology integrity) generated by a smallholder-owned hectare is usually much greater than that produced from a mechanized, industrially-farmed hectare.

If we take a hypothetical situation in which 1000 families are farming 1000 hectares, and a company buys or otherwise appropriates the land in order to establish a palm oil or rubber plantation, the total annual economic value generated by 1000 hectares of rubber can't compare to the value generated by 1000 small, diversified plots. On top of this, plantation agriculture is less intensive in labor than small family farms, so the new company will always employ fewer than the 1000 families that originally occupied the land. In this situation you'd be left with less total wealth generated from a given amount of land, less employment, and usually what little wealth that is generated by the plantation is spirited away to whatever far-off city the owner lives in (Lagos, Sao Paulo, Paris...)

Anyway, Baxter rightly points out, in her article and a comment afterwards, that many urban economists (and oligarchs, and whoever else wants to get people off of small farms) depict farming as hard, degrading work. It's certainly hard physically, though no more so than working in a factory, or hustling to shine shoes, or especially working as a laborer on an agricultural plantation. And farmwork is only degrading if the income generated by it is too low to carry on a dignified life. But in this case, the real solution would be to help farmers to do what they need to to increase their income, not to displace them from their land.

Many cynical interested parties, and even well-meaning intellectuals like Jeffrey Sachs in his book "The End of Poverty", pull this classic bait and switch. They present an image of backbreaking farm labor under a sweltering sun, which serves to justify some neoliberal agenda that would ostensibly get people away from this difficult work. However, they aren't presenting the image of a hard-luck farmer in order to genuinely improve life for him or her, but rather to disparage farming in general, and push another agenda. In Sachs's case the counterproposal is work in textile factories, which is certainly a different kind of work than farm labor. But in the case of land grabbers who would develop huge employee-staffed plantations, the bait and switch is obviously a cynical emotional manipulation. Their alternative, better life for the small farmer working hard in her field would be...working hard in the same field, but as a landless laborer!

Third World Green Daddy 22: Working Dad

As soon as I got back from Haiti in late July, I had to start a new job. More than a year ago, my wife and I wrote a grant proposal for a project called the Muisca Garden project. With our town's archeological museum, we would study the crops used by the Muisca people who lived in our region before the Spanish, and try to promote these crops in the present day as a way of improving nutrition and income for our state. We had spent a lot of time and effort writing that proposal, and were amazed when, after much delay in the process, we were selected to be funded by Colombia's equivalent of the National Science Foundation! I would be the coordinator of the project's agricultural component, in which we would study ten ancient crops and promote them through demonstration plots and through controlled experiments with different varieties of one of those crops, achira.

Achira or sagu (Canna indica) is a tuber-forming plant, somewhat related to bananas. It is native to the middle to high Andes, where from the dawn of agriculture people have consumed it cooked or extracted its starch to make things like cakes and cookies. Today it is rarely cultivated in the Andes, and in fact its major uses are in Vietnam, where farmers extract the starch to make glass noodles, and in the flower gardens of Europe and the US, where achira hybrids give the showy flowers we know as Canna. The proposal of the Muisca Garden project is to experiment with different varieties of achira to evaluate things like yield, fiber content, starch, pest resistance, and whatever else farmers tell us is important for them.

Aside from my agronomic component, the Muisca Garden project has a social sciences aspect, and a forensic archeology aspect. The social sciences group will review original conquistador sources and more recent academic texts to better understand agriculture in general as a cultural process, and specifically Muisca agricultural practice. The biology and archeology teams will analyze phytoliths, microscopic silicon bodies that plants leave behind when they die. By analyzing these phytoliths in the plaque found on the teeth of Muisca mummies, we can better know what plants the Muiscas were eating.

In fact, I haven't yet started working much in earnest on this project. Another project came up that is more urgent, and I have been dedicated most of my time to being the field coordinator. This project is called the Four Provinces. Our museum was contracted by the state government to carry out inventories and registries of the archeological heritage sites in four towns of Boyaca. So every week we spend four or five days in one of these towns, doing fieldwork. The typical registry consists in taking GPS coordinates of each archeological site, filling out standard sheets about what the site consists of, its state of preservation, etc., taking professional photos of the sites, and marking each one with a standardized number. The novel aspect that we bring is to perform an agrarian diagnostic in the area surrounding the archeological sites. Through days of observation, interviews, and economic calculations, we come to understand how people are farming and what their income is like, which gives us guidelines as to the economic ability of local people to participate in preserving the archeological heritage sites.

Thus far we've done fieldwork in three of our four villages. In Ramiriqui, an important Muisca capital, we catalogued different rock paintings and massive carved monolithic columns, as well as a remote cave where the chief of Sogamoso used to come to sacrifice parrots, who would then take spoken messages to the gods.

Here is a monolithic column in a field:

And another one that's been "improved" by the construction of a hideous sculpture around it.

The sculpture gives the idea that the column was carved not by an advanced civilization of our Muisca ancestors, but rather by 9-foot-tall ogres.

Another column in Ramiriqui has been repurposed by a school to plant its flagpole. All things considered, it seems to me like a reverent modern-day use of the archeological patrimony.

The local culture in Ramiriqui is interesting. A favorite breakfast staple is goat's head soup, complete with a chunk of jaw to gnaw on.

In Mongua, a freezing, wet coal town, we marveled at lifelike statues in the village museum.

As well as some of the more realistic rock paintings I've seen in our region. Here's what seems to be a deerhunting party.

In Sachica we found hundreds of meters of natural cliffs with areas of dense rock paintings.

Each town has its own social dynamic, too. Part of Ramiriqui has an organized irrigation district, and the farmers there are generally wealthy (though dependent on lots of pesticides). The other part has no irrigation, and the people's poverty means they probably wouldn't be able to help much with protecting the painted stones. We recommend improvement of farm incomes and the establishment of a tourist circuit around the paintings. Mongua is a mining town, and as such has largely abandoned agriculture. We came to understand the economics of local artisan coal mines, and it seems that the biggest problem for the rock paintings of Mongua is that no one lives in the countryside anymore to protect them. On the other hand, the town's statues are held in a little museum that could stand a lot of improvement in its infrastructure and presentation. In Sachica there is a rock quarry that arrived maybe ten meters away from the painted cliff face before being shut down by the state environmental authorities. There is also a recent irrigation channel that has eroded the riverbank bordering the rock paintings. Here the channel has eroded away so much that they patched it with tubes strung through the air.

We've had lots of adventures in the process of our fieldwork. In Ramiriqui we slipped and slid down a muddy slope leading to the mouth of a cave. In Mongua we faced an impromptu lynch mob when we tried to take the glass covers off the museum cases in order to better photograph the statues. In Sachica we scrambled from rock to rock along the shore of a raging river, before finding a rickety bridge and solid ground. In particular, this last adventure was very stupid and pointless, and I was thankful no one got hurt. Here I am afterwards on the bridge we finally reached, giving a sheepish thumbs-up.

I've settled into a routine in these weeks. We usually work in the field from Wednesday to Sunday, then I go to Bogota to be with my family for a few days. The change is always drastic and difficult. I go from wide-ranging academic inquiry and freewheeling adventures in the outback, to the worries of city life, debts, bills, doctor appointments, household repairs. Then every time I have to leave Bogota I feel like I'm leaving real life and family love, for a monotone, solitary existence. Before I leave I hold Samuel and Caro a lot, and feel awful, like when a loved one dies or a girlfriend breaks up with you. Of course Sam doesn't understand that I'm leaving, and then when I finally return he takes a while to get used to me. After the initial shock though, I feel happy to set off on new adventures. Out there in the field, exploring ancient sites and present-day agricultural landscapes, I feel like Indiana Jones!

I'm getting used to this new routine. It's not ideal; I'd like to see my wife and child more than a few days a week. Once the Four Provinces project wraps up I'll have more flexibility and free time, and once Sam is a bit bigger I'll be able to take him home with me sometimes. For the present though, this is the life I have to get used to, my new life as a working Dad.