The stories that genes tell

Almost a decade ago, I gave myself a gift. I paid to have my Y chromosome analyzed as a part of a global study: "The Genographic Project was launched in 2005 as a research project in collaboration with scientists and universities around the world with a goal of revealing patterns of human migration."

It was about the old story of migration out of Africa, and not about uncovering any mysteries in my heritage.  There isn't any mystery about my people.  I was glad to help researchers figure out the migratory paths our ancestors took while moving out of Africa into the different corners of the planet that we now inhabit.  And, incidentally, find out the geography of my own genes.

Only a man, who has the XY chromosomes can pass the Y chromosome on to a new generation.  I opted to get this Y chromosome mapped.  Back then, the technology was expensive and I didn't want to spend a lot of money on this in order to map the X chromosome too.

The result did not surprise me.  My people have lived in the Subcontinent for a long time.

The man who gave rise to the first genetic marker in your lineage probably lived in northeast Africa in the region of the Rift Valley, perhaps in present-day Ethiopia, Kenya, or Tanzania, some 31,000 to 79,000 years ago. Scientists put the most likely date for when he lived at around 50,000 years ago. His descendants became the only lineage to survive outside of Africa, making him the common ancestor of every non-African man living today. ...

Your ancestors, having migrated north out of Africa into the Middle East, then traveled both east and west along this Central Asian superhighway. A smaller group continued moving north from the Middle East to Anatolia and the Balkans, trading familiar grasslands for forests and high country.

The man who gave rise to marker M20 was born in India or the Middle East. Your ancestors arrived in India around 30,000 years ago and represent the earliest significant settlement of India. For this reason, haplogroup L (M61) is known as the Indian Clan.

But--and this is important--my ancestral father who came to India about 30,000 years ago was not among the first people to come to the Subcontinent.

Although more than 50 percent of southern Indians carry marker M20 and are members of haplogroup L (M61), your ancestors were not the first people to reach India; descendants of an early wave of migration out of Africa that took place some 50,000 to 60,000 years ago had already settled in small groups along the southern coastline of the sub-continent.

By the time he arrived in India, he was an immigrant in a land that was already populated, and this was about 30,000 years ago!

When we take such a long view of where we come from, we will lead humbled lives.  We won't care to think about whether we are different from others, and whether there are some who are inferior or superior to us.  We will recognize our shared past and work together as one.

In this big story, there are millions and millions of subplots.  One of those is told in this fascinating essay in The New Yorker.  It is about skeletons in a high altitude Himalayan lake, Roopkund, that is frozen for most of the year.  Who were those people?

In the process of describing how genetics is helping uncover the mystery, the essay discusses how science helped piece together a story of Europeans by looking at the Y chromosome evidence of the Yamnaya.  The "power of ancient DNA to reveal cultural events":

In the Iberian study, the predominant Y chromosome seems to have originated with a group called the Yamnaya, who arose about five thousand years ago, in the steppes north of the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. By adopting the wheel and the horse, they became powerful and fearsome nomads, expanding westward into Europe as well as east- and southward into India. They spoke proto-Indo-European languages, from which most of the languages of Europe and many South Asian languages now spring. Archeologists have long known about the spread of the Yamnaya, but almost nothing in the archeological record showed the brutality of their takeover.

I was born into a family of Brahmins whose Vedic beliefs was orally transmitted and later written down in Sanskrit, which was derived from the language spoken by the Yamnaya.  How did this happen, and when did this happen?  What happened to my ancestral people who arrived in the Subcontinent more than 20,000 years before the Indo-Europeans arrived from the Caucasus?  How do all these stories square with the civilized human being that I am?

Some day, we will understand many such mysteries of how we came about. 

A virus loses the battle in Africa

Throughout my childhood years, a sudden onset of high-temperature fever was a constant in my life.  One moment I would be playing like any other kid, and the next I would be down with a scalding temperature.

One story that I have heard my mother narrate often was about how I was delirious and calling out the gods Krishna and Rama during one of those fevers when I was a kid.  She panicked that I was well on my way out of earth.

The one that I always remember is when I worried that I wouldn't be able to sit for the Class X exams, because I came down with one such sudden fever.  In the old country's system, missing the all-important end of year exams at the 10th or 12th grade would mess up one's life.  The doctor had a simple treatment protocol: Rest, and do not do any exam preparation.  As one who never cared to spend time prepping for exams, I found the doctor's recommendation to be useless ;)

The fever weakened me a great deal though.  So, for one exam, my father escorted me to the hall and sat outside ready--in case he had to rush me to the hospital.

All through those years of sudden fevers, one of the questions I was always asked was whether I experienced any pain in my legs.  If ever I said yes to that, the expression on my parents' faces conveyed well their worries. It was all because of a fear of polio.

I was fortunate that none of those episodes had anything to do with the poliovirus.

Two years ago, I blogged that most of the world is polio-free, except three countries: Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Nigeria.

Now we are down to one.

The remaining two are in South Asia, which means that the entire continent of Africa is now free of polio.

It is celebration time.

It took quite an effort in Nigeria where public health workers literally lost their lives in their efforts to vaccinate their kids.  The virus did not kill them; they were murdered by assassins who had been brainwashed into thinking that the polio drops were contaminated medicine!

Now, Africa has gotten rid of the damn virus.

Delivering polio vaccines to every child in the African region and wiping out the wild virus is no small feat, and the human resources, skills and experience gained in the process leave behind a legacy in how to tackle diseases and reach the poorest and most marginalised communities with lifesaving services. Leadership from all levels of government across party lines, a historic public-private partnership which raised billions, millions of health workers reaching children across the region - from conflict zones to remote areas only accessible by motorbike or helicopter - and a culture of continual improvement were all critical to overcoming challenges and bottlenecks. 

If the world is committed to doing the right thing, then we can move the proverbial mountains!

Polio and COVID-19 both demonstrate that the best ways to break the chains of disease transmission are working together in solidarity, accelerating the science and continually cooperating to solve problems on the ground and improve service delivery.

It is such an effort that will be needed to fight the coronavirus.  Unfortunately, tRump and his fellow sociopaths are running ruining the government.

For now, we will forget the sociopaths and just celebrate the victory in Africa.

Black Lives Matter ... the Caribbean edition

It blows my mind even after all these years of schooling that it would have been a completely different and better world if and only if the British had not wandered off those islands.  Of course I am biased.  But, come on!

Whenever I get way too angry about how the colonizers messed up the Subcontinent forever, I console myself that it could have been worse.  Like how the Congolese were butchered and maimed by blood-thirsty Belgians under their king.  Or how the Dutch massacred people in ... oh, the list is long, dear reader.  In the process of consoling myself, I then end up getting angrier about all of us from, and in, the "shitholes" who were terrorized by the melanin-impaired from the cold climes.

Anyway ... a couple of months ago, forced by the coronavirus to watch movies at home, we ended up wasting our time on a C-grade movie that was set in England.  One of the bizarre sub-plots involved the backstory of how the father earned his fabulous riches from the sugar plantations that he owned in the Caribbean.  This sub-plot that was left dangling hinted that the father was not any good-hearted colonizer.

The British did make quite some gold out of those plantations, which is why Trevor Noah wittily joked about the Common"wealth" games and how Jamaica might possibly get the gold back one medal at a time.

How important was Jamaica and the Caribbean to those godawful British?

Throughout the eighteenth century the empire’s epicenter lay not in North America, Africa, or India but in a handful of small sugar-producing Caribbean islands. The two most important—tiny Barbados and its larger, distant neighbor Jamaica—were among the most profitable places on earth. On the eve of the American Revolution, the nominal wealth of an average white person was £42 in England and £60 in North America. In Jamaica, it was £2,200. Immense fortunes were made there and poured unceasingly back to Britain. This gigantic influx of capital funded the building of countless Palladian country houses, the transformation of major cities like London, Bristol, and Liverpool, and a prodigious increase in national wealth.

Fortunes were made far away from the cold and dark and damp British Isles.  How were the fortunes created?

We all know the answer.  It is one word.

Slavery.

All this abundance, luxury, and social progress at home derived from the brutal exploitation of huge numbers of enslaved African men, women, and children across the Atlantic (thousands of whom were brought over to the British Isles as well): by the eighteenth century, Britons were the world’s preeminent slave traders.

Nearly two years ago, when I was in Chennai for a longer-than-usual stay in Chennai, I went to the local literary festival.  One of the talks that I attended was by Venki Ramakrishnan--the Nobel laureate.  In selling the importance of science, he stretched his argument by talking up science, technology, and the industrial revolution, as having transformed Britain.  He never said anything about the role of slavery and colonization, which provided Britain with plenty of resources and fortunes.  All the looting!  During the discussions, there was question about this, but he flailed.  He should have instead stuck to talking about the RNA!

If only we would educate kids about the history of these slave traders!

Even the sociopathic enslavers in America were empathetic humans compared to the British enslavers in the Caribbean who inflicted a "sickening degree of extreme violence" on their human chattels.  As difficult as it was to read the following sentences, I forced myself to read them in order to truly understand what it meant to be enslaved by these atrocious creatures from Britian:

In Barbados in 1683, an “old Negro Man” was moved to anger about the bloody flogging of some other slaves: for his “insolent words” he was burned at the stake. At other times, black people were judicially electrocuted, maimed, beaten to a pulp, decapitated, drawn and quartered, roasted alive over “a Slow fire,” or publicly starved to death while suspended in iron cages (“gibbeted”).
Beyond such horrific formal penalties lay the lawless universe of everyday enslavement, in which whites tortured, killed, raped, and mutilated black people with complete impunity. Thomas Thistlewood, an ordinary, bookish young Englishman who came to Jamaica in 1750 to seek his fortune, left a matter-of-fact diary of his three and a half decades as a rural overseer and small-time slaveowner. He considered slaves to be rational human beings and treated them as individuals. Like almost all West Indian whites, he also took for granted that they needed to be frequently and harshly punished. He flogged them incessantly and savagely, rubbing salt, chili peppers, lemon juice, and urine into the scarified flesh to increase their suffering. At his whim, any man or woman might be scourged, branded, chained, dismembered, or exposed naked in the stocks day and night, covered in treacle and swarmed by biting flies and mosquitoes. Sometimes he would then force another slave to defecate into the injured victim’s mouth, and gag it shut for “4 or 5 hours.” In his diary are also recorded 3,852 acts of rape or other forced intercourse with almost 150 enslaved women. Other than in the thoroughness of his record-keeping, he seems to have been entirely typical—if anything, relatively restrained—in his behavior.

This was the white man's burden to civilize the non-white world that Kipling championed!

To quote from Shakespeare, "For Brutus is an honourable man; So are they all, all honourable men"

And what comes with enslaving people?  Hint: One of the rallying chants at the protest movements is directed against ... the heavily armed police.  (Read Jill Lepore's essay on that, and you too will want to defund the police!)

It was the case in Jamaica:

To safeguard its white inhabitants, the colony became ever more heavily militarized. In the aftermath of rebellion, new laws severely curtailed the rights and movements not only of slaves but also of all other nonwhites: white solidarity was increasingly seen as crucial to security. Meanwhile, the widely noticed writings of the planters’ leading apologist, Edward Long, who’d lived through the rebellion, helped develop new, “scientific” theories of black inferiority and racial danger

Seems very contemporary, right?

Ready for the icing on this bloody cake?

[The] independence of most Caribbean colonies in the 1960s was followed by decades of racist British immigration policies that not only sought to prevent black West Indians from coming to the UK but eventually, under the Conservative governments of the past decade, ended up deliberately destroying the lives of thousands of lifelong legal residents by treating them as “illegal migrants.”⁶ In the meantime, for almost two hundred years, British taxpayers funded the largest slavery-related reparations ever paid out. Under the provisions of the 1833 act, the government borrowed and then disbursed the staggering sum of £20 million (equal to 40 percent of its annual budget—the equivalent of £300 billion in today’s value). Not until 2015 was that debt finally paid off. This unprecedented compensation for injustice went not to those whose lives had been spent in slavery, nor even to those descended from the millions who had died in captivity. It was all given to British slaveowners, as restitution for the loss of their human property. Black lives, white rights.

"For Brutus is an honourable man; So are they all, all honourable men."

South of the Sahel

When reading this essay, I was reminded yet again on how much a typical understanding of sub-Saharan Africa begins only with European colonialism and white supremacy.

For a long time, historians in the West have seen the Atlantic slave trade as shaping the beginnings of West Africa’s engagement with Europe. There is no question that the slave trade exerted a profound influence in many parts of Africa. However, to look at African history as the history of slavery and the slave trade is no more accurate than to study the history of the Nazis as the sum of the German past.

That's how I was taught about Africa in world history more than four decades ago, and it continues even today. I often remind students to scratch the surface and discover the plenty that there is to learn.

At least we know something about Egypt, the Pharaohs, and the pyramids.  But the rest?

Take a look at this map of the part of Africa that is south of the Sahara:

No, I am not going to ask you to name the countries--after all, I too would surely miss more than one.  Take a moment to scan the map. The size. The number of countries.

Now, think about American Presidents making trips to African countries.  Since the LBJ years, which is when most of the countries were finally able to shake their colonial masters off, how many of those countries have been visited by American Presidents?

It is a fair enough question, right?

Let's consider the two-term Presidents first.  Nixon was nearly a two-termer.  Yes?  How many of those countries did he visit?  How about Reagan?  From 1968 through 1988.

Here's what Wiki tells us: Neither Nixon nor Reagan visited even one sub-Saharan country when they were Presidents.  Not one.

I am sure there were geopolitical reasons during the Cold War era.  But, still ... not even one country?

Clinton, W. Bush, and Obama have made a number of trips to Africa.  But, the countries they visited?  It feels like they were all on the same beat. Going to the same countries.

I don't care about what they do when they visit.  But, when the President visits a country, Americans at least hear about it, perhaps for the first time ever.  Imagine a President going to Congo--it does not matter which Congo it is.  Or Gabon. Or Mozambique.  At least for those couple of days, those countries will be "trending" in social media, and Wolf Blitzer will cover those countries nonstop on CNN.

But, it does not happen.

Now, we have a (P)resident in the White House who just knows only as shitholes, where people live in huts. He thinks there is a country called Nambia.  No wonder he has steered clear of the continent when making his international trips as the President, including four to France.  Maybe Macron can take him along to visit the old colonies on an apology tour!

President tRump's 17 international trips to 23 countries
Source

But then, maybe it will #BeBest if he does not go anywhere near Africa!

Pop talk

Today--July 11th--is World Population Day, my Google news-feed informs me.  It is also a thirty-year anniversary of the day that we recognize as an important demographic milestone:

World Population Day, which seeks to focus attention on the urgency and importance of population issues, was established by the then-Governing Council of the United Nations Development Programme in 1989, an outgrowth of the interest generated by the Day of Five Billion, which was observed on 11 July 1987.

Yep, thirty years ago, we were only five billion people on this planet.  We are now at 7.6 billion, and growing.  By 2100, we will have added about three-billion-plus.

India is projected to overtake China as the country with the largest population in about five years from now, though there are claims that it has already done so.  An extraordinary rate of growth from the "muppadu koti janangalin" (300 million) that the poet Bharati sang about a century ago. (Click here for the movie adaptation of the song from the old days.)

Population growth continues to freak people out.  Especially those on the left.  The latest to fall victim to that was the latest darling of the left--the French president, Macron.  He claimed that “civilisational” problems and women having "seven or eight children" are some of the main challenges in Africa.

As my intro students get to know well, Africa is way too diverse for any generalization.  We will ignore the "civilisational" aspect in order to focus only on the population aspects on this day.  Even my intro class students get to understand that women having "seven or eight children" is an old story in most of Africa.  Further, population growth is happening despite women having fewer children than before.  Yes, fewer.  As I emphasize over and over and over, population growth is not because of women having more children than ever before, but because children and adults don't die young as they used to in the past.  We live long.  Way too long has always been my worry.

Who you gonna believe?  Macron, or the data from Google?

Macron should at least be familiar with some of the African countries that his beloved France colonized and screwed up, right?

Oh well ... the gut-level Mallthusian worries do not easily go away.

Of course, more humans means more demand for various goods and services.  But, our long-term sustainability issues have less to do with more people.  Instead, those are almost always the result of economic growth and development, and various geopolitical happenings (colonization in the past, wars in the past and present, ...)

If Macron or anybody else wants to do something about population growth, the answer is simple.  It has been known to us for a long time now.  Educating girls acts works like a contraceptive.  The more illiterate the female population, the more they end up in the traditional childbearing roles.  And then provide women with the freedom that men take for granted, well, you will soon have to bribe women to have children.

Of course, with this American president, female empowerment is next to impossible. The 71-year old man-child has had more children than the previous three presidents have had.  We should be more worried about the growth in trump population than in the world population!

Africa? My ass!

I am no Chinese expert.  Heck, am not an expert on anything,  but that has never stopped me from commenting.  It has worked out well all these years; so, why stop now, right?

Of course I have been fascinated with China forever.  Don't forget that I was a commie sympathizer even before I got my first pimple.  I hated how the pimples always appeared in the most obvious places on my face--on my nose, and the center of my forehead.  Yet, I hated the damn British bastards more than how much I hated those damn pimples!

It was only after I started understanding how much the communist systems in China and the USSR were messing around with people, that I started questioning my belief that the commies were the good guys.  As the years rolled on, I could not be bothered with that political economic system, and I decided that America was going to be my home, as imperfect as it was/is.

Now, I detest any system where the party decides the fates of its peoples, and a system where people aren't free.  But, that is their problem, I suppose.

However, when China begins to flex its muscles around the world, it becomes my problem too!

The NY Times editorializes about China's trillion dollar foreign policy, and notes there:

Whatever the economic benefits, a project cannot be allowed to run roughshod over individuals or trample on the environment. Mr. Xi stressed that consultation, transparency and people’s “well-being” are vital, but China’s track record is not encouraging. One example: Kyaukphyu, Myanmar, where a Chinese-Myanmar oil and gas pipeline was pursued in secret, stomped on farmers’ property rights and did significant environmental damage.
China clearly aims to dominate the international system. If it succeeds — shaping how vast sums are spent and where, and which laws are followed or not — it could upend a system established by Washington and its allies after World War II. And there are military concerns: For instance, many Burmese and foreign experts worry that China could use the Kyaukphyu ports for military purposes.

But, China's economic development is built on that model--to "run roughshod over individuals or trample on the environment." The party has merely gone international with its domestic approach.

This approach when taken to countries that are poor and when they have no power to stand up can then result in awful stories like this--Africa's donkeys are being killed in huge numbers:

Donkeys are being slaughtered at an alarming pace to feed a global trade in donkey hides that’s fueled by soaring demand in China, where the skins are used to manufacture a gelatin believed to have anti-ageing and libido-enhancing properties.

I care not about crazy beliefs in anti-ageing and in libido properties.  But, I care about the poor farmers being messed up.  "Niger halted exports of the animal and completely prohibited their slaughtering,"

Mali, Senegal and Gambia followed suit. Zimbabwe, where donkeys are less common, turned down an application to build a donkey slaughterhouse, while Ethiopia closed its only functioning donkey abattoir after residents complained about the stench and pollution.
But large-scale slaughtering continues in many African countries, including Tanzania, Ghana and Kenya, and online sales ads for donkey hides are especially easy to find in Nigeria.”

And, yes, the donkeys are the latest to suffer from this Chinese demand:

Like the poaching of Africa’s rhinos and elephants, and deforestation caused by the largely illicit trade in rosewood timber, the slaughter of donkeys is an unforeseen consequence of rising Chinese incomes and an expanding middle class.

Can't the party strike a balance between its old Mao days and such an approach to "run roughshod over individuals or trample on the environment"?

Theology defined by numbers makes an interesting religious marketplace!

To atheists, this is perhaps the best of the times.  Unless one is in Bangladesh!  By and large, there is no equivalent of a Spanish Inquisition that tortures infidels.  For another, it is immense entertainment watching the religious tie themselves into knots (re)defining what god supposedly said.

Take the case of Quakers.  Until yesterday, I had no idea that of the about 300,000 Quakers in the world, "over one-third of them live in Kenya."  This factoid, by itself, is pretty darn interesting.  But, this atheist is more interested in this:

Today, there are more Quakers in Kenya than in any other country in the world.
But it wasn’t until 2007 that a major international Quaker gathering was held in Kenya. The meeting, and the ones that ensued, weren’t without controversy. In 2012, a gathering held in Nairobi was almost canceled halfway through because of arguments between liberal and conservative Quakers over same-sex marriage.

What did god say about same-sex marriage?  What is the theology here?  The believers beat their chests on how they know what god said about this issue, or other such contemporary social issues too.  However, in the Western tradition, ever since Martin Luther opened the door for democratization of thinking, it is usually the numbers that redefine what god said.  As the numbers in favor of contraception became huge, for instance, the theological interpretations changed on whether contraceptives were allowed by god, which meant that whether sex for pleasure--as opposed to sex for procreation--was allowed by god.  Fun times here on the sidelines!

The future of Christianity is in Africa.

The Pew Research Center estimates that there will be two and a half times more Christians in Africa than Europe by 2050. Currently, the numbers are about equal.

Which is why every denomination, from Roman Catholics to Quakers, and even the Mormons, are targeting Africa.  Demography is destiny!

But, the Quakers are not the first ones to raise same-sex issues as a deep theological struggle for believers.  Earlier this year, the Anglican church suffered a rebellion.  There, too, the numbers are with Africa.  I recall one NPR segment in which a senior church leader from Nigeria complained that Europeans were imposing their colonial liberal bleiefs over them.  But then wasn't Christianity itself a result of European colonialism?

Recently, the Anglican Church held a summit in Lusaka.    The Archbishop of Canterbury writes:

There are plenty of problems, I’ll come to those in a moment, but the central news is that if God, by his Spirit, is working among us, that the future is one of hope, of purpose and of blessing in our call to fulfil the mission of God in the world.
The challenges in Lusaka flowed from issues that we have been facing for many years, especially those around human sexuality, and most recently the decision of the Episcopal Church (TEC) to change its canon on marriage in order to accept same-sex marriage in its churches. It should be noted that at the same time they also decided to make provision for those who disagreed, and no diocese could be compelled to accept this change, nor can an individual priest.

So, what exactly god said will be a negotiated truth after all!

As in any negotiation, here too some of the major disagreeing parties boycotted the summit:

There was no hiding the fact that we had great differences, nor diminishing the sorrow that some Provinces (Nigeria, Uganda and Rwanda) had chosen not to attend for reasons which I fully understand.

I wonder who amongst the seven billion-plus knows what god really thinks!

The mother of all

There was no concept of "Mother's Day" in the old country, back when I was a kid.  Now, of course, such Americana has spread across to the other side of the planet as well.

No, this post is not about my mother, nor is it to rant about Mother's Day.  It is about "mother" Lucy and the home to all of us--you, me, and the rest of humanity as well.  Lucy--not the redhead on television who made us laugh--but the fossil in Ethiopia is what I am referring to.  And, hence, the motherland of all of humanity--Africa.

I routinely ask students if they have upper division courses that were only about Africa's countries and peoples.  It is a rare student who has something to say.  To most students Africa is something out there.  A blob. Irrelevant.

I remind them about Africa's size.  A few eyes wake up to the realization that if one country of Congo itself is that big, then the continent is "yuge."  About how tiny Oregon is compared to Tanzania. I tell them about the demographic future--that population growth this century will happen in Africa.  And about the noticeable uptick in the economies of the countries.  To the scientifically inclined, I even suggest knowing more about "mitochondrial Eve."

It is unfortunate that the university where I teach is like most colleges and universities that continue to remain Euro-centric in what we teach.  Everything from literature to the social sciences is mostly about Europe and North America, with a little bit about South and Central America. It is pathetic that even my university offers more courses about Slovakia and the Balkans than about Africa and its countries.

The result is that most students never, ever encounter Africa in their formal education. I would not be surprised if they then graduate with nothing but the old stereotypes of Africa.

Awful!

So, here's a suggestion for Mother's Day: In addition to wishing the mothers around you: do whatever you can in order to get away from those old stereotypes about Africa.    

Celebrate!

For a change ... I bring you good news!

A polio-free world is in sight.  Yes, a world without polio!

Since the initiative was launched by the assembly in 1988, the number of polio cases have reduced by 99%. The remaining 1% of cases can be found in the two countries with endemic polio – Pakistan and Afghanistan.

This is one of those rare moments when we humans deserve to stand up and congratulate ourselves.  Go ahead, pat yourself on your back.

Note that AfPak is the problem, in more ways than one!  The other notorious home for polio, Nigeria, is off the list; what an achievement, right?

It has been one full year since polio was detected anywhere in Africa, a significant milestone in global health that has left health experts around the world quietly celebrating.

A quiet celebration because of the recognition that the virus can always stage a comeback.  After three continuous years of no cases, the real celebration will begin.

“This is a big success, but it’s still fragile,” said Dr. Hamid Jafari, the initiative’s World Health Organization director. “There’s always a worry that there could be an undetected case in a population you’re not reaching.”

If you are like me, you then wonder how public health experts go around seeking confirmation.  (Maybe it is a good thing you are not like me, eh!)

How does one go about finding the polio virus across the expanse of an entire country or continent? There are now far fewer polio virus needles in the global haystack, which is fantastic news. But the remaining ones become even more difficult to find. We can’t stamp out a disease if we don’t know where it is. But with polio we do know where it is—and we know thanks to poop.

And now, if you are like me, you are puzzled.  What has poop got to do with polio.  That's how ignorant I am; turns out that all these years I hadn't bothered to find out how polio spreads!

When children get polio, the virus grows in their intestines and is excreted in the stool, and from there it spreads to other children. That’s why it has been so tough to beat polio in areas with poor sanitation. 

No kidding; now I understand why India eliminating polio within the country is such a cause for astonishment.  A country with extremely poor sanitation facilities managed to wipe out polio.  That's phenomenal!

The last case of polio in India was reported in 2011, an achievement once thought impossible. The country once suffered from more polio cases than anywhere else in the world, and the combination of dense populations, poor sanitation, and weak routine immunization programs led experts to suggest it would be the last place on Earth to drive out polio. Today, India’s polio story is one of historic success.

What more evidence does one need that we humans can achieve remarkable success, despite all the hurdles!

Since 1988, more than US$9 billion has been invested into the global polio eradication initiative.

What a wonderful use of nine billion dollars!  Let me put this in perspective:

The Marine Corps, the ascetic tribe of “Devil Dogs” that prides itself on being “the first to fight,” is getting a new weapon, announcing Friday that its version of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is, at long last, ready to be unleashed in combat.
The announcement comes after years of testing and development, marking a significant milestone for the sometimes-beleaguered, often-criticized and always controversial $400 billion program, which is years behind its original schedule and billions of dollars over its original budget.

Got that?  400 billion dollars. For fucking fighter planes!  Ok, I shouldn't rant about the military expenditure because I want to bring you only the good news in this post ;)

So, brother, can you spare me a dime. Er, make that a billion dollars. To launch something similar to the war against polio.  Against the Ebola virus:

Last month, the New England Journal of Medicine published a bold proposal by three doctors for an international vaccine fund with an initial capitalization of $2 billion. That is far less than the $8 billion that Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, which had the most Ebola cases, say they need for recovery. Bringing a single new vaccine to market costs between $500 million and $1 billion.
The fund would be a boon to the biotechnology companies and university research centers that are already working on vaccines but don’t have the resources to get drugs approved and manufactured. And it would save lives.

Don't try telling me that we don't have the money for it.  You can never, ever convince me about lack of money.  Will stop here before I take off on a rant on our misplaced priorities! ;)

Palmyra: maybe the Islamic State militants need some good ol' toddy!

I will be honest with you--until I read the news reports of the Islamic State militants capturing a place called Palmyra, I had no idea that there was a settlement in the world--and an ancient one at that--called Palmyra.

I tell ya, every single day the cosmos reminds me that I don't know a damn thing.  It is alarming that they let me teach, given my ignorance!

The certified idiot that I am, my immediate thought was this: is this town Palmyra the origin of the tree palmyra that was all around in my part of the old country?  What if the spellings look the same, but the pronunciations are different?

I tell ya, every single day I keep asking the cosmos questions and it couldn't care whether I even existed.  The cosmos simply is.  Whether I want to understand, ask questions, or ignore them all, is really my call.  I choose against ignoring the questions that pop up, even if the questions are seemingly inane, like whether the advertising "mad men" pressure women into removing their armpit and leg hair!

So ... palmyra.  The tree, that is.  In case you never knew about the tree, first, let me tell you what Wikipedia has to say about this tree and my old country:

The Palmyra tree is the official tree of Tamil Nadu. In Tamil culture it is called karpaha,"Nungu" "celestial tree"

You see why the news about IS taking over Palmyra made me think about the tree in the old country?  ;)

source

The "nungu" was very much a part of the growing up experience, though I way preferred the tender coconut water and the pulp over this.  But, I did like the jelly-like nongu:

The coconut-like fruits are three-sided when young, becoming rounded or more or less oval, 12-15 cm wide, and capped at the base with overlapping sepals. The outer covering is smooth, thin, leathery, and brown, turning nearly black after harvest. Inside is a juicy mass of long, tough, coarse, white fibers coated with yellow or orange pulp. Within the mature seed is a solid white kernel which resembles coconut meat but is much harder. When the fruit is very young, this kernel is hollow, soft as jelly, and translucent like ice, and is accompanied by a watery liquid, sweetish and potable.

How does it look like?  Like so:

source

Of course, there is that toddy from the palmyra trees--but, I have not tasted it ever.

In this first-person narrative that I came across as I read up about the palmyra in the old country, the author wonders if the tree was native to the Subcontinent, given its long historical record:

I started the search from the other end, Africa. Palmyra grows all across that continent's savannas. It truly seemed at home there, surrounded by giraffes, zebras, elephants and other animals. The only creatures I've seen ambling around these palms here are cows and goats. Then it hit me. I was looking at Borassus aethiopum, and one of its other names was Borassus flabellifer. The World Agroforestry Centre suggests that the African species may have been domesticated and became the Indian palmyra. Years of selective breeding may have created a new species, just as domesticated wolves became dogs.
Excited by this discovery, I emailed another friend Rohan Pethiyagoda who shares my interest in history. Within hours, he sent me a scientific paper that showed our palmyra was a distinct species in its own right, even though it looks almost identical to aethiopum. The former ranges across the Indian subcontinent and into the Malayan peninsula, while the latter is strictly African. But that doesn't resolve the question of palmyra's origin. Prehistoric trade could have dispersed a domesticated species far and wide, especially if it had many uses. Rohan says a genetic study currently underway will resolve the ambiguity.

That was from three years ago.  Maybe since then science has provided a definitive answer.  But, I don't care; I am content with the notion that the palmyra, like me, has its origins in Africa.  If the militants keep up with their maniacal destruction of the heritage sites, of which Palmyra is one, it will make it that much more difficult for us to trace our story back to Africa :(

We are missing the story on a country called Africa

A plane goes down in Ukraine. We seem to kind of sort of know where that country is.  A plane goes down somewhere in that area bordering Mali, Algeria, Burkina Faso and, as the friend alerted me, even the Los Angeles Times then produces map about the country of Africa!

“AFRICA" pic.twitter.com/Yv2Oj0aNfq
— Max Fisher (@Max_Fisher) July 25, 2014

Of course, this is not the first time it has ever happened--if I had been paid a dollar for every time I corrected a student who incorrectly referred to Africa as a country, I would be a very rich man by now.

Whether it is students or reporters or the general public, the continent is nothing more than a big blob to most of us. A messed-up "country" out there somewhere.  Clueless we almost always are!  We do too little for the place we should all call home, right?

Plenty has been said and written about this atrocious marginalization of the vast geography and its people.  Anjan Sundaram adds to that commentary and he understates it when he notes:

Our stories about others tell us more about ourselves.

Yes! :(

A few weeks ago, NPR reviewed Sundaram's book, which was my first ever introduction to his work.  In his op-ed, Sundaram writes about his background, which I recall from that NPR report and this interview with Jon Stewart.

As a student in America, where I was considering a Ph.D. in mathematics and a job in finance, I would read 200-word stories buried in the back pages of newspapers. With so few words, speaking of events so large, there was a powerful sense of dissonance. I traveled to Congo, at age 22, on a one-way ticket, without a job or any promise of publication, with only a little money in my pocket and a conviction that what I would witness should be news.

I am always way impressed with people like Sundaram, who choose to walk away from the safety and comforts of the well-traveled roads--especially in his case after an undergraduate degree from the IIT at Madras, a graduate degree from Yale, and a job offer from Goldman Sachs.  Next to people like Sundaram, I am nothing but a facade, if at all. Always lacking his kind of a drive, determination, and dedication, it is no surprise that I am forever wondering whether I coulda been a contender!

As Sundaram writes about the news organizations and his life as a stringer for the AP:

Reporters move like herds of sheep, flocking to the same places at the same times to tell us, more or less, the same stories. Foreign bureaus are closing. We are moving farther away.
News organizations tell us that immersive reporting is prohibitively expensive. But the money is there; it’s just often misallocated on expensive trips for correspondents. Even as I was struggling to justify costs for a new round of reporting in Congo, I watched teams of correspondents stay in $300-per-night hotels, spending in one night what I would in two months. And they missed the story.
Parachuting in with little context, and with a dozen other countries to cover, they stayed for the vote but left before the results were announced. A battle broke out in Kinshasa after they left, and I found myself hiding in an old margarine factory, relaying news to the world, including reports to this newspaper.

And after he left?

For years after I left Congo, my position with The A.P. remained — as it is now — vacant. The news from Congo suffers as a result, as does our understanding of that country, and ultimately ourselves. Stories from there, and from places like the killing fields of the Central African Republic, are still distant, and they are growing smaller.

The vast "country" of Africa is getting more and more distant and smaller even as we talk about how the world is shrinking thanks to all the interconnectedness.  "Our stories about others tell us more about ourselves." Indeed!

We were all black. That is fair and lovely!

My only trip to Africa was when I spent three weeks in Tanzania, in December 2009. The English language newspapers at Dar es Salaam reported on the front pages about the anti-gay fervor in neighboring Uganda and the role of US-based missionaries in that brouhaha. I was so convinced that it was all a fleeting political issue that I threw away those pages; little did I know!  Instead, I brought with me a couple of pages that were news items on how beauty products were marketed targeting the women--because, among others, the products included "skin whiteners."

The anti-gay nastiness has become a law of the land in Uganda, and it seems like it might even spread to a few more countries in Africa. That will be a post for another day, I am sure.  The skin whiteners continue to fascinate me because I grew up in a culture, in a country, where the skin complexion was categorized in so many ways, like.

Coal black
Dark
Dark brown
Brown
Light brown
Wheatish
Fair
Very fair
And, yes, even white!

A graduate school friend, who was from Nigeria, used to joke that there isn't any black skin--it is all only various shades of brown.  A white American grad school colleague noted that there is no white skin and once held a blank sheet of white paper against his skin to prove his point.

In the old country, "Fair & Lovely" was a product that was sold as a skin whitener.  It still is. In a "liberalized" economy that India now is, there are, I bet, quite a few competing products as well.

"White," as I used to joke in graduate school, is nothing but a serious medical condition of pigment deficiency.  Lack of melanin.  My version of "brown pride," I suppose.

The Economist reports a study that confirms why we have melanin:

One suggestion often proferred is that the melanin in black skin, by absorbing ultraviolet light which might otherwise damage DNA and cause mutations, protects against skin cancer.

The confirmation came via:

a study by Mel Greaves, of the Institute of Cancer Research, in Britain, just published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, settles the question in favour of cancer being the driving force. Dr Greaves does so by reviewing the clinical data about those Africans who do not have black skin because they are albino.

As humans wandered into the northern latitudes, there was less of a danger of cancer from the way-less intense sunlight. On the other hand, a lighter skin tone facilitated synthesizing Vitamin D.  The cost-benefit analysis then yielded the "whites."

My favorite Tamil expression for the much adored skin tone is பால் நெரம் (milk color.)  Imagine a Tamil walking around with a skin color that matches the color of milk. If such a person existed, that will be one brief existence on the planet, in those uber-hot conditions!

Of course, this also means that the darker skinned Tamil folks like me living in northern latitudes that aren't our original home, and especially in this part of the Pacific Northwest where the sun rarely ever peeks through the cloud cover, well, we need Vitamin D supplements. But, hey, no worries about any skin cancer though ;)

I wonder if Wendy Doniger will have anything about the "fair" and "dark" skinned Hindu gods.  I will find out when I return to blogging about "The Hindus."

Let there be light ... on the Dark Continent

It was a clear sky last night.  No clouds.  A wonderful summer evening, with a cool breeze, that made me think that putting up with the dark, gloomy, overcast, rainy months was a very small price to pay.

I sat outside on the patio bench--a hand me down from the daughter.  Yes, I have gotten to a stage in life when I have started collecting stuff that my daughter throws out!

I looked up and could see a few stars. Imagine that--a few stars visible here in Oregon. And, despite all the urban lighting.

Over the years, I have pretty much forgotten what it feels like to to look up at a starry, starry night.  One of my most memorable ones in recent years was in Tanzania.  The small town where I was for a fortnight was not only out in the boondocks but with pretty much no electricity.  The night sky was, therefore, spectacular.

The stars above glittered way more beautifully than anything I had seen in the urban world that we humans have created.  Towards the end of the stay, we headed towards the new moon phase.  Thus, with very little lunar shine, and nothing at all from the built environment, the stars looked huge and bright.

As awesome as that was, it was also further evidence on the tremendous under-consumption of energy compared to the phenomenal over-consumption here in these United States.  As this note at the Scientific American points out, the low level of energy consumption gets reflected in the night time darkness imposed by a lack of artificial light:

The post adds:

It’s not because the continent of Africa is devoid of people. It’s because the gift of energy services hasn’t reached many of the billion-plus residents. It’s what is called “energy poverty”, that is, a lack of access to what many of consider to be the common element of modern living: electricity.

As a contrast, the American nightscape:

As African economies pick up, which we hope will happen soon, their energy consumption will also pick up, and Africans will light up their homes and streets in the night time. We would certainly want them to have that opportunity, which we take for granted here.

President Obama says the right things (but then his rhetoric is always lofty, and rarely ever matched by his actions!)

During his three country tour of Senegal, South Africa, and Tanzania, US President Obama has unveiled the Power Africa initiative, in which he has pledged $7 billion of investment over the next five years to increase energy production and access to energy across the sub-Saharan region.
The goal is to double access to electricity across six countries that Obama’s administration has selected for their promotion of good governance; Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Nigeria and Tanzania.

In case you are not convinced why addressing the energy poverty in Africa is important:

Energy poverty severely impacts health and education  prospects. Today, energy poverty leads to more premature deaths than either malaria or tuberculosis. The World Health Organization estimates that almost 4,000 people per day die prematurely each year from household air  pollution from biomass cooking. If nothing is done to address energy poverty, by 2030 this number is expected  to climb to 1.5 million per year—more deaths than will be  caused by HIV/AIDS and malaria combined (IEA, 2011).  Energy poverty also affects the provision of health services (vaccines are hard to refrigerate without electricity)  and hinders education prospects (it is hard to read in the dark without electricity and girls often get pulled out of
school to collect firewood).
Access to affordable electricity is also a major—and in many countries the very top—constraint to economic growth. Business survey data consistently point to the  cost and reliability of electricity as among the most important barriers to business expansion in Africa (Ramachandran et al., 2009). For instance, Ghana’s Valco aluminum smelter is today running at just 20 percent capacity due to a shortage of low-cost power. In Nigeria, 97 percent of large firms rely on (costly, inefficient and polluting) diesel generators to provide nearly two-thirds of their power,  while almost half of all firms operating in sub-Saharan Africa own or share a generator. The economic returns to  modern electricity could be huge for these economies.

Where will all that energy come from?

I sure hope it won't be from coal. China and India are making it very clear for the the people there, and to the rest of the world, that not only can they not meet the demands via coal alone but, and more importantly, it creates problems in many ways.

All the more the reason to explore alternatives. Sooner the better, so that Tanzanians, too, can blog about anything and everything, especially at night, like how this blogger does thanks to the limitless electricity at his disposal.

The Siddis are yet another link in India's connections with Africa

Doesn't it seem like the photo below could be of a person/place in India?

Or, wait, is it from Africa?

Do you feel that I am setting you up with trick questions?

Yes, I am.  Because, I want you to get as flummoxed as I am in learning that there is in India a community of African diaspora.

I am not referring to the overall story of human migration out of Africa.  The photograph is from a collection about a group of Africans who migrated to India: the Siddis.

Every single day it is something new about India.  If understanding India is so difficult for me, who was born and raised in India, with what I consider to be an above-average intelligence and curiosity, then it shouldn't be any surprise at all when even people in India, leave alone those outside the country, walk around with misconceptions about India!

It all started with this tweet in my Twitter feed (yes, Ramesh, we put Twitter to good use!):

Uncovering India’s Siddi Community on.wsj.com/15G0FGT
— IndiaRealTime (@IndiaRealTime) March 24, 2013

That WSJ site had this opening paragraph:

Ketaki Sheth first encountered the Siddi in 2005 on a family holiday to the Gir forest in Gujarat. This community of African origin would become her photographic obsession.

A community of African origin?

An hour later, I was still Googling and reading about this community that I had no clue about until earlier this morning.

Life sometimes seems to be about discovering how clueless and uninformed we are, and yet we act as if we know it all!  Education is not about knowing as much as about finding out what we do not know.  Education is one heck of a humbling experience.

The first of the Siddis may have arrived in India more than a thousand years ago as a result of India importing slaves from Africa.  Seriously, India imported slaves from Africa?

I thought the caste system and the concept of untouchables were bizarre enough.  Slaves? From Africa? Much before the trans-Atlantic slave trade?

[Medieval] Indian history abounds with references to Ethiopian or Abyssinian slaves serving at royal courts or in the armies of imperial/local rulers. But African presences in India testify not only to past systems of feudal power and warfare, but also to the subcontinent's place in a larger Indian Ocean world. This world was ruled by maritime and trading connections extending to East Africa as much as to Arabia, the Persian Gulf and South-East Asia. African seamen, well known for their maritime skills, served not only on the ships of traders from India, the Swahili coast and Arabia, but also on those of Portuguese, British and other European colonial trading companies.
Today, we encounter small communities of people of African origin along the western coast of India, whose predecessors may have been brought to the country as slaves, or may have been sailors who voluntarily settled in India after one of the long stays on land enforced by the monsoon. While diverse historical circumstances ranging from slavery to maritime labour displaced their forefathers from the lands of their birth, today's Sidis, as the descendants of Africans are called in India, no longer sail the ocean. In Gujarat, where one of the larger Sidi communities, numbering around 20,000, is found, they have merged with the masses of the poor, living in urban working class quarters or, though rarely, in villages.

But, of course, this being India, nothing ever is a simple story; the import of slaves into India was very different from the American experience:

In India at least, slaves were not meant for plantation work but served mainly as servants, bodyguards or soldiers and, rarely though, as agricultural labourers. Many women were personal attendants of aristocratic women. In 19th century Gujarat, for example, Sidis served in numerous small princely states. Although they arrived as slaves, once they became part of the court personnel of a ruler, they were treated as other royal servants in a patrimonial system of power. But they were still treated as part of the property of a king. To give an illustration: Sidi maids could be given as part of the dowry of a Rajput bride and had to move with her to her husband's house. In towns, Sidis were given a piece of land for housing and had rights to receive food and clothing from their patrons. There are also numerous shrines dedicated to saintly Sidi ancestors, many of which originated in a gift given by a royal patron.

Not difficult to imagine, eh, why I spent more than an hour reading up about the Siddis!

They are far removed from Africa:

the Siddis in this village [Jambur] 470 kilometres (290 miles) southwest of Ahmedabad, the commercial capital of the western state Gujarat, say they know nothing of their origins as descendants of African slaves.
"I was born here. I got married here. My father and grandfather are also from this village. I've no idea where their ancestors came from," said Aishubehn Makwana Basurim, a 40-year-old woman who is the village head.
"I've never heard of Africa," she said, adding that the more important issues were the lack of access to good education and generally being left behind by India's economic boom.

She has never heard of Africa and I had never heard of her people in India.

Researchers have traced the origins of the Siddis--the later ones brought over by the Portuguese--to sub-Saharan African Bantus:

During the course of the Bantu expansion, African farmers settled in East Africa. Later, during the 15th to 17th centuries, this region was predominantly ruled by the Portuguese. They brought some Africans to India as slaves and sold them to local Nawabs and Sultans, whose descendents, admixed with neighboring populations, comprise the present-day Siddi population of India

This map they include says it all:

Way too much of information on a Sunday morning.  Need coffee--that wonderful elixir that originated in the African highlands of Ethiopia!

I climbed up tamarind trees, too

In this opinion piece, the writer worries about tamarind trees being chopped down in order to construct buildings and roads:

men come with axes and saws for the slaughter of these trees. They bring heavy bulldozers and earth movers — construction equipment powered for destruction — to gouge the ancient roots out of the earth. Trees that stood for centuries are brusquely despatched in a matter of hours. 

How terrible!

Until I read that essay, I had no idea that the tamarind tree, like us humans, is also from Africa!

Its name, derived from the Arabic ‘tamar-ul-Hind' or the ‘the date of India', finds mention in written historical accounts of India going back centuries. There is irony in this, for the tamarind is native to Africa and not a species that grows naturally in India's forests. Despite being alien to India, the tamarind has not run wild and become an invasive pest, becoming instead what biologists call a naturalised species. Embraced by a deep tolerance and cultural acceptance into Indian cuisine and culture, the tamarind is today a familiar and inseparable part of Indian life and landscape. 

I now imagine that the humans wandering out of Africa brought along the tamarind seeds because they were so much in love with the tree and its fruits, and that love is what I experienced as a child.

All my years till I completed high school and went off to college were in the same house at Neyveli.  One of the many charming aspects to it was the number of trees in the compound.  I forget the precise count, but, as I recall now, there were six tamarind trees, eight mango trees, one cashewnut tree, and a couple of trees that did not yield any edible fruits.  It was a jungle out there, come to think of it.

By the gate was a giant tamarind tree.  It was huge.  As my sister recently recounted, kids were brought up with ghost stories in which tamarind trees were almost always the favorite "hang out" for the spirits.  Even in the best of the lighting, the compound was in semi-darkness at best, and some of the trees were in utter darkness.  Most of this old tamarind tree by the gate was in the dark.  It is, therefore, easy to imagine that some of the school friends coming over wanted to get past the tree as fast as they could.

But, we kids were never afraid of that tamarind tree.  After all, we did not know any better.  The tree was always there from the time we remembered the world.

That particular tamarind tree, more than the other ones in the compound, had blossoms and fruits that were phenomenally tasty.  Yes, the blossoms.  I drool now for that taste.  Oh the money I would pay now to grab a few and eat a mouthful of them!

And then came the fruits.  The tiny green ones were wonderfully tasty.  I would pay even more to climb up a branch right now and taste a few.

The tiny green ones mature and bulk up to become the tamarind fruit that is an important ingredient in every Tamil kitchen.  This tree's fruits were a tad sweet, in addition to the usual sourness that made one shut the eyes in response.  It was sheer ecstasy for the kid that I was to enjoy this naturally sweet and sour taste.

Had I known that I would live this far away from tamarind trees, I would have eaten a lot more blossoms, tiny young ones, and the big brown fruits.

A few years ago, when we visited the old home after more than twenty years, the jungle had become even more dense and green.  It looked fantastic.  The few photos that have survived the ten years since, well, there is nothing of that old friend by the front gate.  I do have one where I can spot the green of the Tamarind tree in the rear of the compound:

The man in the photo was the gardener taking care of the property.  It was a German consultant who lived in the house, and was away when we visited.  There is a good probability that the German had no idea about how to enjoy the tamarind trees.

I suppose this is what life is also about: we have no idea about the wonderful stuff we have.

Sometimes we are aware of them and we enjoy them.

Other times, perhaps all too often, we abuse what we have--like cutting down tamarind trees so that we can build roads :(

The birth of a nation

The lack of coverage on the Sudan/South Sudan split seems to echo the typical freshman-level philosophy teaser about whether a tree falling in a forest produces any sound if there is nobody around!

Of course, "who cares about South Sudan" is to be expected in the rather narcissistic and navel-gazing American daily life.

Even when a mid-sea disaster off the Sudanese coast  killed almost 200 African migrants trying to get to Saudi Arabia, it registered lower decibels compared to to the story on a boat capsizing in Mexico--because it had American tourists.

Such a skewed view of the world is no surprise.  Yet, I am shocked, shocked, as Captain Renault put it so well in Casablanca.

There is, thankfully, the BBC and Al Jazeera.

On July 9th, South Sudan will officially become the latest country on this planet.

It does not mean that life will be peaceful from the 9th on, after decades of atrocious violence.  I worry that things will get even worse.  The Sudanese split will not be a Czechoslovakian story.  Perhaps I am projecting here an understanding of the history of the sibling rivalry ever since the partition of India, where I was born, and Pakistan.

Dirty rotten food prices--they are up, again

For a couple of days last December, when I was in India, the headline news was only about onion prices--they had gone way up.  So much so that the federal government had to impose an export freeze.
As those prices started coming down, tomato prices started shooting up.

These are alarming news in India for two reasons: one, food prices affect the poor, who spend a significant percentage of their incomes on food.  And, second, governments--particularly coalition governments like the one in place in India now--can easily get thrown out of power because of food prices.

In the new year, there seems to have been a further escalation in food prices.  According to The Hindu:

food inflation surged further to 17.05 per cent for the week ended January 22 from 15.57 per cent in the previous week as prices of vegetables, fruits, milk and protein-based items continued to soar.

What is particularly hurting the common man is the fact that the current inflationary bout is not just a statistical anomaly of low ‘base effect'. The price rise is for real in that the high food inflation at over 17 per cent, as per the Wholesale Price Index (WPI) data, is over and above the 20.56 per cent surge witnessed during the like week a year ago.

But, even more worrisome is the fact that it is not merely in India:

The FAO Food Price Index, which measures the wholesale price of basic foods within a basket, averaged 231 points last month - its highest level since records began in 1990.
It was up 3.4% from December, the seventh monthly rise for the index.
"These high prices are likely to persist in the months to come," FAO economist Abdolreza Abbassian said.
The index is now higher than June 2008 when the cost of food sparked violent protests in countries including Cameroon, Haiti and Egypt.

Yes, it is catching people's attention:

World Bank President Robert Zoellick has asked global leaders to "put food first" and tackle the problem of price volatility.
"We are going to be facing a broader trend of increasing commodity prices, including food commodity prices," he said.

Unfortunately, for many years now, the developed world has pretty much taken its eyes off the food issue.  I am not sure how pathetic this indifference would be if it were not for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation forcing the world's attention on this--even a few years ago.  At the World Food Symposium, Prabhu Pingali observed this when talking about the Green Revolution:

Smallholders in the Indian Punjab, with average farm sizes of one hectare, went from producing a single crop of rice or wheat with average yields of little over a ton to producing two crops per year, a rice crop followed by a wheat crop, each with average yields of 4-5 tons. Many even managed a third crop of vegetables or fodder in between. In China, farm sizes were even smaller, Chinese farm households were allocated one mu per person. What’s a mu? It’s one fifteenth of a hectare, or one sixth of an acre. For American Football fans, (we are in Iowa State Cyclones country here) one mu is equivalent to the area between the 0 and 12 yards, just a little larger than “the end zone”. The Chinese agriculture transformation took place because farmers extracted the most out of their mu. 

But, the last two decades haven't seen any great push to advance the science, technology, and practice of agriculture in Asia and Africa.

“Investing in small farmers is an incredibly effective way to combat hunger and extreme poverty—history has proved it many times,” said Gates, whose foundation has committed $1.5 billion to date to agricultural development. “The launch of this fund is an important step forward, but only a first step. Other countries meeting at the European, G8 and G20 summits in June, and at the U.N. Summit in September should join the four founding partners and make good on their pledges. If we all sustain focus until the job is done, hundreds of millions of people will lead better lives.”
According to the World Bank, about three-quarters of the 1 billion people who live in extreme poverty depend on agriculture for a living.

The end of the world in 20 years: chocolate will become expensive

The world could run out of affordable chocolate within 20 years as farmers abandon their crops in the global cocoa basket of West Africa, industry experts claim.

If that is not a sign of the coming end of the world!

"What the hell," you say?  Why this crisis?  It is actually a good thing.
But, how can this be good?  Because it makes us wake up to the reality of cocoa production:

Farmers in the countries that produce the bulk of cocoa bought by the multinationals who control the market have found the crop a bitter harvest. The minimal rewards they have historically received do not provide incentives for the time-consuming work of replanting as their trees die off – a task that usually means moving to a new area of canopied forest and waiting three to five years for a new crop to mature.

"It's hard to maintain production at high levels in a particular plot of land every time, because of pest problems that eat away at the yields and the farms need to be rejuvenated," explains Thomas Dietsch, research director of ecosystem services at the Earthwatch Organisation. "Although research into new varieties and better management methods could solve those problems, the other challenge is that cocoa is competing for agricultural space with other commodities like palm oil – which is increasingly in demand for biofuels."

Meanwhile, as the supply of the raw material diminishes, millions of new consumers in the developing world are becoming addicted to the sweet energy-fix at the end of the processing chain. "Chocolate consumption is increasing faster than cocoa production – and it's not sustainable," Tony Lass, chairman of the Cocoa Research Association, told the annual conference of Britain's Academy of Chocolate last month.

Despite price rises on the trading floor, precious little reaches the smallholders who make up 95 per cent of growers, according to Mr. Lass, a former Cadburys trader and ethical sourcing advisor who has co-authored a book on the cocoa industry.

"These smallholders earn just 80 cents a day," he says. "So there is no incentive to replant trees when they die off, and to wait up to five years for a new crop, and no younger generation around to do the replanting. The children of these African cocoa farmers, whose life expectancy is only 56, are heading for the cities rather than undertake backbreaking work for such a small reward."

This graph, from UNCTAD, is data from 2005/2006 on cocoa beans production--the share of the producing countries.  Note the importance of the two neighboring West African countries

A contrast to this geography is the geography of consumption of cocoa.

As one might hypothesize, poor people don't eat a whole lot of chocolates nor do they drink chocolate milk by the gallons.

The following chart explains it all:

I would not mind paying, for instance, a special tax every time I buy a candy bar if I can be guaranteed that the money will go directly to the cocoa producing farmers who engage in this labor-intensive activity for which their monetary rewards are low.

Underestimating Africa

If only I had seen this map of Africa even a week earlier ... in a quick overview of Africa, I showed students in one of my classes a comparison of the physical areas of the Democratic Republic of Congo and those of Germany, France, Slovakia and Oregon.  I know for sure I saw quite a few eyes waking up to the realization that if Congo itself is that big, then the continent is HUGE. I will show them this map even if it is the case that next week's discussions have nothing to do with Africa.

It is unfortunate that the university where I teach is like most colleges and universities that continue to remain Euro-centric in what we teach.  Everything from literature to the social sciences is mostly about Europe and North America, with a little bit about South and Central America. It is pathetic, for instance, that the history department at my university offers more courses about Slovakia and the Balkans than about Africa and its countries.

This term, for instance, there is not a single class about Africa in History.  Perhaps all the African history is finished by the time a freshman completes HST 104: World History?  Plenty of Europe. Same story in Political Science. Sociology is still dealing with the dead and cremated Communism, while the alive Africa is neglected. 
Nothing in my own department either.

The result is that Anthropology is the only place where students might encounter Africa. I would not be surprised if the courses there then end up reinforcing the stereotypes of Africa.

Awful!

We are committing some serious crimes in higher education.  I, too, stand accused :(