Clinton Apologizes For Helping Crush Haitian Farmers

I can hardly believe it, but Change.org is reporting the former President Clinton has apologized for his role in bringing (so-called) free trade to Haiti, helping lead to a situation of exacerbating poverty, where "six pounds of imported rice now costs at least a dollar less than a similar quantity of locally-grown rice. So how can a Haitian farmer compete? The past 15 years have shown they simply can't."

Ruth Messinger points out in the piece that

Prior to the era of so-called "free trade," Haiti could feed itself, importing only 19% of its food and actually exporting rice. Today, Haiti imports more than half of its food, including 80% of the rice eaten in the country. The result is that Haitians are particularly vulnerable to price spikes arising from global weather, political instability, rising fuel costs and natural disasters, such as earthquakes that register 7.0 on the Richter scale. In fact, since the January earthquake, imported rice prices are up 25%.

As was pointed out in a previous J-post on Haiti by J-friend K. McAfee

Like other networks and op ed pundits, CNN reporters refer to Haiti's extreme material poverty despite, they say, a history of US efforts to "help". None have any sense of whom was actually helped by the 1915-35 US occupation (US & French banks, agribusiness, and the small Haitian elite), US support of Duvalier and other dictators (same beneficiaries, plus sweat-shop owners), the US aid & trade policies that undermined staple food production and created dependence on US rice exports, or US-backed neoliberal "adjustment" loan conditions and deliberate, ongoing undermining of the imperfect but legitimate Aristide and Preval governments by the US government and the Clinton Foundation.

It's nice to see someone in our government admit to any of this, even if it's after they're out of office. Better than never after all! -- or -- the interesting example where Colin Powell expressed "regret"* at the US role in the Chilean coup of September 11, 1973 that the US most certainly helped instigate (with former SecState Henry Kissinger playing a key role in that particular 9/11 disaster that set a dictatorship into motion that would, among other things, claim over 3,000 lives, among his other adorable war-criminalistic-sheningans that have led him to having to consult a team of lawyers to figure out where he can travel that he may not be extradited to Chile!), but (as can be seen in the same article above) this was followed by the Administration coming out and "clarifying" Powell's regret, so as to give no hint of an admission of guilt, to re-obscure the open secret of our actions in Chile and elsewhere.

If you've read the J/Anekantavada before, you know this isn't the first time I've looked askance at US actions, to say the least. To see us looking back on any of our "mistakes" (which I put in scare quotes because they were often the intentional action of our leaders) and, if this is true about Clinton, apologizing, well... I can't say it gives me hope, or quite makes me particularly proud to be an American, or makes up for the then and continuing actions of American Empire, but... gosh darn it, admitting when we Fucked Someone Else for fun and profit is a step, and a rarely taken one, much less apologizing for it. So, 1.5 cheers I suppose.

*An excerpt of Powell's 2003 comments can be found here. The money shot, in reference to a question of how the US could be the "moral superior" looking to bring democracy to Iraq, after our actions against democracy and human rights with respect to supporting the Chilean dicatorship:

So it is the will of the international community that Iraq disarm, and not just the moral superior position, as you describe it, of the United States. We have no desire to impose upon the Iraqi people a leadership that is to our choosing, but to give them an opportunity to choose their own leadership.

With respect to your earlier comment about Chile in the 1970s and what happened with Mr. Allende, it is not a part of American history that we're proud of. We now have a more accountable way of handling such matters and we have worked with Chile to help it put in place a responsible democracy.

One of the proudest moments of my life was going to Chile in the late '80s and speaking to all of the military officers in the Chilean armed forces, all the senior officers, and talking to them about democracy and elected representative government and how generals such as them and me -- I was a general at the time -- are accountable to civilian authority so that incidents of that kind or situations of that kind no longer arose.

There's quite an interesting implicit admission of wrong-doing here, considering the emphasis he puts on how things "of that kind" can't happen again, despite, of course, the fact that they happened many times before and many times since...

In defense of Meat

An interesting viewpoint here. I say "interesting" I guess to be purposely milquetoast; I largely agree with what Harvey Ussery has to say, but of course, there are boatloads of critiques, glossed-over points, retorts to critiques and counter-critiques to be had, as seems to happen all the time with food. (This is my impression right now of what seems to be the "local-food-backlash", that is, a flurry of academic and popular articles on how local food actually may be worse, from energy efficiency, causing smugness and related moral turpitude, etc. etc. I was flabbergasted when a mathematician shook her head at me when I maintained that, ceteris paribus (all things being equal), local should be more efficient. I think it's pretty much definitionally true that local food is better, all things being equal; a separate question is whether and when they in fact are equal. But I feel like the local critique is as much founded in a backlash as it is in the fact that local is, of course, not an unconditional universally-good free panacea. I still think the science bears out that more local food systems are a better idea, on average, than a far-flung food system. But I digress.)

Worth a read; not necessarily a new argument but a passionately and clearly phrased one, and one that I think I'm on board with (but can't be sure because my mind has been quite hijacked by work for the past several days and is not all with me). Ussery seems like an interesting guy in the Joel Salatin mode (so much so that I was looking askance at his website to see if he shared some of Salatin's more, um, iconoclastic political views); worth looking more into.

Organic Agriculture can feed the... Africa.

"UN report concludes organic farming offers Africa the best chance to feed itself"

The report is over a year old (news reporting on it can be found here, the report here), and it seems largely based on pre-existing methodology and links by University of Essex's prominent agroecologist Jules Pretty and colleague Rachel Hine.

It seemingly belies the trope that the case of food security in Africa is too desperate, too urgent, and too important to leave to something silly like organic agriculture, though I'm sure the argument will continue in earnest, despite the apparently growing evidence mostly on the side of organic agriculture. (Though the evidence is not unequivocal, perhaps.)

Genetically modified Crops: Critics of the GM Critics Gone Wild?

See this story in Nature on the backlash against an article published finding that

"...[caddis-fly larvae] fed only on Bt maize debris grew half as fast as those that ate debris from conventional maize. And caddis flies fed high concentrations of Bt maize pollen died at more than twice the rate of caddis flies fed non-_Bt pollen. The transgenic maize "may have negative effects on the biota of streams in agricultural areas" the group wrote in its paper, stating in the abstract that "widespread planting of Bt crops has unexpected ecosystem-scale consequences.""

I've said much on GM before, but as far as this article about the swift and forceful critical attacks--as attacks they can be described, when the scientists are charged of scientific misconduct by critics, as we were in an article on organic agriculture, when most would admit that the "misconduct" is usually, at most, from strident but perhaps valid disagreement on wording or analytical approach, my challenge to the types critiquing the GM crop critiques is:

1) Find studies that *find negative effects from GM crops* that you feel are well-conducted. The probability that all studies that critique/find negative effects of GM are poorly done is exceedingly low.
2) If you actually feel all the research finding negative effects are poorly done, for the sake of science and balanced analysis, point out how this is similar/dissimilar to problems in "pro"-GM articles. That is, while it's unlikely all "anti"-GM science is badly done, the probability that all of them are badly done and all of the studies supporting GM are well done (back of the envelope calculations here...) zero point zero percent. A synthesis of the methodological flaws in each body of literature would be far more helpful than systematically decrying all articles with contrary findings and pointing to all positive findings.

In essence, it would be nice for those advocating GM to stop pretending all the evidence against it is bunk, bad science, or politically motivated. The feeling that those opposing GM accuse you of the same is not an excuse, especially considering the attitude in the Nature article of some critics that "That's just science." Accusing people of intentional misconduct is not an everyday reaction, or it shouldn't be, and anyone categorically insisting that their side is rational and the other sides aren't (or otherwise assumes bad faith on an entire side of a discussion and not on the others*) shouldn't really be listened to.

The Path to The Modern World: Go back to the farms!

So skimming those few, those blessed few, who have logged on to read the Continuum ("The J Continuum: Now with Reader(s)!"), I saw one of the hits was someone looking for podcasts from Fred Kirschenmann, Distinguished Fellow of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture. Wondering myself what other bits pop up in a websearch for the distinguished fellow, I ended up finding this, the Capital Press Agriculture News page. This is significant because from there I saw the article "Bill Pan asked growers to get the word out that there's going to be 'an unfathomable number of new jobs' in agriculture in the next 10 years'". I only skimmed the article, but what's interesting is (among other things) it harkens to something said by J-Mentor JV, that I heartily agree with: "No serious futurist can deny that a major re-ruralization of society is going to be necessary in the coming years." That is, although the number of people in agriculture and the number of farms has been dwindling for decades, that's not any kind of path to sustainability. We must go back to agriculture, from urban gardens to periurban agriculture to actual agriculture -- the methods we've used to provide the plenty (that those of us with money get to enjoy) are unsustainably subsidized by fossil fuels. We'll have to replace a lot of that with organic agriculture and people power -- but don't mistake this for a backwards step. With the necessary amount of vision, mass transportation (i.e. fast rail), increased number and subsidizing of widespread institutions of higher learning, and the Internet and modern telecommunications, there's no reason that a future of this type will be a step backwards to a backwater past, real or imagined. And anecdotal evidence implies that those who have willingly gone back to farming in recent years, especially organic farming, report increased happiness and sense of well-being from it (and of course, properly supported family farmers who don't have to use poisonous or degrading agricultural technology also often report high satisfaction, or so I think I've read). There's no reason this can't be a fun and exciting future -- I hope you'll join me in supporting it.

Now, if I heard Obama say something like this, then he might be talking about change I believe in. Meanwhile, this NAFTA bullshit recently does little to endear me to him -- I'm still waiting for him to mention how Free Trade has been an excuse to foster unsustainable and unjust trade policies between partner countries treated as "equals" under trade law yet existing in a very unequal world. As was said in something I read yesterday but now can't find, a system treating everyone "equal" when the groups in the system come to the table with an unequal distribution of power is not fairness, it is a recipe for continuing and worsening inequality. Whether Obama thinks NAFTA needs to tweaked, or is lying out of expediency as his economic advisor Austan Goolsbee allegedly implied, he's once again far wrong on this one to me. NAFTA has impoverished farmers in Mexico, broadened inequality, increased immigration pressure from Mexico, and directly hurt American workers as well. But it's been great for the large companies -- a la Obama, are the companies the ones they've been waiting for?

A largely "Untranslated" quickie on Genetically Modified Foods

Doing research for redrafting a paper/thesis chapter, I came across at least one recent study where genetically modified foods were fed to animals and then statistically tested to see how the animals reacted vs. a variety of other diets. They in fact used Monsanto's own data, released apparently 2 years ago under lawsuit in Europe (did anyone hear about this? I faintly recall something like that, you'd think it might've resurfaced in the news at some point).

So, the re-analysis found several abnormalities in GM-fed rats, especially in weight (lower in GM-fed rat males, higher in GM-fed rat females), and initial signs of damage to detoxifying organs (kidneys, liver). I read it quickly, it didn't seem that they used a statistical test to screen out the fact that when you do hundreds of stats on something, so number will be significant by chance -- I think there is a repeated measure test one can do. Any road, this is not my forté (stats) and I'll be returned to read this and similar studies more deeply, but this is the type of study we HAVEN'T much conducted on GM foods, on the "If it quacks like a duck" theory. ("If this GM duck quacks like a duck, then we can treat it like a duck, and assume it's safe to eat.") Of course, as I commented in an earlier post, I personally don't think our chemical understanding of proteins et al. is good enough to actually determine such "substantial equivalence," and it would seem reasonable to require animal testing as we do for drugs, what hey? (Drugs, pesticides, cosmetics -- but not food?) Clearly, I think this study needs to be followed up on, in exactly the way people aren't these days: animal studies and similar epidemiology, not dissolving GM food in a tube and analyzing its chemical content, when it's not even clear we'd understand pertinent differences if we found them (i.e. the extreme difficulties in determining protein three dimensional structure, which is at least as important as any other chemical characteristic in determining its effects, if not more so.)

Abstract of the paper for those without academic library access (reprinted here under a fair use assumption):

Archives of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2007
10.1007/s00244-006-0149-5
New Analysis of a Rat Feeding Study with a Genetically Modified Maize Reveals Signs of Hepatorenal Toxicity

Gilles-Eric Séralini1, 2 Contact Information, Dominique Cellier1, 3 and Joël Spiroux de Vendomois1
(1) Committee for Independent Information and Research on Genetic Engineering CRIIGEN, Paris, France
(2) Laboratory of Biochemistry, Institute of Biology, University of Caen, Caen, France
(3) Laboratory LITIS, University of Rouen, Mont-Saint-Aignan, France

Contact Information Gilles-Eric Séralini
Email: criigen@unicaen.fr

Received: 18 July 2006 Accepted: 20 November 2006 Published online: 13 March 2007
Abstract Health risk assessment of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) cultivated for food or feed is under debate throughout the world, and very little data have been published on mid- or long-term toxicological studies with mammals. One of these studies performed under the responsibility of Monsanto Company with a transgenic corn MON863 has been subjected to questions from regulatory reviewers in Europe, where it was finally approved in 2005. This necessitated a new assessment of kidney pathological findings, and the results remained controversial. An Appeal Court action in Germany (Münster) allowed public access in June 2005 to all the crude data from this 90-day rat-feeding study. We independently re-analyzed these data. Appropriate statistics were added, such as a multivariate analysis of the growth curves, and for biochemical parameters comparisons between GMO-treated rats and the controls fed with an equivalent normal diet, and separately with six reference diets with different compositions. We observed that after the consumption of MON863, rats showed slight but dose-related significant variations in growth for both sexes, resulting in 3.3% decrease in weight for males and 3.7% increase for females. Chemistry measurements reveal signs of hepatorenal toxicity, marked also by differential sensitivities in males and females. Triglycerides increased by 24–40% in females (either at week 14, dose 11% or at week 5, dose 33%, respectively); urine phosphorus and sodium excretions diminished in males by 31–35% (week 14, dose 33%) for the most important results significantly linked to the treatment in comparison to seven diets tested. Longer experiments are essential in order to indicate the real nature and extent of the possible pathology; with the present data it cannot be concluded that GM corn MON863 is a safe product.

An Inconvenient Idea: Poppies and Cocaine for Food

I'm reading -- skimming -- presently a book called Ecoagriculture by J.A. McNeely and Sara Scherr. Color me deeply unimpressed so far, but it has inspired in me another idea that, of course, makes sense but will, of course, be dismissed or poo-pooed or ignored, either because it goes against the supposedly inexorable logic of capitalism, which governs all space-time, and is thus impractical, or simply because it goes against capitalism and therefore those whose oxes would be gored just wouldn't wanna do it. (Of course, the latter is the cause of the former, but somehow this constitutes immovable realities, around which pragmatic progressives should reshape their dreams.)

What the hell am I talking about? yes, sorry, i'll get on with it.

Ecoagriculture is about feeding the world and the growing human population while saving wild biodiversity. The authors point out the existence of widespread hunger, poverty, especially rural poverty and the poor farmers forced to intensify production and encroach on valuable biodiverse habitats to stay afloat... yadda yadda yadda, all things I agree with. Of course, they somehow (so far) fail to see that a) there's more than enough food being produced today, the problem is distribution, and b) intensification (more food on less land) tends to, economically, draw more people to produce as it gets easier to produce more (yay capitalism!), incurring further price declines of the type what makes being a farmer difficult. (And c) several studies at least have consistently shown it's the rich, large farmers who cause the most damage to conservation-valuable lands... go figure, huh? Why oh why wouldn't people and governments want to go after big business? The mind boggles.)

Jeff & Sara so far seem to be saying we should hurry up and help tropical farmers intensify, and sell tropical products to us so that we pay them enough money that they can then buy grain from us! (You see, thereby saving their biodiversity, because they won't have to bother with growing their own food, they can just sell us coffee and bananas and passion fruit etc.)

So. Can't call them out there, insofar as that this is a pretty traditional view. But wait: let's set a moment and think: if we were designing a system that made sense, and the stakes are really high (widespread hunger: check; rapid biodiversity loss: check), would we figure, instead of carting produce around the world in extremely resource-intensive planes as fuel prices are likely to climb and global warming increases, wouldn't it be better for the Developed Countries to just directly aid the so-called Developing ones, with just normal aid payments to encourage programs that support small farmers, support local agriculture and local markets, and in general look to reduce everyone's ecological footprint as much as possible? Do they have to grow luxury items to sell to us to get money to buy food items from us in turn? Doesn't that seem, I don't know, stupid?

So, what's occurred to me recently is that none of the food & environment-concerned folks (or none that I know of, including me 'till recently) are advocating a turning over of luxury crop land to food land. A coffee plantation, when rustic coffee is grown, can actually provide a lot of food & fiber crops. Pasture systems can become silvo-pastoral (integrated with some amount of forestry) and provide a variety of useful products locally, as well. Why doesn't the US stop paying so fucking much for new clothes we throw away a year from now and instead encourage and support foreign countries in subsidizing the conversion of cotton crops into diversified food & fiber systems for local use? And you know what: if subsidies and price structures were set up such that food prices were a decent living, people growing cocaine and poppies or what have you would probably start growing food. Oh, not today or tomorrow, but if the future is as dire as it may be -- and Sara & Jeff seem to be trying to paint a very dire picture, indeed -- food prices may skyrocket! Then, of course, it would be more profitable to grow food than drugs. But why wait that long, and worry of the effect on consumers? Since farmers only get ~$0.20 on every dollar we spend in food (see handy reports from the U. of Michigan Center for Sustainable Systems, especially the work of Marty Heller & Greg Keoleian, a friend and colleague and a former professor of mine, respectively), and advertisers get a whole bunch of the rest... well, you do the math. Should people starve, or food prices go up, or farmers get an unfair price, or... should we market, and eat, locally, making sure the money AND RESOURCES are used well and used in our own communities?

Some factoids from Marty & Greg (not Jeff & Sara):

Marketing of domestically grown and consumed food, including charges for transportation, processing and distribution, cost an estimated $466 billion in 1998[44]. That represents 80% of the $585 billion that consumers spent on foods originating on U.S. farms. Marketing costs rose 54% from 1988 to 1998. Nearly 88% of the $186 billion increase in consumer expenditures for domestically grown food resulted from increases in the marketing costs[47]. The cost of labor composed nearly half of the 1998 marketing bill. The remainder of the marketing cost is balanced between packaging, transportation, energy, advertising, business taxes, net interest, depreciation, rent, and repairs (see Figure 1). The relative cost of marketing different food items is reflected partly in the farm value as a percentage of retail price seen in Table 9. As mentioned earlier, the farm-to-retail price spread has increased every year for the past 30 years. While retail food prices rose 2.4% from 1996 to 1997, farmers received 4.4% less for the food they produced[57]. In 1997, food manufacturers (including the tobacco industry) received an after-tax profit return on stockholder equity of 19.8% (5.6% as a percentage of sales), a culmination of 5 years of increasing profits. Food retailers averaged a 17.3% return on stockholder equity in 1997 (1.6% of sales)[45].

Surely, there are places where resources and costs must be cut and reallocated that would represent wiser choices in a sustainability-challenged world than advocating and increasing silly exportation? (I.e. the luxury food-for-money-for regular food example given here. See also: Nicaragua's Caribbean Coast, where they export bananas and other food to Costa Rica because it fetches better prices there. Then, of course, they have to buy food for themselves, and end up importing some of the same foods from abroad. These are perverse systems, capitalism or no, and I don't think they can survive the harsh gaze of sustainability, ecoagriculture or no...)