Drought-tolerant genetically-modified corn

This is an article about the first genetically modified commercial seed incorporating a "complex" trait, i.e. one controlled by multiple genes. It is Monsanto's long-awaited drought-resistant corn, which if it were effective would give some justification to the two decades and billions of dollars in public and private research spent on genetic engineering (often at the expense of conventional breeding research. This is because until now the only GM traits marketed in crops have been Bt internal insecticide, and resistance to glyphosate herbicides. Neither of these increased yields, but rather changed the amount and types of chemicals used in large-scale industrial agriculture (something that certainly has its merit, especially in the case of Bt genes that have knocked some of our most nasty, toxic pesticides out of common use). But the major GM researchers and especially private companies have always touted the future possibility of traits like drought or salt tolerance that could actually increase total world food supply, and help small farmers.

Anyway, this article argues that the new Monsanto variety actually doesn't perform any better than existing conventionally-bred varieties under drought conditions. The most interesting quote of the article pertains to the reasonable expectations for major breakthroughs via genetic engineering:

"Plants have been evolving for millions of years. I doubt that [GMO] plant breeders will be able to hit upon anything for nutrient utilization that nature already hasn't tried."

A sage voice speaking out against the hubris of quick-fix tech fetishism.

Interesting coffee project

Here's a video of a USAID project that works with Colombian farmers who've returned to their land after being displaced. The project helped them to get into the high-value specialty coffees production chain, as well as providing psychosocial assessments and accompaniment for the affected communities.

Summary of Colombia's drug war

This is a well-done, in-depth article tracing the course of Colombia's drug war over the 2000s. It is overly credulous of Uribe, doesn't mention the numerous human rights violations he's been indirectly linked to, and even mistakenly claims that his phone was illegally wire-tapped by the DAS security agency. The article is also overly equivocal when it compares the FARC's atrocities (modus operandi taxing narcotics and kidnapping the wealthy and police) to those of the paramilitaries (modus operandi trafficking narcotics and massacring entire villages). It also doesn't entirely follow up on its title; I'd have liked a more detailed discussion of how cracking down on the Colombian theater of the drug trade led in large part to the explosion of trafficking and violence in Mesoamerica, just as cracking down in Peru and Bolivia in the 80s and 90s led to Colombia's rise to prominence. But at any rate, it's a good primer on many aspects of the Colombian conflict.

Oscars made in a Chicago factory

This is an article about how the Oscars are produced in a factory in Chicago, apparently the last remaining manufacturer of trophies in the US. It makes me proud to see high-quality industrial products coming from my city. Here's a video of the production process.

Temporary resolution to the education struggle

For the past few months I've been meaning to write more about the student movement in Colombia. Late last year I wrote blogs about the proposed law to reform higher education in Colombia, and the student movement against that reform. I let the topic drop not because there were no new developments, but simply because I didn't have time to write about them.

Basically students around the country agreed to calling an academic recess, and finishing the semester later, in January. I don't know if it was a victory or a defeat, or not much of either. Especially sad was to see the student movement, which had been so united, rent into factions of official national student leaders who wanted to reconcile with the government given the fulfillment of certain demands, and other, regional groups that said they weren't satisfied with government concessions.

The campus of the university I work at had been closed for most of October, with kids camped out on the grounds. On October 31st they left, which was kind of sad, like the end of an era. That night they held a silent, peaceful march to the center of town, and then they played with trick or treaters in the main plaza. I thought this was a cool idea on their part. In general I sensed a gradual transition on the part of the student movement, from self-righteous demonstrating and even destruction, to constructive demands, conversations, programs. Perhaps the latter were always present, but the movement became better about communicating them to the public at large.

This article claimed that the whole thing was much ado about nothing, since the government had already removed the most contentious aspects of the law regarding the creation of for-profit universities. But this other article parses the privatizing spirit of the rest of the law, even without the most contentious parts of it.

In the end the government withdrew the controversial proposal to reform Ley 30, and by now students are back in classes after a long vacation. In the end I think things turned out well, and I hope students and others (me, perhaps?) will continue working towards a better, more inclusive education system. Nevertheless, whenever I see videos like this one, which is actually a pretty good summary of the students' demands, it raise my hackles. Essentially, I agree with the progressive goals of the movement, but I can't agree with their methods. I have two major problems with the student movement as it has played out in Colombia over the past year or so:

It's a movement of force. In order to fight a measure that they saw as unjust, students resorted to force in order to achieve their goals. They shut down public (read funded by the people) universities and created havoc in order to be heard. Their basic demands of allocating more funding to public universities and not allowing the market to intervene in public education seem sound to me, but they do not necessarily represent the desire of a majority of Colombians (maybe they do, maybe they don't--the students never asked anyone about it). Hence despite their claims of bringing true democracy through the streets, what the students participated in was mobocracy or yellocracy, in which not the majority but those who make the most scandal decide how the society will be. We've seen the awful effects on the US political system of granting influence to those who yell the loudest as opposed to the legitimate popular will.

Aside from this conceptual qualm of mine, the fact is that students used violence (in the form of explosives) and vandalism during their movement. Even today large swaths of Bogota retain the graffiti and broken windows that the protestors caused. Perhaps not everyone involved in the movement took part in the violence, but if the students wish to be heard as one solid block, they also have to accept responsibility for the actions of all elements forming part of the movement.

This is another point of cowardice in the movement--they insist (tacitly or explicitly) on their right to use force, but if the police use force against the students they cry injustice, or if concrete complaints are directed at student vandalism (breaking church windows, breaking windows of university buildings), they deny responsibility or claim it was the police trying to frame them. It is curious that the student movement leaders occasionally hark back to the Union Patriotica political party as an example of the type of political movement they want to become.

The UP was a party formed by the FARC guerrilla movement, whose members were subsequently executed by death squads. There's no doubt that this paramilitary elimination of a political party was a crime against humanity. But let's look at this objectively--the UP was essentially a strategy for the FARC to continue its illegal insurgent activity while also having a legitimate political branch to pursue its agenda. I don't see much difference between UP politicians, who supported and agreed with the FARC armed group and its violence, and the despicable members of the Colombian Congress who maintained ties with illegal paramilitary groups to help them pursue their agenda outside the halls of parliament. This cowardly strategy of advocating violence but then demanding treatment as good faith citizens is something I see hints of in the student movement.

In the end, I know that force is a part of political reality, perhaps especially in Colombia. I know too that if someone makes you do something (for example if students block off universities so classes can't be held), there's not much you can do about it. I accept the use of de facto force insofar as I've no other option. But it's not the way a society should work. And it's especially sad that these young students, who should be the most critical, the most apt to find a way out of Colombia's violent status quo, are just continuing the culture of imposition by force.

My second problem with the student movement, and perhaps less grave than its use of and advocacy of force, is an attitude of self-centered arrogance I sense in the students' way of doing things. The student leaders are basically part of a brotherhood of elites who talk a lot. In a country as rural as Colombia, it's a glaring omission that the student movement never mentioned the peasantry (except as a rhetorical trope to validate their leftist orthodoxy). These students are not aspiring to be farmers or to improve the lives of our poor masses. Their aspiration is that they and their peers can insert themselves into Colombia's circle of overeducated pedants that criticize the state while drawing their salary from it. I see the same yuppy kids from Bogota leading everything on the national level, though in our small town the students and the student movement are decidedly proletarian. Once again, if the student movement shows the same classist, Bogota-centric biases of the rest of society, why should I think it's going to create anything other than the next generation of leftist politicians-turned-elite-clintelists?

A good example of what I'm worried about is Gustavo Petro. This is a guy who just won the Bogota mayor's office, after dividing and discrediting his party (the Polo, the only real leftist party in Colombia) and creating his own personality-cult party. He still talks progressive, but his only real consistent value is the pursuit of his own self-glorification. I see the spark of Petro in some of these student leaders, and it worries me.

The movement calls for a complete overturn of our current society, and even a new constitution. The present constitution in Colombian was drafted in 1991 by a broad coalition of many sectors of society, including ex-guerrillas and the Communist party (and Gustavo Petro, in his more coherent days). But now the student movement is claiming that the constitution is one more rotten tool of neoliberalism. I don't know enough about the current constitution to appraise these claims, but even if the present constitution has flaws, what's to say that a new constitution would be any better? I wouldn't want to entrust my society to a bunch of 20-year-olds that, if past generations are any indication, will eventually tire of the "game" of radical social movements and just become more bourgeois, self-centered jerks.

It's perhaps natural for young people to think they have all the answers, but it's important for the rest of us to avoid such hubris. It seems that there will always be flaws in the solutions we arrive for societal problems, but it's folly to think that because of these flaws we should start from scratch. Likewise, it's never a good idea to entrust your society to a group of self-annointed (or even collectively-annointed) saviors. We've seen time and again in history that the most progressive goals can become distorted and wasted when we entrust them to one or a few fallible people, instead of a robust system of dialogue and popular decision.

Notwithstanding my aversion to charismatic political leaders, I think it will be good if the student movement begins to field candidates and undertake actions within the bounds of the existing political system, in addition to their popular protests. This is an interview with a Chilean student leader who talks about the next step being to gain power in the city councils, and perhaps eventually in national government. If student leaders become involved with elective politics, where they have to show a certain level of success (while adhering to certain rules) in order to keep on advancing with their agenda, then perhaps they will become more concrete and less violent in the actions they propose. I know it's one more example of radical movements being absorbed and coopted by the system, but I guess I'd prefer an accountable mortal working within a set of agreed-upon rules, rather than a radical demi-god spouting fire and discourse and answering to no one but his own ego.

Adventures in Peru 1: Lima from above

From on high Lima doesn't look promising. Out the plane window you see miles and miles of barren grey-brown sandy mountains. They are unlike anything I've ever seen before. When we speak of deserts in the United States, we think of the Sonora with its abundant cactuses and other plant life brilliantly adapted to the sporadic but heavy rains that characterize the ecosystem, or we think of scrubby Texan brushland. Even those badlands that are truly bereft of plant life in the US often have impressive, colorful rock formations or eroded buttes or something.

But the Peruvian coastal desert has nothing. Absolutely no vegetation, because most years there is literally no rain whatsoever. I'd compare it to the rolling sand dunes of the Sahara, or the Namibian desert which, as in Peru, extends right to the seashore, but those aren't fair comparisons, because the Peruvian desert consists in real mountains. They are sandy and barren, but they are actual geological formations, and not just dunes. But they don't look like desert mountains either, those jagged creatures whose lack of vegetation cover means that the rare rainstorms that do arrive totally erode the soil away. In Peru, the absolute lack of rainfall makes the mountains into rounded, smooth lumps, as if they were mere sand dunes.

Eventually from my plane window I spot human settlements. The coastal highway is an orderly black snake surrounded by indifferent, amorphous desert, but it fares much better than the occasional groups of houses arranged hopefully into a fishbone scheme of one main street and a few side streets, all of which are merely wide lanes of unruly sand that does not stay within its assigned place in the grid pattern.

These ill-advised, isolated settlements are soon complemented by crescents of seaside highrises tiling the walls of the rocky bays. I'm sure their owners feel very elegant with their ocean views, but from above it's clear that the desert isn't planning on ceding them this space for the long term.

Now the constructed space becomes thicker, wider. There's still no vegetation, but one begins to see industrial storage tanks, ship container yards, parking lots for massive transport fleets. The city pours forth, as if bubbling up from some hidden underground source of life and abundance.

But what source of life could there possibly be here? There is absolutely no water, no plants save a few feeble, overly-optimistic attempts at irrigated lawns and crop fields. I've heard that coastal morning fog waters some plant ecosystems on the mountains, but up to now the only hints of that I've seen are dark grey mantles covering some of the mountains--perhaps dead vegetation. I don't even see the harbor that must provide the miles and miles of stacked containers I see on the land below. I have never been a fan of dry climates, and my time in Colombia has even further predisposed me to verdant, cool, wet landscapes. Here in Lima there are mountains as in Colombia, but you can't even see them because they're blocked by dust and smog. How could anybody live here, much less a city of eight million people?

The fleet of fishing boats now below the plane begins to answer my question. The Peruvian coast is the site of an upswell of cold ocean water, which feeds lots of phytoplankton at the surface, which in turn feeds anchovies, the larger fish that eat anchovies, and birds that deposit guano on the shore's rocks. Later I will find out that Lima, like the other inhabited areas of the Peruvian coast, is located where a mountain river (the Rimac, in this case) tumbles down to the ocean. For more than five thousand years, people have exploited these rivers in complex irrigation schemes that made verdant cultivated landscapes (with patches of natural floodplain forest and wetlands, too) in the middle of the desert. Lima has totally absorbed the green fields that originally attracted the Spanish (and the Wari before them, and the Lima before them) to the site, but the water that once fed fields of crops now serves the urban population's needs, and the pre-Hispanic irrigation canals still flow as "rivers" through the city's heart.

So this is my first lesson on Lima. Despite the drab, sad grey-brown aspect of the mountains around it, and indeed of most of the brick-and-concrete buildings and the sandy unpaved streets you see from the airplane, Lima's location was perfect for its first settlers. In one place they had big and small fish, natural fertilizer, and irrigated fields. Even today Peruvians of all social strata seem to consume much more fish than anyone I've seen. A plate of ceviche is tiny and expensive anywhere else in the world, but in Peru it's a generously-portioned staple at even the most basic roadside stands.

This abundance underlying an apparent barren wasteland is my first surprise in Peru, like the brightly-painted house facades that start to peek out from the drab brown landscape when your plane gets close to landing, or Lima's mild climate bathed by cool ocean breezes when you expected a hot, arid, dusty exit from the airport. After my first full day in Lima I still won't have a clear handle on what the city is all about, but the joy is in the discovery, as the city wends you back and forth between new observations and unsteady interpretations.

Agrarian prosperity in Haiti

Here is a New York Times article that challenges the narrative of Haiti's having always been an economic basketcase. The authors point to the 19th century in Haiti as a time of relative prosperity arising from the system of small, intensive subsistence farms that replaced the prior slave plantation system, and they claim that Haiti should model its future development along support to smallholder farmers. I agree with this prognosis, and it's refreshing to see validated my observations and interpretations that Haitian smallholdings are actually very productive and ecologically sound.

That said, Haiti's ecological and economic decline is a bit more complex than the NYT article would make it seem. Today Haiti is still largely comprised of smallholders providing food for autoconsumption and local markets, so we can't blame the country's crises on a move away from a subsistence peasant economy or the centralization of political power. A different article I read as part of research for a documentary film gives more nuance to the NYT's blaming of ecological degradation and poverty on 20th-century economic and political trends. This other article, by Bob Corbett, claims that Haiti's 19th-century agrarian system depended in part on each peasant's having access to large amounts of land, and thus being able to move on to virgin forest when population density or land degradation lowered production. If this is true, the 19th-century system of farming in Haiti wasn't sustainable in the long term, though it was an appropriate way to organize life at the time.

This doesn't change the fact that Haiti should keep in mind the ecologically and economically sage aspects of its long agrarian history when looking to prosper and improve life in the future.

Post on Stuff Expat Aid Workers Like

Here is a little satirical piece I wrote for a really great blog about the quirks of expat aid workers (Stuff Expat Aid Workers Like). I hope you like it.

Greg's Haitian Adventure 8: Back to Panama

I'm finally posting the last chapter of my Haiti odyssey from this July.

The flight back from Haiti to Panama was really cold. I'd gotten used to Haiti's lowland tropical climate (which really wasn't that unbearably hot while I was there), so the stark air-conditioned plane was hard on my body. I spent the latter part of the flight with my hands tucked in my shirt to keep warm.

Once we arrived in Panama I was thankful for the brief bit of tropical stickiness I felt on the walk down the boarding chute, though this relief was quickly snuffed out when I entered the ACed airport.

After more than a month away from my family, and already a few days of travel under my belt for the return trip, I was not eager to spend another night in a strange bed. I frantically rushed about the Panama airport looking for a last-minute flight to Bogota that I might hop on instead of my scheduled flight the next day. I did indeed find a flight, but it was boarding at that moment and they wouldn't let me change my ticket on such short notice. I resigned myself to another day traveling after my brief glimmer of hope, and found an expensive shared cab outside the airport.

The cab ride was atmospheric if nothing else. I was with an English-speaking couple who talked the entire ride. The guy was fat and somewhat ethnic-looking, with a weird accent. The girl had the nasal, awful, piercing voice of certain Corn Belt suburbanites or small towners--think Roseanne Barr's TV character. In the course of their nonstop conversation that I couldn't help catching every detail of, I discovered that the guy was from Belize (hence the weird accent accompanied by obvious native-speaker comfort with the English language), and it seemed as if he were employed in some shady sector that entailed long trips through Mexico while his girlfriend waited for him in resort towns. She kept pressing to know about what went down on these trips, and he kept telling her that she knew he couldn't tell her about his work. The guy also kept joking about a Jamaican they'd met on the flight, whom he was sure was not really a farmer but rather a narcotrafficker. I mused to myself that the Belizean must think everyone was a shady narco, since he himself was.

This couple really had nothing pertinent to say, and I surmised that they had no interesting thoughts in their heads. They talked exclusively about frivolous shit, and kept referencing the same things over and over, the way you do when you're with someone you don't know but might be interested in sleeping with, and you talk uncomfortably just to fill the dead space between you. But they had been traveling together for at least a few months, if not more, and their conversation never got past the superficial. Nevertheless, it seems that empty-headed people do feel and hurt like the rest of us, because they both expressed jealousy whenever an ex-lover came up in the conversation. I guess even if you don't have profound thoughts or anything to talk about, you can love another person (or at least not like the idea of them screwing someone else).

Another thing that sprang to my mind was an existential question I've often pondered: what makes some people intellectually curious, and others not? More specifically, my wife and I have a few friends that show an interesting combination of curiosity and lack thereof. On the one hand, when they're with us, they are very interested in discussing and learning new things and thinking about how things work. But their lack of general knowledge or cultural capital makes me imagine that they aren't very intellectually curious in their other day-to-day endeavors. How could this be? When I don't know or understand something, I have like this burning need to look into it and obsess over it until I have learned about it. This is the attitude I usually see in the friends I'm thinking of. But then why don't they have an encyclopedic knowledge of the world? Maybe they sometimes turn off their minds. I think TV and iEverythings and the like must have a role in the dampening of our collective curiosity. It's easy to get distracted from the business of living and learning with so many entertainment options beckoning to us at once.

Finally the insipid couple got out of the taxi at a very elegant hotel. More evidence for a narco-related profession; how do two people who have no discernible intellectual merits, don't speak Spanish, and who have spent the past months traveling around Mexico have the money to stay in an upscale Panama City hotel?

I, on the other hand, was not bound for an elegant hotel in Panama City's endless swath of coastal luxury high-rises but rather for a hostel in the city's colonial center. There still remained a lot of posh urban landscape to pass by yet though, and I marveled at the wealth surrounding me. Who lived in these places? Where did the poor live, or even just the normal people? Perhaps much of the luxury property belongs to foreigners or out-of-towners, people who are earning in dollars and not staying much in their Panama apartments. Otherwise it's difficult for me to explain how a small Central American economy that's only come into its own recently can boast a city full of huge skyscrapers with few people walking the streets and few lights on in the windows.

Another cultural trait that sunk in for me was the Panamanian love for salsa music. The radio in the cab was sounding nonstop classic salsa, and there were ads and billboards everywhere for big-name acts in concert. Hell, this is the country where Ruben Blades is a government minister!

Finally I got to the hostel where I'd reserved a bed online a few days prior. It was nothing special--neither the ultra-chic, spiffy-clean look of a newer hostel catering to young people, nor the absolute filth and decadence of a lower grade of hostel. I checked in and went straight to bed in a room shared with maybe eight other beds. It was a bit stuffy and smelly, but it served my purposes.

The next morning I got up pretty early, showered in silence so as not to awake my hung-over hostelmates, and strolled around Panama's Old City. This is not to be confused with the original colonial city a few miles down the coast, which I believe was destroyed by some natural or martial event, and whose ruins are now preserved as a sort of park. Anyway, my hostel was on the edge of the nicer part of the Old City, where well-restored offices and hotels give way to shady, run-down ruins and tenements. In general the Old City struck me for the prevalence of normal people living normal lives there, sending their kids to school, hanging the wash out to dry, etc.

It is a much more authentic and vibrant neighborhood than Cartagena's Old Quarter in Colombia, which is now occupied almost entirely by hotels, restaurants, and foreigners. Unlike Santo Domingo's Old City though, which feels above all like just a working-class area where the buildings happen to be 500 years old, Panama's old part felt on the verge of being gentrified. As I said, regular people continued living their lives in rundown old buildings, but they seemed to me like the last tenacious resistance entrenched in hostile territory, surrounded by both severe decay and nascent gentrification, and surely soon to be pushed out of the neighborhood.

I was especially impressed by Panama City's embrace of elegant decay as a kind of art form.

There are a few churches that have been reduced by earthquakes or neglect to roofless shells bounded by their original brick walls. But instead of either refurbishing them or knocking them down to make way for other construction, they've been turned into small urban parks, with benches, cafes, and cultural events.

There are also more traditional, full-fledged garden parks, like this square.

As I walked around I had dreams of buying and rehabbing one of the houses I saw.

It was two floors, with outside balconies and a zinc roof. The house was on the edge of what I'd consider to be the Old City proper, and faced onto a park with a tumbled section of colonial defensive wall and a lot of winos lying about.

I bet in a few years the neighborhood will be a hot investment spot for wealthy foreigners with money to blow. They're already setting up free Wifi spots:

The city also seems to be trying to renovate the seaside Malecon, which is pretty run-down. I believe residents of the Old City successfully rebuffed plans to build a coastal highway, which would block the view of the ocean, but I think a lot of seaside property has remained in limbo, neither well-maintained nor definitively torn down.

The time finally came to start making my way to the airport. Unlike the prior night, when I didn't feel comfortable navigating an unfamiliar and perhaps dangerous city, today I was to take a public bus out to my destination. The ride would cost me 25 cents US (un cuarter, as they say in Panama) as opposed to $20!

I picked up my bag at the hostel and set off on foot. From the Old City I passed through neighborhoods built in maybe the 1920s, with lots of rundown houses and small businesses like barbershops. It's how I imagine the non-colonial parts of Havana. The hand-painted signs were a far cry from the glitzy highrises I'd seen the night before. I guess this is where normal people live in Panama City. You can also see the Afro-Carribean Santeria influence in this area.

And "normal people" in Panama seem to be pretty varied. I saw people of all colors walking up and down the streets, with no clear race/class distinctions of certain colored people doing all the buying, or all the serving, or all the sweeping. I even saw a fair amount of indigenous people in colorful outfits.

I eventually got to a pedestrian street of big stores built perhaps between the 20s and 50s. There was an air of faded glamour, sooty cement facades that at one point must have been pristine white or sleek grey. The stores were mainly of the tacky variety--dollar stores, small grocers and minimarts, junky clothing. It reminded me of Uptown in Chicago, or State Street in the early 90s when it was all seedy shops selling electronics, shoes, and (bootleg?) clothes.

The bus left from a big roundabout, and the ride took about an hour 15 minutes--not much slower than the prior night's cab ride. The bus was a converted, repainted schoolbus from the US. I'd been advised to take the Metrobus, which is a more modern, unified system of municipal buses, but at the roundabout a guy pointed me to one of the shabbier buses as the right one to reach the airport. We passed first through the high-end part of town that my annoying taximates had gotten off at the night before, then through a more lower-middle-class-looking area of unremarkable cement apartment buildings, similar to much of Bogota but with more low-rise strip malls, at least along the big street our bus was plying. Eventually we reached an area dominated by warehouses and light industry, with many signs indicating a major Chinese investment presence. Finally the bus left me at a point from which I could see the airport at the other end of a sprawling vacant field I had to cross to get there.

The airport was clearly not designed to be entered by foot, and I had to pass through a lot of parking lots and driveways that I was probably supposed to be prohibited from walking over. There was, however, a nice sculptural homage to Panama's indigenous archeological heritage.

Security at the airport was fast, thorough, and amiable. It was much better than at any other airport I've been to, which tend to range from very lax to neurotically invasive. Security procedures at US airports seem to create the illusion of effectiveness by lots of aimless busy-ness and inconvenience, but ultimately they're not very thorough.

And there I was, set for the last leg of my trip home to Colombia. I settled into a chair at my gate, with my toxic but sweet Domino's pizza and chocolate chip cookie I'd bought for breakfast, and I wrote the outline for this blog post.

Goodbye Panama City. Goodbye, elegant decay.