The importance of vaccination

Here is a fascinating firsthand account of someone who grew up unvaccinated, and who as a result was infected with all sorts of bizarre diseases that most of us have never even heard of, and certainly never suffered from.  It is a strong reminder of the fundamental irresponsibility of not vaccinating your kids.  It also serves to clarify for me my own position on germs and microbiota.  As I've written about in past blog posts, I am increasingly convinced that, by our expanding use of antibiotics and our lack of exposure to soil and animals, humans in modern societies are losing important parts of the microbial life that has traditionally lived on and around our bodies and helped us to avoid certain chronic conditions like allergies and perhaps even cancers that are plaguing us all today.  I believe that people should try to maximize their exposure to manure, farm soil, and livestock so as to inoculate their bodies with whatever good microbes are out there (which we admittedly still know very little about).  Such a pro-microbial stance on my part might seem to overlap with those who don't vaccinate themselves or their children, but my thinking is totally the opposite.  Vaccination is essentially a controlled, responsible exposure to certain microbes so we can deal with them in our environment without suffering horrible consequences, and as such I'm a firm believer in the importance of vaccination.  Vaccination is thus a great complement to intentionally increasing our exposure to other, ambient microbes, because vaccination drastically minimizes the risk from the very small but important proportion of ambient microbes that are human pathogens, while allowing us to benefit from exposure to the rest of the microbial world.

Strong developing world voices

Here is an article from India regarding the country's attempts to maintain certain government support for farmers there, in the face of US and WTO objections.  Here is one from Nigeria recognizing the importance of family farmers in ensuring the country's food supply.  This second article especially is a refreshing change from the tone of many (presumably urban-based) journalists in developing countries, who in their ignorance of how farming works see only the apparent "backwardness" of their peasant countrymen.  Too often, developing world journalists and other important influencers of policy seem to be embarrassed by the peasantry, embarrassed that the rest of the world defines their countries by their agrarian base and not by the go-go, bourgeois urban lifestyle that is seen as more desireable and respectable in a modern consumerist value system.  I think that this embarrassment of their "hillbilly relatives" contributes to many misled policies in the developing world that favor urban elites instead of the rural mass of the population.  At any rate, both articles I've linked to here seem to call for a real, society-wide acceptance and recognition of the peasantry, and surely the FAO declaration of 2014 as the year of family farming is pushing us all to see the peasantry with respect and validation.  I'm all for that.

The Warmth of Other Suns

Well it was Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday last week, or at least the official observation thereof.  In homage to him and to the black folk who have so contributed to who and what we are as a nation, I am finally getting around to writing this post about a great book about the Great Migration, Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns.  I read this book a few years ago, and since then I've been thinking about it and the issues it discusses, trying to come up with something coherent I can write about it myself.

The occasion for finally writing this blog post was all the more auspicious on the MLK Jr. weekend, because I happened to be in my hometown of Chicago, for better or for worse the teeming black heart of the North and the archetypal symbol of the Great Migration.  On the train trip there I was confronted at every turn with reminders of the Great Migration and the US's black culture, perhaps simply because the Migration touched everything about this country.  I traveled from Washington, DC, that recently whitewashed black metropolis, on a train, that great conveyor of black folks fleeing the South for the uncertain promise of the North.  The train's staff was almost all black, which of course brought to mind stories of Malcolm Little flitting about the eastern seaboard in his youth.  The journey took me from former slavery territory, through Harper's Ferry, site of John Brown's last stand, and into the snow-blanketed plains of the Midwest, whose cold and flatness and overt difference were surely welcome markers of the final destination for southern black refugees from the early 1800s onwards.  The final leg of my trip had us flying past mile after mile of bustling, fuming factories in northwest Indiana, still churning out steel and cars in quantity, if not employing nearly as many people as they did before massive mechanization.  And finally to my beautiful black city (or at least what's left of it), through Chicago's South Side black belt--South Shore, Englewood, Washington Park, Bronzeville--as it empties out, houses decaying and vacant land opening up in slow motion.  This is the whimpering, inauspicious postlude to the story of the Great Migration, the grand, shameful failure of the North to fully welcome and include all who came to its shores in search of opportunity.  They came, they prospered, they stopped prospering, and then they hobbled back to the South, having moved the country forward without moving forward themselves.

But back to the book--here is a review of it from the author's website:

“Wilkerson has created a brilliant and innovative paradox: the intimate epic. At its smallest scale, this towering work rests on a trio of unforgettable biographies, lives as humble as they were heroic… In different decades and for different reasons they headed north and west, along with millions of fellow travelers. . . In powerful, lyrical prose that combines the historian’s rigor with the novelist’s empathy, Wilkerson’s book changes our understanding of the Great Migration and indeed of the modern United States.”

I agree with the reviewer's qualification of The Warmth of Other Suns as an intimate epic.  The book weaves together both the personal stories of migrants for whom the Great Migration was the defining bedrock underlying much else in their lives (but who in the end were mainly just trying to live their little, particular lives), and the sweeping, unfathomable scale of this massive movement of population, culture, and ideas over the breadth of the United States.  The book is amazingly, thoroughly well-researched.

However, "intimate epic" is a difficult, perhaps inherently incongruous genre, and the historian and the novelist are always at odds in it.  Wilkerson's prose shifts between spare, utilitarian historiography and large-scale statistics, and florid descriptions of landscapes or human moments.  She is a journalist, and it seems that she can't combine personal interest-style reporting with cold, hard, big-issue reporting, at least not in a graceful, unified way.  As such the book's style felt at times like a patchwork, which is perhaps the only way it could have sounded.  The most effective passages, and indeed those that fill up perhaps 90% of the book, are when Wilkerson steps back and subsumes her own voice, and we follow directly the stories of the three protagonists she has chosen as typifying the Migration's different faces.  This is where the reader is truly thankful for Wilkerson's acute journalistic instinct to let the story tell itself from the mouths of those who lived it.

Aside from the high quality of the book, and its ability to maintain you rapt through hundreds of pages, I was also stricken by how much it relates to my own story.  It occurs to me that the black Great Migration is really a part of a larger, more general great migration in the 20th century US, when our population went from something like 80% rural to about 80% urban today.  My parents each left smaller Midwestern towns for Chicago (after their parents had left rural living for those smaller towns).  In both of their cases they left their hometowns in search of better jobs, more sophistication, more options for culture and thought and enrichment that could only be found in a bustling metropolis like Chicago.  In fact, the fifth anniversary of my dad's death, which also has fallen in these past few days, has seen me reviewing the mementos of his life.  It is fascinating to think about all the movement and living and change that happened between the "Born:  Wichita 1947" and his death on a bitter cold day in 2009, in a hospital room overlooking a frozen Lake Michigan in his adopted home of Chicago, where he spent well over half his life.  Also as in Wilkerson's case, I am a product of this migration.  If either of my parents hadn't undertaken the journey, they wouldn't have met, and I wouldn't exist.

Obviously my white parents weren't fleeing racial violence and terror in their white birthplace, but Wilkerson brings out that this awful, suffocating terror for black folks in the South simply overlaid the boredom and lack of opportunity that defined rural life in general as the nation urbanized and industrialized.  In Colombia today something similar happens; displaced people fleeing rural violence and terror are mixed in with a larger rural exodus comprised of people looking for better economic opportunities in the cities.  In all cases the economic realities are driving the rural-urban migration, though the specifics of violence and fear (which are in turn driven in large part by economic realities, too) differentiate some migrants from others.  Likewise, Wilkerson draws explicit parallels between black Great Migrants and European immigrants to the US.  Both groups traveled great distances and encountered a much bigger change in culture and climate than did the more typical, white Anglo rural-urban migrants in the US, who usually migrated from a surrounding rural hinterland to a nearby catchbasin city (Wisconsin to Chicago, Missouri to Kansas City, Pennsylvania to Philadelphia, etc.).  It's a lot farther from Louisiana to LA than my father's journey from Kansas to Chicago, or certainly than my mother's Beloit-Chicago hop, and the culture shock was a lot more drastic for these long-distance black Southern or European migrants (though that said, the Mississippi-Chicago black migrants were and are unique in the relatively small distance and the ease of going back and forth).

In this respect, the story of the Great Migration is really the story of the United States in the 20th century, and perhaps of the modern world in general. 

Another aspect of the book that most struck me was the sheer nastiness, the neurotic hate of the Jim Crow South.  You get the sense that many white folk, not just lawmakers but the general populace, went out of their way to be mean to blacks in every way, every day.  There are countless stories of common whites humiliating blacks in ways great and small, bullying, beating, even killing blacks just because they knew they wouldn't fight back.  In some towns there were separate staircases to public buildings, even separate Bibles to swear on in the courtroom.  I mean, how pathological is that?  I'm linking to an article that reminds us of how bad life was for Southern blacks during Jim Crow.  It argues that Dr. King's most important legacy was not any one march or speech or even any law that he got passed, but simply his example and his exhortation to blacks to overcome their fears of the white oppressor.  I always advocate for sticking with your roots, which would normally impel me to speak out against massive migration.  I think it's important to appreciate your land, your culture, the place you're from.  You shouldn't just pull up stakes, give up on what you know for an uncertain, fanciful shot at success elsewhere.  But in the Jim Crow South, staying put was intolerable for blacks.  Not many people could unquestioningly love a land where you and your family were constantly under threat.

The book briefly hints at, though it doesn't fully explore, the tension and the difference between those blacks that left the South and those that stayed.  Yes, those that left were often the most motivated, the most educated, those willing to endure some short-term hardship for a better future, as opposed to just grinding on passively through a life of oppression.  But it would be wrong to think of those who stayed behind as consenting, feeble-minded Uncle Toms.  The Warmth of other Suns has a poignant example of two brothers (or maybe cousins), both black doctors in Louisiana.  One, the less politically-minded and perhaps less brilliant, leaves for the freedom and the glamor of Los Angeles.  The other urges him to stay behind, and does so himself, feeling a duty to serve his beleaguered countrymen.  Furthermore, let us remember that it was Southern blacks who led the Civil Rights movement, Southern blacks who braved state terror and oppression to change the laws and the culture of the land.  It may be that they were in part inspired or enabled by the departure of others for the North (the Southern white establishment must have been more willing/desperate to compromise knowing that the entire peasant underclass could always just up and leave, if it really wanted to), but we mustn't forget that Southern resistance to racism and terror was much more ardent, and in the end much more effective, than anything Northern blacks mounted in the 50s and 60s.

If the white South had been punished for its sin of hatred and brutality, and the North had benefited, I'd be very happy.  It would be a fitting recompense to us open-minded Northerners, and indeed we did benefit economically for a time, as the South provided us with a hard-working, cheap labor force happy to live among us.  Reading about the mid-20th century, my Northern pride kicked in, and I thought, "Of course the South deserves to be the depressed, dangerous place it still is today.  They committed the sin of entrenched hate, which led them to hold onto a feudal, backwards economic model in which a huge portion of their population was kept from making meaningful contributions to the advancement of society.  While the North was an open society, happy to incorporate those beleaguered Southern peasants and extend the promise of prosperity to them."

The problem is that blacks weren't accepted in the North either.  If you want to see entrenched hate and a backwards, feudal economic model, just look at Chicago today!  For the most part black migrants were not incorporated in the virtuous cycle of prosperity that swept over the industrial North during the middle of the 20th century.   The terror of the South was gone, but the North's cold economic exclusion kept blacks in an economically marginalized position.  The migrants portrayed in the Warmth of other Suns did not fare much better economically than if they had remained in the South.  Granted, the immediate change from Depression-era Mississippi to boomtown Chicago was a big step up economically, but in the book we see that the children of many of the migrants regressed to being at the bottom of the economic barrel.  If this is typical, then black migrants went from Southern oppression, to a good spell in the North, to either Northern poverty and decadence or a return South.  Through the many decades spanned in the book, with all their epochal changes for the nation as a whole, the well-being of the black migrants seems to be the one thing that changed little.  They transformed the country, but didn't seem to benefit much in the end.  We in the North owe these brave black migrants more for what they contributed to our economic development. 

Furthermore, more recently both North and South have adopted what is largely a fraud-based pyramid economy of empty finance, over-priced services, strip-mall retail, and oil-derived leisure.  This is at base even worse and less viable than the feudal sharecropper economy present in the South during the Great Migration.  So now blacks go back to the South, because the North no longer offers a better economic life, and certainly can't offer the ties to land, family, tradition, and mild weather of the South.  This is disgusting and disappointing to me--the North failed many blacks and thus failed itself, instead of taking advantage of a historical moment to become even greater.

This is all of course an oversimplification of things.  Many blacks have succeeded in the 20th and 21st centuries, and perhaps the freedom and capitalism they enjoyed in the North was indispensable for that transition from disenfranchised peasants to middle or upper class citizens.  Or maybe not--Southern blacks seem to form an important part of the black middle class in the nation as a whole (both in the Jim Crow era and today), and the South is becoming as prosperous if not moreso than much of the post-industrial North.  Who knows how our nation's economic trajectory, and the place of blacks in it, would have changed if the Great Migration had never occurred?  In any case, too many blacks have not partaken in the capitalist growth and prosperity, and they form a sort of permanent underclass in the North that I imagine might have been better off if they'd have stayed in the South with family.  Their forebears made such sacrifices, yet they have not been able to benefit fully from them.

I want to make it clear that blacks do not form the majority of the US's poor, and that poor people do not comprise a majority of blacks.  But in Chicago, in my part of the country, the place I most care about, the underclass that has been most left behind by prosperity and hit most fully by post-industrial decadence and depression are blacks, and their story is an integral part of the Great Migration and its aftermath.

If my possible reading of the Great Migration as a failure is correct, then Malcolm X was clearly the most prescient prophet of this result.  (By the way, I've temporarily curtailed my bedtime reading of his autobiography with my young sons.  I don't know how to explain to them that I'm white, I don't consider myself a devil, but nevertheless I want them to hear a text that refers to whites as devils on almost every page!)  Anyway, Malcolm X spent his whole life in the North, and suffered lynching, oppression, discrimination, and terror in his life, so (rightly or wrongly) he saw little difference in the nation's attitude towards blacks in North and South.  He equated overt Southern oppression with the grinding, inhuman indifference of the industrial North.  I have written in a past blog post that Malcolm perhaps saw more clearly than Dr. King or others the North's brand of economic oppression (which persists in North and South long after most explicitly racist laws and customs have faded).  As such, maybe he was really getting more at the heart of black marginalization than Dr. King did, despite the latter's seemingly more concrete gains in his lifetime.

On the other hand, despite the apparent differences in the two men's outlooks and methods, maybe they were both getting at the same thing--that blacks had to (still have to?) overcome their fears of upsetting the status quo in order to become truly free.  As it says in the article I linked to above, maybe Dr. King's greatest accomplishment was ending "the terror of living in the South" by defying the white terrorizer.  If this is so, then his legacy is similar to that put forth in the eulogy Ossie Davis rendered to brother Malcolm:  "Malcolm was our manhood, our living, black manhood!"

Common-sense improvements to farming

Here is a list of twelve adjustments we could make to farming so it is more sustainable ecologically, economically, and socially.  Most are pretty basic and obvious, but it is good to see such advice circulating in mainstream food security thinking.  It often doesn't

Families in the US

Here is a wide-ranging look at what "family" means today in the US.  It is fascinating to see the different arrangements, difficulties, and satisfactions that different families have.  We truly are a diverse nation.

Charter schools as private investment vehicle

This is an article about the appalling trend of charter schools' serving as equity vehicles for private investors.  The most relevant passages of the article for me:

"Too bad the kids in charter schools don’t learn any better than those in plain-vanilla public schools. Stanford University crunched test data from 26 states... Nor does the evidence show that charters spend taxpayers’ money more efficiently... About the only thing charters do well is limit the influence of teachers’ unions. And fatten their investors’ portfolios."

The Noahpinion blog

My cousin just shared this blog post with me, about the difference between "tribal reality", or the perpetuation of myths by a group for the sake of its members' own sense of group cohesion, and "extant reality", or the objective reality surrounding us.  I often find myself torn between sympathy for those who would elevate objective observation of reality above all else (read scientists and modern rational thinkers), and sympathy for a distinctly pre-modern, "tribal" sense of reality that gives deep meaning to us humans, as well as assuring some degree of ecological and social sustainability to our societies by the wisdom acquired through centuries of groupthink. 

At any rate, I am thankful to my cousin for sharing this blog with me.  It's called Noahpinion, and deals with the diverse thinking and views of a behavioral finance professor.  He covers lots of economics topics, but also more personal reflections on things like depression or Western civilization.  I also particularly liked his call for everyone to be more respectful to one another and to define all work and all people (not just prestigious jobs and people) as dignified and worthy of our admiration and respect.  I believe firmly in such a respectful attitude, though admittedly my recent entry into the ranks of people who are somewhat decently paid and respected has perhaps eroded the respect I pay to others who now find themselves below me in society's pecking order.  This blog post is a call to attention so I don't slide further down that path.

I will probably not follow Noahpinion in the future, simply because I don't have much time anymore to keep up with other bloggers.  But if you've got some time, you should definitely check him out.

More on extreme poverty

Here is an article from the Economist looking at the very real prospects for largely eliminating extreme poverty by 2030, which references many of the same new numbers and reports that I briefly discussed in a recent blog post.  It goes into some detail as to how this would/will play out demographically, namely that economic growth in countries like India will carry massive amounts of people over the $1.25/day extreme poverty threshold in the next few years, but after that the outliers that remain under $1.25/day in the world will become harder for the economy to bring out of poverty.  Another question I have that is not really addressed in the documents I've seen is how the new, extreme poverty-free world would look after 2030.  I mean, something like 10% of the US population is considered food insecure, which means that they go hungry some days during the year.  They may not manifest the same physical symptoms as someone who is chronically undernourished, but their life is still drastically affected by hunger.  This is also the case for countless people in places like Brazil or Colombia that earn well over $1.25 a day, but that are still very poor and deal with poverty's problems such as violence, unemployment, poor education, and hunger.  If that's the case for people well over the $1.25/day threshold in a generally prosperous country, how much nicer and better will the world really look even after eliminating the most egregious poverty?

Article on the flawed food security narrative

This is an amazingly well-thought, well-reasoned, well-explained article about the real food security challenges facing our planet, and how they differ significantly from the common narrative we hear in many media sources.  The author starts by presenting this common narrative about food security.  It goes like this:


"The world's population will grow to 9 billion by mid-century, putting substantial demands on the planet's food supply. To meet these growing demands, we will need to grow almost twice as much food by 2050 as we do today.
"And that means we'll need to use genetically modified crops and other advanced technologies to produce this additional food. It's a race to feed the world, and we had better get started."

The author then analyzes and breaks down this narrative in various steps.  First he points out its assumption that the current irresponsible US-style food consumption patterns are an inmutable given, and that they will expand as more people on the planet become wealthier.  In the prevalent narrative, it is not explained in depth that our future population will not in fact be double the current population, and that we will only need to double food production if everyone adopts the US's current artery-clogging diet of grain-fed meat and milk, accordingly reducing their consumption of grains, pulses, and tubers.  So subscribers to the prevalent narrative unthinkingly accept that we will need to change our production practices in order to double production, without ever considering that we also could (and indeed should) change our consumption patterns.

The second critique the author offers to the current food security narrative regards the assertion that genetically-modified crops and other high-tech approaches will be necessary to produce more food for a hungry world.  The author is not an objector to genetic engineering per se, but he correctly points out that up to now it has had very little impact on total food production in the world.  More importantly, he explains that the major potential increases in yield are not to be had by applying cutting-edge technology to wheedle out a few extra bushels per acre from modernized Iowa farms, but rather by making accessible rather simple, low-tech improvements like better soil management, drip irrigation, or new plant breeds that can result in huge yield increases for resource-poor farmers in the developing world.

The author finishes with an improved, more nuanced narrative on food security:


"The world faces tremendous challenges to feeding a growing, richer world population - especially to doing so sustainably, without degrading our planet's resources and the environment.
"To address these challenges, we will need to deliver more food to the world through a balanced mix of growing more food (while reducing the environmental impact of agricultural practices) and using the food we already have more effectively.
"Key strategies include reducing food waste, rethinking our diets and biofuel choices, curbing population growth, and growing more food at the base of the agricultural pyramid with low-tech agronomic innovations. Only through a balanced approach of supply-side and demand-side solutions can we address this difficult challenge."

Farming bluefin tuna

This is an interesting article on the attempts to produce viable tuna fingerlings to stock Japan's existing bluefin tuna "farms", which I assume are really just fattening pens for wild-caught fish.  Apparently the inability to produce spawn is the major sticking point in Japanese tuna farming right now, such that the large-scale production of spawn would totally revolutionize the sector.  If my understanding is correct, there is no true tuna farming in Japan, but rather a sort of tuna taming.  The difference between tame animals and domesticated animals is that tame animals are born wild and then captured and raised, like Asian elephants trained to work for people.  Domesticated animals, on the other hand, have their life cycle totally controlled by humans, like a cow or a pig.  If the research profiled in this NYT article pans out, it would mean the transition of Japanese tuna farming from a primitive wild capture and fattening system to true domestication.

Land grabbing

For some two or three years now I've wanted to do a blog post on land grabbing.  Attempts by big companies and even foreign governments to buy up large parcels of land to farm in countries in Africa, Latin America, and parts of Asia, were big new a few years ago.  The topic has somewhat slipped off the news radar more recently.  I don't know if it's because there's less land grabbing going on, or if some of the early projects didn't pan out, or what.

I still haven't gotten my thoughts together for a big, coherent overview and commentary on the land grabbing trend, so in this post I will just link to good things that have been written about it, and offer a few brief comments for each link.  Other than that, my general take is that land grabbing will almost always involve the violation of human rights, because it is not a viable proposition unless you commit some abuses to make it work.  What I mean is that big plantations usually have very low per-acre margins on whatever it is they're producing.  To get around this inherent low profitability, a company can improve its bottom line by reducing costs in at least two ways I can think of:  getting land for really cheap, or reducing workers or paying them poorly.  Both of these involve doing some bad things.  The only cheap land is unused land, but there is very little of that in the world today (despite the claims that you read in newspaper article about vast tracts of unfarmed or uninhabited land in different African countries).

So to get cheap land, you either have to intrude on pristine, unpopulated areas like jungle or savanna or steppe, which has the drawback of destroying important ecosystem functions, or you have to steal land that people are already using.  Luckily, most big land grabs that I know of don't go the first route of destroying prime wild habitat (though it does happen, as in this case in Liberia), but unfortunately, they do tend to kick people off their land.  This second strategy is what armed paramilitary groups have long employed in Colombia to extend their political and economic control over large areas, as I profiled in a past blog.  But unlike the paramilitary land grabs in Colombia (which are usually not even referred to as land grabs, since they occur at a very local scale and don't get much publicity), the companies perpetrating the modern wave of land grabs don't go in with guns.  They make cozy deals with the government to use "unoccupied" land at rock-bottom sale or lease prices, and it is the country government itself that takes care of kicking people off the land.  Aside from being wrong, this is poor business practice; the big land grabbers are only able to make a profit by externalizing their land costs, paying cents or dollars per acre.  If this artificial land price depression ever fails, as it is bound to in the face of angry people pushed off their land and demanding accountability from their government, the land grabber's business model will fail.

The second strategy to decrease costs on a big plantation is to pay low wages and not hire many workers to begin with.  This ties into the first issue of land grabbing--if you push people off their land, where they were more or less making a living, and then you only hire back a tenth of the people to work the same amount of land, you're going to end up with a lot of angry, destitute unemployed people lurking about the plantation.  Again, it's not a viable business model, and it's based on iniquities and artificial cost structures.

One last thing I didn't mention as far as maximizing company profit in a land grab project is to speculate on the land.  Even after paying absurdly low amounts for the land and the labor, a big company is still going to be operating on the razor's edge of profitability.  I mean, however you cut it, growing large plantations of sugar or corn or soybeans or whatever just isn't a high-margin business.  So when you see forecasts of big companies that expect to make a lot of money in these land-grab deals, another strategy they are often using is to profit not by producing anything on the land, but by flipping it for a higher price to other farmers or real estate developers.  If you get land for next to nothing, and then you sell it for a thousand dollars an acre, you can make the type of double-digit returns that Wall Street investors like to see.  Growing corn and beans, not so much.  At any rate, this is once again an example of a totally artificial, rent-seeking profit model based on corrupting government officials (to sell or lease you the land at a fraction of its real value) and externalizing your costs.

So without further ado, here are some more sources that can speak much more eloquently than I about land grabbing.  Stefano Liberti wrote a journalistic expose of land grabbing in a book reviewed here by the Financial Times.  Fred Pearce wrote another book along the same lines.  The New York Times weighed in on the subject a few months ago.  Here is a bit from my hometown paper about Coca Cola and other companies' seeing the light on land-grabbing, and making some demands on their sugar suppliers in order to decrease the trend.  It is particularly offensive to me that the reporter here presents Coca-Cola as a big hero for merely responding to the common-sense demands of civil society groups in Cambodia that have presumably spent years fighting land grabbing and risking their lives.  The groups in question in this case, the ones that got a court ruling against a major sugar supplier who had stolen their land, are 200 Cambodian villagers and two committed lawyers from the US and the UK.  Coca-Cola (or any other big company) isn't the one that has taken the lead on this; they are merely responding to civil society and even court proceedings.  For instance, it looks like Pepsi may follow Coke's lead on the land grabbing issue, under pressure from Oxfam.  The companies should be commended for their coming around on this issue, but it is a mistake (common in our corporate-dominated society) to think that companies are somehow doing us a favor by responding to our demands for basic decency and basic rights. 

Here is an article discussing the so-called Principles on Responsible Agricultural Investment, a controversial set of voluntary guidelines that (along with the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Tenure of Land etc.) either assure businesses act responsibly when investing in land, or serve merely as a way to "responsibly destroy the world's peasantry", depending on who you ask.  Here is another damning analysis of these voluntary guidelines, and an even more nuanced critique of the inherent problems with big land deals.  Here is the website of a conference from a few years ago that examined the trend and ramifications of global land grabbing.  Here is an overview of the land grabbing phenomenon from the International Fund for Agricultural Development.  This next link is a critique of the World Bank's 2010 report on land grabbing (you can also download the original report here).  Here is a chilling profile of a war/land profiteer operating in South Sudan, and an article about a different land-grabber operating next door in Ethiopia.  Here is a summary of an Oxfam report on land grabs (the original is here).  Oxfam followed up that report with a call for a World Bank moratorium on lending for land acquisition deals.  Here is the WB's response to that call.  Here is a nuanced look at the trend of white South African farmers fanning out across Africa to create big new farms. 

And here is an excellent website that continuously compiles all pertinent articles on the web dealing in some way with land grabbing.  It has exposed me to general articles on African land-grabbing like this one from Al Jazeera, this article analyzing the difference between favoring large-scale vs. small-scale farmers in a land reform program, this article in favor of increasing corporate control in Indian farming, a view of Ethiopia's recent land deals to grow food for other countries, a US farmer's explanation of food sovereignty as an alternative to the agroindustrial land grab model, and this look at the logic and mechanics of speculative food investing in general.

Opium in Afghanistan

Here is a bit from NPR on the continued prevalence of opium poppy in Afghanistan.  The farmers quoted here could be coca farmers in Colombia.  They know it's bad, but it's the only way they can live with what they consider to be some modicum of dignity and material comfort.  Getting rid of poppy or any other illicit crop is no easy proposition.

Is farming back-breaking?

Here is an article from the Guardian about robots designed to do farm labor.  Unlike what I profiled in my last blog post, this science reporting is actually pretty decent.  It presents a new technology, analyzes what it can and can't do right now, what it hopes to do in the future and how long those results may take to bear fruit.  The article also addresses social and technological objections to the new development. 

My only qualm with the article is that it falls into the same cliche of focusing on "back-breaking" work on a farm.  As I've discussed in other blog posts, farm work is certainly physically demanding, but I don't understand why in a large proportion of media presentations of farming, "back-breaking" is an obligatory adjective.  It just serves to frame farming in a negative light, which in turn frames whatever new technology or alternative to farming in a positive light.  It's obfuscation, not information.  I mean, not every sports article talks about how back-breaking the athletes' training is.  That is understood as a necessary part of, but not the only, defining feature of sports, and as such doesn't need mentioning in every article on sports.  Why should it be different with farming?  And while we're on the subject of sports, maybe back-breaking work isn't something we should be avoiding so assiduously.  In an era of high rates of obesity and other health problems related to a lack of exercise, maybe all of us should be seeking to do a bit of backbreaking work now and again, whether it's on a farm or elsewhere!

Fake science and fake news

Recently I've come across a number of articles dealing with the often-specious claims of poorly-conducted science and journalism.  I've also come across a few illustrative examples of just such poor science and poor journalism.  I wanted to share both with my readers.

First off, here is an article from a virologist named Latham decrying the lazy reporting that often occurs in science journalism.  He uses the example of reporting on new genetic engineering breakthroughs, because this is indeed an area in which most reporting is pretty bad.  Essentially Latham claims that much of what passes for reporting on biotech issues really just consists in a journalist's receiving claims from the researcher or the company responsible for the research and then directly pasting those claims in an article.  There is little critical analysis of these claims, which are usually overblown and wishful.  The end result is that we the readers are always hearing about the revolutionary potential of this or that new genetic engineering event, but we don't hear about when that potential doesn't pan out.  Again, this is a problem with most science reporting for the general public.  Good science occurs through small discoveries that result in conservative, well-delimited assertions.  If you hear about a single scientific breakthrough that will have far-reaching effects, it's usually rubbish.  The insertion of a gene to produce provitamin A in one variety of rice is indeed a big deal, but a responsible headline would be something like "An important step to improving vitamin A intake", not "New rice will eliminate child blindness".  The first headline leaves room to discuss the remaining hurdles, such as possible gene silencing for vitamin A production under certain field conditions, or the need to cross the vitamin A trait into high-yielding, tasty varieties of rice that people will actually plant, or the possibility that without a high-fat diet, the vitamin A will not be absorbed by the human body.  The second headline is pure boosterism--irresponsible reporting that heralds something the science can never live up to.  And the end result is that media in this case is not serving its duty to inform the public, but rather serving the agenda of private companies that want to control the public's knowledge so as to inculcate a positive feeling toward a particular industry.

An example of just such irrational, boosterish pseudo-journalism comes from Dr. van Montagu, this year's winner of the World Food Prize.  In this opinion piece, he flits about in a self-righteous fury, mixing a bit of scientific fact and lots of heavy-handed moralizing.  His major tactic seems to be to juxtapose real problems, such as the population projections for the future, or the increasing need for stress-tolerant crops, and then make it seem as if genetic engineering is the only or even the principal means for addressing these problems.  The writer's histrionics even overflow into his writing style, which is sloppy and unclear.  Granted, he's not a native English speaker, but this carelessness seems to me to be indicative too of his scientific claims, which are not the precise, humble claims of good science, but rather megalomaniac, world-changing claims.  Sometimes his claims turn into outright lies:  "It is proven that GM crops result in much higher yields per hectare ... In order to obtain the same kind of yields for conventionally bred maize or soybean, even more land ... will be needed".  I am not aware of any study consistently showing that GM corn and soybeans are higher-yielding than conventionally-bred crops.  In all fairness, van Montagu is not a journalist, and this is just an editorial.  But the magazine that chose to print this editorial is presumably run by journalists who should have known better than to publish a poorly-reasoned, sloppy editorial that serves only to promote a given product and not to inform or educate the reader.

Here is another, less egregious example of sloppy biotech boosterism.  The article is purportedly about biotech regulation's impact on global agriculture, but it is really just about how regulation affects profits for agricultural biotechnology companies.  I consider this a less egregious oversight, because it comes from AgriNews, which is clearly set up mainly as a mouthpiece for big industrial agriculture, so no one should be expecting a critical, overarching look at world food security issues from this news source.

Lastly, here is a long but excellently written treatment of a popular medical book.  The article looks at how popular books proposing radical diet changes come out regularly, and why these books do not represent good science.  To me the proliferation of weird, unnatural diets in the US (raw food, vegan, Paleo, Atkins, high-fat, low-fat, etc.) is perhaps the most visible and far-reaching symptom of the type of thinking typified by lazy science journalism.  We as a society are not equipped or willing to undertake careful, well-thought analysis of scientific facts and claims, so we swing recklessly, fecklessly from one fad to the next.  We suffer from a sort of postmodern disregard for objective fact, instead clinging stubbornly (and ever-changingly) to the latest arbitrary idiosyncracy that has caught our attention.  We are dying from our caprices, especially when it comes to diet.

Health care capitalism

Here is an interesting, if chilling, article about one man's quest to make money off of the new health care law.  It is interesting because it shows a possible way that the further privatization of health care could end up saving patients and the country some money, by efficient companies' sweeping in and cutting costs due to market incentives.  It is chilling because nowhere in the article does real patient wellbeing (and certainly not what would be best healthwise for the USA as a nation) come into the picture, except as a corollary to making money.  Despite capitalism's undeniable potential for improving efficiency through market incentives, I do not see how making private companies rich can figure into an honest plan to improve health for a population.  This is especially the case in light of my recent dealings with different healthcare companies in the aftermath of my child's birth; it is clear to me that no one has my best interest in mind, but rather they are looking at the easiest ways to make money off of me.  There will always be rent-seeking, perverse incentives, and dirty dealing in any poorly-regulated capitalist market (and even in well-regulated ones), and when you are holding human beings' health in your hands, such dishonest practices become even more despicable and unacceptable for society to allow.  It is clear to me that no capitalist system of healthcare is ever going to be as effective as a well-run public program.  Unfortunately, I don't think we'll be getting that anytime soon in the US.

Another view on TED talks, from a TED talk

In a past post I referenced the TED talks, and gave my agrarian take on them.

Now I'd like to share a presentation from someone (Benjamin Bratton) discussing the shortcomings of the TED talks, which he describes as "middlebrow megachurch infotainment".  I think that many of his critiques of TED are spot-on, especially his central thesis that TED is a form of self-congratulatory sterile exercise in which we are lulled to social and political inaction by the promise of a bright, innovative technological future that is just around the corner.  "Placebo politics and placebo innovation" is his term for it. 

I love his opening comment that few of the techno-futurist dreams laid out in TED talks or elsewhere ever actually materialize, and that perhaps this is due to the fact that just talking a lot about abstract ideas cannot actually change realities.  I love his condemnation of TED's smug oversimplification of complex problems (I also got a kick out of his characterization of Malcolm Gladwell as "a journalist who recycles cheap insights").  He's also right on in seeing this oversimplification of problems as itself one of our larger society's major problems, and as such a very weak tool for facing society's other problems. 

Bratton makes an observation that at the same time as we become more technologically dynamic, our society is becoming more culturally static ("our machines get smarter and we get stupider").  I don't know how you might quantify or measure the truth of this, but it does ring true to my anecdotal experience.  Furthermore, the forecast he draws from this assertion is very prescient and indicative of our times, namely that employing more computing power along the same grooves of old, stale ideas won't take us to a very good or different future.

Bratton makes a noble call for a focus on economics in TED, and particularly an effort for thinkers to get away from the same old economic models in order to conceive of "a new economic architecture".  I really like his critique of the metaphysical bent to much economics, the insistence on a perfect, coherent ideal whose inapplicability to reality we label as a shortcoming of reality, not of the ideal.  More relevant still to my profession of economic development is Bratton's observation that we keep putting forth ostensibly well-thought, well-designed solutions that then fail when we try to scale them up, and then wonder why the next new solution doesn't work either. 

Perhaps his most heterodox, taboo assertion is that we should not only recognize and admit the negatives inherent in many new technologies, but actively prevent certain innovations that we know will cause harm.  Such talk is totally unacceptable to the modern technoworshipping ethic that imbues much of our culture in the modern US.

The speaker often lapses into language that, while seemingly pithy and searing, doesn't really mean much in the end.  He lost me at "when inspiration becomes manipulation, inspiration becomes obfuscation".  He convinced me for a moment that we should indeed debate the difference between "digital cosmopolitanism and cloud feudalism", though on further analysis I'm not quite sure what either of those things mean.  I've noticed that this type of powerful but abstruse language is common in a certain brand of academic cultural critic.  At any rate, this talk is a nice antidote to the complacent nonsense that usually comes out of TED.

Perhaps the best summary of this wide-ranging talk is that our problems are not puzzles to be solved by rearranging the pieces and adding a faster computing capacity, but rather that they need new pieces in order for us to solve them.  I agree with this, though in some ways it seems to go against my belief that there is nothing new under the sun, and that we usually, mistakenly, try to invent something new instead of taking advantage of preexisting, proven (but unglamorous) ways of solving old problems.  Perhaps the synthesis of my and Bratton's positions is that sometimes we must look to tradition and established techniques to solve problems, and sometimes we should look to truly new, groundbreaking thought.  And never should we ignore the existing, larger context (socioeconomic, natural, artistic, historical, etc.) that informs and creates the problems we're trying to solve. 

But in no case will we be favored by the TED and the techno-worshippers' approach of merely applying bigger motors to systems that are inherently flawed.  Such a philosophy at once scorns the old while it is too distracted and smug to explore the new.  It diverts productive inspiration into what Bratton calls "a black hole of affectation".