Third World Green Daddy 39: Benign neglect and childrearing styles

My wife and I have been in charge of three kids for the past year and a half:  my son Sam, my stepdaughter Gabri, and my wife's nephew Manuel.  In many ways, raising these three kids has involved three different parenting styles, because we got them by three different paths.  Sam is two years old, and he was born of our marriage.  Despite occasional debates as to how best to raise and treat him, things have been relatively easy thus far, because he's our kid and no one else's (though of course he has a phalanx of grandparents and cousins and his sister that help raise him).  Plus he's still just a baby.  Raising Gabriela, my teenage stepdaughter, has been a fairly distinct experience from Sam, first of all because she's much older, but also because she's not my biological daughter.  There are certain things I don't feel comfortable imposing on her, and she wouldn't accept my authority on them anyway.  Plus our family has to coordinate with her dad in many decisions as to her upbringing.  All that said, and despite many years of butting heads, Gabri is in many ways more like me than I would ever have imagined.  Her sense of justice, her occasional intolerance and conservatism when it comes to things she considers frivolous, and increasingly an austere, anti-consumerist lifestyle have clearly been influenced by me; I hope some of my inputs have been positive, and that she hasn't simply adopted my most radical, intolerant stances.  Manuel has been yet another situation.  He was raised by his mother until he was 17 (with considerable input from his aunt, my wife Caro), and we have only taken over since the middle of last year.  He was already pretty well formed as a person when he came to us, and I haven't ever felt very comfortable participating directly in his upbringing, though my wife has done a wonderful job bringing out his finer points and discouraging any bad habits he might have.

There was a period about a year ago when our two teenage charges didn't come to many family get-togethers.  Caro's family is very big, and they try to get together at least once a month or so.  We always have fun seeing everyone and catching up.  At any rate, Gabri and Manu often didn't want to go to these events, and Caro let them stay home and do their own thing.  I asked myself if this was normal in families, whether in Colombia or the US.  Family events had never been optional in my childhood, and I wouldn't have wanted to miss them, anyway.  Had childrearing changed since I was a kid?  Was the situation different with bigger kids that could take care of themselves alone, as opposed to my situation as an only child?  Was it a difference between lenient parenting in Colombia and stricter mores in the US?  Or was our teenage kids' non-participation in family events a sign of the steady disintegration of tradition and family that seems to plague all modern societies?


This type of thing also had me wondering what to do with Manuel at times.  As I said, years spent with Gabri have endowed us with a certain understanding of what each one can or can't do with the other, and I am able to incur to some extent in the decisions that affect her.  But Manu grew up as someone else's kid, and came under my care precisely in his most lethargic, apathetic phase of adolescence.  Maybe his non-participation in family events, as well as other non-participations in various aspects of life, was simply a part of normal male adolescence.  A Chicago Public School teacher friend of mine once remarked in response to the increasing concern for poor male performance in high school that the problem of "What do we do with adolescent males?" is by no means a new one.  Many cultures send them to war, or to hunt, or otherwise remove them from normal, acceptable norms of daily life.  I've heard that the Vikings lived in communal longhouses, and a normal part of male development was that a teenage boy would spend a year or so just rolling around in the ashes of the central fireplace, acting like a crazy person.  Maybe this was what Manu and other teenage boys needed.

Colombians certainly do have a different childrearing style than I am accustomed to, though as I remarked above, I think most of the particularities of raising our different children has more to do with their respective situations and our relationship to them, as opposed to cultural norms.  To me and to my Spanish father-in-law, Colombians seem to spoil their kids.  Well into adolescence and adulthood children will cuddle with parents, ask them to do basic things for them like warming their food or bringing them things from another room, and generally act like spoiled babies.  Colombians call this way of babying people "consentir", though it doesn't have the negative connotations of "to spoil" in English.  In fact, Colombians of all stripes seem to regard this type of spoiling as the ultimate expression of care and affection.  Mix that up with the economic inequality inherent to Colombian society, and you have a whole ethic where gettting others to serve you (even if they're hired help and not family members) is viewed as a cute show of affection and closeness, and not as imposition or oppression.  Obviously I'm sort of appalled by this way of doing things, because it contrasts so strongly with the ethic of self-sufficiency, fixing things, and not being a burden to others that I was brought up with.  That said, I wonder how typical my upbringing and my ethic was in the US, and how common the opposite happens, with parents spoiling their kids and never teaching them valuable qualities like responsibility.  The society-scale evidence in the US would seem to indicate the latter approach; we are increasingly a soft, spoiled, rash people with little sense of responsibility or self-control.  At any rate, a positive spin on Colombian parenting would be that it encourages a realistic recognition of our interdependence with others, and prizes affection and gentle words.  In any case, I can't say that one parenting style or the other seems to have created a clearly more healthy society.  Both Colombia and the US are beset by problems of inequality, irresponsibility, laziness, and lack of consideration.

A quick aside on this note has to do with something I read about food pouches that parents can give their kids to suck on instead of actually preparing and sharing a meal with them.  This idea sounds ridiculous to me, and is just one more component of a sick lifestyle where people are harried, eat like shit, don't spend time with their families, and in general are oblivious to real life.  It is what the article refers to as unstructured, "free-range parenting".  Another vomit-inducing quote:  "mobile food technology for the modern family".  The author does a pretty good job of exploring the ethical concerns raised by the existence of these food packets.  I'm especially pissed off by the quotes from parents who claim they just don't have time to feed their kids real food.  I don't know many people who are more busy or productive than my wife and me, and yet we always make time to sit down and eat real food in a family.  When I read nonsense like this, I think it would be more accurate if people were to say, "We have chosen to live two hours from our workplace, to watch hours of TV every day, and to be surgically attached to electronic entertainment devices, so that doesn't leave much time for eating real food or enjoying our family."

While we were studying in France, my wife and I were exposed to a very different parenting style.  One author in the New York Times lauded the French approach, but I would characterize it more cynically as yelling at and shushing kids for the first 15 years of life, and then leaving them to act like silly, wild, partying teens until they're 30, at which point they'll hopefully have finished college and gotten some kind of job.

Over the two years of our son Sam’s life, I feel that my wife and I have gradually adopted (or fallen into) a sort of benign neglect in certain aspects of parenting.  An example of an intentional policy is when we leave him alone and unsupervised in a room as he plays by himself, because we feel that it is best for him to learn how to operate and feel comfortable on his own.  A less deliberate bit of neglect is for instance our failure to have thoroughly childproofed our home.

Months ago I read an article in the New York Times about how parents should crawl aroundtheir home and identify any potential hazards for their child.  Obvious measures to take involve plug outlet covers, securing bookcases to walls, and locking devices to close medicine cabinets and storage areas for toxic cleaning products.  

For a long time we had not taken any of these measures.  I find this shameful in certain cases, such as our having lots of heavy bookshelves, some of them precariously constructed of bricks and wooden planks.  In other cases, like not covering all our plug outlets, I have become convinced by the Colombian example that this precaution is more a superstition of US culture than anything else.  It would be very hard for a kid to stick any part of himself into an electrical outlet, and consistent remonstrances whenever your crawling toddler touches an outlet seem to leave him thoroughly conditioned against playing with plug sockets.  As for locking away toxic cleaning products, we rely more on keeping them high up on shelves so they’re out of Sam’s reach, though we probably haven’t been as assiduous about this as we should.  We don't have TVs or window treatments, so I guess we're okay on that count.

At any rate, I attribute most of whatever irresponsible oversights we’ve committed to our having spent the last year and a half in a crazy limbo of rehabbing two houses in two towns and moving out of two apartments in two towns.  There are a lot of responsible, settled things that I have dreamed of doing, like childproofing our house(s) or setting up a decent handyman’s workshop, that I am only now able to start on thanks to our having finished our epic rehab project in our hometown and moved into this new house.  Just this weekend I managed to fix our bookshelves to the wall so they don’t fall on our kid.

As I mentioned though, there are many aspects (obviously not the life or death things) in which I think it’s good not to be so responsible or attentive to your children.  A few recent articles bear me out in their argument that, if they never face and overcome adversity, childrendon’t grow and development into healthy, responsible, happy, productiveadults.  This is something I’ve always instinctively felt, and that drives even little actions like when I don’t help Sammy untangle his pull-along truck from a chair, but these articles helped me see it in a more conscious, explicit light. 

By the same token, we are now shopping around for a new preschool for Sam in our hometown, after a year in a very well-run preschool in Bogota.  I have written before about the more silly,touchy-feely aspects of Sam’s Bogota school, but I really believe that their basic, common-sense mix of having kids play freely, do art and dancing and things, and pushing them to develop motor and mental skills and discipline, is just what kids need at Sam’s age.  On the other hand, today in our hometown we went to what was surely a well-intentioned preschool, but the influence of petty bourgeois concerns and excessive worries was evident everywhere.  Starting when kids are less than a year old, this school has them sitting in a classroom and doing set workbook activities according to a curriculum.  They pride themselves on things like a focus on computer skills, intensive English exposure, newly-installed security cameras, a full staff of psycho-, speech, and other therapists, and having TVs in every room to reach kids intellectually who are accustomed to seeing lots of TV.  Not only does all this structure seem like bullshit for little kids who should just be running around and pooping on each other, but I fear it is a sure path to the type of constant anxiety and obsession with external appearances that seem to be plaguing upper-middle-class kids and parents in the US.   

The saddest thing is that this preschool isn’t particularly expensive, and I don’t imagine the parents who send their kids there are much different from most people in our town—simple people who, whether laborers or professionals, are usually not more than a generation removed from the peasant life.  I get the feeling that in our town, it may be precisely this type of humble, normal person that insists most on vacuous bourgeois trappings when selecting an education for his children.  The director of the school actually made it a point to tell us that if we come to pick Sam up and see him playing tag, he’s not wasting time, because they are explicitly tailoring his play to the curricular goals.  I imagine all this rigid, neurotic setup is a response to the types of parents who are more concerned with the quantity of official things their kids are doing, with feelings of status and an outward appearance of busyness, and not the quality of what the kid is doing.  “Why isn’t that two-year-old making a productive academic use of her time?”  These must be the same types of parents who look for the most expensive or prestigious private school to send their kids to, and then don’t take ten minutes a day to talk to their kids or help with their homework assignments.  Pure appearance, little content.

I actually think a rigid, conservative school like the one we saw would be good for Sam or any other kid when they’re a bit older.  I don’t believe too much in loosey-goosey alternative educational models that don’t even give kids the basic, rote mental mechanics (reading, writing, arithmetic, consulting a dictionary) that are necessary before you can engage effectively in any higher intellectual pursuit.  And furthermore, I think the sense of not being so special, the sense of arbitrary anonymity you find in a big, orthodox school, both imbues a healthy sense of one’s (relatively small) place in the larger society, as well as a clear indication of ugly things and injustice that should be fought against.  But all of my opinions on the matter apply more to higher levels of education, at least first grade and up.  A two-year-old like Sam doesn’t need to feel insignificant, and is too little to rebel meaningfully against perceived shortcomings of the societal model.  Furthermore, even when Sam is older, I don't want him to suffer for my rigid, anti-elitist dogmas.  He's a kid, not a mission statement.

In general I think my living in a developing country like Colombia has endowed me with a less rigid, normative sense as to how things should happen in life.  As I’ve indicated, at times this is negative, as when it somehow allows me to accept not removing imminent dangers like falling bookshelves from my child’s environment.  But in general I believe it’s a healthier way to live, more in tune with the real possibilities and impossibilities the world offers us.  And living within the means of your world is a big part of what sustainability is all about.

A major manifestation of our having to accept the possibilities dealt us is our desire to have more kids.  We have long dreamed of adopting lots of kids, because we like raising kids and because we want Sam to have siblings closer to his age.  But hectic work, limited economic resources, and above all our not living together have prevented my wife and me from seriously pursuing this project until now.  That said, God has seemed to be signaling to us that it’s not that we aren’t to have more kids, but rather that for now they will come in the form of errant teenagers, and not adopted babies.  Since last year our nephew has been living with us, and we’ve been lucky enough to receive a lot of help from the rest of the family in taking care of him.  We briefly had a friend of my stepdaughter staying in our Bogota house after his mother could no longer pay his rent for college, and in our town, my brother-in-law’s stepdaughter has been living with me as she is in college away from her hometown.  This week we learned that an ex-boyfriend of my stepdaughter’s has been kicked out and cut off by his father, so now we are working out a deal whereby he lives with us and we help him to go to school, in return for his helping us with lots of projects around the house and also with our burgeoning business ideas.  It is how the Haitian restavek system is supposed to work (though in reality this latter usually involves very young children working as slaves for a family and unable to go to school).  At any rate, for now we’ve got plenty of kids, though few that are cute and cuddly and bear our last names.

Third World Green Daddy 38: Migrant blues

Yesterday I was pickpocketed.  I had never been pickpocketed or criminally victimized in any other way in my entire life, a fact of which I have always been proud, because I attributed it to my being very alert and careful.  Which means that now I feel stupid and shitty, because getting pickpocketed implies that I was oblivious and careless.

It happened like this:  I was with my mother in a crowded bazaar in central Bogota, getting party favors and things for my son's birthday, which will be tomorrow.  We had braved our way through the thrumming, thronging humanity to get paper goods, cheap plastic toys, markers, and the like, and we'd even withstood some not entirely friendly attention from passers-by who heard us talking in English.  This type of thing makes me see red; in what kind of a place do people stare or make ugly comments to others based on their nationality or their language?  I mean, for all its problems with race and ethnicity, in the US people usually don't stare or yell things at foreigners just because they're foreigners.  In fact, even in Colombia I usually don't have problems.  I have been to remote peasant villages and provincial cities (hell, I live in one), and more often than not the people there, different from me as they are, treat me like a normal person and judge me for what I say and do, not for where I was born.  What a sad situation that in Bogota, supposedly the open-minded, cosmopolitan capital, people act like uncivilized, xenophobic baboons.

Surely part of the issue is that, despite my height and my odd appearance, it seems that I blend in more or less well when I'm alone and not saying anything.  But when I'm with my very blond mother, and we're talking in English, we seem to attract a lot of attention.  Even so, why should I have to try and hide my language, hide my mother, just for us to be left alone on the street?  That's no dignified way to live.

At any rate, I was already somewhat annoyed with the general situation as my mother and I got onto the public transit bus (which you get on from a platform, just like in a subway).  We had debated whether to catch the bus or a taxi, and then we let a few buses pass as we decided which route to take and which bus didn't seem too full.  Finally, as we got on a bus, I felt a guy shove his leg against mine as if he were trying to squeeze on.  I made sure that my mother got on okay, and that no one was messing with her purse, and then I felt in my pocket to make sure that no one was trying to take my wallet.  But by the time I could do this, and I definitively felt that my wallet was gone, I was inside the bus and the doors were closing.  I thought to pull the emergency stop and get off the bus to find the guy, but for some reason I didn't do it.  In short, in various moments I had an instinctual urge to do things to prevent me from getting robbed (covering my pocket, pulling the emergency brake), but I didn't act on them.  And so I was robbed.

I feel like less of a man now, not only for being fool enough to get robbed, but also because I think that, ever since I started carrying a wallet at the age of twelve or so, it made me feel like an adult.  The heft in my left pocket was a sign that I was like other grown-up men, with money, cards, IDs, obligations, etc.  Now my pocket is conspicuously light and empty, and it reminds me with every step of my carelessness.

Beyond this, the whole affair has rekindled a fatigue and an ire that I've been feeling for some weeks now, if not for years.  Namely, being a migrant, a foreigner, has worn me down and filled me with rage.  I often feel like people second-guess me or simply don't listen to what I have to say, because they are so fixated on the fact that I talk differently from them, that I was born somewhere else.  They are so focused on what I am that they don't care to know who I am.  As a result, they treat me almost like a talking parrot or a chimpanzee.  They hear that I mouth words and even string them together into sentences, but they don't entirely believe that I know what the words mean.

This issue came up a few weeks ago at a place I was working temporarily.  A series of discussions had convinced me that, despite working with me on and off for years, some of my colleagues had never thought of me as anything more than a foreigner, something not quite human.  It really hurt me on a personal level, it offended and hindered me professionally, and it gave me that crazy, self-doubting feeling of the person who is pretty sure he's being discriminated against, but everyone tells him that he's just imagining it.  Like Tom Hanks in Philadelphia.

Right around the time this problem happened at work, I saw a new Canadian movie called Mr. Lazhar.  It is about an Algerian refugee who becomes a teacher in Montreal.  There are many subtle, accurate depictions of the little slings and arrows that come one's way as a foreigner trying to operate in a professional milieu, especially one like teaching where you are supposed to form people and inculcate your values in others.  In many parts of the movie you can see that colleagues, students, and parents discredit or disrespect the main character or his teaching methods.  You never know for sure if it's an honest disagreement with method and philosophy, or if there is an undertone of intolerance or suspicion because the character is a foreigner.  I felt like the movie captured perfectly what I was going through at the moment.

In the case of my problem at that job, I more or less resolved the situation through some difficult arguments and conversations, and now I feel that the people who were mistreating me give me more consideration and respect.  I had thus calmed down, and now felt okay in my place as a foreigner in Colombia, especially insofar as I recently finished rehabbing our house in our small town.  I now have a safe place where it's just me and my family, and we can live life as we see fit.

But yesterday's robbery, along with the stupid comments from stupid people as my mother and I walked around Bogota, all this rekindled my general rancor with Colombia, and especially with Bogota, which I am more and more convinced is not a place where people can live like human beings.  I am sick of people mistreating each other, especially when it doesn't even lead to much personal benefit for the abuser.  I mean, I had the equivalent of maybe $15US in my wallet (between pesos, dollars, and a charged bus card), which even in lower-income Colombia doesn't amount to much.  The thief can't use any of my credit or debit cards, and my IDs and health insurance cards don't do him any good, either.  So he only got $15US, and I lost much more than that in the personal value that my wallet had for me, in the notes from my wife, in my kid's photo.  It is a problem that repeats itself across Colombia.  Politicians and contractors think up scams that rob millions of dollars of value from the public, but only give them a few thousand dollars' profit in their pocket.  Grave robbers search for gold and pottery that they can sell for a few hundred dollars to collectors, and in the process they steal from the nation an incalculable cultural wealth and a sense of identity.  Agroindustrialists replace family farms that generate millions of dollars of profit for the local families with gleaming, modern plantations of oil palm or bananas, which only generate a few thousand dollars for the one oligarch that now controls all that land.  It all makes me want to send the whole country to hell sometimes.

Of course this isn't coherent in my case, because my wife, my child, the people I love, and even professional colleagues and neighborhood acquaintances that I esteem, they're all Colombian.  Furthermore, I can't rightly complain too much about my life here.  I live well, better than most Colombians and probably better than most people in the US.  I am hardly an oppressed victim, a hapless refugee.  Above all, I chose to come here, just as I chose to leave the US.  This decision to leave was in part because there are many aspects of life and culture in my birthplace that I detest (I mean shit, no one in Colombia is storming grammar schools and shooting up 6-year-olds with assault rifles), and in part because my way of thinking and my set of skills aren't very highly valued in the land where I was born.  So it's not realistic for me to think that I should just leave Colombia behind because everything will be better in the States.

I guess this is part and parcel of being a migrant.  You don't fully belong to your original homeland, because you chose to leave it and have chosen to stay away.  But you won't ever fully belong to your adopted home either, both due to your own traits and due to the prejudices of your new compatriots.  You can no longer naively think that by leaving a place behind you can get away from your problems, because you've already done that and have seen that there are new problems (perhaps even some of the old ones from your homeland) in the new place you've arrived to.  In my more optimistic moments I muse that these challenges of living as a migrant make one stronger, make one a better person, even as they cause one to suffer.  But lately I have to say I wouldn't wish this fate on anyone.  It's very possible that all this suffering doesn't have any redeeming value, and is just more hassle and hardship piled onto what you already have to deal with in life.  I dread the prospect of my wife having to live and feel all these things if we live in the US or elsewhere, and I especially feel bad for having thrust my son into a position whereby he may never be at ease, where he will always feel like a migrant split between two worlds.  I'm going to try not to make a big deal of this with him; he might not mind it at all, and my constantly bringing up how awful and difficult it is to live between two cultures might be like the parent who frets so much about spiders that his kid ends up learning to be afraid of them too.

But for right now, I'm sure not liking this whole migrant thing.  It's a tough way to live sometimes.

Land policy in Africa

Here is the final report from a conference on African land policy (that is, the laws and norms surrounding the purchase, property, and use of land) held in Germany in 2011.  Since it is really just the summary of the conference proceedings, it doesn't go too in-depth into any issues.  But it is very interesting to see the clashing viewpoints of European NGOs, European governments, African NGOs, African governments, etc.  Especially on the issue of foreign land investments in African countries, the African participants and a few civil society Europeans come out very strongly against basically any kind of large corporate land purchases, while a few European and international bodies give a weak response that, despite having little or no evidence of any positive outcomes, ever, foreign direct investment in land projects might be a decent idea in some cases.

The Future of Food and Farming

As part of my long-term project of commenting on different big reports that touch on food and agriculture issues, in this post I am going to review a report by the Government Office for Science of the UK, called "The Future of Food and Farming".

In general this is a decent report that discusses various of the major issues that will affect our food supply over the next few decades.  In this respect it follows "The Coming Famine", a book I read last year.  The weaknesses of the UK report though are its consistent pro-business stance.

One of the report's supposed working methodologies is that the authors were not going to reject a priori any policy possibilities based on moral issues (page 166).  Such a goal is near impossible and could even be downright evil if you were really to follow through on it; for instance, the report never considers resorting to slavery, genocide, mass sterilization, or anything else of the sort in its efforts to ensure a stable food supply.  I am glad they don't consider such things, but this is indicative precisely of certain policies that they are rejecting on moral grounds.  What the authors really seem to be saying, then, is that they do not wish to step on the toes of big commercial interests that are trying to make money from the patenting of life forms, the overturning of certain basic biological principles, the destruction of ecosystem integrity, or the industrialization of animal production. 

Furthermore, in almost the next breath after saying they aren't going to reject any policies out of hand, the authors explicitly reject the pursuit of food self-sufficiency on a national level as a valid political decision.  Furthermore, the authors incorrectly equate the idea of national food self-sufficiency (that is, the satisfaction of all a country's food needs through national production) with the concept of food sovereignty, which is the idea that each nation should be able to decide how to meet its own food needs through a mix of national production, imports, and any other options the people deem appropriate.  The report seems to be wary of the idea of national self-determination (as they were of moral deliberation by individuals and societies), because it may interfere in the open market, neoliberal fantasy.  But of course they don't want to make a claim so obviously undemocratic as to say that countries shouldn't be able to decide how they get their food, so the report resorts to mischaracterizing food sovereignty as an unreasonable insistence on totally rejecting imports.  The contradiction becomes clear when the report claims that nations should not be limited in their sovereignty, but then immediately calls for legal frameworks such that the international community can prohibit export bans by sovereign nations (pp. 96 and 97).

In the same vein, the report casts doubt on the possibility that having a few large companies dominate various facets of the food supply chain might be a dangerous or undesirable thing (pp. 99-100).  In addition, the report makes it seem as if only private companies are capable of doing valuable agricultural research, when in fact most of the really important breakthroughs that have had a big impact on the world food supply over the past century were based on publicly-funded research with very little patenting or "protection" of intellectual property rights (the breeding work carried out by public universities and the CGIAR system chief among these breakthroughs).  Another telling sign is that all the research and development projects cited by the report are public-private partnerships involving big companies like Syngenta.  You would think from this report that there are no worthwhile initiatives at the national or regional level, and you would certainly have no idea from reading the report that many research and development projects funded by large private companies (and even private donors) have drawn the wrath of a lot of people (among them the poor farmers they purport to help) for their heavy-handed way of doing things.

When it comes time to assign blame for the 2008 food price spike, the report is reticent about the role of permanent long-position index funds and the dominance of commodity markets by non-agricultural actors.  The report on the one hand mischaracterizes these investors as "speculators" in order to be able to make the tautological and smug claim that speculation always cancels itself out, so there's nothing to worry about (pp. 22 and 109), then makes a quick statement that the role of over-the-counter commodity swaps and the permanent roll-over of long positions in index funds needs to be explored further before it can be definitively asserted that these shady dealings had something to do with the 2008 crisis.  They even show a graph that demonstrates that the 2008 price spike was not that big of a deal, but the graph leaves out corn and soybean prices (p. 106).  On the other hand, when it comes to the relatively self-evident and straightforward wisdom of maintaining food reserves, the report does not hesitate to spout unsupported dogma that such reserves would be more costly to maintain than the crises they were meant to avoid.  In addition, the report mainly deals with the straw man possibility of maintaining a unified, international food reserve, which would admittedly be difficult to coordinate, as opposed to addressing the advisability of each country's maintaining a national or regional reserve (p. 168).  Such reserves are not difficult, expensive, pie-in-the-sky ideas in the same way that a global reserve is, but they do aim to influence markets, prices, supply, etc.  This is clearly against the report's neoliberal orthodoxy, which is why the idea of national food reserves is never seriously engaged in the report.  Once again we see the report's overriding fear of distorting trade and capitalism as is (p. 110).  Indeed, the report mimics the WTO's eternal contortions in an attempt to provide some semblance of environmental protections, protections of rural livelihoods, guarantees of food safety and quality, etc., but always with a suspicion that such concerns are just excuses to interfere in the smooth functioning of the sacred global market (pp. 96-97, and especially p. 122's insistence on looking critically at social protection measures).  Throughout the report there are a million suggestions to address the many market failures of a neoliberal system, while always insisting that it's easier or smarter to get every country on board to agree on these million adjustments, instead of trusting each country to govern itself and look out for its own people.

I hope it's clear by now that this report is very biased in terms of its economic policy thinking.  That said, it gives a pretty well-thought treatment to environmental issues (p. 169, for example), and is healthily skeptical of any quick fixes (like biochar, p. 139).  The report rightly points out that agriculture and food production in general will have to operate with fewer resources in the future, and will have to be a contributor to solving many environmental problems, as opposed to worsening them.

My final critique of the report, and it's a really big, damning one, is that there was hardly any input from farmer groups.  In the authors and editors listed, there is one representative of a UK farmer union, and no other national or international farmer representation.  This is perhaps the best indicator of the report's bureaucratic, big business focus.  If you are purporting to ponder and write about food production but you involve basically no farmers in the process, you're bound to miss a big part of the story.  I don't want to say that this report is totally irrelevant, because I know a lot of people worked hard and earnestly on it, but I think if you asked the billion-plus small farmers that feed most of the world, I imagine they wouldn't have much regard for "The Future of Food and Farming".  In this respect, the report seems to repeat the mistakes of the past of food and farming; it totally ignores the intellectual contributions and practical considerations that farmers might offer.