GLOBALIST The Yale
Summer 2012 / Vol. 12, Issue 4
The Farm Disappearing Bees 16 * Crops on the Rooftops 30 * The Keepers of the Seeds 22
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR 3
GLOBALIST The Yale
An Undergraduate Magazine of International Affairs Summer 2012 / Vol. 12, Issue IV www.tyglobalist.org
This magazine is published by students of Yale College. Yale University is not responsible for its contents.
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Journalism Advisory Board Steven Brill, Yale Dept. of English Nayan Chanda, Director of Publications, MacMillan Center Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, Foreign Affairs Jef McAllister, Time Magazine Nathaniel Rich, The Paris Review Fred Strebeigh, Yale Dept. of English
Academic Advisory Board Harvey Goldblatt, Professor of Medieval Slavic Literature, Master of Pierson College Donald Green, Director, Institution for Social and Policy Studies Charles Hill, Yale Diplomat-in-Residence Ian Shapiro, Director, MacMillan Center Ernesto Zedillo, Director, Yale Center for the Study of Globalization
DEAR
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GLOBALIST
READERS,
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e don’t always know what we’re eating. Whether we’re grabbing a Big Mac at McDonald’s or a cup of fair trade coffee at the local coffee shop, our food comes from somewhere and holds its own history. Global corporate food enterprises and localgrowing organic farmers alike face enormous challenges along the chain of food production and trade. Every new fad diet advertisement, every wine and cheese pairing at the start of a four-course dinner, and every late night slice of greasy pizza is a part of a complex web of food, agriculture, and farming worldwide. In the Globalist’s fourth and final issue of the 2011-2012 school year, our reporters are tackling this web, one grain of rice or coffee bean at a time. Aliyya Swabby’s feature investigates the issue of illegal bushmeat hunting in Ecuador, while Aaron Gertler’s snappy reporting tells a story of a strange worldwide phenomenon of bees dying out by the thousands. Sampada KC’s article on the presence of the agrobusiness giant in Nepal reveals a fundamental tension in global agricultural development between the public and private sectors, and Emily Hong’s sensitive look at the decline of the French local farming tradition tells a story of what happens to the little guys when corporations are so global. As always, this issue of the Globalist also features a number of off-theme pieces. Rae Ellen Bichell’s piece on the decline of an indigenous language in Panama takes the reader deep into a culture facing the remnants of a colonial linguistic heritage, and Marissa Dearing investigates the caste politics behind the Indian party system, shedding light on the longstanding systemic roots responsible for a messy national politics. I have been incredibly proud and honored to serve as Editor-in-Chief of the Globalist this year, and it has been my greatest pleasure to see the magazine continue to grow; many of our new freshmen and sophomore writers are ascending to positions on the editorial board in the coming year, and many more will continue to write and blog from all around the world this summer. The Globalist will set out on its annual reporting trip this May, sending 20 writers and editors to explore Chile for two weeks and to research the material for the first issue of the fall. I hope that you will continue your faithful readership of this magazine, and follow us on the web this summer at www.tyglobalist.org, where we will be blogging about our experiences in Chile as well as our various adventures from all other corners of the world. I am confident and excited to pass on leadership of the Globalist to Diana Saverin, who I know will serve as an energetic and visionary leader of this magazine. Thank you all for reading this year, and I am proud to present the final issue of the 2011-2012 school year: THE FARM. Warmly,
Sanjena Sathian Editor-in-Chief, The Yale Globalist
Production & Design Editors Jay Pabarue, Anisha Suterwala Managing Editor for Online Raisa Bruner
ON THE COVER:
The many nationalities of a meal. (Graphics by Jay Pabarue and Anisha Suterwala)
Pictures from CreativeCommons used under Attribution Noncommercial license. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/
Director of Online Development Lauren Hoffman
Editor-in-Chief Sanjena Sathian
Executive Director Jessica Shor
Managing Editors Jeffrey Dastin, Nikita Lalwani, Charlotte Parker, Adele Rossouw
Publisher Jason Toups
Associate Editors Marissa Dearing, Cathy Huang, Diana Saverin, Emily Ullmann, Maggie Yellen Copy Editor TaoTao Holmes
Editors Emeriti Raphaella Friedman, Uzra Khan, Sibjeet Mahapatra, Angela Ramirez, Eli Markham, Alexander Krey, Sophie Broach
Directors of Development Conrad Lee, Margaret Zhang Events Coordinator Julie Kim
Editors-at-Large Rae Ellen Bichell, Jeffrey Kaiser, Catherine Osborn, Diego Salvatierra
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CONTENTS
TABLE OF CONTENTS 5
Summer 2 01 2 / Vo l. 1 2, Issue 4
34
7
26
19
FOCUS: The Farm
24 | Mange Bien! A French pastoral tradition is on the decline. By Emily Hong
16 | Silent Swarm A mysterious disease kills bees worldwide. By Aaron Gertler
26 | Game An illegal meat trade engulfs the Ecuadorean rainforest. By Aliyya Swaby
18 | Arresting Monsanto in Kathmandu A future for Monsanto and Nepal? By Sampada KC
30 | Farmer on the Roof A new kind of urban farming. By Ashley Wu
19 | Boricua Roast World-famous coffee is threatened. By Diego Salvatierra
31 | The Road to Rice The cost of feeding a country. By Jessica Shor
22 | Letter from... Chile Mapuche women care for local farms. By Diana Saverin
34 | Back to the Grassroots India’s new take on rural development. By Daniel Gordon
A CONVERSATION WITH
GLIMPSES
7 | William Trubridge
8 | Private Education Goes Public 9 | Losing Words
The world’s strangest sport. By Seth Kolker
Educating an expatriate community. By Aahan Bhojani
FEATURES A tribe struggles to find its voice. By Rae Ellen Bichell
12 | The Age of the Elephant Caste conflict in India transforms politics. By Marissa Dearing
The Yale Globalist is a member of Global21, a network of student-run international affairs magazines at premier universities around the world.
A CONVERSATION WITH 7
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Q & A
A Conversation with William Trubridge William Trubridge holds the world record in free diving. For a living, he treads water at the surface of the ocean, takes a big gulp of air, and proceeds to dive straight down more than 360 feet without any equipment to assist him. Then, he comes back to the surface without taking a breath. Free diving has grown in numbers and in infamy, becoming an extreme sport of global prominence. SETH KOLKER reports.
Q: How dangerous is free diving? A: This is a question that pops up
all the time—but free diving doesn’t have to be of any danger at all if it’s done with adequate safety. No one has ever died during a competition, or during training that has the same safety systems as a competition. Most of the mortalities have been in the sled disciplines, where you go down in the water on a weighted sled like an anvil, and then come back up with a balloon. But that’s more of a stunt than an actual free dive.
Q: How do you train? A: I do a lot of yoga and other dry
training exercises to prepare for the dives. At the depths I’m going to my lungs collapse from the pressure, and at that point I can’t exhale any air from my lungs. That means that for the second half of the dive I’m not going to be able to equalize by exhaling against my ears, so I need to take air into my mouth earlier in the dive and store it all in my mouth. Then I use my tongue to push that air from my mouth into the middle ear.
Q: How did you get into free diving? A: When I was 18 months old my
family sold our house in the north of England to buy a boat; we lived on the boat until I was ten. So the water’s just always been a natural place for me to be, and free diving is the most natural expression of that.
The first time I did a dive purely for the depth itself probably happened when I was eight. My family was living in Vanuatu, and my brother and I had this thing where you had to swim down to the bottom of the ocean and grab a stone or a handful of sand and bring it up to the surface to prove you’d been down. We got to I think 45 or 50 feet with no idea of proper technique, and very rudimentary equipment. It wasn’t until I was 22 that I actually found out about the sport of free diving. I was planning a trip to Central America at the time, so I bought a bunch of free diving equipment and spent three months in the water every day; that’s where I got hooked on the sport.
Q:
How do you see the sport changing in the next few years?
A:
The growth is probably the biggest change. I also think there’s a shift away from the stunts and into a more pure and refined athletic discipline. I hope this continues—it would give free diving more of a chance to be accepted as a mainstream sport instead of being seen as an extreme thing. Perhaps even in the future one or two of the disciplines might be accepted into the Olympics, if it did grow to that scale. It really is the purest expression of human aquatic potential and what we can do under the water, so it deserves recognition as an important aquatic sport.
Q: Why do you do it? A: For me it’s just the pure novelty of
the experience, how different free diving
(Courtesy Igor Liberti) is to anything else that you encounter in your day-to-day life. When you’re in the water it’s very hard to have any thoughts that are of the future or of the past, anything outside of what you’re doing in that present moment. When we hold our breath it’s almost like a suspension of time: you don’t have that natural rhythm of breath to show you that time is passing. And it’s an escape from gravity as well; there are no strong forces on the body, no particular distinction between any of the directions. There’s almost no sound, and all the lights are muted, and all of that combined gives you the chance to go more inside of yourself without any stimuli coming in. A friend of mine used to say that a scuba diver dives to look around, while a free diver dives to look inside. All of those reasons together make it a joyful kind of escape from what we experience in the rest of our lives. SETH KOLKER ’14 is an Ethics, Politics & Economics Major in Jonathan Edwards College. Contact him at seth.kolker@yale.edu.
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Private Education Goes Public By Aahan Bhojani
O
ver the past decade, Dubai has come to be known as the Rome of modern Asiancities, a city built of glitzy skyscrapers, manicured lawns, expansive shopping malls, and celebrityfull hotels. Regarded for its impressive growth and diversification away from oil, Dubai has established itself as a model for other developing and resource-rich cities. Beyond the glitter and economic strength, the city’s evolution from barren desert to bustling metropolis has led to the development of a unique education system. Private schools, known in most developed countries for their high tuition fees and elitist environments, have the opposite connotation in Dubai. Dubai’s municipality sees the private education sector as an industry that both creates investment opportunity and possesses social value. The UAE government, in fact, has recognized the private sector as more effective than itself at running the country’s education system. Because the state opens public schools only to Emirati nationals, the
entire expatriate community, constituting over 80 percent of Dubai’s population, has to rely on private education. And these expat students do not attend any ordinary private schools. What distinguishes Dubai’s private education system from others around the world is the diversity of its students and income levels to which it caters. Through different pricing schemes, fee structures, and types of schools, over ten private education providers have made high quality private education accessible to most of Dubai’s expatriate community. These providers cater to around 88 percent of Dubai’s student population and offer twelve different international curriculums across the city’s 150 private schools. Over 88 percent of Dubai’s students are enrolled in private schools that teach 12 different international curriculums. Dubai is a test case for private enterprises, which are increasingly filling the gaps left by the government’s social policy. Dubai’s population demographic is one of the main forces that steers its schools towards a private education system. With a wide socioeconomic spectrum represented
Dubai’s iconic skyline as shown from one of its many resorts. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)
in the city from millionaires to migrant laborers, Dubai does not boast a low cost of living. As a result, the student population in Dubai is comprised largely of students from upper-low to high-income households that are willing to pay slightly higher fees for education. The international mix and relative affluence of Dubai’s student population make a privatized education system well suited to the city. Access to these high quality schools in Dubai is being continually expanded. As events in the Middle East have pushed investors to realize the power of youth populations, capital has increasingly been directed towards private sector education. Ahmed Badreldin, a Senior Partner at Abraaj Capital, the region’s largest private equity firm, spoke about the high growth potential for private education in Dubai. The city’s overwhelmingly expatriate community has created increasing demand for international schools since 2000. “A lucrative niche opportunity for investment [in private sector education] has arisen,” he explained––one that will grow between 10 to 15 percent each year. An expanding privatized education system could have positive implications for youth in Dubai. More high quality schools in the city mean more educated citizens. The hope of many in the city is that talent might more easily be created, retained, and perhaps even exported to other countries in the Middle East as the private sector grows. What remains to be seen, however, is whether the private system is an implementable model for the rest of the region’s developing cities. In Dubai, the model has shown how a government can allow the free market’s invisible hand to work to its benefit, how investors can create change through a high growth market, and how entrepreneurs can be inspired to contribute to the global knowledge economy. AAHAN BHOJANI ’14 is a an Economics and Political Science double major in Ezra Stiles College. Contact him at aahan.bhojani@yale.edu.
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Losing Words At the “Heart of the World,” a language starts to lose its pulse. By Rae Ellen Bichell
Rufina Gamarra Santana, the first female queen of the Naso tribe, sits on the banks of the Teribe River in Panama with her granddaughter and son, Agustin “Tito” Concepcion, who helped translate the New Testament into Naso. (Osborn/TYG)
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he community of Siekin looks like the Garden of Eden. In Panama in the jungle, the thatch huts that come up off the ground on stilts are surrounded by big, leafy trees with coconuts, cacao and coffee beans, jackfruits, avocados, lemons and oranges, guava, and passion fruit dripping off of them. Toucans and flocks of white herons fly overhead. Pumas prowl the forest. Even the stinkbugs are impressive, with shells of Halloween colors and each at the size of a quarter. “This is the heart of the world,” said Agustin “Tito” Concepcion Santana, a 47-year-old farmer and teacher who lives in Siekin. When he was a teenager, it took him and his grandfather two days to make the trip from the closest town to their
home, pulling their dugout canoe against strong rapids with bamboo poles and often their own bodies. I was there because I wanted to hear something rare and dying––Naso, an endangered language only spoken fluently by about 500 of the 3,500 people worldwide who identify as ethnic Nasos. The language used to be part of a family of languages spoken from Honduras to Colombia, but is now only spoken in isolated pockets of Central America. I arrived at the start of a birthday party. Entering the house, lifted about five feet off the ground by palm tree trunks and covered in palm leaf thatching, I saw many faces. There was Rufina Gamarra Santana, the former Naso queen. There was Tito’s mother, a handful of aunts and uncles, about a dozen grandkids running around the house, and… Dora the Explor-
er. The main room was decked out with the popular American cartoon character, who happened to be the star of the six-year-old birthday girl’s favorite television show. In the United States, the cute Nickelodeon character with a pink T-shirt teaches native English speakers words in Spanish, a Spanish meant to foster pride in being Latina. In each episode, Dora asks her viewers to help her find her way as she wanders through a backdrop of blue mountains and palm trees that look like they’ve been cut from construction paper. In the Amistad jungle, Dora speaks a different kind of Spanish. There, it’s the language of the invaders. When the Spanish conquistadores arrived in the 17th century, the Naso had been speaking their language for thousands of years. Over the next centuries, Spanish brought more than men in boats searching for gold––
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they brought diseases that decimated the Naso, missionaries who converted and resettled the tribes, the United Fruit Company factories stamped with the face of Chiquita Banana, and hordes of workers from a variety of ethnic and linguistic backgrounds. Lately, it’s brought a series of government hydroelectric projects. Each phase of development, always occurring in Spanish, has delivered a major blow to the people and their surroundings––but especially to their language. Even in Seikin, one of the most isolated of the 12 Naso communities, children not only know who Dora is, but also love her. It may not seem like it, but Spanish and Naso are engaged in an invisible battle of the tongues. The kids running around with the birthday hats on are speaking Spanish. So far, Dora is winning.
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e’re used to hearing about animals that are about to die out. From the lynx to the sea turtle, biologists estimate that up to half of presently existing species may become extinct by 2100. Languages are dying faster. Linguists estimate that in the same amount of time, 97 percent of the world’s 6,500 currently existing languages will likely go extinct. A language dies out about every two weeks; in the past few decades alone, Irish Gaelic, Bukhari, Yiddish, Pennsylvania Dutch have all been placed on the “endangered language” list. UNESCO’s Atlas on Endangered Languages lists about 3,000 as endangered or dying. In a world dominated by dominant tongues like Russian, Chinese, English, and Spanish, the other ones are dropping off of our tongues as they become less and less useful in the business world and on the Internet. Naso is going quickly. “It’s leaving as fast as a bus that goes 80 kilometers per hour,” said Tito. He and his family are especially worried. “What would you lose?” I asked. “Everything,” said Eleuterrio Gamarra, a 67-year-old farmer, Tito’s neighbor. After the birthday party, he and a few others gathered in another thatch roof house to talk. Gamarra is one of about 500 people who speak Naso. When he was a boy, his father and mother did not speak a word of Spanish. Neither did his brothers and sis-
Friends and relatives gather for a birthday party at a home in Siekin, a Naso community on the Teribe River in northwestern Panama. (Osborn/TYG) ters. Over the past 50 years, though, Spanish has inched farther and farther into the Amistad jungle, winding its way into the vocabularies of the Naso Teribe communities. Across the room from Gamarra, perched on a bench, sat a Naso girl about 10 years old. She and Gamarra exchanged no words, maybe out of disinterest, but also because communication between the two would be fragmentary at best. Gamarra speaks fluent Naso, intermingled with bits and pieces of Spanish. The girl speaks fluent Spanish, and though she understands Naso, rarely chooses to use it. “By the time they’re ten and they’re still not speaking it, it’s already too late,” said Joseph Errington, a linguist at Yale. When two generations have lost the ability to communicate, a language is fading. In the case of Naso, it took less than one human lifespan. According to Tito, there are some things that just don’t translate into Spanish. “With the language you can help tell
people how things were before. How were the kings, how were the wars, who were the people. There are customs in a culture, like how men and women interact intimately with each other, and those will be lost because they don’t translate.” Tito said there are some things his mother would only ever speak of in Naso, like when a girl first gets her period. “They say, don’t eat a lot of salt, don’t go in the river, don’t go out of the house for eight days. She’s not going to talk about this in Spanish. She’s going to talk about it in her language and culture.” Marta de Gerdes, a Panamanian linguist who founded the Center for the Documentation of Minority Languages in Panama, said that a language can function as an emblem for a group. “Language replacement is not simply a matter of putting one language in the place of another; for these groups it has been a matter of having to use the language of another group,” she wrote in an email. She explained that language loss compromises the cultural
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out the Bible translation, which said in gold letters “Sbo Tjlokwo,” or “Word of God” in Naso. “The Bible says I’m from the Tower of Babel, but I know I’m from here,” he said, “I was born here. God left me here. There’s a kingdom of resources, a river. I can tell anyone I’m Naso. The language holds all Rufina Gamarra Santana, the first female ruler of the Naso tribe, inspects her grand- of this.” Even with daughter’s piñata winnings on the banks of the Teribe River. “Teribe” is the Spanish academic linname of the river. The original Naso name Tjër Di, or “Grandmother Water,” the giver guists doing of life and guiding spiritual force of the Naso ancestors. (Osborn/TYG) languagerecording projects all over the world, the integrity of an ethnic minority group. “When such replacements take place, in Bible remains one of the most powerful most cases, the language-culture-society tools in preservation––it takes motivation link cannot be severed without causing and resources, and Christian missionarthe affected group to lose aspects of its ies like Andy Keener tend to match that identity, and without the cultural patrimo- profile well. Keener works for the Summer ny of mankind forfeiting part of its histori- Language Institute, or SIL International, a Christian nonprofit devoted to language cal memory.” Rufina was the first female ruler in the preservation. As of 2009, at least a portion Naso dynasty when she took the throne in of the Bible had been translated into at the 1980s. She said, “A community with- least 2,508 different languages. SIL Interout a language is not a community,” said national also publishes Ethnologue, which Tito. “The young people want to dye their at 6,909 languages is the most extensive hair red, yellow, black. They want to put catalog of the world’s languages. It took Keener and a group of five Naso makeup and earrings on and pluck their eyebrows so they look like a little grand- orthographers 12 years to translate the mother,” said Tito. Adolfo estimates that New Testament and 20 percent of the Old only about a fifth of the Naso under age 18 Testament. “Given the size of the project it all happened pretty fast,” he said. “There speak the language fluently. was an understanding that the language is slew of people have come to Naso dwindling downriver, and even in the most communities to record the lan- isolated communities like Siekin. That guage, most in order to spread the made everyone realize that if we didn’t word of the Bible, and some to work on work fast enough, we’d lose it.” Since then, missionaries with another organization PhD dissertations. Most of what is known and described have recorded audio versions as well. Over the course of translating the Biof the Naso language is due to the persistent toil of Christian missionaries, who ble, Tito decided that he wants to teach have come in over the past centuries in his birth language to Naso schoolchildren. small but consistent groups. Tito brought Most days he works on growing oranges
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to sell in town, but Tito said he will come to classrooms and teach Naso if a teacher asks him to. Until he gets certified to teach, though, he won’t ever be paid to do so. Despite a promise to provide bilingual education to Panamanian school children living on reservations, the government has done little to follow through. Even if they did, Keener says in an average year Naso children likely only go to school 80 days out of the year. The hydroelectric project might be the nail in the coffin. “The current king isn’t interested in the language,” said Tito, “He’s interested only in the hydroelectric dam.” However you look at it, a fractured community can’t keep a dying language breathing, and certainly not if the very figurehead of Naso culture is not interested in it.
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panish is winning. “That’s the language that kids want to learn because it’s bound up in the image of the city, which for kids in the rural peripheries is so attractive. They have televisions and radios, so that gives them this little window into the larger world,” said Errington. Even Tito, who is the most gung-ho about the Naso language from within the community, doesn’t speak it to his young daughters. Keener said that’s pretty common. “They think that if they don’t insist that their children speak Spanish, they won’t. They see it as a way up. If you speak Spanish, you do have more opportunities.” Ultimately, it all comes back to the kids. “Something happens,” said Errington, “It’s something in the heads of those kids. It’s not just a matter of the political, economic, or demographic stuff. Ultimately it has to be something about heads and hearts.” What’s in the hearts of those kids? It might be Dora. I think back to the birthday party, with the dozen kids running around, wearing Dora the Explorer birthday hats. I’m not sure what exactly is in their hearts, but I do know what was in their hands: a baseball bat. With the sounds of the jungle rain pouring down outside, they used it to beat a Dora the Explorer piñata to shreds. RAE ELLEN BICHELL ’12 is an Anthropology major in Davenport College. Contact her at raeellen.bichell@yale.edu.
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The Age of the Elephant The politics of caste in Uttar Pradesh By Marissa Dearing
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midst the swarming crowds of Uttar Pradesh tower are hundreds upon hundreds of colossal stone and bronze elephants. Although the sheer scale and spread of this super-sized herd might suggest elephants here enjoy ceremonial reverence, the statues are neither sacred nor traditional. They are political mascots for the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), a lower-caste party whose winning 2007 campaign slogans included “If you don’t vote for elephant, you will be history!” and “Upper castes must be humiliated!” The elephants are not alone. BSP’s leader, Mayawati, who is so famous she goes by a single name, is a Dalit, a member of the “Untouchable” caste. Historically the pariah caste of Indian society, Dalits are prohibited from marrying, living, eating, walking, touching, and even making eye contact with those of higher castes and physically barred from temples, public wells, upper-caste neighborhoods, and other public areas. They have faced discrimination in nearly every sphere of daily life. Before losing power in last February’s state elections, Mayawati strove to overcome this corrosive legacy, using millions of dollars’ worth of state funds to build statues of Dalit heroes throughout Uttar Pradesh (UP), many in her own image. India’s largest and most populous state is as notorious for its extreme poverty as it is for its caste violence, and Mayawati’s flamboyant tenure generated immense controversy. From channeling state funds to extravagant projects promoting lowercaste interests to sporting outsized necklaces made of rupee notes worth between $400,000 and $2,000,000, Mayawati seemed to continually contradict the political interests she championed. Last February, Mayawait’s elephants disappeared under endless sheets of pink and orange plastic by order of UP’s Election Commission, which feared the impos-
Political parties in India engage in constant information war to gain votes. (Courtesy Lenin Raghuvanshi) ing symbols might inappropriately influence voters’ decisions in the upcoming state elections. The controversy surrounding caste and corruption, far from unique to Mayawati or UP, has been raging across India for the past decade. The multi-colored elephants of Uttar Pradesh seem to be just the latest red flags in the future of the world’s largest democracy. Not all are convinced, however, that such zeal for a caste-specific party is so ominous. “It is not grotesque. It is not abnormal. It is not absurd to see that Indians are still voting on caste lines,” said Professor Priyankar Upadhyaya, the UNESCO Chair for Peace and Intercultural Understanding, and long-time resident of UP. Upadhyaya believes recent caste parties like the BSP in Uttar Pradesh have done much to give lower-caste groups a voice and dignity long denied them. Despite the constitutional prohibition of lower-caste discrimination decades ago, as recently as 1999, killing squads in the neighboring state of Bihar took hundreds of Dalit lives. Smaller-scale caste violence has persisted even today, often involving police, judicial, and official complicity decried by rural and urban Indians alike. Pervasive
discrimination continues, denying Dalits access to adequate education, jobs, and social services, not to mention political representation. But in recent years, caste parties have actually been a way four many of India’s underrepresented and severely underprivileged to force the state to listen to their concerns and improve their daily lives. Upadhyaya, for one, believes that Mayawati transformed Dalit identity in the UP. “Dalits who, ten years back, would not easily display their identity as Dalit—now they come forward and say that they are Dalits,” said Upadhyaya. Such a transformation is in part attributable to the very programs for which Mayawati is so maligned in the Indian press: as Upadhyaya affirmed, prominent Dalit symbols in public places have helped establish equality as a new societal norm. Mayawati also worked to solidify her constituency’s protection through laws that make it much more difficult to exploit rural Dalits for their land or publicly abuse lower castes without facing a weighty punishment. In the last round of UP elections, how-
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ever, the BSP was soundly defeated, in part due to the uproar surrounding Mayawati’s flashy opportunism, according to Lenin Raghuvanshi, a Dalit rights activist, participant in UP’s 2012 Election Watch, and cofounder of the People’s Vigilance Committee on Human Rights. Though BSP’s loss could signal the decline of caste-driven politics, many remain unconvinced. But caste will likely continue to play a major role in determining how Indians vote. Caste is deeply ingrained in Indian society, and has been a basis of political identity. Many voters assume elected members of their own caste, a sort of “extended family” as Upadhyaya termed it, are most likely to help them get into schools, find adequate jobs, and receive the social services they need. “People [just] go back to their caste shell,” said Upadhyaya. Many, like Raghuvanshi, hold caste responsible for India’s rampant corruption; voters often support candidates of their own caste despite blatant corruption or incompetence because they believe that once in office, co-caste representatives will reward them with benefits like jobs or college admission. The resulting impunity pervades Indian politics: In UP, almost half of all members of the legislative assembly have criminal cases declared against them, and the state’s newly elected chief minister has strong familial ties to politi-
“Without eliminating [caste] in this country, how are you going to eliminate corruption in the society?” cal power in the region. Despite a continuing corrupt political system, UP’s elections suggest times are changing in India. Reports on election returns indicate some Dalits chose to vote against their lower-caste champion Mayawati to protest her corruption and extravagance, and there is reason to believe such shifts away from purely caste-based voting may run deeper than this election in this state this year. “Caste took a little bit of a back seat,” said Gaurav Saigal, a principal correspondent for the Hindustan Times. Saigal believes this switch is due in part to the
strengthening of Indian civil society. In a country where everything from a driver’s license to a restaurant permit to avoiding wrongful arrest requires a bribe, Indians’ greater capacity to organize, inform, and participate through social media like Facebook, Twitter, and personal blogs has resulted in widespread insistence on government transparency and accountability. “Civil society… made the issue of corruption a grassroots issue,” Saigal said. “85 percent of the electorate could understand that [corruption] is a word that affects them in their daily lives.” Indians are demanding more than the transactional status quo from their governments, and Upadhyaya believes that eventually, real evidence of good governance may eventually draw people away from electoral caste lines (as has happened in the state of Bihar under Nitish Kumar). Pressure for fundamental change in India is mounting. Activist Raghuvanshi sees that change taking a radical form in UP: “a new Dalit revolution.” In villages and cities across UP, Indians are now rising up against the caste system and joining a new Dalit movement, a revolution not restricted to Untouchables, but open to all opposed to the caste system. “Without eliminating [caste] in this country, how are you going to eliminate corruption in the society?” Raghuvanshi asked. “It is the most corrupt system in the world.” Increasingly, activists from higher castes, like Raghuvanshi, have been going into villages to wash Dalits’ feet, eat with them, and raise awareness of political and social issues in hopes of erasing caste divisions and decades of marginalization (largely uncovered by the Indian press, he added). Even over his lifetime, Raghuvanshi has already seen a great deal of change. “When I was a kid… in an upper caste family, I never [saw] Dalits coming to our
marriages [or] to eat with us, but now [it’s] happening all the time,” he said. At the same time, the lower-caste poor are working to transform and empower themselves through modernization. According to Raghuvanshi, the younger generation is now increasingly relying on the Internet to stay informed and build communication networks. Dalits in rural villages and urban slums have used radio, television, and SMS text messaging to learn about and discuss events beyond the immediate locale; some have used SMS networks to broadcast news of local human rights abuses to activists like Raghuvanshi. “They’ve changed themselves very dramatically,” he said. For Raghuvanshi, this new, inclusive, and unified Dalit revolution represents the best hope for the future of Indian democracy, calling it “the force [that’s] going to change the feudal system of India and [help India] join the real global democracy.” After decades of politics rooted in caste divisions, the foundations of Indian democracy are shifting. In the aftermath of the recent state elections, leaders of several major parties in UP have acknowledged that the caste system has been the root of rampant discrimination and corruption in India, and increasingly, the political consensus is that its divisions must be ended. Perhaps UP’s notorious elephants are not stony omens about the rising tyranny of caste but milestones marking how far democracy in India has come. MARISSA DEARING ’14 is a Political Science and Humanities double major in Berkeley College. Contact her at marissa.dearing@yale.edu.
(Graphics by Anisha Suterwala)
We’re never eating just what’s in our backyard anymore—the agricultural industry is truly global. Trace the lines to get a look at what the global FARM really looks like.
We are what we eat, and we’re
eating the world
16 FOCUS: THE FARM
the yale globalist: summer 2012
Silent Swarm Across the globe, bees are dying. By Aaron Gertler
S
ix years ago, the bees stopped waking up. As winter turned to spring, beekeepers across the United States found their dormant hives devastated. Some lost 90 percent of their colonies, and the insects that remained were weak and listless. The United States Department of Agriculture leapt into action, but the losses persisted; according to 2009 and 2010 reports, the American bee population dropped by 29 percent and 34 percent respectively. By winter 2007, the catastrophe had spread to the nations of Europe. The National Association of German Beekeepers reported a quarter of all hives dead, and Italy lost nearly half its colonies. The international media quickly christened the crisis “colony collapse disorder” (CCD), but beekeepers resisted, claiming the phrase glossed over the diverse causes behind the industry’s devastation. Was the parasite Nosema creeping into colonies and snuffing out the swarms? Had the Varroa destructor mite annihilated insects vital to the pollination of countless crops, from cranberries to canola oil? Or were human farming techniques and pesticides primarily to blame? The pesticide problem, though not the sole cause of bee deaths, is easier to control than the spread of parasites and has become the main focus of several European governments. Neonicotinoids, the world’s most commonly-used class of insecticide, came into use in the early ’90s to protect Europe’s corn, rapeseed, and other plants, but suspicion regarding its impact on pollinators wasn’t far behind. Observa-
(Graphic by Jay Pabarue)
tional studies showed bees in areas heavy with insecticide residue growing strangely apathetic; they failed to care for developing young and got lost trying to find their way back to their hives from nectargathering expeditions. Liona Rowan, an organic beekeeper from Texas, described the insecticide’s effects as a kind of “bee AIDS—weakening their natural immunities so they can’t resist many of the notso-deadly problems that naturally occur in bee populations.” France banned the application of imidacloprids, one substance in the neonicotinoid class, to sunflower and corn seeds before 2000, and Slovenia followed suit in 2003, but Germany, where Bayer, the world’s foremost pesticide manufacturer, is headquartered, didn’t do the same until 2008. However, each nation continues to permit the spraying of grown plants—
precisely where bees prefer to forage. Bayer representatives didn’t respond to inquiries, but their website claims there has been “no demonstrated effect” of neonicotinoids on bee health. In 2011, multiple American and European studies claimed otherwise. The United Kingdom hasn’t yet restricted the use of neonicotinoids. But in March 2011, as evidence piled up from France to the Netherlands that such insecticides made bees far more vulnerable to the fungal disease nosema, Professor Robert Watson of the British Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs ordered an investigation of published research into the substance. A year later, the March 2012 issue of Science published a pair of studies on neonicotinoids, one of which came from Dave Goulson, a biology professor at Britain’s University of Stirling
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who claims that he may have “put the nail in the coffin” for the chemicals. In a press release, Goulson showed that exposure to even low levels of neonicotinoids reduces the production of new queen bumblebees by up to 85 percent. Since queens are responsible for founding new hives in springtime, multiple seasons of insecticide exposure will seriously diminish bumblebee populations in cultivated areas, leaving fewer around to pollinate. Rosemary Mason, an independent observer who runs a nature reserve in the UK, feared even greater losses to come. “Unless we get [neonicotinoids] banned,” she told me, “we’ve no hope. Biodiversity is being hammered.” Another deadly pattern emerged from one of Goulson’s earlier studies (2004-10). Wild bees normally spend most of the
to colonies, information alone won’t stop the dying. One such threat is the parasitic mite Varroa, the most prominent factor behind the tripling of Ontario’s death rate in 2007, which began plaguing Canada shortly after the U.S. collapse. The mite worries Rod Scarlett, Executive Director of the Canadian Honey Council, not only because it can wipe out hives in a week, but also because of its incredible adaptability. “We always need to have a new treatment in the queue,” he said, since the wandering habits of bees allow chemical-resistant mites to spread quickly from hive to hive. Until recently, a lack of attention to research also plagued Britain. Tim Lovett, former president of the BBKA, called the relatively small market for bee treatments
Liona Rowan, an organic beekeeper from Texas, described the insecticide’s effects as a kind of “bee AIDS—weakening their natural immunities so they can’t resist many of the not-sodeadly problems that naturally occur in bee populations.” year gathering nectar from every flowering plant in the vicinity. When bees live in monocultured fields, however, only one form of flower is available; it blooms for a few short weeks, bees enter a feeding frenzy and breed at full capacity, then the flowers close and starvation ensues. Whatever bees remain are easy prey for parasites and diseases. Goulson thinks this issue might be solved easily by devoting a fraction of farmland to flowers to leave colonies as robust as ever. Goulson hopes to channel his fellow Britons’ affinity for nature into another lifeline for Britain’s bumblebees. A passion for the outdoors has already convinced 6,000 civilians to answer Goulson’s call for “keen amateur bee enthusiasts” to patrol their stretch of countryside and report local bee activity to the Bee Conservation Trust, an organization Goulson founded in 2010 to track colony health around the country. Thanks to programs like the Trust and the BeeBase program of the British Beekeeping Association (BBKA), scientists in the UK know more about their nation’s bumblebee population than ever before. However, unless researchers keep pace with the swarm of other threats
“a great handicap” to the timely creation of new medicines. Although bees themselves don’t bring riches to their keepers, they contribute roughly 150 billion dollars in annual value to global agriculture, with nearly half a billion for just eight of the dozens of British crops they pollinate, according to Lovett. The British government’s contribution to bee research, a mere thousandth of that annual total, incensed the nation’s beekeepers and drove hundreds of them to march on Downing Street in their trademark white isolation suits to present a petition signed by 140,000 nervous Britons at the height of the crisis, in November 2008. The British government’s resulting pledge—nine million pounds for research and development—funded Goulson’s work and that of many more apiologists. But studies that outline the causes of death fail to propose any policy-based holistic solution to the shrinking bee population. Mass bee die-offs have been seen since before pesticides came into wide use; according to University of Delaware entomology professor Deborah Delaney, “fall dwindle” and “disappearing disease” predate CCD by decades.
Delaney also admits that conditions outside the wild are rougher than ever before. “Some of the really scary things from the 1950s have been banned…but this is the first time we’re seeing hive walls themselves actually permeated with chemicals.” Britain’s actions may be too little, too late; the UK’s overall bee population has been halved since 2006, and the 2006 numbers were half those of the early 1900s. Each die-off is more severe than the last, and the most recent crisis involved more factors in more countries than ever before. After the next wave of mutant mites and opportunistic diseases, will there be any bees left to save Britain’s broad beans and Canada’s canola? If, as Mason and Rowan think, bees become mostly unusable as pollinators on pesticide-soaked land, the consequences will be dire. Without bees’ activity, the BBKA estimates that we’d lose a third of the food we consume daily. Common plant species wouldn’t go extinct, but prices would skyrocket for canola and sunflower oil, fruit, vegetables, nuts, coffee, the list goes on. Certain popular crops, however, rely on pesticides to thrive as much as others rely on bees. Wheat, rice, and corn don’t require outside pollinators and account for the majority of global calories. Suspending pesticide usage on the world’s most productive farmland could lead to billions of dollars in lost crops. Pesticide use in Sichuan, China, for example, led to total bee extinction, forcing farmers to hand-pollinate their apple trees in a process far less efficient than letting bees do the work. Farmers lose either way. If bees are someday relegated to organic gardens and sheltered honey production, however, humanity, as always, will find a way to cope. This February, a team of Harvard engineers revealed their newest creation: an assembly-line process that churns out bumblebee-sized flying robots. The first possible use listed for the machines: “autonomously pollinating a field of crops.” In a world of unnatural plant protection and international exchange, unnatural nature might become an inevitability. AARON GERTLER ’15 is in Timothy Dwight College. Contact him at aaron.gertler@yale.edu.
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the yale globalist: summer 2012
Arresting Monsanto in Kathmandu
M
onsanto, the U.S.-based GMO giant, has had its share of controversy. While a few of its admirers uphold the company as the world’s best hope of tackling the looming global food crisis, its critics identify it as a corporate giant that uses science to poison food. In September 2011, as part of its “Feed the Future Initiative,” USAID announced that it was facilitating a project by Monsanto to promote hybrid maize seeds in Nepal. Street protests in the nation’s capital of Kathmandu followed the announcement, and a great many debates ensued in the newspapers and across social networking sites. With a population of 29 million people, of whom 3.5 million are considered moderately to severely food insecure, Nepal is in immediate need of a long term agricultural strategy that will boost agricultural yield and productivity. Monsanto’s hybrid maize seeds may promise to do exactly that. But the protestors disagree. The campaign against the seeds “has been more than just Monsanto bashing,” said Sabin Ninglekhu, one of the founders of “Stop Monsanto in Nepal,” the Facebook group that organized most of the protests in Kathmandu. “Our campaign questions the logic of promoting dependency among farmers in Nepal that a pact with a multi-
By Sampada KC national company will create.” Although farmers in Nepal have been using hybrid seeds from Monsanto and other companies for over a decade, there was no public outcry until this September. A governmental partnership with Monsanto seems to have served as the catalyst. Ninglekhu said that if the partnership goes ahead farmers will be forced to buy seeds from Monsanto for every planting “because Monsanto’s seeds are patented.” There are also wider fears of monoculture, destruction of heirloom varieties, and loss of agro-bio diversity. But neither these allegations against hybrids nor the claims of Monsanto (or
“Home-grown options of organic farming that combine traditional methods and seeds with science are a superior alternative.” for that matter, of any bio-tech firm), that hybrids increase yield have been warranted by any conclusive independent study. However, the rejection of Monsanto is not unique to Nepal. Monsanto’s hybrid seeds have been the subject of public dissent in neighbouring India and more recently in Haiti, where farmers burnt 470 tons of
Protesters in Kathmandu object to Monsanto’s presence in the country. (Courtesy Florian Gye)
seeds donated by the company. Although the seed campaign in Nepal has focused on criticizing USAID’s proposed project, it has also generated some debate regarding the alternatives to Monsanto’s hybrid seeds. Anil Bhattarai is the founder of Ajambari Foundation, an organization that has taught organic farming to families in the Chitwan valley in Nepal since 1995. According to Bhattarai, “Home-grown options of organic farming that combine traditional methods and seeds with science are a superior alternative.” In the farm that Bhattarai supervises in Chitwan, Chandra Prasad Adhikari grows paddy and fish in the same field with azole as a companion plant. “The azole, with its nitrogen fixing properties, provides all the needed nitrogen for the plants while also blocking out light to prevent the growth of weeds,” Bhattarai said. He added, “The fish droppings add to the nutrient of the rice, additionally.” Bhattarai hopes that similar methods of organic farming can be made common in all of Nepal’s farming communities. While such alternatives may be the answer to a future of sustainable agriculture in Nepal, their promise to increase agricultural yield in the face of a food crisis has not yet been recognized at the institutional level. Gyan Chandra Acharya, the current Chair of the Global Coordination Bureau for the Least Developed Countries (LDCs), said, “In Nepal we need biotechnology to address the challenges imposed by climate change in agriculture; we can no longer depend solely on traditional agricultural methods.” And thanks to the Monsanto deal, the future of agriculture is finally a topic of public and policy debate in Nepal. Rather than leaving the plight of the hungry at the charity of international food aid organisations, Nepal is looking at ways in which its own farmers can feed the hungry. Nepal must integrate technology and tradition in agriculture without help from a foreign multinational corporation. SAMPADA KC ’15 is in Morse College. Contact her at sampada.kc@yale.edu.
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Boricua Roast Café hopping in San Juan, tasting an endangered espresso By Diego Salvatierra
I
want to try Puerto Rico’s best coffee,” I told my San Juan cab driver. He drove me through the cobblestone streets of Old San Juan, the city’s colonial district, until we reached Café Cola’o, a waterfront café. Sipping my macchiato (tangy, not too bitter) out in the warm Caribbean air, I told the barista, Josué, the two things I knew about Puerto Rican coffee: that it was one of the world’s best, and that it was in deep crisis. “It’s true,” said Josue, “…and [that’s] really sad… it’s a great coffee, great quality. [Now] there is no sense of heritage.” Puerto Rico was once one of the world’s leading exporters of coffee, but today, for every three cups consumed on the island, two are made with imported coffee, while harvests decline yearly. I
“Don’t be surprised to see our brands in the U.S. soon. There are millions of Puerto Ricans in the States, and they’ll be happy to buy.” asked Josue who would know more about the coffee crisis, and he jotted down an address. Invigorated by caffeine, I made my way to Café Poetico, one of the many artsy coffee shops filling the district’s narrow, pastel-colored streets. Classical music mixed with the scent of espresso. Nataly Rosales, owner and founder, was eager to talk as I tasted her espresso (rich taste, fruity notes). “Yes, production is falling; people prefer to buy big foreign coffees,” she said, behind thickrimmed glasses. “The Big Corps, big companies, brand it as Puerto Rican––
it’s often not.” But the biggest problem, she says, is a crippling labor shortage: “I’ve seen coffee pickers in the hill towns up at 5 a.m., packed into vans, spending hours under the hot sun––people don’t want to do that anymore,” she said. “Go talk to Joaquin.” She circled a street on my map. “He’s really the expert.”
J
oaquín Pastor’s brew (a delicious, deep-scented espresso) was recently chosen as the second best on the island by the Puerto Rico Coffee Fair. “My grandfather started the plantation,” he said in thickly accented Boricua Spanish, “but I began roasting my own, doing the whole vertical process.” He explained coffee’s three-stage process: Farmers grow the coffee beans, then sell them to a “beneficiador” for processing and roasted. Once “benefitted,” the beans go to distributors. For Pastor, more than manpower, the main cause of decline is low raw coffee prices. Puerto Rico’s local Department of Agriculture sets the price of raw coffee. But this price has stagnated. “An almúd of coffee (about 20kg) sells for $13.65––the same misery of a price since 2005!” said Pastor. Initially designed to keep the industry competitive, these price controls have become, at least according to Pastor, “a robbery, an arbitrage––plans to break small farmers.” Pastor is convinced that if coffee imports and prices are made more flexible, the island’s coffee will thrive. “[People] will appreciate our coffee––they’ll realize how special it is, even compared with quality foreign competition,” he said. To understand why Puerto Rico’s coffee was of such quality, I was put in touch with Daniel Rivera, head barista for Hacienda San Pedro, a gourmet coffee plantation. I was very jittery after my four or five double espressos that day, but I sat down with Rivera for one more cup.
“Coffee is originally from Africa, and grows great in permanently warm, wet locations in the tropics,” Rivera said. “Puerto Rico is within this tropical fringe, but lies at its northern edge, making its climate the coolest you can get while still allowing coffee to grow. These mild temperatures make Puerto
This colorful alley in Old San Juan is where Joaquín Pastor’s café, Finca Cialitos, is located. (Salvatierra/TYG)
20 FOCUS: THE FARM Rican coffee grow slower and better, as
“But Puerto Rico’s coffee is going extinct, like the dinosaurs, and we can’t all survive around this little source of income––imagine all the dinosaurs around a tiny watering hole!” if cooked on a slow fire.” Café especial, or specialty coffee, made from the highest quality beans, comprises a niche market burgeoning in the face of the island’s depressed largescale production. Unlike large-scale “commercial” roasts, quality-controlled specialty coffees have no government
the yale globalist: summer 2012
price restrictions, allowing a large profit margin. I wondered if this was the solution for the decline, but William Mattei, president of the Agricultural Association’s coffee sector and third-generation coffee grower, is skeptical. “Specialty coffees are more select, they go through a rigorous process, and the coffee connoisseur is willing to pay more for that,” he said. “But Puerto Rico’s coffee is going extinct, like the dinosaurs, and we can’t all survive around this little source of income––imagine all the dinosaurs around a tiny watering hole!” With four million consumers, Puerto Rico is not a small market, but local firms are increasingly missing out on it. For Mattei, the problem is once again one of market inflexibility. The Puerto Rican government is the only entity that can import unprocessed coffee, and since they earn money from this, they have no incentive to lower imports or promote local production. “It’s reality,” said Mattei, “they win by importing.”
Joaquín Pastor holding his Second Best Coffee in Puerto Rico award. (Salvatierra/TYG)
Germán Negrón, agricultural director for Puerto Rico Coffee Roasters, which sells over 80 percent of Puerto Rico’s locally produced coffee, a U.S. $100 million sector, pointed to another motivation for stagnant prices. “The government views coffee as a primary necessity, and keeps prices low for consumers,” he said, noting the coffee industry only employs about 20,000 people on the island, compared to the millions who buy coffee daily. The government balances the needs of farmers and consumers, a balance now tilted towards consumers. So while prices of inputs like fertilizer and manure goes up, the price of coffee stays the same, making the industry less and less viable. “Ever since 1998,” he said, “local production has been in decline, and the past five years have seen an even steeper fall.” “[Puerto Rico Coffee Roasters] could make more money by simply importing all our coffee––but it is our responsibility to keep this industry alive,” said Negrón. To do that, they have started a
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The inside of Café Poético, where classical music mixes with spoken-word poetry and the scent of espresso. (Salvatierra/TYG)
massive project to plant 1,500 new acres of coffee within three years, reversing the decade-long trend of decline. “In three or four years,” said Negrón, “we hope the island can produce half of its coffee consumption.” Until the sixties, Puerto Rico exported coffee worldwide, and Negrón hopes to do so again. “Don’t be surprised to see our brands in the U.S. soon. There are millions of Puerto Ricans in the States, and they’ll be happy to buy.
O
ut in the countryside, though, beyond the issues of consumption, brands, supply, and demand, the concrete problem remains manpower. In Adjuntas, in the lush hills of central Puerto Rico, Luis Acevedo runs a small plantation. Like Mattei, he is a thirdgeneration coffee planter, and hopes his children will inherit the farm. But that future is becoming uncertain: “There are fewer and fewer workers––no one wants to pick beans anymore,” said Acevedo. For the past several years, Acevedo explained, prison inmates have been
recruited to pick beans in exchange for shorter sentences. This has allowed Acevedo and others to bridge some of the labor shortage at low cost, but is not a permanent solution. As U.S. citizens, Puerto Ricans can travel freely to the mainland, and many have experienced American work environments firsthand. Tough, isolated work in the hills is becoming unappealing to an increasingly urban society. “Work is done with horrible transportation to the fields, under the sun, under the rain,” said Mattei. “We need better shelter and better transportation for workers,” proposed Mattei. Paying for these investments is difficult with current low coffee profits, so the Agricultural Association turned to the government for funding. But though the government does provide subsidies, these have been cut back in recent years. “The pressure is on us, the farmers, to convince them that for the long run, they should invest in local coffee,” argued Mattei. Puerto Rico has a coffee planting tradition of nearly three centuries, but
it is a legacy in danger of near-extinction. Farmers and café owners point to different culprits, from working conditions to imports to prices. “Still, I’m an optimist––all we’re doing, investments, everything!” said Negrón. But even he recognized the difficulty: “Puerto Rico imports 85 percent of its entire agricultural consumption,” he said, noting the island’s small farming capacity. Year to year, the decline continues, while consumption and imports grow, and only the gourmet sector is thriving. Thanks to this niche, filled by quality coffees like Pastor’s, some of the espressos I tasted will survive. But as Mattei feared, the island’s thousands of farmers will be left fighting for this small niche, struggling to get by on the only trickle left. As many already have, the old plantations will become museums of the past, in the wake of a decline as bitter as a dark espresso. DIEGO SALVATIERRA ’13 is an Ethics, Politics & Economics in Pierson College. Contact him at diego.salvatierra@yale.edu.
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the yale globalist: summer 2012
Letter from... Chile Meeting the Keepers of the Seeds By Diana Saverin Farms like this one are home to most of the indigenous Mapuche population in Chile (Saverin/TYG)
I
sat alone in the plaza as the thick November dusk dissolved off the stones. I was in a town in southern Chile called Curarrehue: a village of a few thousand people, mostly indigenous, nestled at the base of a volcano-speckled valley, with gravel roads twisting through the passing farms. I watched cloud stripes on the horizon fade from electric orange to soft grey, guessing which evening wanderer Edith Cumiquir might be. I knew her from weeks of stuttering correspondence that began when I found her email address on a list of Chilean organic farms. To get Internet , she has to visit the back room of a local pharmacy. Eventually, her silver streaked black hair appeared. We linked eyes, kissed cheeks, and followed the spiral of streets from the plaza center to her home. Her dark eyes blinked deliberately from behind her glasses as we spoke. Her home stood a few blocks away, a one-story house surrounded by its own rainforest: a canopy of large, leafed branches drooping under the roof and onto her porch, lined with herbs and flowers growing out of old tires and pots. I dropped my backpack inside, and she brought me my first mug of tea, a sugary blend with the green spines of pine needles floating to the top. That mug of tea was the first of several traditional treats Edith shared with
me. My favorite was nalka, a wide-leafed wild rhubarb plant found throughout the southern Chilean rainforest. Edith often served pickled strands of its stem drenched in sweet milk. In the kitchen, the steps for these traditional dishes fell from
“We find it impossible to maintain our biodiversity now. This is why the protection of and exchange of seeds is so important—it helps us avoid having our biodiversity driven by the larger market.” her fingertips without recipes, just like the names of the area’s plants streamed from her lips as we passed them by. Like nalka, Edith is native to southern Chile. Edith is Mapuche, the country’s most prominent indigenous group. She has lived in Curarrehue her whole life, and her ancestors have lived in the area for thousands of years. “This is one of the original towns,” she explained to me. “We are the descendents of the first owners of the land.” In Curarrehue, she is the president of
La Sociedad de Gastronomía y Cultivos Rayen Quimey, the Society of Food and Crops. Through this organization, she leads seven other Mapuche women from the indigenous community of Francisco Cumiquir in Curarrehue. They aim to share their Mapuche worldview through community-oriented tourism, based around, as she described it, “[their] ancestral knowledge of gastronomy, work with sheep’s wool, and use of native medicinal plants.” These eight women share ownership of a farm a few miles outside of town and a restaurant they started together, a small circular building with a stone fireplace set in the center. They specialize in traditional Mapuche food and drinks. Fresh juice is particularly sought after. At a meeting one rainy afternoon, I sat by the woodstove in their restaurant kitchen, passing around maté with five of the eight women, and between turns sipping through the metal straw, they discussed their menu for the evening. The conversation tripped over how to make enough juice from the berries they had after customers the week before had demanded pulp-stained pitchers of raspberry juice all night. But for Edith, preserving local knowledge of the land goes beyond the tasty rewards it often offers. In the past, Trafinktu was a practice of exchanging seeds between Mapuche neighbors or villages. Often, women had the honor of choosing
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the seeds to trade or preserve. Among other benefits, this practice conserved the biodiversity of seeds of the region. As the years went on, the practice waned. But Edith refuses to consider its obsolescence. “We find it impossible to maintain our biodiversity now. This is why the protection of and exchange of seeds is so important—it helps us avoid having our biodiversity driven by the larger market,” she said. In response, Edith and other Mapuche women from neighboring towns established a group, Las Curadoras de Semillas, the Keepers of Seeds, to revive this exchange to conserve local knowledge about the biodiversity of seeds. Edith thinks women have been at the center of the issue because of their unique position in Mapuche society. “We worry more about society itself, beginning with our own families, and our children, who will continue our work of recovering the natural environment,” she remarked. “We are more integral.” Edith believes universal health and
survival depend upon the health of indigenous communities, the recovery of what has been forgotten, and the prioritization of plant life. As a Keeper of Seeds, her work focuses on preserving the land and traditions she knows so well by maintaining natural spaces and collections of seeds, as well as planting seeds in areas where they have been lost. Eating helps, too. Seeds deteriorate if they are not consistently planted. And continuing to grow and eat plants helps ensure that their seeds remain viable for future generations. In the past, traditions in Chile and around the world included collecting, saving, and trading a variety of seeds from one season’s successful crops while selecting specific traits to save, such as taste or durability in one region’s climate. More recently, larger seed companies and genetic modification have affected these practices. Some seed companies, such as Monsanto, require farmers sign a contract to not save or sell seeds, ensuring that the farmers return as customers year after year. The company has also marketed controversial seeds with
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genetic use restriction, often termed “suicide seeds,” that die after one season. The fight to preserve native species is fortified in Curarrehue by the history of Trafinktu and the strong connection between Mapuche people and the land, though outcry against the homogenization and centralization of agriculture has grown louder in the debate around the future of food globally. Larger scale efforts include an 8,000 member Seed Saver’s Exchange based in Iowa and the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a seed bank located on an island in the Arctic and managed by the Norwegian government. As food activists in different pockets of the world look to revive a past of green zebra tomatoes and Kenearly yellow eye beans, Edith focuses on her own backyard, one with nalka and more. She wants to preserve the land the way her ancestors knew it, the land whose seeds she keeps. DIANA SAVERIN ‘13 is an English major in Berkeley College. Contact her at diana.saverin@ yale.edu.
(Saverin/TYG)
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the yale globalist: summer 2012
Mange Bien! A food-lover’s exploration of the French culinary history at the Salon International de l’Agriculture. By Emily Hong
At the Salon International de l’Agriculture, visitors come from around the country to sample traditional French farm fare. (Hong/TYG)
I
‘ve come to appreciate Paris as a metropolis of many food quirks: Parisians disdain peanut butter as “too rich” while hailing fatty duck liver as a national treasure. But it’s not every day that the quick jaunt from my host family’s apartment to the nearest metro stop is interrupted by cattle crossing the street. It happens once a year, when the Salon International de l’Agriculture is in town, that such livestock sightings are common here in the southwest corner of Paris. As a newly minted Parisian, I felt obligated to pay a visit to the Salon. My host mother only heightened my enthusiasm with assurances that there would be many
French cheeses for “degustation,” or tast-
“My visit to the Salon showed me that the French people, famous for their fierce protection of their cultural patrimoine, or heritage, will do anything to safeguard their future.” ing. Never one to turn down free dairy products, I dutifully followed the cattle
through the park gates. The Salon, held the first week of March at the enormous Parc des Expositions around the corner from where I’m staying, is equal parts rodeo, Disney World, and trade show. It welcomed almost 700,000 visitors over the course of its eight-day run–– that’s almost a third of the entire population of Paris––and is a veritable hive of propaganda, politics, and media coverage. Making a tour of the Salon as a stop on the campaign trail leading up to the April elections was practically required of each French presidential candidate. President Nicolas Sarkozy, who infamously told a French farmer the equivalent of “screw you, you poor fool” on his 2008 visit to the Salon, made a remarkable showing of over
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www.tyglobalist.org four hours spent posing with cows, tasting French agricultural products, and trumpeting By courting the French farmer, the candidates hope to tap into the militant locavorism that has marched into France in recent years. Given the enormous attendance of the Salon and the intense national media attention it received, one might believe that France depends on agricultural enterprises. In reality, however, agribusiness accounts for only 2.9 percent of the country’s GDP and is steadily shrinking. The French family farmer is in crisis, under siege by the unholy trinity of economic recession, the globalization of food markets, and industrialized agro-conglomerates. My visit to the Salon showed me that the French people, famous for their fierce protection of their cultural patrimoine, or heritage, will do anything to safeguard their future. The Salon is loosely organized into four separate pavilions: the “Gastronomy of the World,” “Agricultural Services and Professions,” “Crops and Plant Sectors,” and “Animals.” First up on my agenda: gastronomical delights. Modeled after an indoor market of internationally themed food kiosks, this area reminded me of EPCOT’s “It’s a Small World After All.” Everything from ropes of Spanish chorizo to plastic shot glasses of Japanese sake tempt passersby. Unfortunately for the national waistline (and my own), my host mother was absolutely right: samples were ubiquitous. I was handed a piece of bread covered in molten gruyere by a ruddy Swiss fraulein only to have a platter
of Russian caviar, at a nippy four euros a bite, pushed into my face by a small woman in a sarafan. I was a little taken aback by the division between the “International” and the “Agricultural”; Outside of the fair-like international gastronomy pavilion, I was barraged by overwhelming, even urgent declarations of the “Frenchness” of this service or that product. The display put on by LU Biscuits, a French company formed in Nantes in 1846, seemed to me an apt metaphor for France’s changing alimentary landscape. Now owned by Kraft, Inc, LU still markets itself as an artisanal, thoroughly French company, even as the cheery sales representatives handed out mass-produced biscuit samples in sterile plastic wrappers. The Salon also stepped on the environmentalism bandwagon to encourage visitors to choose French agricultural products. Slogans like “manger local” (eat local), or “manger bio” (eat organic), were everywhere. Competition from factory farms and enormous agricultural collectives has forced many smaller producers to market their products as “artisanal” luxury goods or health products. In the animal pavilion, small French children cooed over piglets marketed as high quality, highly local meat products. Brochures bearing images of steaks, sausages, and hams were stacked neatly next to the animal enclosures. The cultural and political stakes at the Agricultural Salon were clear. The alimentary nationalism of the Salon’s rhetoric was intentionally appealing to French
Farmers bring their best animal stock to the Salon. (Hong/TYG)
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hearts shaken by drastic change and economic uncertainty. It seemed to suggest that even if French is no longer the lan-
“Now owned by Kraft, Inc, LU still markets itself as an artisanal, thoroughly French company, even as the cheery sales representatives handed out mass-produced biscuit samples in sterile plastic wrappers.” guage of diplomacy, its cultural dominance persists in one last realm: gastronomy. But with the impending demise of the French farmer, many fear generations of gastronomical and cultural heritage–– French cuisine was added to the UNESCO cultural heritage list in 2010––will be lost. A vibrant locavorist movement has sprung up to defend local markets, and most people in Paris still buy bread from neighborhood boulangeries. France might still be a country of markets, where locally grown apples are often cheaper than imported varieties, but it is actively moving away from traditional ways of producing and consuming food. Large grocery stores have gained ground, and one of the most popular brands sold in France is Picard, which sells only frozen food. As an adopted French daughter, I hope they continue to fight for this tradition; it is truly something worth saving. Consider the simple raw milk cheese and perfectly crusty, lightly salted baguette de tradition––this divine combination can only be found in France: raw milk cheese is barred by US pasteurization laws, and the Parisian baguette has a lifespan of less than six hours. Heaven could never taste the same produced en masse abroad and shipped to France in plastic. EMILY HONG ’14 is an Environmental Engineering Major in Pierson College College. Contact her at emily.hong@yale.edu.
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the yale globalist: summer 2012
GAME:
Illustration by Kate Liebman
Cracking down on Ecuador’s illegal meat trade By Aliyya Swaby
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n the morning of June 11, 2011, the Ecuadorian navy publicly burned a heap of confiscated wild animal meat in front of their offices in Coca, a jungle town in the country’s northeast. The smoke from the bonfire and the smell of the meat was carried away by the wind, enveloping a small mob outside the building’s gates. “Give me a leg!” one man heckled the naval officers standing by the fire. He, like the other onlookers, had been a potential buyer of the contraband material and now watched his goods turning to ash before him. Earlier that morning, the buyers had arrived at the weekly open air market in Pompeya and looked out at the indigenous hunters arriving in motorized canoes on the Napo River, hoping to spot white sacks concealing smoked haunches of wild pig or even monkey. The meat came from Yasuní National Park in the Ecuadorian Amazon, one of the most biodiverse forests in the world. The illegal meat trade used to function with ease; local police officers were known to take bribes to look the other way. But that day the Ministry of the Environment, an autonomous governmental body in charge of policing the wild meat trade, had sent a boat of naval officers to shut it down. More than 1,500 pounds of animal meat were confiscated and burned, according to Javier Vargas, a provincial director of the Ministry. It was the most drastic governmental action taken against the indigenous hunters and meat suppliers since the market opened almost two decades ago. Yet since that day, illegal trade has increased, underpinned by the development of an underground meat market that has proven hard to regulate. If the hunting continues at its current rate, scientists predict animal life may soon disappear altogether in Yasuní. Overhunting depletes natural resources and is changing the shape of the forest. It is now difficult to find large monkeys in the forest, and hunters resort to selling large rodents and wild pigs.
The trade entered Yasuní a year after oil company Maxus Ecuador Inc. did in 1993. The company built the Pompeya SurIro road, which cuts through more than 87 miles of national park. A year later the indigenous Waorani and Quichua people living along the road started selling wild meat in Pompeya, a small town located three miles outside of the park.
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pain-based Repsol is currently the only oil company allowed in the park, bound by contract with the Ecuadorian government to strictly control access to the Pompeya Sur-Iro road. Ecuador’s economy is dependent on business from companies like this. But Repsol also offers free bus transportation to the indigenous communities living along the road, which allows hunters to travel farther and hunt greater quantities of meat. The Waorani, responsible for the bulk of the meat at the markets, used to be nomads but now mostly live in established communities. Repsol has brought the Waorani access to otherwise unaffordable benefits like shotguns, gasoline, Western medicine, and even indoor soccer fields. The company gives them these gifts as “compensation” for drilling on their land, said Remigio Rivera, Repsol’s director of community outreach. Some Waorani even have jobs doing manual labor for the oil company in the forest. Rivera said Repsol is helping the Waorani learn how to become productive citizens of Ecuador, instead of isolated peoples, something he said is necessary in an age of increased globalization. But Waorani culture is rapidly disappearing with the forest, said Gloria Irumenga, a Waorani woman who lives in Guiyero, a community along the road that supplies much of the meat at the markets. With a soft voice and a baby nestled in her arms, she describes her life in simple terms. Irumenga and her family live in a house made of a palm tree native to the region. But a few of the 15 houses in Guiyero are made of concrete—those are the ones the oil company built for them, she said.
If the hunting continues at its current rate, scientists predict animal life may soon disappear altogether in Yasuní.
Locals hunt their own food in the Yasuní forest. (Swaby/TYG) Most Waorani are bilingual, Irumenga said, speaking Spanish in addition to their native language in order to communicate with the oil workers and scientists sharing the road. They wear modern clothing, instead of the clothes of their ancestors, and they eat less wild meat, instead traveling outside of the forest weekly to buy groceries. It is more difficult to find game these days than in the days of her mother and grandmother. “The animals are disappearing. [Hunters] now have to travel three hours to hunt,” she said. These indigenous groups rely on subsistence hunting, Vargas said, and they are allowed to under law. Commercial hunting is illegal, but the Waorani and Quichua have been selling meat ever since they first made contact with the outside world in the 1960s. Foreign natural resource development companies have facilitated the trade, and the permanence of the weekly market and the accessibility of the road have only amplified it. Today there are wild meat markets in at least seven cities or towns, near the rainforest in northeastern Ecuador. The market at Pompeya is the largest.
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Among the biggest group of consumers of the meat are locals, including those whose ancestors within one or two generations used to live in indigenous communities but have since moved outside of park boundaries, according to Esteban Suarez, a professor of ecology at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito and former scientist with the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). “It is what helps them to keep some sort of attachment of the forest that they might have had when they were kids and don’t have now because they live in Tena or Puyo or Coca,” he said. “They consider it to be a really healthy meat.” For special events, like weddings, one buyer could order hundreds of pounds of wild meat. Businessmen also buy meat at the market to sell to restaurants at higher prices. While at WCS in 2008, Suarez produced a comprehensive scientific article that found that almost half of the meat brought to the Pompeya market over a period of three years ended up resold at restaurants in Tena, a town 145 miles away. Demand from restaurant-goers is high; the restaurant owners make five times more money from the trade than the hunters. “This means that if they can’t get meat from Pompeya, they will go elsewhere,” Suarez said. The vendors seem to be aware of this
the yale globalist: summer 2012
“The animals are disappearing. [Hunters] now have to travel three hours to hunt.” dynamic. Sources say the trade, active as ever, has continued underground since the June raid, faced with constant authority presence at the market. Vendors are making special arrangements to sell before governmental officials arrive at Pompeya, said Juan Carlos Armijos, professor at La Universidad Catolica, who has been working in Waorani communities for eleven years. He said the Waorani use the money they make selling meat to buy groceries and large quantities of alcohol. Canoes departing from towns like Pompeya are often weighed down with more beer than groceries. The Waorani are not likely to stop selling anytime soon. “The young people see [the wild meat trade] as a business. If they want something, they tell their parents and their parents have to hunt to get it for them,” Armijos said. Although the people are outraged to be losing their goods in the confiscations, it is easy to sneak meat past the Ministry, said Miguel Tega, a Waorani teenager who lives in Dicaro, the largest Waorani community within influence of the road. “They just
Underground meat trades are increasingly common and threaten the forest ecosystem. (Swaby/TYG)
hide it in a backpack.” There is also a possibility that the bulk of the wild meat market might move away from Pompeya, said Galo Zapata, a WCS scientist, which would make it difficult for the organization or the government to track it. WCS does bimonthly surveys of the market, with the use of indigenous informants, though it has been harder to perform them accurately since the recent government interference, Zapata said. People are more secretive about the trade and often refuse to give information. A report consolidating these surveys shows a general increase in the average amount of meat sold per market day between 2005 and 2011. But since August, it has been almost impossible to measure the exact amount of meat being sold, Zapata said. People sell small quantities of meat at the market in order to keep the government distracted from the undercover activity.
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he government has a reputation for apathy when it comes to the wild meat trade. In fact, many officials supposed to be preventing illegal sales either turned their backs or partook in the activity themselves. Vargas said the Ministry only became centralized enough to deal with the issue in the past several years, since he became provincial director for the province of Orellana where most of the meat is sold. Soon after, the Ministry became involved in the most successful long-term effort to date, culminating in the raid, which involved three non-governmental organizations and several national and provincial governmental bodies. The initiative aimed to attack the trade through three strategies: strictly controlling the markets, educating the local buyers about its environmental harm, and offering the sellers economic alternatives to selling the meat. One branch of the project, aimed at tourists from within Ecuador, set up an advertising campaign used on national flights, hotels, and buses to dissuade them from eating the meat. Scientists and officials agree that the amount of meat being sold in the open at
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(Swaby/TYG) the markets decreased after the project began, a fact corroborated by WCS survey reports. But this does not account for the meat sold underground, outside of the markets. And the project has been short lived. Funding ran out at the end of June, a few weeks after the Ministry’s dramatic meatburning operation, preventing any of the organizations from continuing to work on it. The Ministry has had to continue the project alone, and despite its presence at the markets seems to be at a loss for how to deal with the underground trade. Ideally, surveillance at the markets would be more thorough, leaving no opening for secret deals. Instead, WCS survey reports from this year show that Ministry control efforts have severely declined since June 11. Local Pompeya police, not national naval officers, carry out the control operations. They show up at the market about once a month at 8:00, hours after the majority of the sales are complete. The amount of meat sold openly at the market has increased from an all-time low of 190 pounds in June 2011 to more than 1,500 pounds in mid-August, the WCS report shows. But the Ministry says it is pulling its weight and that oil company Repsol should begin to take some responsibility. “We don’t live at those sites. It’s hard for us to get there,” said Alonzo Jaramillo, an official at the Ministry. “We can only carry
out the law. [Repsol] isn’t doing their part of the work.” Vargas agreed that the company has failed to execute their promise to control movement in and out of Yasuní through the Pompeya Sur-Iro Road. But Rivera said that it is impossible for the oil company to do any more than it already is to solve the problem, especially without governmental cooperation. The agreement, he said, was made mainly to stop outsiders from getting into the area, not to stop the indigenous people from traveling through it. “It’s hard for us being on [Waorani] land to control them,” he said. Additionally, he said, a few Waorani have their own vehicles, which Repsol has no basis to control. But scientists believe the restitution is destroying the communities. “Even if you forget about wild meat, what happens with the Waorani when the oil company leaves after there is no more oil?” Suarez asked. The company would leave in place the road that has led to major destruction in the forest, while taking with them the free benefits the Waorani have come to depend on. Many groups have been working with the Waorani to find economic alternatives to hunting and living off of the oil company. Irumenga’s community, Guiyero, grows yucca and cacao to sell at the markets, and even has a few domesticated farm animals.
“Even if you forget about wild meat, what happens with the Waorani when the oil company leaves after there is no more oil?”
The Ministry and WCS are working on a project in Waorani communities to restore the population of Yasuní’s river turtles, whose eggs the Waorani eat. Waorani communities are also developing their own projects. Manuela Ima is one of the leaders of the Asociacion de Mujeres Amazonicas Waorani de Ecuador (ANWAE) a small women’s organization that offers financial alternatives to illegally selling wild meat. They encourage communities to grow crops to sell at the markets instead of meat. ANWAE works with Waorani in three provinces and 34 communities, including Guiyero and Dicaro along the road. Anyone is welcome to learn, Ima said, though women are particularly invested in the issue. “The women are worried about their children,” she said. There are more than 300 Waorani committed to the cause, and the Waorani’s main governing body, Nacionalidad Waorani del Ecuador, has committed its support. Ima wants to expand efforts, but is worried that it will not be feasible, mainly because the organization is low on funds. These projects are successful within their small scopes, but are unlikely to make pervasive change without increased effort from the Ministry and Repsol. The illegal meat trade is not a government priority, and the oil company would rather bribe the Waorani than restrict the sales. By building and managing the road, the oil company began a problem it is not willing to remedy. By allowing Repsol to continue in Yasuní, the government dealt a grave sentence to the national park and many communities that live in it. In Guiyero one night in July, it was dinnertime after dark. Irumenga heated up a piece of peccary meat over the fire for her family. The wild pig was fresh, hunted by the men just that morning, and the meat sizzled over the gas oven. To supplement it, there was white rice and chicken in individual plastic containers, groceries from the town. Irumenga’s small house was filled with women and children who laughed and talked while eagerly eating platefuls of the mix. In the thick forest beyond the clearing, the birds called louder in the nighttime, signaling what’s left. ALIYYA SWABY ’14 is an Environmental Studies Major in Pierson College. Contact her at aliyya. swaby@yale.edu.
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Farmer on the Roof
the yale globalist: summer 2012
Agriculture takes a stroll up the stairs. By Ashley Wu
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new generation of urban farmers believes they are on the cusp of an agricultural revolution––and it starts on rooftops. As the world population grows towards 10 billion inhabitants by 2050, most new citizens will be born in cities. Agribusiness has replaced bucolic family farms at a similarly rapid rate, wreaking havoc on the environment in the process. Faced with the prospect of more mouths to feed and worsening environmental conditions, urban farmers believe that enabling city dwellers to grow their own food is the future of modern agriculture. Christian Echternacht of Berlin’s Efficient City Farming (ECF) believes that urban farmers act on a simple imperative to make farming more sustainable. “Seventeen percent of global carbon dioxide emissions derive from agricultural production, and on average, Germans emit 10 tons of CO2 a year,” he said. “To reduce my personal 1.7 tons, I can eat less. Or I can just eat products that come from CO2neutral agricultural systems that don’t use transportation.” ECF is building one such CO2-neutral agricultural system on top of an abandoned malt factory rooftop, in the form of the world’s largest aquaponic farm. Using almost 90 percent less water than traditional growing methods, aquaponic
(Courtesy Tarek Hosni)
systems raise fish and vegetables symbiotically. In what Echternacht describes as “a perfect cycle,” a biofilter converts fish waste into fertilizer, water is continuously cycled from the fish tanks to the hydroponic plant beds, and plants also bind the CO2 produced by fish farming. Not only do urban farms use resources efficiently, they also reduce the environmental cost of transportation as well. Planes and barges must burn fossil fuels to ship bananas from Costa Rica to Canada and cucumbers from Mexico to France. But urban farmers like those at Montreal’s Lufa Farms believe that rooftop farms are an excellent way to encourage an “eat local” philosophy. Lufa sends daily baskets of produce to 1,000 closely located households that own a share in the farm. By 9 a.m., three workers have picked all of the day’s produce; by 6 p.m., the baskets are delivered. “With our system, there is so little waste because we don’t guess what consumers will buy; they’re happy to get what is local and seasonal,” said Lauren Rathmell, Lufa’s greenhouse director. Most farmers agree that investor and government interest in rooftop farms has skyrocketed in recent years. “Rooftop farming is absolutely scalable,” said Rathmell. “We just celebrated our first anniversary, and we’re already profitable at this point. There are multiple government districts competing for the contract
to our second farm.” While the trendiness of urban farming has increased investment, being “eco-friendly” remains a First World fetish. In other parts of the world, the notion of having a garden on one’s roof already seems strange, let alone the idea of a hydroponic farm with no soil. According to Tarek Hosny, co-founder of Cairo’s Schaduf, “Some people will definitely think [urban farming] is cool, particularly the younger generation. It goes along with being health conscious and environmentally conscious, but others will always think it’s kind of bizarre.” Schaduf, named for an ancient Egyptian method of irrigation, has developed a rooftop hydroponic system that uses recycled water to grow produce in one of the world’s driest regions. Through the use of this technology, Schaduf even aims to fight poverty. Households purchase the systems for around $1,000, largely financed by microfinance loans, and they repay the loans by selling crops in local street markets. Though Schaduf is in its testing stage and currently has only four customers, Hosny believes that its model will succeed because of its ease of adoption. “Especially for those who are expected to stay at home, either for cultural reasons or otherwise, rooftop farming is very convenient,” said Hosny. “If you are a woman at home anyway, putting some minimal effort into tending to the farm on your rooftop can generate a lot of supplemental income.” Hosny added, “There is no reason there cannot be a farm on every rooftop.” Indeed, urban farmers hope that this rising trend will catch on globally as it already has among western urbanites. Though hydroponic systems do involve significant start-up costs, the convenience and efficiency of rooftop farming will eventually win over those who hesitate at the thought of growing lettuce on their roof. The hope is that a future where everyone, from New York lawyers to Middle Eastern housewives, is a farmer may not be far off. ASHLEY WU ’15 is in Morse College. Contact her at ashley.wu@yale.edu.
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The Road to Rice Eighty-five percent of calories consumed in Liberia come from rice, but now the country relies on imports to feed itself—at a steep cost. By Jessica Shor
(Shor/TYG)
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n 1979, Liberian Minister of Agriculture Florence Chenoweth proposed to raise the price of imported rice from $22 to $26 per 100-pound bag. It was an attempt to encourage domestic rice production, but the prospect of an increase to the cost of their dietary staple outraged Liberians. In protest, on April 14 of that year more than 12,000 citizens
flooded the streets of Monrovia, Liberia’s capital city. The event became infamous as the 1979 rice riots, and what began as a peaceful protest turned into looting and chaos. In the mayhem on that steamy spring day, the Liberian army shot and killed dozens of civilians and wounded 500 more. The rice riots are widely blamed for sparking Liberia’s descent into civil war: They ushered in a series of assassinations and
coups that continued for ten years, until full-on war broke out in 1989. Thirty years after the rice riots, Liberia is no closer to achieving rice self-sufficiency. According to United Nations estimates, 85 percent of calories consumed in Liberia come from rice, 90 percent of which is imported from places like the United States, China, and South and Southeast Asia. The problem is not just that the rice comes from abroad, but that it is astronomically
32 32 FOCUS: THE FARM expensive for Liberians: It carries an typical price tag of 30 cents per serving, in a country where average per capita income hovers around $1 per day. Liberia’s low levels of domestic rice production are not for lack of demand, nor for lack of attention. Noting the grain’s importance, President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf named rice a strategic commodity, placing it on par with oil and concrete. During elections, campaign officials purchase sacks of the grain to distribute to potential voters at election rallies, and on street corners throughout the country, women sit behind wheelbarrows of rice, doling it out to customers by the tin can-full. Beside coal stoves in restaurants and cooking huts alike, Liberians consume heaping plates of rice, smothered in spicy stews of palm butter, potato greens, fish, chicken, and bushmeat. Liberia’s dependence on imported rice is part of a larger story, of the destruction of war and the struggle to recover. Between 1989 and 2003, fighting killed more than a quarter-million civilians, pushed waves of rural refugees into Monrovia, plunged Liberia to the bottom of human development index rankings, and destroyed the country’s infrastructure. These effects still linger today, posing obstacle after obstacle on the road to rice self-sufficiency.
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hese hurdles consume the thoughts of Dr. Sizi Subah, a government researcher and consultant at the Ministry of Agriculture’s Central Agriculture Research Institute (CARI). In his office on the outskirts of Monrovia, he asked the question that has long plagued policy makers and citizens alike. “Liberia has everything going for it. We have good land and good rainfall,” Dr. Subah said. “So why are we importing more than two-thirds of our rice?” Dr. Subah is right to wonder why Liberia does not feed itself. Clinging to the coast of West Africa just above the Equator, Liberia enjoys the same environmental conditions that make countries like Indonesia, Thailand, Pakistan, and India agricultural powerhouses. Slightly smaller than Virginia, the hilly country is hot and humid, with frequent downpours during the six-month rainy season. Monrovia, for example, receives an average of 202 inches of rain annually, making it the wettest capital city on earth. In this climate,
the yale globalist: summer 2012 rice should be thriving. Yet as I drove through Lofa County, a rural region near the border of Guinea, swamp rice paddies lay fallow beside villages, their mud surfaces punctuated by only the occasional anemic tuft. It was July, and according to Dr. Subah, the rice seeds should have been planted in June, and the paddies should have been lush in preparation for an October harvest. “Swamp rice paddies can be developed as permanent production sites,” Dr. Subah explained, describing how nutrient-rich runoff collects in the lowland paddies and keeps their soil especially rich. “You can farm them for time indefinite. But right now, what is farmed is only a drop in the bucket. We’re not even at two percent of potential.” Most Liberians, including Dr. Subah, blame stalled attempts to increase rice production primarily on infrastructure–– or, more accurately, the lack thereof. Ninety-four percent of Liberia’s roads are unpaved, and during the rains, these roads become slicks of rust red mud, impassible for days at a time. Even on dry days, the 300-mile drive from Monrovia to Lofa drags on for 14 joint-rattling hours, on a dirt road that boasts ruts large enough to swallow the tires of even the biggest trucks. The World Bank has invested 218 million dollars into infrastructure rehabilitation in Liberia, and Chinese contractors have swooped in to complete the projects. Paving attempts, however, are concentrated in the capital. While several contractors have offered to repair roads that link iron mines to Monrovia’s port, few efforts have been made to repair the country’s impassable farm roads. These roads have proved fatal to past attempts at growing rice commercially. In 2008, the Foundation for African Development Aid and the Libya-Africa Investment Portfolio (ADA/LAP) launched a 30-million dollar project to increase rice production in Lofa by mechanizing the cultivation process. It was the largest project of its kind, and it promised to employ 900 farmers and cultivate 2500 hectares of land. To reach these goals, ADA/LAP organizers imported equipment for planting, harvesting, processing, and storing the rice, but road conditions prevented that equipment from ever reaching the production sites–– or even leaving Monrovia. Three years after the project was announced, Liberian
newspapers reported that the machines remained in the city, collecting rust and drawing complaints from frustrated farmers. The project ultimately folded after Libyans disposed of Muammar Qaddafi in 2011. It is not only large-scale projects that face challenges posed by Liberia’s roads. On his family’s farm in Kakata, halfway between Monrovia and Lofa County, Fabio Velanet founded Fabrar Rice. Fabrar is one of only two companies that sell Liberian-grown rice commercially, and for now it is sold in only 12 Monrovia supermarkets and has monthly sales of less than $2000. But in the three years since he began production, Velanet has steadily expanded the company and has started to purchase surplus rice from nearby subsistence farmers. Yet often, Velanet finds that farmers resist his encouragement to increase production. He explained, “Rice is our staple food. Everybody eats it, and everybody knows that we need to grow it. But there’s that apprehension, like, ‘If I grow too much, will I actually benefit from it? Will I actually be able to sell it, or will it rot? Am I wasting my money?’ I think you’re going to continue to see that trend where farmers don’t want to grow rice until they get that linkage between themselves and markets.” Then he clarified: “It’s the roads. We just don’t have ‘em. Even if you could grow extra rice, there’s no way to get that rice to a market. Literally no way. Once the rains come, the best you could do is maybe get a bike to the farm, but that’s not going to work too well.”
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n Kingsville, 40 minutes outside the capital, there exists proof of what Liberians can do when their fields sit beside a smoothly paved road. Beside the street, scrubby brush suddenly gives way to lush rice patties. The 20-acre fields form part of a seed farm and training center run by BRAC, a Bangladeshi NGO that has operated in Liberia since 2008. The paddies are test sites for new strains of rice under development, and BRAC recruits farmers from rural areas to practice cultivation in the Kingsville fields and attend trainings in the center. In one session, Ousman Dorley, a BRAC employee, taught 20 rice farmers from Grand Gedeh County about everything
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www.tyglobalist.org from making homemade fertilizer, to using tabacco leaves to prevent insect infestations during storage, to choosing attractive and protective packaging for the finished product. During a mid-session break for crackers and tea, Josiah, one of the Grand Gedeh farmers, praised BRAC’s training sessions. “Education never ends,” he said, leaning forward in his chair. “I am old, but my mind still learns. I live in the lowlands, and BRAC teaches me how to grow rice in them. It’s my first experience with BRAC, and they are fine, fine, fine. I learned so many things.” The center’s gleaming tile and stucco facility, the productivity of its fields, and its easy access to Monrovia’s markets show that BRAC can give farmers the resources that Subah and his Ministry cannot. But BRAC’s successes are not necessarily replicable in Liberia’s more isolated areas. BRAC uses a network of local coordinators to draw farmers into its training program, but those representatives cannot reach every rural community in the country, and they cannot provide the equipment, like irrigation pipes and mechanized harvest tools, that is available at the Kingsville facility. Moreover, training alone cannot lure back the thousands of Liberians who left their farms for the city as refugees during the war and have not returned, choosing to stay in Monrovia for its educational and employment opportunities. The Grand Gedeh farmers at the BRAC training represent the lucky few; most of their peers remain on small, isolated farms, stooping to tend their fields with dull cutlasses and their bare hands.
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RAC’s limited reach in remote areas––and the government’s inability to step in––became spectacle on the eve of Liberia’s July 26 Independence Day. An excited crowd gathered around a stage in a field outside Voinjama, the capital of Lofa County. President Johnson Sirleaf and a cohort of political and business elites sat in a cluster of folding chairs, while the rest of the spectators crouched in the grass, swatting away mosquitoes as they watched the song and dance show that kicked off official Independence Day celebrations. “They call Lofa the breadbasket of Li-
beria,” the emcee thundered into the cool jungle night. “But this next group wants to tell you how intensive rice farming really is!” From the darkness, four men inched onto the stage, chopping down invisible weeds as they went. Pantomimed rain began to fall. Five women, their heads wrapped in white scarves and their legs swathed in patterned lapa, crept on stage, pretending to plant rice seeds to the beat of a beaded gourd. The line of women snaked across the stage, preparing for a rice harvest that, had it been planted in real fields, likely wouldn’t come. “This is our message for the Ministry of Agriculture today,” the emcee proclaimed. “We can do better with improved
The problem is not just that the rice comes from abroad, but that it is astronomically expensive for Liberians: It carries a typical price tag of 30 cents per serving, in a country where average per capita income hovers around $1 per day. agricultural tools!” But the government didn’t hear the message that night. Before the dance ended, President Johnson Sirleaf and her companions left the show, the high beams of their SUVs sweeping over the crowd as they drove off. It wasn’t the first time the government had turned a blind eye to the problems plaguing farmers. In 2003 the Liberian government signed onto an African Union declaration that encouraged states to allocate 10 percent of their annual budgets to agricultural development. By 2005, Liberia ranked dead last among the declaration’s signatories in terms of actual funds put towards farm improvements. According to Subah, the government’s $460 million 2011 budget contained only $1.5 million for the Ministry of Agriculture. Some citizens cry corruption, but
others more generously attribute the slow progress to the government’s lack of funding and resources. Whatever their explanation, though, few Liberians consider current state-led efforts to promote domestic rice production adequate. “They’re trying,” admitted Subah, “but our budget is not enough. It will never be enough.” So, for the foreseeable future, rice still enters Liberian markets not from the land and the farmers, but through the vast Freeport of Monrovia and the merchants who import foreign rice. At the shipyard, armies of workers sling sacks of the grain onto trucks, for delivery to the distribution centers that line Monrovia’s main streets and market squares. These shops are run by people like Mistress Mulbah, who owns a distribution center on Tubman Boulevard, Monrovia’s main thoroughfare. Prices, Mulbah said, are set by the government and vary by grain quality: Chinese butter rice costs 33 dollars per 100-pound bag, for example, while U.S. parboiled rice goes for 36 dollars. Mulbah turns a healthy profit––she declined to give exact figures––but she too wants to see her country grow its own rice, even if doing so would put her out of business. She admitted most Liberians cannot afford to buy her rice, and claimed domestic production would both make rice more affordable and also provide more income for farmers. “If the government would only provide machines, or put in more interest,” Mulbah complained, shaking her head as she gestured to the bags of rice being loaded onto a truck. ‘Product of China,’ the bags read. “Our soil is better than theirs,” Mulbah lamented. That may be true, but rice production cannot be extricated from the tangle of post-conflict obstacles that remain. Eight years after the last shots were fired, the need and desire for recovery are there. The rich, rust-red soil is there. But the roads, tools, and funds aren’t, and until they are, neither is the rice. JESSICA SHOR ’13 is an Anthropology major in Ezra Stiles College. The research for this article was made possible with the support of the Kingsley Trust Association Fellowship and the Tristan Perlroth Prize.
34 FOCUS: THE FARM
the yale globalist: summer 2012
Back to the Grassroots
An alternative model of rural development takes root in India By Dan Gordon
I
Although irrigation systems, artificial ndia has forgotten Gandhi. nologies,” he warned, adding that policyHis face might be on the makers’ greed for genetically modified fertilizers, and chemical pesticides can be rupee note in everyone’s (GM) crops and other technological nov- used responsibly to increase yields, their pockets, but his philoso- elties threaten traditional farming tech- indiscriminate use in many places has lowered water tables and exhausted the soil. phy of self-reliant small niques. Bharat Bhosale, who works in the In- As Mr. Bhosale exclaimed, “Every year we villages is rarely on anyone’s lips. Gandhi’s once- dian province of Maharashtra for a local end up planting hybrids in the same soil, prominent dream for a nation of agricul- NGO, takes issue with GM crops in par- and that is dangerous.” Over the years, the tural villages is now regarded as nothing ticular, which were a major innovation of Gandhian ideal of environmental trusteemore than a pastoral fantasy. Policymak- the Green Revolution. “Hybrid seeds— ship has fallen victim to increasing crop ers have instead opted for rural develop- there are some different problems. They output. Yesterday’s solution to India’s ment policies that align with the Green are having tasting problem, they require famine problem—the Green Revolution— Revolution’s principle of maximizing crop high fertilizers. The nutrient requirement has became today’s ecological crisis. Besides spoiling the envioutput—which inevitably ronment, the Green Revoluplaces less emphasis on imtion has also harmed the liveproving the small farmer’s lihoods of farmers, driving situation. them into debt. DisappointAs rural discontent siming yields, the result of abusmers, poverty grows. And ing the soil, are not uncomas the exodus into the memon in India. In recent years, ga-cities continues, there dismal harvests and the is little doubt that India debt burden have caused an must find new models for epidemic of farmer suicides agricultural development. across the country. Gandhi’s In ram raj, Gandhi’s vision rural villages, where they do of a prosperous and interexist, are crumbling under connected village republic, the weight of environmental NGOs and activists may and financial troubles. have found just that model. True to his namesake, But faced with political corMr. Gandhi finds a solution ruption, poor policy, and the Organic and sustainable projects, like this greenhouse outside of Pune, contribute to these woes in tradition. state’s prejudice against tra- to less than five percent agricultural output in India. (Gordon/TYG) “Lots of people are working ditional farming techniques, it will take a near-miracle to turn Gandhi’s is also more. They degrade the soils,” he with traditional farming practices and explained. Taste aside, the new seeds re- traditional agricultural methods and conram raj into a reality. In the 1960s, India’s Green Revolution quired a novel, energy-intensive farming servation of traditional seeds. And they modernized and mechanized farming technique. Farmers were forced to aban- shouldn’t be brushed off as madcaps or ilpractices, and moved India towards food don traditional—and oftentimes more sus- lusionists.” Fostering sustainable farming methods in the villages and showcasing security, even weaning the country off tainable—agricultural practices. Compared to heartier local varieties their successes might be the best way to imports and assuaging the once ubiquitous fear of famine. For all its successes, and strains, GM crops could not survive win over doubtful farmers and push polithough, the Green Revolution has brought the intense heat and aridity of the dry cymakers towards solutions that respect a slew of unintended consequences. Today, season without enough water. So farmers, less energy-intensive cultivation techits legacy is one of the main roadblocks to with the help of the government, began niques. The Green Revolution was a top-down building complex irrigation systems that creating a Gandhian countryside. Enter Tushir Gandhi. The great-grand- made water scarce and expensive. Chemi- policy endeavor, but new models of ecoson of the Mahatma, fiery Mr. Gandhi, cal pesticides replaced the use of natural nomic development must be participatory, a crusader against corporate greed and pesticides like neem oil, and synthetic including the small farmer at all stages. government corruption, is wary of adopt- fertilizers supplanted intercropping tech- When policymakers listen to the farmers’ ing modern technologies associated with niques, in which farmers would plant two voice in the planning and implementation the Green Revolution. “We have to be very crops in one field to confuse pests and re- process, development tends to be more equitable, helping not only the corporate careful when rushing to newfangled tech- plenish the soil.
FOCUS: THE FARM 35
www.tyglobalist.org growers but also the small farmers. Inclusive projects also tend to be more sustainable, since farmers will invest in development schemes that improve their lives and livelihoods, long after the government has left. BAIF, the Bhartiya Agro-Industry Foundation, offers one model of how to create inclusive agricultural development projects. An offshoot of Nature Cure Ashram, which Mahatma Gandhi established in 1946, BAIF now has a national footprint, working in 15 Indian states. Their track record is internationally lauded. Over 70 percent of the families they worked with have climbed above the poverty line. On a small hill in a village outside Jawhar, Maharashtra, an unassuming building contains a seed bank that BAIF established. Hot and dusty inside, it houses around 230 strains of local crops in plastic bags and large bins. The seed bank employees educate farmers and conserve seeds that might otherwise disappear. A scientist affiliated with the seed bank also works to identify the characteristics of each strain, discovering which varieties work best in which soils in order to sustainably increase yields. At the end of the harvest, farmers supply the bank with their seeds. Several months later, at the beginning of planting, the seed bank redistributes the seeds to farmers, and the cycle contin- ues. “This is not like a university or government center, but it is a participatory center for farmers,” noted Bhosale, an employee of BAIF. The local seeds might not provide the highest yields, but they do produce reliable yields, since they require lower energy inputs than GM seeds and preserve the soil quality for future years. Off a nearby dirt road, under the shadow of parched hills, sits a rural village that is home to another one of BAIF’s projects. Over the course of several years, BAIF has transformed this once subsistent village into a surplus economy, moving India one step closer to Gandhi’s vision of a thriving village republic. Along the hills, mango and cashew trees spring up, which receive better prices at market than traditional crops. Below the terraces, small greenhouses hold mango saplings while jasmine flowers, soon to be gathered up and sold in city markets, grow on more level stretches. Nearer to their homes, farmers grow vegetables for their own consumption.
BAIF has also provided infrastructural solutions for the village. Up the steep hills lie a labyrinthine series of micro-dams, channels, drip-irrigation hoses, and terraces that supply water for the crops, improving water conservation. Closer to the village, value-added processing sites provide another source of income for farmers, allowing them to make liquor from cashew flowers, for instance. Although the village is poorly connected with other population centers, a small financial cooperative even enables farmers to transport and sell their goods in Mumbai a few hours away. Kashinga, a middle-aged farmer in the village, used to go to Mumbai as a sand dredger, until BAIF gave him land and helped him build his farm. “I used to go out to work for other people. Now other people work for me,” he said with a large smile. Kashinga’s success is not an isolated incident. Most land laborers in Maharashtra make at most 100 rupees per day, about two dollars. Over the course of a few years, many of the farmers benefiting from the BAIF scheme make more than three times that amount—and are more sure of a stable future income. BAIF has been successful in this village and in the seed bank experiment because it has provided technical expertise that is congruent with the farmers’ cultural and traditional practices, unlike Green Revolution policies. However, most farmers in Maharashtra do not receive such generous assistance. A policy bias towards top-down decision making, increased mechanization, and corporate farming prevent the BAIF model of tailored participatory development from being implemented on a larger scale. “Opportunistic politicians are the biggest hindrance to farm liberalization because they pander to the rural rich, the big farmers with large holdings,” Mr. Ghandi said. In this political climate, national policies usually promote corporate farming and perpetuate the failures of the Green Revolution. At the same time, “overhead” problems such as a lack of transportation linking rural and urban areas, the isolation of farmers from markets, the shortage of market information, the absence of cold storage facilities to prevent spoilage, and the distance between farms and processing facilities all hinder the ability of farmers to raise their standards of living. Mr. Gandhi, at least, believes that new
and better policies can create solutions. “I think what we require is some out-of-thebox thinking as far as policymaking for the agricultural sector goes. And I think that will be in tune with the Gandhian philosophy of mixing tradition with modernization, whenever necessary.” Distancing the government from development projects might work best. The success of NGOs like BAIF, along with the government’s failures to help small farmers and its collusion with industrialists and corporate farmers, all point to the need for a decentralized development plan. Without inclusive and steady development, rural discontent could turn violent—as is already happening. As recently as March 27, a roadside bomb, the work of Maoist Naxalites, claimed the lives of 12 central reserve police force troopers in eastern Maharashtra. India is no stranger to rural reactionaries. Change will not come quickly to India. Corporate farming will grow larger. Corruption will go on. Environmental abuses will remain the norm. In short, the Green Revolution, which has only lived up to half
“Every year we end up planting hybrids in the same soil, and that is dangerous.” its name, will tow the country down the dangerous path of higher yields and any cost. For the much-needed Gandhian rural revitalization to work, it must proceed as Gandhi did: through crisis. Gandhi manufactured his own crises by undertaking voluntary fasts to mobilize the country. Rural India may have found its own emergency in the countryside’s suicide epidemic, environmental troubles, and violent protests. When disaster, in whatever form it takes, does strike India’s hinterland, the children of the Green Revolution, politicians and farmers alike, will awaken to announce a counterrevolution, one green not in name only, but in deed. For now, though, India will continue to await a Greener Revolution. DAN GORDON ’14 is a History major in Davenport College. Contact him at daniel.p.gordon@ yale.edu.