614 Inspiration

The BBC reports:

Four Latin American leaders, meeting in Caracas, have agreed on a $100m (£50m) scheme to combat the impact of rising food prices on the region’s poor.

The presidents of Bolivia, Nicaragua and Venezuela and Cuba’s vice-president also agreed on joint programmes to promote the development of agriculture.

Unable to sleep in the heat last night, I turned on the BBC and saw Bolivian President Evo Morales‘ face shining with the conviction that he was doing something good. Then I flipped to Al-Jazeera and saw an Egyptian pundit arguing with a Syrian pundit about whether Iran or America was responsible for the region’s woes.

And I thought, “Wouldn’t it be nice if the Arab League stopped squabbling for a moment and did something similarly productive?”

For more inspirational reading material, see “How to ease the squeeze on food access.”

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  1. That CSM piece is a little odd. Or maybe I am. Doesn’t it at once recommend more food aid and warn against interference with “free market pricing”? And aren’t both integral to what has gotten Egypt into the situation in which it can neither grow enough food to feed its population nor afford to buy in enough to meet the shortfall?

    Comment by MC — April 27, 2008 #

  2. Yeah, agreed. It’s comforting but wrong to think there are five bullet-point solutions that could solve this problem.

    The reasons why Egypt’s agricultural system are fucked up could fill a couple bookshelves, and how to fix them could probably fill a couple more.

    I’m way out of my depth here… I’ve read a couple books on the subject, few enough that I was convinced by each.

    Comment by The Skeptic — April 27, 2008 #

  3. i had a similar reaction to MC upon reading “free market pricing” and other points in the article. true, egypt’s food woes are complicated, but i have a feeling responses needn’t match that complexity in order to work. for example, here’s one line of thinking that’s really catching with post-Development shabab globally:

    (she wrote a book on it too, check it out.)

    would be great to get this conversation rolling at home, no? yalla, see you this summer inshallah.

    Comment by gayyash — April 28, 2008 #

  4. “egypt’s food woes are complicated, but i have a feeling responses needn’t match that complexity in order to work.”

    That’s an inspirational idea, Gayyash. I hope you’re right.

    I like the idea of localization. It makes for better produce on my plate. Cutting out middle men and transportation lowers costs. It’s particularly well suited to Egypt, where the farms are small and the Delta is close to Cairo.

    But what I simply don’t know is whether such a model can sustain the kind of crazy population growth we (in the world) have now. Do you need industrial farming to feed huge numbers of people?

    Let’s say you don’t, just for a moment. How do you convert a system of huge, industrial farms in the Midwestern United States, Russia, or Brazil (farms that depend on long-distance commerce to survive, and on which huge population centers hundreds, nay thousands, of miles away depend to survive) into small farms serving local needs without killing those farms and the people who depend on them for survival?

    It would be good to get this conversation rolling at home. I’ve been really frustrated by the conversation here. The opposition has been exploiting this issue without offering any alternatives.

    And so much of the government response has been a security response (no surprise there), as if you could fix the entire problem by cracking down on black-market sales of subsidized flour.

    Yalla, ya Gayyash. Come back soon. Your country needs you.

    Comment by The Skeptic — April 28, 2008 #

  5. Population growth often seems to be the elephant in the room when these discussions take place. We all know that Egypt’s population has more than tripled in the last 50 years, and become overwhelmingly urbanized, but somehow overlook the fact. Maybe because local food production is all very well and good when you have the kind of population, and population distribution, that you had in 1930, but when you’ve got a city the size and the density of Cairo to support? (let’s not even start on the potential of urban food production to promote bird flu bugs).

    That said, localization, like Norberg-Hodge seems to mean it, even if it isn’t a solution, is going to be a necessity soon enough, as will low chemical farming, as we run out of oil.

    I like the “post-development” thing, tied up as it is in all that glittering academic mumbo-jumbo. At least it recognizes that something’s badly wrong. Mind, when lefty tenure-slugs start cranking out puffy “emphasize human happiness” screeds between jaunts down to the Montessori kindergarten in the SUV with a paper cup of Starbucks balanced between their chubby little thighs, my bean starts to creak and whine. But I guess that’s just background noise that won’t be taken too seriously by anybody sitting in a hitherto aid-dependent country with no escape passport in their back pocket.

    Comment by MC — April 28, 2008 #

  6. this is perfect. if only discussions on this (and related) topic(s) proceeded as smoothly elsewhere.

    i hear you guys on the population issue, but there’s also talk that it’s might not be that big a deal. timothy mitchell’s essay “the object of development” cites figures that show arable land in egypt to have actually expanded at a higher rate than the population since the sixties. of course, maybe trends have changed since he wrote it in the late nineties. population concerns were also the logic behind india’s green revolution back in the day, but industrial (that is, input-intensive, monoculture) farming, while it did solve some food problems proved a bad choice on the long run. check out vandana shiva’s “the violence of the green revolution”. also you will find among the more shrill commentators from the global south those who see the population concern as the fault, problem and bias of the affluent north, because per-capita resource consumption is much higher in the uncrowded developed world than it is elsewhere. all this is not at all to say that population isn’t an issue. just that it’s complicated. which does mean we should name it.

    i think the question of those massive midwestern farms and the distant big cities they serve is a serious one. but one thing i love about norberg-hodge’s work is that she acknowledges that the status quo is useful and healthy for those folks, as it is for people whose climate only supports like three vegetables for nine months out of the year. she says long distance food should be the exception rather than the rule. for those of us close to where the food is, we should have no problem getting our shit together.

    MC, chapeau on the starbucks-montessori-SUV image (scarring as it is) and the point about urban gardens and bird-flu trouble. i think generally in the final analysis what really works is simply what is shown to work. i for one salute those who are out busting their asses and trying to show that all that fancy talk is actually doable. here are folks that are doing just that in india: swaraj.org/shikshantar do check them out.

    on the home front, my father and brother have started a small farm near lake mariut and we’re trying to keep it real and it’s damn hard. elijah, when i get back inshallah, let’s make a list of all the people we know who would be interested in having this conversation and maybe see about having like a series of seminars on the topic, and even maybe thinking up little things we can do to actually start making a difference. one comrade (to use a 3arabawyism) once suggested going round the country and giving composting and green-fertilizer workshops in communities that are suffering from high fertilizer prices. just a thought. let’s do this!

    Comment by gayyash — May 2, 2008 #

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