El Pollo Local?

Among people walking around with smartphones that were made in China, wearing clothes that were made in Bangladesh, and planning their dream vacations abroad, there are plenty who seem to be uber-maniacal about eating food that is locally produced.  As if everything else foreign is ok, but the cucumber shall not be from more than a few miles away!  An illogical and unrealistic fixation on "local":

While local food has emerged as an alternative to industrial food, many people have simply transferred their expectations from the grocery store to the farmers’ market. Consumers still expect a global array of products, despite natural restrictions in season or geography. Additionally, emotional expectations surrounding food have increased. People want to imagine chickens free-ranging in a pasture without knowing anything about their deaths. They want their farmers to be simple, iconic food heroes.

It is all emotional. Indeed.  Thinking, as opposed to merely going with emotions, is hard work:

Consumers should be dogged in insisting that food be represented accurately. This includes asking questions and requesting labelling programmes at farmers’ markets. It also helps to know about crop seasonality in your region. Watermelons appearing at winter farmer’s markets were not likely grown anywhere in North America, much less locally.
It’s up to consumers to advocate for policies that allow farmers to succeed. If you care about artisan cheese wheels, you should care about dairy prices.

When it comes to smartphones, we do not care about how the phones are made, and the conditions in which the labor works in order to get us those phones.  This disconnect then helps us not even think about the harsh impacts on the environment in those countries where the manufacturing happens, or about the terrible working conditions.  If we did, then we would want to act on it,  But then the smartphones will be more expensive, and the tshirts won't be available for $5.99.

With the "local" food, while we might prefer the connection between us and the growers, we rarely ever look into the realities of the local food.  With romantic notions, we developed the idea of CSA--community-supported agriculture.  

It was a private transaction in which all the money went directly to the farmer. It did not rely on distributors or brick-and-mortar stores, and it gave farmers a crucial infusion of cash for the winter, used to buy seeds, repair equipment and expand into new growing methods.
The goal was for C.S.A. farmers and members to build a mutually supportive long-term relationship. Members would get straight-from-the-farm produce from a farmer they knew and trusted, and farmers would get financial stability.

But then strange things happen:

Now, online hubs are using sophisticated distribution technology to snap into the food chain, often using “C.S.A.” to describe what they deliver.
The term is not regulated in most states, so companies can define it as they wish. Peapod, the online shopping service owned by the international grocery giant Ahold, delivers farm-sourced boxes throughout the Northeast; FreshDirect offers a variety of C.S.A. options in and around New York City.

In case you thought that this somehow helps out the farmers:

Depending on how and where these new businesses buy their produce, consumers can receive all the benefits of C.S.A. membership, while the farmers get only a fraction. Some farmers say that after years of steady growth, their C.S.A. memberships have dropped since the arrival of services like Local Roots or Farmigo.

As I often remind students, it takes a lot of work to be an engaged consumer and an engaged citizen.  That means a whole lot of critical thinking day in and day out.  

Taking the time to tease out whether buying granola made in Brooklyn qualifies as supporting local agriculture can test the patience of consumers

A "patient consumer" is an oxymoron in this world of instant gratification.  I read a sarcastic comment the other day that instant gratification takes too long!   Oh well, maybe we humans were always impatient and unthinking and it is I who have been living with an unrealistic fixation on a world of critically thinking consumers and citizens.  It is a good thing that I am also on my way to extinction ;)

Chart of the day: Farmer suicides in India

More than a quarter million suicides :(

The data show clearly that the last eight years were much worse than the preceding eight. As many as 1,35,756 farmers killed themselves in the 2003-10 period. For 1995-2002, the total was 1,21,157. On average, this means the number of farmers killing themselves each year between 2003 and 2010 is 1,825 higher than the numbers that took their lives in the earlier period. Which is alarming since the total number of farmers is declining significantly. Compared to the 1991 Census, the 2001 Census saw a drop of over seven million in the population of cultivators (main workers). The corresponding census data for 2011 are yet to come in, but their population has surely dipped further. In other words, farm suicides are rising through the period of India's agrarian crisis, even as the number of farmers is shrinking.

How good ideas can be easily hijacked: microcredit

A few years ago, in an upper division course, I started including essays and news articles on microfinance as an innovative approach to economic development in the poorer countries of Asia and Africa.  It helped a lot when Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank were recognized with the Nobel Prize for the pioneering efforts in micro finance and rural development.  Students seemed to be excited too--one of them a week or so after the class discussions sought my permission first to talk to the rest of the class about kiva.org that she had "discovered" on the web and used it ...

Slowly the idea spread in India.  And it was only a matter of time before a few Indians also decided to corrupt it as any good idea is almost always distorted in that country.  A classic example is Gandhi's message of civil disobedience and satyagraha, and fasting until corrective measures are implemented.  Within a few years of his death, every third rate politician started launching satyagrahas, and fasting photo-ops for every trivial pet cause one might imagine.  The end of the Gandhian ideas, so to say.

So, why should micro finance be exempt from such corruption in order to pursue most ulterior self-interests of profits, right? And that has what has happened in India over the last few years.  Unfortunately!  Yunus wrote in the NY Times:

I never imagined that one day microcredit would give rise to its own breed of loan sharks.

I am surprised that Yunus didn't know his fellow South Asians any better :(

Microcredit has morphed into the ugly loan shark modes, with all the typical attitudes that we knew about them.  The Hindu's caption for the photo below is:

There were reports of suicides, allegedly due to extreme harassment by loan recovery officials from MFIs. A family mourns one such death reported from Rolakal village, Nalgonda, Andhra Pradesh last October. Photo: Singam Venkata Ramana

Once again, it is a screw-the-poor, which is a tragic irony in a culture that talks a lot about helping the poor.  More on this in my earlier postings in the context of "Peepli Live"

As Yunus writes:

The kind of empathy that had once been shown toward borrowers when the lenders were nonprofits disappeared. The people whom microcredit was supposed to help were being harmed. In India, borrowers came to believe lenders were taking advantage of them, and stopped repaying their loans.
Commercialization has been a terrible wrong turn for microfinance, and it indicates a worrying “mission drift” in the motivation of those lending to the poor. Poverty should be eradicated, not seen as a money-making opportunity.

Even while disagreeing with Yunus' argument, David Roodman has this important observation:

Credit is not an ordinary product. It is weighed down by millennia of baggage, for the good reason that it can do real harm. It is like a drug in that it is potentially healthy in small doses, but also potentially addictive. So it stands to reason that sellers of this product must take unusual steps to counteract its special problems of reputation and risk.

Things have taken quite a nasty turn, and Yunus is being compelled to defend those ideas and himself:

[In] his native Bangladesh Mr Yunus’s reputation is under attack. His supporters fear that the government plans to remove him from Grameen Bank, the microlender he founded, and take it over. In late December Mr Yunus had to issue a statement denying claims by some in the Bangladeshi government that he had resigned from his post as the managing director of Grameen. ...
Mr Yunus denies all the charges against him but has made powerful enemies among Bangladesh’s politicians. During a period of rule by a military-backed caretaker government a few years ago, he announced the formation of a political party, a project he soon dropped. Some reckon Sheikh Hasina is miffed that Mr Yunus and Grameen got the Nobel prize. It remains unclear how far the government, which already has three seats on Grameen Bank’s board, will go. Some fear that if the government succeeds in taking Grameen over it could turn its sights on other successful outfits, like BRAC. Bangladeshi microlenders can no longer consider themselves safe from the country’s messy politics.

The strange story of Yunus doesn't end there; he was hauled before the court, but not for any wrongdoings related to Grameen:

The current defamation charges against Yunus stem from comments he made in an interview with French news agency AFP four years ago, in which he reportedly criticized politicians and said they were only in "power to make money." The remarks came shortly after a military-backed interim government took over amid deadly political violence in Bangladesh.
A leftist politician in Mymensingh filed the defamation case on January 21, 2007, with a local magistrate court after Yunus' interview was published in local media.
The court last month asked Yunus to appear after a judicial probe found enough evidence to support the allegations, court inspector Md. Shahid Sukrana told CNN.
Nazrul Islam Chunnu, who filed the case, is a politician and district joint general secretary of the socialist party JSD. He charged that Yunus branded politicians as "corrupt and greedy" and said the politicians were "devoid of ideologies."
If Yunus is convicted of the charges, he faces a maximum two years in prison and/or a fine, said a court official.

That is right--all because Yunus aired in public the truth that is well known that politicians are corrupt and greedy!  How dare he, eh!

A Fistful Of Dollars: The Story of a Kiva.org Loan from Kieran Ball on Vimeo.

Peepli Live, and suicides of farmers in India

On the flight back home, I got to watch Peepli Live, which I blogged about a couple of months ago.  I noted then, after watching the trailer and reading about it:

It so reminds me of a Tamil film from three decades ago, called "Thanneer Thanneer", which in English would translate to "Water, Water."  Adapted from a play, the movie was one sarcastic comedy on the plight of the poor, the bureaucracy, and the self-promoting and self-aggrandizing politicians.  It was brilliant.

Peepli is pretty much along the same lines of rural poverty, grossly-self interested politicians and bureaucrats, and competing cable news channels that are trying to one-up each other on sensational reporting.  It was well done.

I am not sure how many in India watched the movie though--after all, Indians are the ones who need to recognize, understand, and act on the situation presented there.

Indians need to engage in this because it is not merely a satirical movie, but a terribly tragic reality of farmers and their spouses committing suicides in order to escape the debts; Sainath had a poignant column in The Hindu:

A sharp increase in farm suicides in 2009 with at least 17,368 farmers killing themselves in the year of “rural resurgence.” That's over 7 per cent higher than in 2008 and the worst numbers since 2004. This brings the total farm suicides since 1997 to 216,500. While all suicides have multiple causes, their strong concentration within regions and among cash crop farmers is an alarming and dismal trend.

Insanely tragic this statistic is.

Here is the irony that Sainath points out--banks loan out money for wealthy rural folks to buy Mercedes Benz cars at 7 percent interest rate, while farmers will be lucky to get 9 percent loans for tractors:

It took roughly a decade and tens of thousands of suicides before Indian farmers got loans at 7 per cent interest — many, in theory only. Prior to 2005, those who got any bank loans at all shelled out between 9 and 12 per cent. Several were forced to take non-agricultural loans at even higher rates of interest. Buy a Mercedes, pay 7 per cent interest. Buy a tractor, pay 12 per cent. The hallowed micro-finance institutions (MFIs) do worse. There, it's smaller sums at interest rates of between 24 and 36 per cent or higher.

Now, how about the data on the suicides?

these numbers are gross underestimates to begin with. Several large groups of farmers are mostly excluded from local counts. Women, for instance. Social and other prejudice means that, most times, a woman farmer killing herself is counted as suicide — not as a farmer's suicide. Because the land is rarely in a woman's name.

Then there is the plain fraud that some governments resort to. Maharashtra being the classic example. The government here has lied so many times that it contradicts itself thrice within a week. In May this year, for instance, three ‘official' estimates of farm suicides in the worst-hit Vidarbha region varied by 5,500 per cent. The lowest count being just six in four months (See “How to be an eligible suicide,” The Hindu, May 13, 2010).

The NCRB figure for Maharashtra as a whole in 2009 is 2,872 farmers' suicides. So it remains the worst State for farm suicides for the tenth year running. The ‘decline' of 930 that this figure represents would be joyous if true. But no State has worked harder to falsify reality. For 13 years, the State has seen a nearly unrelenting rise. Suddenly, there's a drop of 436 and 930 in 2008 and 2009. How? For almost four years now, committees have functioned in Vidarbha's crisis districts to dismiss most suicides as ‘non-genuine.' What is truly frightening is the Maharashtra government's notion that fixing the numbers fixes the problem.

What does it all mean?

It means over a quarter of a million Indian farmers have committed suicide since 1995. It means the largest wave of recorded suicides in human history has occurred in this country in the past 16 years. It means one-and-a-half million human beings, family members of those killing themselves, have been tormented by the tragedy. While millions more face the very problems that drove so many to suicide. It means farmers in thousands of villages have seen their neighbours take this incredibly sad way out. A way out that more and more will consider as despair grows and policies don't change. It means the heartlessness of the Indian elite is impossible to imagine, leave alone measure.