Articles on grain reserves and conservatives

Here is a short piece on the importance of grain reserves for food security.  For most of its history, the US Farm Bill contained provisions that at once assured farmers a fair price for produce and maintained a store of certain key commodities for our nation.  Since the 80s and 90s, those sensible measures have been hacked away at by ideologues and immoral fatcats, leading to a situation in which we have no real public food stores, at the same time as our government must spend ever more to support beleaguered farmers and sick, obese citizens.  Who has benefited?  Why, speculators and junk food processors, of course.  Why shouldn't our citizenry and our government pay to enrich these upstanding people?

On a perhaps unrelated note (but maybe not that unrelated), here is a David Brooks article about the intellectual tensions within conservativism.  I like his image of a conservative concerned with general wellbeing, taking a cautious approach to cultural change, and advocating to spread prosperity to all in order to make for a more stable society.  I don't know if that's really what conservativism is or ever has been about, because I don't know much about conservative intellectual history.  However, it seems possible to me that Brooks's vision of a compassionate conservatism is either something guys like him espouse because they are essentially liberals but don't like the whiny hippy stereotypes associated with the Left, or on the other hand that Brooks's rosy style of conservativism is simply a pleasant facade for a political philosophy that has always been somewhat mean-spirited at heart.  I am particularly suspicious of Brooks's categorization of Catholic social teachings as essentially conservative, because pressure for social justice and solidarity (both within and outside of the Church) has usually come from the more Left-leaning sectors, often with great resistence from more conservative forces (though subsidiarity, the idea that the lower levels of human organization should have autonomy to deal with their problems before government steps in, is perhaps a more conservative idea).  At any rate, I wanted to share the article with my readers, and to give Brooks recognition for what I see as a rare gem within his often clumsy and simplistic columns.

In meatro

Here is an article from journalist Leo Hickman, about in vitro meat.  This is meat from muscle cells grown in artificial culture medium.  Hickman stresses the potential gross-out factor of it, and weighs this against the important environmental and ethical problems associated with modern livestock-raising.  However, whenever I hear about this sort of ultra-technological, synthetic food production, my first thoughts have to do with thermodynamics.  Whether you're talking about meat grown in a lab, or crops grown in hydroponic conditions with artificial light, thermodynamics are always going to be a problem, it seems to me.  Normally all life comes from the sun.  The sun fuels plant growth, and plants feed humans and animals alike.  The amount of sun hitting the Earth is fixed, so all we humans can do to increase food production is increase the efficiency with which plants absorb light.  Piling up a bunch of plants in a tall building, for instance, won't increase food production, because the amount of light hitting that building is going to stay the same.

A major way we've found of increasing plant productivity is by using massive amounts of fossil fuel (natural gas-based fertilizers, for instance) to increase the total amount of energy available to plants.  Even this tactic though is limited by the Earth's and the sun's natural dynamic, because ultimately fossil fuels are just an accumulation of solar energy from millions of years ago.

All this is to say that Hickman is mistaken to think that in vitro culture might be a more efficient way to obtain meat.  Despite his techno-dazed, anti-agrarian assertion that the conversion of grass into protein by living animals is an inefficient process, the fact is that this is actually one of nature's and man's more brilliant and efficient solutions to the problem of producing food.  Well-managed livestock has a very important role to play in producing nutritious food from marginal and/or ecologically valuable lands (that can't or shouldn't be plowed and cropped), as well as from inedible waste and byproducts.

So when you hear gee-whiz technological ejaculations at the prospect of non-agricultural, synthetic food production, remember that the energy to drive it has to come from somewhere.  The electricity for growing lamps, the nutrient solutions for hydroponic plants and in vitro meat, all this energy ultimately must come from the sun (or its fossil fuel legacy).  In a future in which the sun will shine no brighter than it does now, and fossil fuels will become even more scarce, it's naive and dangerous to think that energy-intensive synthetic food will have an important role to play, except as a Nero-fiddling-style novelty.

Importance of fossil fuels

This is a short bit from The Atlantic Monthly website showing the proportional share of the world economy held by different regions of the world.  The author deftly indicates that before the industrial age, a country's wealth was basically determined by its population.  More people meant more wealth (despite the author's slightly off-the-subject digression about per-capita GDP, which has nothing to do with the graph).  After the industrial age, total quantity of wealth created had mostly to do with the harnessing of fossil fuels.  This is why European countries and the US, which got a jump on the use of these fuels, saw their share of world wealth skyrocket after 1800 with respect to Asia.

I think this is important to point out, because I'm not so sure of how much Adam Smith's division of labor had to with the post-industrial wealth explosion.  I mean, even if you have a very advanced business organization, without using energy sources other than humans and animals you're never going to be very productive in industry.  If I'm right, then we have less reason to congratulate ourselves for our world's recent spell of a few centuries of prosperity.  It's simply linked to greater availability of energy, which is quickly running out.  And despite everyone's enthusiasm about how the knowledge and technology economy is now creating wealth on an extraordinary scale, the fact is that technology and the knowledge economy depend on a physical infrastructure based on the use of fossil fuels.  It may be that the energy used to cool a mainframe is very little compared to the amount of ostensible value created by that mainframe, but that value is still 100% dependent on that fossil fuel.

Work and travel

During the next month I will be leading a series of 20 workshops with dairy farmers.  The theme of the workshops is promoting sustainability in dairy farms.  I started last week in the Nariño department of Colombia, in the extreme south of the country, near the Ecuador border.  My initial impressions of Nariño were shocking; I had long heard of Nariño as a green, fertile highland department, much like my home base of Boyacá.  But the approach to the airport looked like this:



I later learned that the arid, eroded, denuded slopes I had seen belong to a lower altitude, semi-desert zone of Nariño, much like the Valle de Leyva in Boyacá.  Also like the Leyva valley, for some reason rich urbanites from Nariño like spending vacations in this dusty, warm region called Chachagüí. 

The rest of my trip in Nariño consisted in landscapes that were closer to what I had expected.  Mosaics of plowed fields, green pastures, wooded fencelines. 



The people of Nariño are also similar to the boyacenses.  They are quiet, shy, with many indigenous cultural attributes, and very sharp and attentive.  While many of my workshops were dominated by some of the wealthier, larger dairy farmers in each zone, I felt that the rest of the audience was intently considering the themes we were discussing, mulling over them critically. 

I gave workshops in Guachucal, Pupiales, and Pasto, all in Nariño.  I regret to say that I didn't do much sightseeing; I mainly gave my workshops, then collapsed exhausted in my hotel room, to eat, work some, and go to sleep.  I felt like a highly modified version of George Clooney in "Up in the Air".  One night I watched the movie musical of "Hairspray" in my room and nostalgically listened to Erykah Badu.  But I didn't get any photos of the places I visited.  I did, however, feel that I really got to know something of the structure and functioning of Colacteos, the dairy cooperative that was hosting me in the zone.  I am eager to learn more about cooperativism, and back in Bogotá I'll be looking for their delicious Papialpa cheese, which is a special cheese for roasting, a la Greek saganaki.

Now I'm in the Cauca Valley department, near Cali.  The weather is warmer, the terrain flat, and the dairy farms much bigger.  Today was my first workshop here, hosted by Cogancevalle, the local cattle rancher cooperative.  The people in this area are reputed to be more direct and talkative, and in many ways they are; we had a lot of avid participation during the workshop.  But for some reason I felt like I didn't get through to them as much with certain messages.  Maybe I'm accustomed by now to working with reserved indigenous peasants, and I don't know how to deal with other personality types.  Or maybe I was just a bit off my game today.  At any rate, tonight I'm staying in a hotel in Tuluá, and tomorrow I'll give another workshop here.  Let's hope it goes better than today did in Cartago.

True to form, I didn't do much sightseeing yesterday in Cartago.  I was so tired from my flight and long taxi trip that I just worked in my room and then ate dinner in the hotel.  I did notice on the ride in that Cartago has a lovely, dilapidated old colonial stone church.  Surely there's some interesting history behind it, but my Lonely Planet and Michelin tour guides that I'm toting on this trip don't even mention Cartago.  It made me think that it would be interesting to publish a more in-depth tourism guide for Colombia, something like "Colombia like a native".  For tour guides of Spain or France, small towns like Cartago would receive at least a mention, but for more exotic, Third-World destinations, often tour guides linger only on the big cities and sights.  I feel like Colombia is entering a place now though in which there are more and more tourists coming, and surely some will want to break off the beaten path.  Would there be a demand for a guidebook that talks about all the little neat corners of Colombia, like Mongua with its pre-Spanish statues, or La Capilla, Boyacá with its miraculous image of the Virgin Mary?

 If such a guide existed, I'm not sure it would include Tuluá.  Tuluá is a nice, manicured little town, a tropical version of anytown, Europe. 





Nice plazas, with lots of people out and about socializing in public spaces. 

Lots of bike use.  Even a very snazzy public library set into a picturesque riverfront park.



But not much to offer a tourist.  Or maybe so; maybe a glimpse of the comfortable tropical life people have carved out for themselves in the Cauca Valley would be interesting to travelers.  Even if not, I'm glad I finally got out and walked around in order to get to know these places I'm passing through.  Granted, spending a day with local dairy farmers is also a fascinating way to get to know part of the reality of a given place, but I hope to be better too about taking a stroll and seeing firsthand at least a small slice of each place my work takes me.

A post on picky eating from "Stuff Expat Aid Workers Like"

Some time ago I submitted a post for "Stuff Expat Aid Workers Like" about the irony and difficulties of picky eating when you're posted in an exotic developing country.  Here is the link to their version of my post (with some heavy editing from my original version to make it fit more with the tone of their blog).

Two interesting books on plants and man

A few months ago I read two books that had come up in my work research, but that were not directly related to my job focus.  One was Baker's "Plants and Civilization", a somewhat stuffy but broad and often funny overview of how different plants have shaped and continue to be important in human culture.  The other was Crosby's "Ecological Imperialism", an expansion of some of the themes explored in his book "The Columbian Exchange", which was a favorite of my dad's and mine in my late teenage years.  Here is an in-depth explanation of Crosby's thesis, namely that certain factors of Eurasian species ecology favored the spread of Europeans into what he calls the "Neo-Europes", namely New Zealand, Australia, North America, Argentina, and South Africa.

Bad Economist article

Here's a poorly thought little bit of dogma from the Economist, whose normally astute reporting seems to be clouded when facts seem to go against their neoliberal faith.  Basically the article discusses a rice subsidy and government stockpiling scheme in Thailand.  According to the article, the government plan to support a high price for rice is favored by the rice farmers and the rest of the "landslide" majority, and seen unfavorably by a small group of merchant rice exporters.  The Economist's silly twist is that somehow policies that favor a food-producing majority as opposed to an arbitrage-ing merchant minority are a bad thing.