Summer 2012: The Farm

GLOBALISTSummer 2012 / Vol. 12, Issue 4

The Yale

Disappearing Bees 16 * Crops on the Rooftops 30 * The Keepers of the Seeds 22

The Farm

3

We don’t always know what we’re eating. Whether we’re grabbing a Big Mac at Mc-Donald’s or a cup of fair trade coffee at the local coffee shop, our food comes from somewhere and holds its own history. Global corporate food enterprises and local-

growing organic farmers alike face enormous challenges along the chain of food production and trade. Every new fad diet advertisement, every wine and cheese pairing at the start of a four-course dinner, and every late night slice of greasy pizza is a part of a complex web of food, agriculture, and farming worldwide.

In the Globalist’s fourth and final issue of the 2011-2012 school year, our reporters are tack-ling this web, one grain of rice or coffee bean at a time. Aliyya Swabby’s feature investigates the issue of illegal bushmeat hunting in Ecuador, while Aaron Gertler’s snappy reporting tells a story of a strange worldwide phenomenon of bees dying out by the thousands. Sampada KC’s article on the presence of the agrobusiness giant in Nepal reveals a fundamental tension in global agricultural development between the public and private sectors, and Emily Hong’s sen-sitive look at the decline of the French local farming tradition tells a story of what happens to the little guys when corporations are so global.

As always, this issue of the Globalist also features a number of off-theme pieces. Rae Ellen Bichell’s piece on the decline of an indigenous language in Panama takes the reader deep into a culture facing the remnants of a colonial linguistic heritage, and Marissa Dearing investigates the caste politics behind the Indian party system, shedding light on the longstanding systemic roots responsible for a messy national politics.

I have been incredibly proud and honored to serve as Editor-in-Chief of the Globalist this year, and it has been my greatest pleasure to see the magazine continue to grow; many of our new freshmen and sophomore writers are ascending to positions on the editorial board in the coming year, and many more will continue to write and blog from all around the world this summer. The Globalist will set out on its annual reporting trip this May, sending 20 writers and editors to explore Chile for two weeks and to research the material for the first issue of the fall. I hope that you will continue your faithful readership of this magazine, and follow us on the web this summer at www.tyglobalist.org, where we will be blogging about our experiences in Chile as well as our various adventures from all other corners of the world.

I am confident and excited to pass on leadership of the Globalist to Diana Saverin, who I know will serve as an energetic and visionary leader of this magazine. Thank you all for read-ing this year, and I am proud to present the final issue of the 2011-2012 school year: THE FARM.

Warmly,

Sanjena SathianEditor-in-Chief, The Yale Globalist

3LETTER FROM THE EDITOR www.tyglobalist.org

ON THE COVER:The many nationalities of a meal.

(Graphics by Jay Pabarue and Anisha Suterwala)

Journalism advisory BoardSteven Brill, Yale Dept. of English

Nayan Chanda, Director of Publications, MacMillan Center

Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, Foreign AffairsJef McAllister, Time Magazine

Nathaniel Rich, The Paris ReviewFred Strebeigh, Yale Dept. of English

academic advisory BoardHarvey Goldblatt, Professor of Medieval

Slavic Literature, Master of Pierson College

Donald Green, Director, Institution for Social and Policy Studies

Charles Hill, Yale Diplomat-in-ResidenceIan Shapiro, Director, MacMillan Center Ernesto Zedillo, Director, Yale Center for

the Study of Globalization

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click the Subscribe link in the upper right corner.

Editor-in-ChiefSanjena Sathian

Managing Editors

Jeffrey Dastin, Nikita Lalwani, Charlotte Parker, Adele Rossouw

Associate EditorsMarissa Dearing, Cathy Huang, Diana Saverin, Emily Ullmann, Maggie Yellen

Copy Editor

TaoTao Holmes

Production & Design EditorsJay Pabarue, Anisha Suterwala

Managing Editor for OnlineRaisa Bruner

Director of Online DevelopmentLauren Hoffman

Executive DirectorJessica Shor

Publisher

Jason Toups

Directors of DevelopmentConrad Lee, Margaret Zhang

Events Coordinator

Julie Kim

GLOBALISTAn Undergraduate Magazine of

International AffairsSummer 2012 / Vol. 12, Issue IV

www.tyglobalist.org

The Yale

Pictures from CreativeCommons used under Attribution Noncommercial license.

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/

This magazine is published by students of Yale College. Yale University is not responsible for its contents.

Send comments, questions, and letters to the editor to [email protected].

Editors-at-LargeRae Ellen Bichell, Jeffrey Kaiser, Catherine

Osborn, Diego Salvatierra

Editors EmeritiRaphaella Friedman, Uzra Khan, Sibjeet Mahapatra, Angela

Ramirez, Eli Markham, Alexander Krey, Sophie Broach

5TABLE OF CONTENTSwww.tyglobalist.org

CONTENTSSummer 2012 / Vol . 12 , Issue 4

FOCUS: The Farm

The Yale Globalist is a member of Global21, a network of student-run international affairs magazines at premier universities around the world.

A CONVERSATION WITH7 | William Trubridge

The world’s strangest sport.By Seth Kolker

GLIMPSES8 | Private Education Goes Public

Educating an expatriate community.By Aahan Bhojani

FEATURES9 | Losing Words

A tribe struggles to find its voice. By Rae Ellen Bichell

12 | The Age of the Elephant Caste conflict in India transforms politics. By Marissa Dearing

7

26

34

19

16 | Silent SwarmA mysterious disease kills bees worldwide.

By Aaron Gertler

18 | Arresting Monsanto in KathmanduA future for Monsanto and Nepal? By Sampada KC

19 | Boricua RoastWorld-famous coffee is threatened.By Diego Salvatierra

22 | Letter from... ChileMapuche women care for local farms.By Diana Saverin

24 | Mange Bien!A French pastoral tradition is on the decline.By Emily Hong

26 | GameAn illegal meat trade engulfs the Ecuadorean rainforest.By Aliyya Swaby

30 | Farmer on the RoofA new kind of urban farming.By Ashley Wu

31 | The Road to RiceThe cost of feeding a country.By Jessica Shor

34 | Back to the GrassrootsIndia’s new take on rural development.By Daniel Gordon

Q: How dangerous is free diving?

A: This is a question that pops up all the time—but free diving doesn’t have to be of any danger at all if it’s done with adequate safety. No one has ever died dur-ing a competition, or during training that has the same safety systems as a competi-tion. Most of the mortalities have been in the sled disciplines, where you go down in the water on a weighted sled like an anvil, and then come back up with a balloon. But that’s more of a stunt than an actual free dive.

Q: How do you train?

A: I do a lot of yoga and other dry training exercises to prepare for the dives. At the depths I’m going to my lungs col-lapse from the pressure, and at that point I can’t exhale any air from my lungs. That means that for the second half of the dive I’m not going to be able to equalize by exhaling against my ears, so I need to take air into my mouth earlier in the dive and store it all in my mouth. Then I use my tongue to push that air from my mouth into the middle ear.

Q: How did you get into free diving?

A: When I was 18 months old my family sold our house in the north of England to buy a boat; we lived on the boat until I was ten. So the water’s just always been a natural place for me to be, and free diving is the most natural expression of that.

The first time I did a dive purely for the depth itself probably happened when I was eight. My family was living in Vanuatu, and my brother and I had this thing where you had to swim down to the bottom of the ocean and grab a stone or a handful of sand and bring it up to the surface to prove you’d been down. We got to I think 45 or 50 feet with no idea of proper technique, and very rudimentary equipment.

It wasn’t until I was 22 that I actually found out about the sport of free diving. I was planning a trip to Central America at the time, so I bought a bunch of free diving equipment and spent three months in the water every day; that’s where I got hooked on the sport.

Q: How do you see the sport changing in the next few years?

A: The growth is probably the big-gest change. I also think there’s a shift away from the stunts and into a more pure and refined athletic discipline. I hope this continues—it would give free diving more of a chance to be accepted as a main-stream sport instead of being seen as an extreme thing. Perhaps even in the future one or two of the disciplines might be ac-cepted into the Olympics, if it did grow to that scale. It really is the purest expres-sion of human aquatic potential and what we can do under the water, so it deserves recognition as an important aquatic sport.

Q: Why do you do it?

A: For me it’s just the pure novelty of the experience, how different free diving

is to anything else that you encounter in your day-to-day life. When you’re in the water it’s very hard to have any thoughts that are of the future or of the past, any-thing outside of what you’re doing in that present moment.

When we hold our breath it’s almost like a suspension of time: you don’t have that natural rhythm of breath to show you that time is passing. And it’s an escape from gravity as well; there are no strong forces on the body, no particular distinc-tion between any of the directions. There’s almost no sound, and all the lights are muted, and all of that combined gives you the chance to go more inside of yourself without any stimuli coming in.

A friend of mine used to say that a scuba diver dives to look around, while a free diver dives to look inside. All of those reasons together make it a joyful kind of escape from what we experience in the rest of our lives.

SETH KOLKER ’14 is an Ethics, Politics & Economics Major in Jonathan Edwards College.

Contact him at [email protected].

7www.tyglobalist.org A CONVERSATION WITH

William Trubridge holds the world record in free div-ing. For a living, he treads water at the surface of the ocean, takes a big gulp of air, and proceeds to dive straight down more than 360 feet without any equip-ment to assist him. Then, he comes back to the sur-face without taking a breath. Free diving has grown in numbers and in infamy, becoming an extreme sport of global prominence. seTH KolKer reports.

Q & A

A Conversation with William Trubridge

(Courtesy Igor Liberti)

ver the past decade, Dubai has come to be known as the Rome of modern Asian-cities, a city built of glitzy skyscrapers, manicured lawns, expansive shop-ping malls, and celebrity-

full hotels. Regarded for its impressive growth and diversification away from oil, Dubai has established itself as a model for other developing and resource-rich cities. Beyond the glitter and economic strength, the city’s evolution from barren desert to bustling metropolis has led to the develop-ment of a unique education system.

Private schools, known in most devel-oped countries for their high tuition fees and elitist environments, have the oppo-site connotation in Dubai. Dubai’s munici-pality sees the private education sector as an industry that both creates investment opportunity and possesses social value. The UAE government, in fact, has recog-nized the private sector as more effective than itself at running the country’s educa-tion system. Because the state opens pub-lic schools only to Emirati nationals, the

entire expatriate community, constituting over 80 percent of Dubai’s population, has to rely on private education.

And these expat students do not at-tend any ordinary private schools. What distinguishes Dubai’s private education system from others around the world is the diversity of its students and income levels to which it caters. Through differ-ent pricing schemes, fee structures, and types of schools, over ten private education providers have made high quality private education accessible to most of Dubai’s ex-patriate community. These providers cater to around 88 percent of Dubai’s student population and offer twelve different inter-national curriculums across the city’s 150 private schools. Over 88 percent of Dubai’s students are enrolled in private schools that teach 12 different international curric-ulums. Dubai is a test case for private en-terprises, which are increasingly filling the gaps left by the government’s social policy.

Dubai’s population demographic is one of the main forces that steers its schools to-wards a private education system. With a wide socioeconomic spectrum represented

in the city from millionaires to migrant la-borers, Dubai does not boast a low cost of living. As a result, the student population in Dubai is comprised largely of students from upper-low to high-income households that are willing to pay slightly higher fees for education. The international mix and relative affluence of Dubai’s student popu-lation make a privatized education system well suited to the city.

Access to these high quality schools in Dubai is being continually expanded. As events in the Middle East have pushed investors to realize the power of youth populations, capital has increasingly been directed towards private sector education. Ahmed Badreldin, a Senior Partner at Abraaj Capital, the region’s largest private equity firm, spoke about the high growth potential for private education in Dubai. The city’s overwhelmingly expatriate com-munity has created increasing demand for international schools since 2000. “A lucra-tive niche opportunity for investment [in private sector education] has arisen,” he explained––one that will grow between 10 to 15 percent each year.

An expanding privatized education sys-tem could have positive implications for youth in Dubai. More high quality schools in the city mean more educated citizens. The hope of many in the city is that talent might more easily be created, retained, and perhaps even exported to other countries in the Middle East as the private sector grows. What remains to be seen, however, is whether the private system is an imple-mentable model for the rest of the region’s developing cities. In Dubai, the model has shown how a government can allow the free market’s invisible hand to work to its benefit, how investors can create change through a high growth market, and how entrepreneurs can be inspired to contrib-ute to the global knowledge economy.

AAHAN BHOJANI ’14 is a an Economics and Political Science double major in Ezra Stiles College. Contact him at [email protected].

88 the yale globalist: summer 2012GLIMPSE

OBy Aahan Bhojani

Private Education Goes Public

Dubai’s iconic skyline as shown from one of its many resorts. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

9www.tyglobalist.org FEATURE

he community of Siekin looks like the Garden of Eden. In Panama in the jungle, the thatch huts that come up off the ground on stilts are surrounded by big, leafy trees with coco-

nuts, cacao and coffee beans, jackfruits, avocados, lemons and oranges, guava, and passion fruit dripping off of them. Tou-cans and flocks of white herons fly over-head. Pumas prowl the forest. Even the stinkbugs are impressive, with shells of Halloween colors and each at the size of a quarter.

“This is the heart of the world,” said Agustin “Tito” Concepcion Santana, a 47-year-old farmer and teacher who lives in Siekin. When he was a teenager, it took him and his grandfather two days to make the trip from the closest town to their

home, pulling their dugout canoe against strong rapids with bamboo poles and often their own bodies.

I was there because I wanted to hear something rare and dying––Naso, an en-dangered language only spoken fluently by about 500 of the 3,500 people world-wide who identify as ethnic Nasos. The language used to be part of a family of languages spoken from Honduras to Co-lombia, but is now only spoken in isolated pockets of Central America. I arrived at the start of a birthday party.

Entering the house, lifted about five feet off the ground by palm tree trunks and covered in palm leaf thatching, I saw many faces. There was Rufina Gamarra Santana, the former Naso queen. There was Tito’s mother, a handful of aunts and uncles, about a dozen grandkids running around the house, and… Dora the Explor-

er. The main room was decked out with the popular American cartoon character, who happened to be the star of the six-year-old birthday girl’s favorite television show.

In the United States, the cute Nick-elodeon character with a pink T-shirt teaches native English speakers words in Spanish, a Spanish meant to foster pride in being Latina. In each episode, Dora asks her viewers to help her find her way as she wanders through a backdrop of blue mountains and palm trees that look like they’ve been cut from construction paper.

In the Amistad jungle, Dora speaks a different kind of Spanish. There, it’s the language of the invaders. When the Span-ish conquistadores arrived in the 17th century, the Naso had been speaking their language for thousands of years. Over the next centuries, Spanish brought more than men in boats searching for gold––

TRufina Gamarra Santana, the first female queen of the Naso tribe, sits on the banks of the Teribe River in Panama with her granddaughter and son, Agustin “Tito” Concepcion, who helped translate the New Testament into Naso. (Osborn/TYG)

At the “Heart of the World,” a language starts to lose its pulse.

By Rae Ellen Bichell

Losing Words

they brought diseases that decimated the Naso, missionaries who converted and re-settled the tribes, the United Fruit Compa-ny factories stamped with the face of Chiq-uita Banana, and hordes of workers from a variety of ethnic and linguistic back-grounds. Lately, it’s brought a series of government hydroelectric projects. Each phase of development, always occurring in Spanish, has delivered a major blow to the people and their surroundings––but espe-cially to their language.

Even in Seikin, one of the most isolated of the 12 Naso communities, children not only know who Dora is, but also love her. It may not seem like it, but Spanish and Naso are engaged in an invisible battle of the tongues. The kids running around with the birthday hats on are speaking Spanish. So far, Dora is winning.

We’re used to hearing about ani-mals that are about to die out. From the lynx to the sea turtle,

biologists estimate that up to half of pres-ently existing species may become extinct by 2100. Languages are dying faster.

Linguists estimate that in the same amount of time, 97 percent of the world’s 6,500 currently existing languages will likely go extinct. A language dies out about every two weeks; in the past few decades alone, Irish Gaelic, Bukhari, Yid-dish, Pennsylvania Dutch have all been placed on the “endangered language” list. UNESCO’s Atlas on Endangered Lan-guages lists about 3,000 as endangered or dying. In a world dominated by dominant tongues like Russian, Chinese, English, and Spanish, the other ones are dropping off of our tongues as they become less and less useful in the business world and on the Internet.

Naso is going quickly. “It’s leaving as fast as a bus that goes 80 kilometers per hour,” said Tito. He and his family are es-pecially worried.

“What would you lose?” I asked. “Everything,” said Eleuterrio Gamarra,

a 67-year-old farmer, Tito’s neighbor. After the birthday party, he and a few others gathered in another thatch roof house to talk. Gamarra is one of about 500 people who speak Naso. When he was a boy, his father and mother did not speak a word of Spanish. Neither did his brothers and sis-

ters. Over the past 50 years, though, Span-ish has inched farther and farther into the Amistad jungle, winding its way into the vocabularies of the Naso Teribe communi-ties.

Across the room from Gamarra, perched on a bench, sat a Naso girl about 10 years old. She and Gamarra exchanged no words, maybe out of disinterest, but also because communication between the two would be fragmentary at best. Gamar-ra speaks fluent Naso, intermingled with bits and pieces of Spanish. The girl speaks fluent Spanish, and though she under-stands Naso, rarely chooses to use it.

“By the time they’re ten and they’re still not speaking it, it’s already too late,” said Joseph Errington, a linguist at Yale. When two generations have lost the abil-ity to communicate, a language is fading. In the case of Naso, it took less than one human lifespan.

According to Tito, there are some things that just don’t translate into Span-ish. “With the language you can help tell

people how things were before. How were the kings, how were the wars, who were the people. There are customs in a cul-ture, like how men and women interact intimately with each other, and those will be lost because they don’t translate.” Tito said there are some things his mother would only ever speak of in Naso, like when a girl first gets her period. “They say, don’t eat a lot of salt, don’t go in the river, don’t go out of the house for eight days. She’s not going to talk about this in Spanish. She’s going to talk about it in her language and culture.”

Marta de Gerdes, a Panamanian lin-guist who founded the Center for the Documentation of Minority Languages in Panama, said that a language can function as an emblem for a group. “Language re-placement is not simply a matter of putting one language in the place of another; for these groups it has been a matter of hav-ing to use the language of another group,” she wrote in an email. She explained that language loss compromises the cultural

1010 the yale globalist: summer 2012FEATURE

Friends and relatives gather for a birthday party at a home in Siekin, a Naso community on the Teribe River in northwestern Panama. (Osborn/TYG)


integrity of an ethnic minority group. “When such replacements take place, in most cases, the language-culture-society link cannot be severed without causing the affected group to lose aspects of its identity, and without the cultural patrimo-ny of mankind forfeiting part of its histori-cal memory.”

Rufina was the first female ruler in the Naso dynasty when she took the throne in the 1980s. She said, “A community with-out a language is not a community,” said Tito. “The young people want to dye their hair red, yellow, black. They want to put makeup and earrings on and pluck their eyebrows so they look like a little grand-mother,” said Tito. Adolfo estimates that only about a fifth of the Naso under age 18 speak the language fluently.

A slew of people have come to Naso communities to record the lan-guage, most in order to spread the

word of the Bible, and some to work on PhD dissertations.

Most of what is known and described of the Naso language is due to the persis-tent toil of Christian missionaries, who have come in over the past centuries in small but consistent groups. Tito brought

out the Bible t r a n s l a t i o n , which said in gold letters “Sbo Tjlokwo,” or “Word of God” in Naso. “The Bible says I’m from the Tower of Ba-bel, but I know I’m from here,” he said, “I was born here. God left me here. There’s a king-dom of resourc-es, a river. I can tell anyone I’m Naso. The lan-guage holds all of this.”

Even with academic lin-guists doing l a n g u a g e -

recording projects all over the world, the Bible remains one of the most powerful tools in preservation––it takes motivation and resources, and Christian missionar-ies like Andy Keener tend to match that profile well. Keener works for the Summer Language Institute, or SIL International, a Christian nonprofit devoted to language preservation. As of 2009, at least a portion of the Bible had been translated into at least 2,508 different languages. SIL Inter-national also publishes Ethnologue, which at 6,909 languages is the most extensive catalog of the world’s languages.

It took Keener and a group of five Naso orthographers 12 years to translate the New Testament and 20 percent of the Old Testament. “Given the size of the project it all happened pretty fast,” he said. “There was an understanding that the language is dwindling downriver, and even in the most isolated communities like Siekin. That made everyone realize that if we didn’t work fast enough, we’d lose it.” Since then, missionaries with another organization have recorded audio versions as well.

Over the course of translating the Bi-ble, Tito decided that he wants to teach his birth language to Naso schoolchildren. Most days he works on growing oranges

to sell in town, but Tito said he will come to classrooms and teach Naso if a teach-er asks him to. Until he gets certified to teach, though, he won’t ever be paid to do so. Despite a promise to provide bilingual education to Panamanian school children living on reservations, the government has done little to follow through. Even if they did, Keener says in an average year Naso children likely only go to school 80 days out of the year.

The hydroelectric project might be the nail in the coffin. “The current king isn’t interested in the language,” said Tito, “He’s interested only in the hydroelectric dam.” However you look at it, a fractured community can’t keep a dying language breathing, and certainly not if the very fig-urehead of Naso culture is not interested in it.

Spanish is winning.

“That’s the language that kids want to learn because it’s bound up

in the image of the city, which for kids in the rural peripheries is so attractive. They have televisions and radios, so that gives them this little window into the larger world,” said Errington.

Even Tito, who is the most gung-ho about the Naso language from within the community, doesn’t speak it to his young daughters. Keener said that’s pretty com-mon. “They think that if they don’t insist that their children speak Spanish, they won’t. They see it as a way up. If you speak Spanish, you do have more opportunities.”

Ultimately, it all comes back to the kids. “Something happens,” said Errington, “It’s something in the heads of those kids. It’s not just a matter of the political, economic, or demographic stuff. Ultimately it has to be something about heads and hearts.”

What’s in the hearts of those kids? It might be Dora. I think back to the birthday party, with the dozen kids running around, wearing Dora the Explorer birthday hats. I’m not sure what exactly is in their hearts, but I do know what was in their hands: a baseball bat. With the sounds of the jungle rain pouring down outside, they used it to beat a Dora the Explorer piñata to shreds.

RAE ELLEN BICHELL ’12 is an Anthro-pology major in Davenport College. Contact her at [email protected].

Rufina Gamarra Santana, the first female ruler of the Naso tribe, inspects her grand-daughter’s piñata winnings on the banks of the Teribe River. “Teribe” is the Spanish name of the river. The original Naso name Tjër Di, or “Grandmother Water,” the giver of life and guiding spiritual force of the Naso ancestors. (Osborn/TYG)

1212 the yale globalist: summer 2012FEATURE

midst the swarming crowds of Uttar Pradesh tower are hundreds upon hundreds of colossal stone and bronze elephants. Al-though the sheer scale and spread of this super-sized

herd might suggest elephants here en-joy ceremonial reverence, the statues are neither sacred nor traditional. They are political mascots for the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), a lower-caste party whose winning 2007 campaign slogans included “If you don’t vote for elephant, you will be history!” and “Upper castes must be hu-miliated!”

The elephants are not alone. BSP’s leader, Mayawati, who is so famous she goes by a single name, is a Dalit, a member of the “Untouchable” caste. Historically the pariah caste of Indian society, Dalits are prohibited from marrying, living, eat-ing, walking, touching, and even making eye contact with those of higher castes and physically barred from temples, pub-lic wells, upper-caste neighborhoods, and other public areas. They have faced dis-crimination in nearly every sphere of daily life. Before losing power in last February’s state elections, Mayawati strove to over-come this corrosive legacy, using millions of dollars’ worth of state funds to build statues of Dalit heroes throughout Uttar Pradesh (UP), many in her own image. India’s largest and most populous state is as notorious for its extreme poverty as it is for its caste violence, and Mayawati’s flamboyant tenure generated immense controversy. From channeling state funds to extravagant projects promoting lower-caste interests to sporting outsized neck-laces made of rupee notes worth between $400,000 and $2,000,000, Mayawati seemed to continually contradict the political in-terests she championed.

Last February, Mayawait’s elephants disappeared under endless sheets of pink and orange plastic by order of UP’s Elec-tion Commission, which feared the impos-

ing symbols might inappropriately influ-ence voters’ decisions in the upcoming state elections. The controversy surround-ing caste and corruption, far from unique to Mayawati or UP, has been raging across India for the past decade. The multi-col-ored elephants of Uttar Pradesh seem to be just the latest red flags in the future of the world’s largest democracy.

Not all are convinced, however, that such zeal for a caste-specific party is so ominous. “It is not grotesque. It is not ab-normal. It is not absurd to see that Indians are still voting on caste lines,” said Profes-sor Priyankar Upadhyaya, the UNESCO Chair for Peace and Intercultural Under-standing, and long-time resident of UP. Upadhyaya believes recent caste parties like the BSP in Uttar Pradesh have done much to give lower-caste groups a voice and dignity long denied them. Despite the constitutional prohibition of lower-caste discrimination decades ago, as recently as 1999, killing squads in the neighbor-ing state of Bihar took hundreds of Dalit lives. Smaller-scale caste violence has per-sisted even today, often involving police, judicial, and official complicity decried by rural and urban Indians alike. Pervasive

discrimination continues, denying Dalits access to adequate education, jobs, and social services, not to mention political representation.

But in recent years, caste parties have actually been a way four many of India’s underrepresented and severely under-privileged to force the state to listen to their concerns and improve their daily lives. Upadhyaya, for one, believes that Mayawati transformed Dalit identity in the UP.

“Dalits who, ten years back, would not easily display their identity as Dalit—now they come forward and say that they are Dalits,” said Upadhyaya.

Such a transformation is in part at-tributable to the very programs for which Mayawati is so maligned in the Indian press: as Upadhyaya affirmed, prominent Dalit symbols in public places have helped establish equality as a new societal norm. Mayawati also worked to solidify her con-stituency’s protection through laws that make it much more difficult to exploit ru-ral Dalits for their land or publicly abuse lower castes without facing a weighty pun-ishment.

In the last round of UP elections, how-

A

The Age of the Elephant

Political parties in India engage in constant information war to gain votes. (Courtesy Lenin Raghuvanshi)

The politics of caste in Uttar Pradesh

By Marissa Dearing


ever, the BSP was soundly defeated, in part due to the uproar surrounding May-awati’s flashy opportunism, according to Lenin Raghuvanshi, a Dalit rights activist, participant in UP’s 2012 Election Watch, and cofounder of the People’s Vigilance Committee on Human Rights.

Though BSP’s loss could signal the decline of caste-driven politics, many re-main unconvinced. But caste will likely continue to play a major role in determin-ing how Indians vote. Caste is deeply in-grained in Indian society, and has been a basis of political identity. Many voters as-sume elected members of their own caste, a sort of “extended family” as Upadhyaya termed it, are most likely to help them get into schools, find adequate jobs, and re-ceive the social services they need. “Peo-ple [just] go back to their caste shell,” said Upadhyaya.

Many, like Raghuvanshi, hold caste re-sponsible for India’s rampant corruption; voters often support candidates of their own caste despite blatant corruption or incompetence because they believe that once in office, co-caste representatives will reward them with benefits like jobs or college admission. The resulting impunity pervades Indian politics: In UP, almost half of all members of the legislative assem-bly have criminal cases declared against them, and the state’s newly elected chief minister has strong familial ties to politi-

cal power in the region.Despite a continuing corrupt political

system, UP’s elections suggest times are changing in India. Reports on election returns indicate some Dalits chose to vote against their lower-caste champion May-awati to protest her corruption and ex-travagance, and there is reason to believe such shifts away from purely caste-based voting may run deeper than this election in this state this year.

“Caste took a little bit of a back seat,” said Gaurav Saigal, a principal corre-spondent for the Hindustan Times. Saigal believes this switch is due in part to the

strengthening of Indian civil society.

In a country where everything from a driver’s license to a res-taurant permit to avoiding wrong-ful arrest requires a bribe, Indians’ greater capacity to organize, inform, and participate through social me-dia like Facebook, Twitter, and per-sonal blogs has resulted in widespread insistence on gov-ernment transparency and accountability.

“Civil society… made the issue of cor-ruption a grassroots issue,” Saigal said. “85 percent of the electorate could under-stand that [corruption] is a word that af-fects them in their daily lives.”

Indians are demanding more than the transactional status quo from their gov-ernments, and Upadhyaya believes that eventually, real evidence of good gover-nance may eventually draw people away from electoral caste lines (as has hap-pened in the state of Bihar under Nitish Kumar). Pressure for fundamental change in India is mounting.

Activist Raghuvanshi sees that change taking a radical form in UP: “a new Dalit revolution.” In villages and cities across UP, Indians are now rising up against the caste system and joining a new Dalit movement, a revolution not restricted to Untouchables, but open to all opposed to the caste system.

“Without eliminating [caste] in this country, how are you going to eliminate corruption in the society?” Raghuvanshi asked. “It is the most corrupt system in the world.”

Increasingly, activists from higher castes, like Raghuvanshi, have been going into villages to wash Dalits’ feet, eat with them, and raise awareness of political and social issues in hopes of erasing caste di-visions and decades of marginalization (largely uncovered by the Indian press, he added). Even over his lifetime, Raghu-vanshi has already seen a great deal of change.

“When I was a kid… in an upper caste family, I never [saw] Dalits coming to our

marriages [or] to eat with us, but now [it’s] happening all the time,” he said.

At the same time, the lower-caste poor are working to transform and empower themselves through modernization. Ac-cording to Raghuvanshi, the younger generation is now increasingly relying on the Internet to stay informed and build communication networks. Dalits in rural villages and urban slums have used ra-dio, television, and SMS text messaging to learn about and discuss events beyond the immediate locale; some have used SMS networks to broadcast news of local human rights abuses to activists like Ra-ghuvanshi. “They’ve changed themselves very dramatically,” he said.

For Raghuvanshi, this new, inclusive, and unified Dalit revolution represents the best hope for the future of Indian de-mocracy, calling it “the force [that’s] going to change the feudal system of India and [help India] join the real global democ-racy.”

After decades of politics rooted in caste divisions, the foundations of Indian de-mocracy are shifting. In the aftermath of the recent state elections, leaders of sever-al major parties in UP have acknowledged that the caste system has been the root of rampant discrimination and corruption in India, and increasingly, the political con-sensus is that its divisions must be ended. Perhaps UP’s notorious elephants are not stony omens about the rising tyranny of caste but milestones marking how far de-mocracy in India has come.

MARISSA DEARING ’14 is a Political Science and Humanities double major in Berkeley College.

Contact her at [email protected].

“Without eliminating [caste]

in this country, how are you

going to eliminate corruption

in the society?”

(Graphics by Anisha Suterwala)

We’re never eating just what’s in our back-yard anymore—the agricultural industry is truly global. Trace the lines to get a look at what the global FARM really looks like.

We are what we eat,

and we’re eating the world

ix years ago, the bees stopped waking up. As win-ter turned to spring, bee-keepers across the United States found their dormant hives devastated. Some lost 90 percent of their

colonies, and the insects that remained were weak and listless. The United States Department of Agriculture leapt into ac-tion, but the losses persisted; according to 2009 and 2010 reports, the American bee population dropped by 29 percent and 34 percent respectively.

By winter 2007, the catastrophe had spread to the nations of Europe. The Na-tional Association of German Beekeepers reported a quarter of all hives dead, and It-aly lost nearly half its colonies. The inter-national media quickly christened the cri-sis “colony collapse disorder” (CCD), but beekeepers resisted, claiming the phrase glossed over the diverse causes behind the industry’s devastation. Was the para-site Nosema creeping into colonies and snuffing out the swarms? Had the Varroa destructor mite annihilated insects vital to the pollination of countless crops, from cranberries to canola oil? Or were human farming techniques and pesticides primar-ily to blame?

The pesticide problem, though not the sole cause of bee deaths, is easier to con-trol than the spread of parasites and has become the main focus of several Euro-pean governments. Neonicotinoids, the world’s most commonly-used class of in-secticide, came into use in the early ’90s to protect Europe’s corn, rapeseed, and other plants, but suspicion regarding its impact on pollinators wasn’t far behind. Observa-

tional studies showed bees in areas heavy with insecticide residue growing strange-ly apathetic; they failed to care for devel-oping young and got lost trying to find their way back to their hives from nectar-gathering expeditions. Liona Rowan, an organic beekeeper from Texas, described the insecticide’s effects as a kind of “bee AIDS—weakening their natural immuni-ties so they can’t resist many of the not-so-deadly problems that naturally occur in bee populations.”

France banned the application of imi-dacloprids, one substance in the neonic-otinoid class, to sunflower and corn seeds before 2000, and Slovenia followed suit in 2003, but Germany, where Bayer, the world’s foremost pesticide manufacturer, is headquartered, didn’t do the same un-til 2008. However, each nation continues to permit the spraying of grown plants—

precisely where bees prefer to forage. Bayer representatives didn’t respond to inquiries, but their website claims there has been “no demonstrated effect” of neo-nicotinoids on bee health. In 2011, multiple American and European studies claimed otherwise.

The United Kingdom hasn’t yet re-stricted the use of neonicotinoids. But in March 2011, as evidence piled up from France to the Netherlands that such in-secticides made bees far more vulnerable to the fungal disease nosema, Professor Robert Watson of the British Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs ordered an investigation of published re-search into the substance. A year later, the March 2012 issue of Science published a pair of studies on neonicotinoids, one of which came from Dave Goulson, a biology professor at Britain’s University of Stirling

the yale globalist: summer 201216 FOCUS: THE FARM

Silent Swarm

By Aaron Gertler

Across the globe, bees are dying.

S

(Graphic by Jay Pabarue)

www.tyglobalist.org 17FOCUS: THE FARM

who claims that he may have “put the nail in the coffin” for the chemicals. In a press release, Goulson showed that exposure to even low levels of neonicotinoids reduces the production of new queen bumble-bees by up to 85 percent. Since queens are responsible for founding new hives in springtime, multiple seasons of insecticide exposure will seriously diminish bumble-bee populations in cultivated areas, leav-ing fewer around to pollinate. Rosemary Mason, an independent observer who runs a nature reserve in the UK, feared even greater losses to come. “Unless we get [ne-onicotinoids] banned,” she told me, “we’ve no hope. Biodiversity is being hammered.”

Another deadly pattern emerged from one of Goulson’s earlier studies (2004-10). Wild bees normally spend most of the

year gathering nectar from every flower-ing plant in the vicinity. When bees live in monocultured fields, however, only one form of flower is available; it blooms for a few short weeks, bees enter a feeding fren-zy and breed at full capacity, then the flow-ers close and starvation ensues. Whatever bees remain are easy prey for parasites and diseases. Goulson thinks this issue might be solved easily by devoting a frac-tion of farmland to flowers to leave colo-nies as robust as ever.

Goulson hopes to channel his fellow Britons’ affinity for nature into another lifeline for Britain’s bumblebees. A passion for the outdoors has already convinced 6,000 civilians to answer Goulson’s call for “keen amateur bee enthusiasts” to patrol their stretch of countryside and report lo-cal bee activity to the Bee Conservation Trust, an organization Goulson founded in 2010 to track colony health around the country. Thanks to programs like the Trust and the BeeBase program of the British Beekeeping Association (BBKA), scientists in the UK know more about their nation’s bumblebee population than ever before. However, unless researchers keep pace with the swarm of other threats

to colonies, information alone won’t stop the dying.

One such threat is the parasitic mite Varroa, the most prominent factor behind the tripling of Ontario’s death rate in 2007, which began plaguing Canada shortly af-ter the U.S. collapse. The mite worries Rod Scarlett, Executive Director of the Cana-dian Honey Council, not only because it can wipe out hives in a week, but also be-cause of its incredible adaptability. “We al-ways need to have a new treatment in the queue,” he said, since the wandering hab-its of bees allow chemical-resistant mites to spread quickly from hive to hive.

Until recently, a lack of attention to re-search also plagued Britain. Tim Lovett, former president of the BBKA, called the relatively small market for bee treatments

“a great handicap” to the timely creation of new medicines. Although bees them-selves don’t bring riches to their keepers, they contribute roughly 150 billion dol-lars in annual value to global agriculture, with nearly half a billion for just eight of the dozens of British crops they pollinate, according to Lovett. The British govern-ment’s contribution to bee research, a mere thousandth of that annual total, in-censed the nation’s beekeepers and drove hundreds of them to march on Downing Street in their trademark white isola-tion suits to present a petition signed by 140,000 nervous Britons at the height of the crisis, in November 2008.

The British government’s resulting pledge—nine million pounds for research and development—funded Goulson’s work and that of many more apiologists. But studies that outline the causes of death fail to propose any policy-based holistic solution to the shrinking bee population. Mass bee die-offs have been seen since be-fore pesticides came into wide use; accord-ing to University of Delaware entomology professor Deborah Delaney, “fall dwindle” and “disappearing disease” predate CCD by decades.

Delaney also admits that conditions outside the wild are rougher than ever before. “Some of the really scary things from the 1950s have been banned…but this is the first time we’re seeing hive walls themselves actually permeated with chemicals.” Britain’s actions may be too little, too late; the UK’s overall bee popu-lation has been halved since 2006, and the 2006 numbers were half those of the early 1900s. Each die-off is more severe than the last, and the most recent crisis involved more factors in more countries than ever before. After the next wave of mutant mites and opportunistic diseases, will there be any bees left to save Britain’s broad beans and Canada’s canola?

If, as Mason and Rowan think, bees be-come mostly unusable as pollinators on pesticide-soaked land, the consequences will be dire. Without bees’ activity, the BBKA estimates that we’d lose a third of the food we consume daily. Common plant species wouldn’t go extinct, but prices would skyrocket for canola and sunflower oil, fruit, vegetables, nuts, coffee, the list goes on. Certain popular crops, however, rely on pesticides to thrive as much as others rely on bees. Wheat, rice, and corn don’t require outside pollinators and ac-count for the majority of global calories. Suspending pesticide usage on the world’s most productive farmland could lead to billions of dollars in lost crops. Pesticide use in Sichuan, China, for example, led to total bee extinction, forcing farmers to hand-pollinate their apple trees in a pro-cess far less efficient than letting bees do the work. Farmers lose either way.

If bees are someday relegated to organ-ic gardens and sheltered honey produc-tion, however, humanity, as always, will find a way to cope. This February, a team of Harvard engineers revealed their new-est creation: an assembly-line process that churns out bumblebee-sized flying robots. The first possible use listed for the ma-chines: “autonomously pollinating a field of crops.” In a world of unnatural plant protection and international exchange, unnatural nature might become an inevi-tability.

AARON GERTLER ’15 is in Timothy Dwight College. Contact him at [email protected].

Liona Rowan, an organic beekeeper from Texas, described the

insecticide’s effects as a kind of “bee AIDS—weakening their

natural immunities so they can’t resist many of the not-so-

deadly problems that naturally occur in bee populations.”

the yale globalist: summer 2012FOCUS: THE FARM18

onsanto, the U.S.-based GMO giant, has had its share of controversy. While a few of its admir-ers uphold the company as the world’s best hope of tackling the looming

global food crisis, its critics identify it as a corporate giant that uses science to poi-son food.

In September 2011, as part of its “Feed the Future Initiative,” USAID announced that it was facilitating a project by Mon-santo to promote hybrid maize seeds in Nepal. Street protests in the nation’s capital of Kathmandu followed the an-nouncement, and a great many debates ensued in the newspapers and across so-cial networking sites. With a population of 29 million people, of whom 3.5 million are considered moderately to severely food insecure, Nepal is in immediate need of a long term agricultural strategy that will boost agricultural yield and productiv-ity. Monsanto’s hybrid maize seeds may promise to do exactly that. But the pro-testors disagree.

The campaign against the seeds “has been more than just Monsanto bashing,” said Sabin Ninglekhu, one of the founders of “Stop Monsanto in Nepal,” the Facebook group that organized most of the protests in Kathmandu. “Our campaign questions the logic of promoting dependency among farmers in Nepal that a pact with a multi-

national company will create.”Although farmers in Nepal have been

using hybrid seeds from Monsanto and other companies for over a decade, there was no public outcry until this Septem-ber. A governmental partnership with Monsanto seems to have served as the catalyst. Ninglekhu said that if the part-nership goes ahead farmers will be forced to buy seeds from Monsanto for every planting “because Monsanto’s seeds are patented.” There are also wider fears of monoculture, destruction of heirloom va-rieties, and loss of agro-bio diversity.

But neither these allegations against hybrids nor the claims of Monsanto (or

for that matter, of any bio-tech firm), that hybrids increase yield have been warrant-ed by any conclusive independent study. However, the rejection of Monsanto is not unique to Nepal. Monsanto’s hybrid seeds have been the subject of public dissent in neighbouring India and more recently in Haiti, where farmers burnt 470 tons of

seeds donated by the company. Although the seed campaign in Nepal

has focused on criticizing USAID’s pro-posed project, it has also generated some debate regarding the alternatives to Mon-santo’s hybrid seeds. Anil Bhattarai is the founder of Ajambari Foundation, an or-ganization that has taught organic farm-ing to families in the Chitwan valley in Nepal since 1995. According to Bhattarai, “Home-grown options of organic farming that combine traditional methods and seeds with science are a superior alterna-tive.”

In the farm that Bhattarai supervises in Chitwan, Chandra Prasad Adhikari grows paddy and fish in the same field with azole as a companion plant. “The azole, with its nitrogen fixing properties, provides all the needed nitrogen for the plants while also blocking out light to pre-vent the growth of weeds,” Bhattarai said. He added, “The fish droppings add to the nutrient of the rice, additionally.” Bhatta-rai hopes that similar methods of organic farming can be made common in all of Ne-pal’s farming communities.

While such alternatives may be the an-swer to a future of sustainable agriculture in Nepal, their promise to increase agri-cultural yield in the face of a food crisis has not yet been recognized at the insti-tutional level. Gyan Chandra Acharya, the current Chair of the Global Coordination Bureau for the Least Developed Countries (LDCs), said, “In Nepal we need biotech-nology to address the challenges imposed by climate change in agriculture; we can no longer depend solely on traditional ag-ricultural methods.”

And thanks to the Monsanto deal, the future of agriculture is finally a topic of public and policy debate in Nepal. Rather than leaving the plight of the hungry at the charity of international food aid or-ganisations, Nepal is looking at ways in which its own farmers can feed the hun-gry. Nepal must integrate technology and tradition in agriculture without help from a foreign multinational corporation.

SAMPADA KC ’15 is in Morse College. Contact her at [email protected].

m

“Home-grown options of

organic farming that combine

traditional methods and seeds

with science are a superior

alternative.”

Protesters in Kathmandu object to Monsanto’s presence in the country. (Courtesy Florian Gye)

Arresting Monsanto in KathmanduBy Sampada KC

want to try Puerto Rico’s best coffee,” I told my San Juan cab driver. He drove me through the cobblestone streets of Old San Juan, the city’s colonial district, until we

reached Café Cola’o, a waterfront café. Sipping my macchiato (tangy, not too bitter) out in the warm Caribbean air, I told the barista, Josué, the two things I knew about Puerto Rican coffee: that it was one of the world’s best, and that it was in deep crisis. “It’s true,” said Josue, “…and [that’s] really sad… it’s a great coffee, great quality. [Now] there is no sense of heritage.”

Puerto Rico was once one of the world’s leading exporters of coffee, but today, for every three cups consumed on the island, two are made with imported coffee, while harvests decline yearly. I

asked Josue who would know more about the coffee crisis, and he jotted down an address. Invigorated by caffeine, I made my way to Café Poetico, one of the many artsy coffee shops filling the district’s narrow, pastel-colored streets. Classical music mixed with the scent of espresso.

Nataly Rosales, owner and founder, was eager to talk as I tasted her espresso (rich taste, fruity notes). “Yes, produc-tion is falling; people prefer to buy big foreign coffees,” she said, behind thick-rimmed glasses. “The Big Corps, big companies, brand it as Puerto Rican––

it’s often not.” But the biggest problem, she says, is a crippling labor shortage: “I’ve seen coffee pickers in the hill towns up at 5 a.m., packed into vans, spending hours under the hot sun––people don’t want to do that anymore,” she said. “Go talk to Joaquin.” She circled a street on my map. “He’s really the expert.”

Joaquín Pastor’s brew (a delicious, deep-scented espresso) was re-cently chosen as the second best

on the island by the Puerto Rico Coffee Fair. “My grandfather started the planta-tion,” he said in thickly accented Boricua Spanish, “but I began roasting my own, doing the whole vertical process.” He explained coffee’s three-stage process: Farmers grow the coffee beans, then sell them to a “beneficiador” for pro-cessing and roasted. Once “benefitted,” the beans go to distributors. For Pastor, more than manpower, the main cause of decline is low raw coffee prices.

Puerto Rico’s local Department of Ag-riculture sets the price of raw coffee. But this price has stagnated. “An almúd of coffee (about 20kg) sells for $13.65––the same misery of a price since 2005!” said Pastor. Initially designed to keep the in-dustry competitive, these price controls have become, at least according to Pas-tor, “a robbery, an arbitrage––plans to break small farmers.”

Pastor is convinced that if coffee im-ports and prices are made more flexible, the island’s coffee will thrive. “[People] will appreciate our coffee––they’ll real-ize how special it is, even compared with quality foreign competition,” he said. To understand why Puerto Rico’s coffee was of such quality, I was put in touch with Daniel Rivera, head barista for Hacienda San Pedro, a gourmet coffee plantation. I was very jittery after my four or five double espressos that day, but I sat down with Rivera for one more cup.

“Coffee is originally from Africa, and grows great in permanently warm, wet locations in the tropics,” Rivera said. “Puerto Rico is within this tropi-cal fringe, but lies at its northern edge, making its climate the coolest you can get while still allowing coffee to grow. These mild temperatures make Puerto

19FOCUS: THE FARMwww.tyglobalist.org

I

Boricua RoastCafé hopping in San Juan, tasting an endangered espresso

By Diego Salvatierra

“Don’t be surprised to see our

brands in the U.S. soon. There

are millions of Puerto Ricans

in the States, and they’ll be

happy to buy.”

This colorful alley in Old San Juan is where Joaquín Pas-tor’s café, Finca Cialitos, is located. (Salvatierra/TYG)

the yale globalist: summer 201220 FOCUS: THE FARM

Rican coffee grow slower and better, as

if cooked on a slow fire.” Café especial, or specialty coffee,

made from the highest quality beans, comprises a niche market burgeoning in the face of the island’s depressed large-scale production. Unlike large-scale “commercial” roasts, quality-controlled specialty coffees have no government

price restrictions, allowing a large profit margin.

I wondered if this was the solution for the decline, but William Mattei, presi-dent of the Agricultural Association’s coffee sector and third-generation coffee grower, is skeptical. “Specialty coffees are more select, they go through a rig-orous process, and the coffee connois-seur is willing to pay more for that,” he said. “But Puerto Rico’s coffee is going extinct, like the dinosaurs, and we can’t all survive around this little source of in-come––imagine all the dinosaurs around a tiny watering hole!” With four million consumers, Puerto Rico is not a small market, but local firms are increasingly missing out on it.

For Mattei, the problem is once again one of market inflexibility. The Puerto Rican government is the only entity that can import unprocessed coffee, and since they earn money from this, they have no incentive to lower imports or promote lo-cal production. “It’s reality,” said Mattei, “they win by importing.”

Germán Negrón, agricultural director for Puerto Rico Coffee Roasters, which sells over 80 percent of Puerto Rico’s lo-cally produced coffee, a U.S. $100 million sector, pointed to another motivation for stagnant prices. “The government views coffee as a primary necessity, and keeps prices low for consumers,” he said, noting the coffee industry only em-ploys about 20,000 people on the island, compared to the millions who buy cof-fee daily. The government balances the needs of farmers and consumers, a bal-ance now tilted towards consumers. So while prices of inputs like fertilizer and manure goes up, the price of coffee stays the same, making the industry less and less viable. “Ever since 1998,” he said, “local production has been in decline, and the past five years have seen an even steeper fall.”

“[Puerto Rico Coffee Roasters] could make more money by simply importing all our coffee––but it is our responsi-bility to keep this industry alive,” said Negrón. To do that, they have started a

Joaquín Pastor holding his Second Best Coffee in Puerto Rico award. (Salvatierra/TYG)

“But Puerto Rico’s coffee is

going extinct, like the dino-

saurs, and we can’t all survive

around this little source of

income––imagine all the dino-

saurs around a tiny watering

hole!”

massive project to plant 1,500 new acres of coffee within three years, reversing the decade-long trend of decline. “In three or four years,” said Negrón, “we hope the island can produce half of its coffee consumption.” Until the sixties, Puerto Rico exported coffee worldwide, and Negrón hopes to do so again. “Don’t be surprised to see our brands in the U.S. soon. There are millions of Puerto Ricans in the States, and they’ll be happy to buy.

Out in the countryside, though, be-yond the issues of consumption, brands, supply, and demand, the

concrete problem remains manpower. In Adjuntas, in the lush hills of central Puerto Rico, Luis Acevedo runs a small plantation. Like Mattei, he is a third-generation coffee planter, and hopes his children will inherit the farm. But that future is becoming uncertain: “There are fewer and fewer workers––no one wants to pick beans anymore,” said Ace-vedo. For the past several years, Acev-edo explained, prison inmates have been

recruited to pick beans in exchange for shorter sentences. This has allowed Ace-vedo and others to bridge some of the labor shortage at low cost, but is not a permanent solution.

As U.S. citizens, Puerto Ricans can travel freely to the mainland, and many have experienced American work en-vironments firsthand. Tough, isolated work in the hills is becoming unappeal-ing to an increasingly urban society. “Work is done with horrible transporta-tion to the fields, under the sun, under the rain,” said Mattei. “We need better shelter and better transportation for workers,” proposed Mattei. Paying for these investments is difficult with cur-rent low coffee profits, so the Agricultur-al Association turned to the government for funding. But though the government does provide subsidies, these have been cut back in recent years. “The pressure is on us, the farmers, to convince them that for the long run, they should invest in local coffee,” argued Mattei.

Puerto Rico has a coffee planting tradition of nearly three centuries, but

it is a legacy in danger of near-extinc-tion. Farmers and café owners point to different culprits, from working condi-tions to imports to prices. “Still, I’m an optimist––all we’re doing, investments, everything!” said Negrón. But even he recognized the difficulty: “Puerto Rico imports 85 percent of its entire agricul-tural consumption,” he said, noting the island’s small farming capacity.

Year to year, the decline continues, while consumption and imports grow, and only the gourmet sector is thriving. Thanks to this niche, filled by quality coffees like Pastor’s, some of the espres-sos I tasted will survive. But as Mattei feared, the island’s thousands of farmers will be left fighting for this small niche, struggling to get by on the only trickle left. As many already have, the old plan-tations will become museums of the past, in the wake of a decline as bitter as a dark espresso.

DIEGO SALVATIERRA ’13 is an Ethics, Politics & Economics in Pierson College. Con-

tact him at [email protected].


The inside of Café Poético, where classical music mixes with spoken-word poetry and the scent of espresso. (Salvatierra/TYG)

sat alone in the plaza as the thick November dusk dissolved off the stones. I was in a town in southern Chile called Curarrehue: a village of a few thousand people, mostly indigenous,

nestled at the base of a volcano-speckled valley, with gravel roads twisting through the passing farms. I watched cloud stripes on the horizon fade from electric orange to soft grey, guessing which evening wan-derer Edith Cumiquir might be. I knew her from weeks of stuttering correspon-dence that began when I found her email address on a list of Chilean organic farms. To get Internet , she has to visit the back room of a local pharmacy.

Eventually, her silver streaked black hair appeared. We linked eyes, kissed cheeks, and followed the spiral of streets from the plaza center to her home. Her dark eyes blinked deliberately from be-hind her glasses as we spoke.

Her home stood a few blocks away, a one-story house surrounded by its own rainforest: a canopy of large, leafed branches drooping under the roof and onto her porch, lined with herbs and flow-ers growing out of old tires and pots. I dropped my backpack inside, and she brought me my first mug of tea, a sugary blend with the green spines of pine nee-dles floating to the top.

That mug of tea was the first of sev-eral traditional treats Edith shared with

me. My favorite was nalka, a wide-leafed wild rhubarb plant found throughout the southern Chilean rainforest. Edith often served pickled strands of its stem drenched in sweet milk. In the kitchen, the steps for these traditional dishes fell from

her fingertips without recipes, just like the names of the area’s plants streamed from her lips as we passed them by.

Like nalka, Edith is native to southern Chile. Edith is Mapuche, the country’s most prominent indigenous group. She has lived in Curarrehue her whole life, and her ancestors have lived in the area for thousands of years.

“This is one of the original towns,” she explained to me. “We are the descendents of the first owners of the land.”

In Curarrehue, she is the president of

La Sociedad de Gastronomía y Cultivos Rayen Quimey, the Society of Food and Crops. Through this organization, she leads seven other Mapuche women from the indigenous community of Francisco Cumiquir in Curarrehue. They aim to share their Mapuche worldview through community-oriented tourism, based around, as she described it, “[their] an-cestral knowledge of gastronomy, work with sheep’s wool, and use of native me-dicinal plants.”

These eight women share ownership of a farm a few miles outside of town and a restaurant they started together, a small circular building with a stone fireplace set in the center. They specialize in tra-ditional Mapuche food and drinks. Fresh juice is particularly sought after. At a meeting one rainy afternoon, I sat by the woodstove in their restaurant kitchen, passing around maté with five of the eight women, and between turns sipping through the metal straw, they discussed their menu for the evening. The conver-sation tripped over how to make enough juice from the berries they had after cus-tomers the week before had demanded pulp-stained pitchers of raspberry juice all night.

But for Edith, preserving local knowl-edge of the land goes beyond the tasty re-wards it often offers. In the past, Trafink-tu was a practice of exchanging seeds between Mapuche neighbors or villages. Often, women had the honor of choosing

22 the yale globalist: summer 2012FOCUS: THE FARM

I

Letter from...

Chile

By Diana Saverin

“We find it impossible to

maintain our biodiversity now.

This is why the protection of

and exchange of seeds is so

important—it helps us avoid

having our biodiversity driven

by the larger market.”

Meeting the Keepers of the

Seeds

Farms like this one are home to most of the indigenous Mapuche population in Chile (Saverin/TYG)

the seeds to trade or preserve. Among other benefits, this practice conserved the biodiversity of seeds of the region. As the years went on, the practice waned. But Edith refuses to consider its obsoles-cence.

“We find it impossible to maintain our biodiversity now. This is why the protec-tion of and exchange of seeds is so impor-tant—it helps us avoid having our biodi-versity driven by the larger market,” she said.

In response, Edith and other Mapuche women from neighboring towns estab-lished a group, Las Curadoras de Semi-llas, the Keepers of Seeds, to revive this exchange to conserve local knowledge about the biodiversity of seeds. Edith thinks women have been at the center of the issue because of their unique position in Mapuche society.

“We worry more about society itself, beginning with our own families, and our children, who will continue our work of recovering the natural environment,” she remarked. “We are more integral.”

Edith believes universal health and

survival depend upon the health of in-digenous communities, the recovery of what has been forgotten, and the prioriti-zation of plant life. As a Keeper of Seeds, her work focuses on preserving the land and traditions she knows so well by main-taining natural spaces and collections of seeds, as well as planting seeds in areas where they have been lost.

Eating helps, too. Seeds deteriorate if they are not consistently planted. And continuing to grow and eat plants helps ensure that their seeds remain viable for future generations. In the past, traditions in Chile and around the world included collecting, saving, and trading a variety of seeds from one season’s successful crops while selecting specific traits to save, such as taste or durability in one region’s climate. More recently, larger seed com-panies and genetic modification have af-fected these practices. Some seed compa-nies, such as Monsanto, require farmers sign a contract to not save or sell seeds, ensuring that the farmers return as cus-tomers year after year. The company has also marketed controversial seeds with

genetic use restriction, often termed “sui-cide seeds,” that die after one season.

The fight to preserve native species is fortified in Curarrehue by the history of Trafinktu and the strong connection between Mapuche people and the land, though outcry against the homogeniza-tion and centralization of agriculture has grown louder in the debate around the fu-ture of food globally. Larger scale efforts include an 8,000 member Seed Saver’s Exchange based in Iowa and the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a seed bank located on an island in the Arctic and managed by the Norwegian government.

As food activists in different pockets of the world look to revive a past of green zebra tomatoes and Kenearly yellow eye beans, Edith focuses on her own back-yard, one with nalka and more. She wants to preserve the land the way her ances-tors knew it, the land whose seeds she keeps.

DIANA SAVERIN ‘13 is an English major in Berkeley College. Contact her at diana.saverin@

yale.edu.

23www.tyglobalist.org FOCUS: THE FARM

(Saverin/TYG)


‘ve come to appreciate Paris as a metropolis of many food quirks: Parisians disdain pea-nut butter as “too rich” while hailing fatty duck liver as a national treasure. But it’s not every day that the quick

jaunt from my host family’s apartment to the nearest metro stop is interrupted by cattle crossing the street. It happens once a year, when the Salon International de l’Agriculture is in town, that such live-stock sightings are common here in the southwest corner of Paris.

As a newly minted Parisian, I felt obli-gated to pay a visit to the Salon. My host mother only heightened my enthusiasm with assurances that there would be many

French cheeses for “degustation,” or tast-

ing. Never one to turn down free dairy products, I dutifully followed the cattle

through the park gates. The Salon, held the first week of March

at the enormous Parc des Expositions around the corner from where I’m staying, is equal parts rodeo, Disney World, and trade show. It welcomed almost 700,000 vis-itors over the course of its eight-day run––that’s almost a third of the entire popula-tion of Paris––and is a veritable hive of propaganda, politics, and media coverage. Making a tour of the Salon as a stop on the campaign trail leading up to the April elections was practically required of each French presidential candidate. President Nicolas Sarkozy, who infamously told a French farmer the equivalent of “screw you, you poor fool” on his 2008 visit to the Salon, made a remarkable showing of over

IAt the Salon International de l’Agriculture, visitors come from around the country to sample traditional French farm fare. (Hong/TYG)

Mange Bien!A food-lover’s exploration of the French culinary history at the Salon

International de l’Agriculture.

By Emily Hong

“My visit to the Salon showed

me that the French people,

famous for their fierce pro-

tection of their cultural pat-

rimoine, or heritage, will do

anything to safeguard their

future.”


four hours spent posing with cows, tasting French agricultural products, and trumpeting

By courting the French farmer, the candidates hope to tap into the militant locavorism that has marched into France in recent years. Given the enormous at-tendance of the Salon and the intense national media attention it received, one might believe that France depends on ag-ricultural enterprises. In reality, however, agribusiness accounts for only 2.9 per-cent of the country’s GDP and is steadily shrinking. The French family farmer is in crisis, under siege by the unholy trin-ity of economic recession, the globaliza-tion of food markets, and industrialized agro-conglomerates. My visit to the Salon showed me that the French people, famous for their fierce protection of their cultural patrimoine, or heritage, will do anything to safeguard their future.

The Salon is loosely organized into four separate pavilions: the “Gastronomy of the World,” “Agricultural Services and Professions,” “Crops and Plant Sectors,” and “Animals.” First up on my agenda: gastronomical delights. Modeled after an indoor market of internationally themed food kiosks, this area reminded me of EP-COT’s “It’s a Small World After All.”

Everything from ropes of Spanish cho-rizo to plastic shot glasses of Japanese sake tempt passersby. Unfortunately for the national waistline (and my own), my host mother was absolutely right: samples were ubiquitous. I was handed a piece of bread covered in molten gruyere by a ruddy Swiss fraulein only to have a platter

of Russian caviar, at a nippy four euros a bite, pushed into my face by a small wom-an in a sarafan.

I was a little taken aback by the divi-sion between the “International” and the “Agricultural”; Outside of the fair-like in-ternational gastronomy pavilion, I was barraged by overwhelming, even urgent declarations of the “Frenchness” of this service or that product. The display put on by LU Biscuits, a French company formed in Nantes in 1846, seemed to me an apt metaphor for France’s changing ali-mentary landscape. Now owned by Kraft, Inc, LU still markets itself as an artisanal, thoroughly French company, even as the cheery sales representatives handed out mass-produced biscuit samples in sterile plastic wrappers.

The Salon also stepped on the envi-ronmentalism bandwagon to encourage visitors to choose French agricultural products. Slogans like “manger local” (eat local), or “manger bio” (eat organic), were everywhere. Competition from factory farms and enormous agricultural collec-tives has forced many smaller producers to market their products as “artisanal” luxury goods or health products. In the animal pavilion, small French children cooed over piglets marketed as high qual-ity, highly local meat products. Brochures bearing images of steaks, sausages, and hams were stacked neatly next to the ani-mal enclosures.

The cultural and political stakes at the Agricultural Salon were clear. The alimen-tary nationalism of the Salon’s rhetoric was intentionally appealing to French

hearts shaken by drastic change and eco-nomic uncertainty. It seemed to suggest that even if French is no longer the lan-

guage of diplomacy, its cultural dominance persists in one last realm: gastronomy.

But with the impending demise of the French farmer, many fear generations of gastronomical and cultural heritage––French cuisine was added to the UNES-CO cultural heritage list in 2010––will be lost. A vibrant locavorist movement has sprung up to defend local markets, and most people in Paris still buy bread from neighborhood boulangeries. France might still be a country of markets, where locally grown apples are often cheaper than im-ported varieties, but it is actively moving away from traditional ways of producing and consuming food. Large grocery stores have gained ground, and one of the most popular brands sold in France is Picard, which sells only frozen food.

As an adopted French daughter, I hope they continue to fight for this tradition; it is truly something worth saving. Consider the simple raw milk cheese and perfectly crusty, lightly salted baguette de tradi-tion––this divine combination can only be found in France: raw milk cheese is barred by US pasteurization laws, and the Parisian baguette has a lifespan of less than six hours. Heaven could never taste the same produced en masse abroad and shipped to France in plastic.

EMILY HONG ’14 is an Environmental Engi-neering Major in Pierson College College. Contact

her at [email protected].

“Now owned by Kraft, Inc,

LU still markets itself as an

artisanal, thoroughly French

company, even as the cheery

sales representatives handed

out mass-produced biscuit

samples in sterile plastic

wrappers.”

Farmers bring their best animal stock to the Salon. (Hong/TYG)


GAME:

Cracking down on Ecuador’s illegal meat trade By Aliyya Swaby

Illustration by Kate Liebman

n the morning of June 11, 2011, the Ecuadorian navy publicly burned a heap of confiscated wild animal meat in front of their offic-es in Coca, a jungle town in the country’s northeast. The smoke from the bon-

fire and the smell of the meat was carried away by the wind, enveloping a small mob outside the building’s gates.

“Give me a leg!” one man heckled the naval officers standing by the fire.

He, like the other onlookers, had been a potential buyer of the contraband mate-rial and now watched his goods turning to ash before him. Earlier that morning, the buyers had arrived at the weekly open air market in Pompeya and looked out at the indigenous hunters arriving in motorized canoes on the Napo River, hoping to spot white sacks concealing smoked haunches of wild pig or even monkey. The meat came from Yasuní National Park in the Ecuador-ian Amazon, one of the most biodiverse forests in the world.

The illegal meat trade used to func-tion with ease; local police officers were known to take bribes to look the other way. But that day the Ministry of the Environ-ment, an autonomous governmental body in charge of policing the wild meat trade, had sent a boat of naval officers to shut it down. More than 1,500 pounds of animal meat were confiscated and burned, according to Javier Vargas, a provincial direc-tor of the Ministry. It was the most drastic governmental action taken against the indigenous hunters and meat suppli-ers since the market opened almost two decades ago.

Yet since that day, illegal trade has in-creased, underpinned by the development of an underground meat market that has proven hard to regulate. If the hunting con-tinues at its current rate, scientists predict animal life may soon disappear altogether in Yasuní. Overhunting depletes natural resources and is changing the shape of the forest. It is now difficult to find large monkeys in the forest, and hunters resort to selling large rodents and wild pigs.

The trade entered Yasuní a year after oil company Maxus Ecuador Inc. did in 1993. The company built the Pompeya Sur-Iro road, which cuts through more than 87 miles of national park. A year later the indigenous Waorani and Quichua people living along the road started selling wild meat in Pompeya, a small town located three miles outside of the park.

Spain-based Repsol is currently the only oil company allowed in the park, bound by contract with the Ecuador-

ian government to strictly control access to the Pompeya Sur-Iro road. Ecuador’s economy is dependent on business from companies like this. But Repsol also offers free bus transportation to the indigenous communities living along the road, which allows hunters to travel farther and hunt greater quantities of meat.

The Waorani, responsible for the bulk of the meat at the markets, used to be no-mads but now mostly live in established communities. Repsol has brought the Wa-orani access to otherwise unaffordable benefits like shotguns, gasoline, Western medicine, and even indoor soccer fields. The company gives them these gifts as “compensation” for drilling on their land, said Remigio Rivera, Repsol’s director of community outreach. Some Waorani even have jobs doing manual labor for the oil

company in the for-est.

Rivera said Repsol is helping the Wa-orani learn how to become productive citizens of Ecuador, instead of isolated peoples, something

he said is necessary in an age of increased globalization.

But Waorani culture is rapidly disap-pearing with the forest, said Gloria Iru-menga, a Waorani woman who lives in Guiyero, a community along the road that supplies much of the meat at the markets. With a soft voice and a baby nestled in her arms, she describes her life in simple terms.

Irumenga and her family live in a house made of a palm tree native to the region. But a few of the 15 houses in Guiyero are made of concrete—those are the ones the oil company built for them, she said.

Most Waorani are bilingual, Irumenga said, speaking Spanish in addition to their native language in order to communicate with the oil workers and scientists sharing the road. They wear modern clothing, in-stead of the clothes of their ancestors, and they eat less wild meat, instead traveling outside of the forest weekly to buy grocer-ies.

It is more difficult to find game these days than in the days of her mother and grandmother. “The animals are disappear-ing. [Hunters] now have to travel three hours to hunt,” she said.

These indigenous groups rely on sub-sistence hunting, Vargas said, and they are allowed to under law. Commercial hunting is illegal, but the Waorani and Quichua have been selling meat ever since they first made contact with the outside world in the 1960s. Foreign natural resource develop-ment companies have facilitated the trade, and the permanence of the weekly market and the accessibility of the road have only amplified it. Today there are wild meat markets in at least seven cities or towns, near the rainforest in northeastern Ecua-dor. The market at Pompeya is the largest.


If the hunting continues at its

current rate, scientists predict

animal life may soon disappear

altogether in Yasuní.

Locals hunt their own food in the Yasuní forest. (Swaby/TYG)

O


Among the biggest group of consum-ers of the meat are locals, including those whose ancestors within one or two genera-tions used to live in indigenous communi-ties but have since moved outside of park boundaries, according to Esteban Suarez, a professor of ecology at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito and former scien-tist with the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS).

“It is what helps them to keep some sort of attachment of the forest that they might have had when they were kids and don’t have now because they live in Tena or Puyo or Coca,” he said. “They consider it to be a really healthy meat.” For special events, like weddings, one buyer could order hun-dreds of pounds of wild meat.

Businessmen also buy meat at the mar-ket to sell to restaurants at higher prices. While at WCS in 2008, Suarez produced a comprehensive scientific article that found that almost half of the meat brought to the Pompeya market over a period of three years ended up resold at restaurants in Tena, a town 145 miles away. Demand from restaurant-goers is high; the restaurant owners make five times more money from the trade than the hunters.

“This means that if they can’t get meat from Pompeya, they will go elsewhere,” Su-arez said.

The vendors seem to be aware of this

dynamic. Sources say the trade, active as ever, has continued underground since the June raid, faced with constant authority presence at the market. Vendors are mak-ing special arrangements to sell before gov-ernmental officials arrive at Pompeya, said Juan Carlos Armijos, professor at La Uni-versidad Catolica, who has been working in Waorani communities for eleven years.

He said the Waorani use the money they make selling meat to buy groceries and large quantities of alcohol. Canoes de-parting from towns like Pompeya are often weighed down with more beer than grocer-ies.

The Waorani are not likely to stop sell-ing anytime soon.

“The young people see [the wild meat trade] as a business. If they want some-thing, they tell their parents and their par-ents have to hunt to get it for them,” Armi-jos said.

Although the people are outraged to be losing their goods in the confiscations, it is easy to sneak meat past the Ministry, said Miguel Tega, a Waorani teenager who lives in Dicaro, the largest Waorani community within influence of the road. “They just

hide it in a backpack.”There is also a possibility that the bulk

of the wild meat market might move away from Pompeya, said Galo Zapata, a WCS scientist, which would make it difficult for the organization or the government to track it.

WCS does bimonthly surveys of the mar-ket, with the use of indigenous informants, though it has been harder to perform them accurately since the recent government interference, Zapata said. People are more secretive about the trade and often refuse to give information. A report consolidating these surveys shows a general increase in the average amount of meat sold per mar-ket day between 2005 and 2011. But since August, it has been almost impossible to measure the exact amount of meat being sold, Zapata said. People sell small quanti-ties of meat at the market in order to keep the government distracted from the under-cover activity.

The government has a reputation for apathy when it comes to the wild meat trade. In fact, many officials

supposed to be preventing illegal sales ei-ther turned their backs or partook in the activity themselves.

Vargas said the Ministry only became centralized enough to deal with the issue in the past several years, since he became provincial director for the province of Orel-lana where most of the meat is sold. Soon after, the Ministry became involved in the most successful long-term effort to date, culminating in the raid, which involved three non-governmental organizations and several national and provincial governmen-tal bodies.

The initiative aimed to attack the trade through three strategies: strictly control-ling the markets, educating the local buy-ers about its environmental harm, and of-fering the sellers economic alternatives to selling the meat. One branch of the project, aimed at tourists from within Ecuador, set up an advertising campaign used on na-tional flights, hotels, and buses to dissuade them from eating the meat.

Scientists and officials agree that the amount of meat being sold in the open at

“The animals are disappearing. [Hunters] now have to travel

three hours to hunt.”

Underground meat trades are increasingly common and threaten the forest ecosystem. (Swaby/TYG)


the markets decreased after the project began, a fact corroborated by WCS survey reports. But this does not account for the meat sold underground, outside of the mar-kets.

And the project has been short lived. Funding ran out at the end of June, a few weeks after the Ministry’s dramatic meat-burning operation, preventing any of the organizations from continuing to work on it.

The Ministry has had to continue the project alone, and despite its presence at the markets seems to be at a loss for how to deal with the underground trade. Ide-ally, surveillance at the markets would be more thorough, leaving no opening for secret deals. Instead, WCS sur-vey reports from this year show that Ministry control ef-forts have severely declined since June 11. Local Pompeya police, not national naval officers, carry out the control opera-tions. They show up at the market about once a month at 8:00, hours after the major-ity of the sales are complete. The amount of meat sold openly at the market has in-creased from an all-time low of 190 pounds in June 2011 to more than 1,500 pounds in mid-August, the WCS report shows.

But the Ministry says it is pulling its weight and that oil company Repsol should begin to take some responsibility.

“We don’t live at those sites. It’s hard for us to get there,” said Alonzo Jaramillo, an official at the Ministry. “We can only carry

out the law. [Repsol] isn’t doing their part of the work.” Vargas agreed that the com-pany has failed to execute their promise to control movement in and out of Yasuní through the Pompeya Sur-Iro Road.

But Rivera said that it is impossible for the oil company to do any more than it al-ready is to solve the problem, especially without governmental cooperation. The agreement, he said, was made mainly to stop outsiders from getting into the area, not to stop the indigenous people from trav-eling through it.

“It’s hard for us being on [Waorani] land to control them,” he said. Additionally, he said, a few Waorani have their own vehi-

cles, which Repsol has no basis to control.

But sci-entists be-lieve the restitution is destroying the commu-nities.

“Even if you forget about wild meat, what happens with the Waorani when the oil company leaves after there is no more oil?” Suarez asked. The company would leave in place the road that has led to major destruction in the forest, while taking with them the free benefits the Waorani have come to depend on.

Many groups have been working with the Waorani to find economic alternatives to hunting and living off of the oil company. Irumenga’s community, Guiyero, grows yucca and cacao to sell at the markets, and even has a few domesticated farm animals.

The Ministry and WCS are working on a project in Waorani communities to restore the population of Yasuní’s river turtles, whose eggs the Waorani eat.

Waorani communities are also devel-oping their own projects. Manuela Ima is one of the leaders of the Asociacion de Mujeres Amazonicas Waorani de Ecuador (ANWAE) a small women’s organization that offers financial alternatives to illegally selling wild meat. They encourage commu-nities to grow crops to sell at the markets instead of meat. ANWAE works with Wa-orani in three provinces and 34 communi-ties, including Guiyero and Dicaro along the road. Anyone is welcome to learn, Ima said, though women are particularly in-vested in the issue.

“The women are worried about their children,” she said.

There are more than 300 Waorani com-mitted to the cause, and the Waorani’s main governing body, Nacionalidad Waora-ni del Ecuador, has committed its support. Ima wants to expand efforts, but is worried that it will not be feasible, mainly because the organization is low on funds.

These projects are successful within their small scopes, but are unlikely to make pervasive change without increased effort from the Ministry and Repsol. The illegal meat trade is not a government priority, and the oil company would rather bribe the Waorani than restrict the sales. By building and managing the road, the oil company be-gan a problem it is not willing to remedy. By allowing Repsol to continue in Yasuní, the government dealt a grave sentence to the national park and many communities that live in it.

In Guiyero one night in July, it was din-nertime after dark. Irumenga heated up a piece of peccary meat over the fire for her family. The wild pig was fresh, hunted by the men just that morning, and the meat sizzled over the gas oven. To supplement it, there was white rice and chicken in in-dividual plastic containers, groceries from the town. Irumenga’s small house was filled with women and children who laughed and talked while eagerly eating platefuls of the mix. In the thick forest beyond the clearing, the birds called louder in the nighttime, sig-naling what’s left.

ALIYYA SWABY ’14 is an Environmental Stud-ies Major in Pierson College. Contact her at aliyya.

[email protected].

“Even if you forget about wild meat,

what happens with the Waorani

when the oil company leaves after

there is no more oil?”

(Swaby/TYG)

new generation of urban farmers believes they are on the cusp of an agricul-tural revolution––and it starts on rooftops.

As the world population grows towards 10 billion

inhabitants by 2050, most new citizens will be born in cities. Agribusiness has re-placed bucolic family farms at a similarly rapid rate, wreaking havoc on the envi-ronment in the process. Faced with the prospect of more mouths to feed and wors-ening environmental conditions, urban farmers believe that enabling city dwell-ers to grow their own food is the future of modern agriculture.

Christian Echternacht of Berlin’s Ef-ficient City Farming (ECF) believes that urban farmers act on a simple imperative to make farming more sustainable. “Sev-enteen percent of global carbon dioxide emissions derive from agricultural pro-duction, and on average, Germans emit 10 tons of CO2 a year,” he said. “To reduce my personal 1.7 tons, I can eat less. Or I can just eat products that come from CO2-neutral agricultural systems that don’t use transportation.”

ECF is building one such CO2-neutral agricultural system on top of an aban-doned malt factory rooftop, in the form of the world’s largest aquaponic farm. Using almost 90 percent less water than traditional growing methods, aquaponic

systems raise fish and vegetables symbi-otically. In what Echternacht describes as “a perfect cycle,” a biofilter converts fish waste into fertilizer, water is continuously cycled from the fish tanks to the hydro-ponic plant beds, and plants also bind the CO2 produced by fish farming.

Not only do urban farms use resourc-es efficiently, they also reduce the envi-ronmental cost of transportation as well. Planes and barges must burn fossil fuels to ship bananas from Costa Rica to Cana-da and cucumbers from Mexico to France. But urban farmers like those at Montreal’s Lufa Farms believe that rooftop farms are an excellent way to encourage an “eat lo-cal” philosophy.

Lufa sends daily baskets of produce to 1,000 closely located households that own a share in the farm. By 9 a.m., three work-ers have picked all of the day’s produce; by 6 p.m., the baskets are delivered. “With our system, there is so little waste because we don’t guess what consumers will buy; they’re happy to get what is local and seasonal,” said Lauren Rathmell, Lufa’s greenhouse director.

Most farmers agree that investor and government interest in rooftop farms has skyrocketed in recent years. “Roof-top farming is absolutely scalable,” said Rathmell. “We just celebrated our first anniversary, and we’re already profitable at this point. There are multiple govern-ment districts competing for the contract

to our second farm.” While the trendiness of urban farming has increased invest-ment, being “eco-friendly” remains a First World fetish. In other parts of the world, the notion of having a garden on one’s roof already seems strange, let alone the idea of a hydroponic farm with no soil.

According to Tarek Hosny, co-founder of Cairo’s Schaduf, “Some people will defi-nitely think [urban farming] is cool, par-ticularly the younger generation. It goes along with being health conscious and en-vironmentally conscious, but others will always think it’s kind of bizarre.” Schaduf, named for an ancient Egyptian method of irrigation, has developed a rooftop hydro-ponic system that uses recycled water to grow produce in one of the world’s driest regions. Through the use of this technol-ogy, Schaduf even aims to fight poverty. Households purchase the systems for around $1,000, largely financed by micro-finance loans, and they repay the loans by selling crops in local street markets.

Though Schaduf is in its testing stage and currently has only four customers, Hosny believes that its model will succeed because of its ease of adoption. “Especial-ly for those who are expected to stay at home, either for cultural reasons or other-wise, rooftop farming is very convenient,” said Hosny. “If you are a woman at home anyway, putting some minimal effort into tending to the farm on your rooftop can generate a lot of supplemental income.”

Hosny added, “There is no reason there cannot be a farm on every rooftop.” In-deed, urban farmers hope that this rising trend will catch on globally as it already has among western urbanites. Though hydroponic systems do involve significant start-up costs, the convenience and effi-ciency of rooftop farming will eventually win over those who hesitate at the thought of growing lettuce on their roof. The hope is that a future where everyone, from New York lawyers to Middle Eastern house-wives, is a farmer may not be far off.

ASHLEY WU ’15 is in Morse College. Contact her at [email protected].


Farmer on the RoofAgriculture takes a stroll up the stairs.

By Ashley Wu

A

(Courtesy Tarek Hosni)


I

The Road to RiceEighty-five percent of calories consumed in Liberia come from rice, but now the

country relies on imports to feed itself—at a steep cost.

By Jessica Shor

n 1979, Liberian Minister of Agriculture Florence Chenoweth proposed to raise the price of imported rice from $22 to $26 per 100-pound bag. It was an at-tempt to encourage domes-

tic rice production, but the prospect of an increase to the cost of their dietary staple outraged Liberians. In protest, on April 14 of that year more than 12,000 citizens

flooded the streets of Monrovia, Liberia’s capital city.

The event became infamous as the 1979 rice riots, and what began as a peaceful protest turned into looting and chaos. In the mayhem on that steamy spring day, the Liberian army shot and killed dozens of civilians and wounded 500 more. The rice riots are widely blamed for spark-ing Liberia’s descent into civil war: They ushered in a series of assassinations and

coups that continued for ten years, until full-on war broke out in 1989.

Thirty years after the rice riots, Liberia is no closer to achieving rice self-sufficien-cy. According to United Nations estimates, 85 percent of calories consumed in Liberia come from rice, 90 percent of which is im-ported from places like the United States, China, and South and Southeast Asia. The problem is not just that the rice comes from abroad, but that it is astronomically

(Shor/TYG)


expensive for Liberians: It carries an typi-cal price tag of 30 cents per serving, in a country where average per capita income hovers around $1 per day.

Liberia’s low levels of domestic rice production are not for lack of demand, nor for lack of attention. Noting the grain’s im-portance, President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf named rice a strategic commodity, plac-ing it on par with oil and concrete. Dur-ing elections, campaign officials purchase sacks of the grain to distribute to poten-tial voters at election rallies, and on street corners throughout the country, women sit behind wheelbarrows of rice, doling it out to customers by the tin can-full. Be-side coal stoves in restaurants and cook-ing huts alike, Liberians consume heaping plates of rice, smothered in spicy stews of palm butter, potato greens, fish, chicken, and bushmeat.

Liberia’s dependence on imported rice is part of a larger story, of the destruction of war and the struggle to recover. Between 1989 and 2003, fighting killed more than a quarter-million civilians, pushed waves of rural refugees into Monrovia, plunged Li-beria to the bottom of human development index rankings, and destroyed the coun-try’s infrastructure. These effects still lin-ger today, posing obstacle after obstacle on the road to rice self-sufficiency.

These hurdles consume the thoughts of Dr. Sizi Subah, a government re-searcher and consultant at the Min-

istry of Agriculture’s Central Agriculture Research Institute (CARI). In his office on the outskirts of Monrovia, he asked the question that has long plagued policy mak-ers and citizens alike. “Liberia has every-thing going for it. We have good land and good rainfall,” Dr. Subah said. “So why are we importing more than two-thirds of our rice?”

Dr. Subah is right to wonder why Li-beria does not feed itself. Clinging to the coast of West Africa just above the Equa-tor, Liberia enjoys the same environmen-tal conditions that make countries like Indonesia, Thailand, Pakistan, and India agricultural powerhouses. Slightly small-er than Virginia, the hilly country is hot and humid, with frequent downpours dur-ing the six-month rainy season. Monrovia, for example, receives an average of 202 inches of rain annually, making it the wet-test capital city on earth. In this climate,

rice should be thriving.Yet as I drove through Lofa County, a

rural region near the border of Guinea, swamp rice paddies lay fallow beside vil-lages, their mud surfaces punctuated by only the occasional anemic tuft. It was July, and according to Dr. Subah, the rice seeds should have been planted in June, and the paddies should have been lush in preparation for an October harvest.

“Swamp rice paddies can be developed as permanent production sites,” Dr. Subah explained, describing how nutrient-rich runoff collects in the lowland paddies and keeps their soil especially rich. “You can farm them for time indefinite. But right now, what is farmed is only a drop in the bucket. We’re not even at two percent of potential.”

Most Liberians, including Dr. Subah, blame stalled attempts to increase rice production primarily on infrastructure––or, more accurately, the lack thereof. Ninety-four percent of Liberia’s roads are unpaved, and during the rains, these roads become slicks of rust red mud, impassible for days at a time. Even on dry days, the 300-mile drive from Monrovia to Lofa drags on for 14 joint-rattling hours, on a dirt road that boasts ruts large enough to swallow the tires of even the biggest trucks.

The World Bank has invested 218 mil-lion dollars into infrastructure rehabilita-tion in Liberia, and Chinese contractors have swooped in to complete the projects. Paving attempts, however, are concentrat-ed in the capital. While several contrac-tors have offered to repair roads that link iron mines to Monrovia’s port, few efforts have been made to repair the country’s im-passable farm roads.

These roads have proved fatal to past attempts at growing rice commercially. In 2008, the Foundation for African Develop-ment Aid and the Libya-Africa Investment Portfolio (ADA/LAP) launched a 30-million dollar project to increase rice production in Lofa by mechanizing the cultivation process. It was the largest project of its kind, and it promised to employ 900 farm-ers and cultivate 2500 hectares of land. To reach these goals, ADA/LAP organizers imported equipment for planting, harvest-ing, processing, and storing the rice, but road conditions prevented that equipment from ever reaching the production sites––or even leaving Monrovia. Three years after the project was announced, Liberian

newspapers reported that the machines remained in the city, collecting rust and drawing complaints from frustrated farm-ers. The project ultimately folded after Libyans disposed of Muammar Qaddafi in 2011.

It is not only large-scale projects that face challenges posed by Liberia’s roads. On his family’s farm in Kakata, halfway between Monrovia and Lofa County, Fa-bio Velanet founded Fabrar Rice. Fabrar is one of only two companies that sell Liberian-grown rice commercially, and for now it is sold in only 12 Monrovia su-permarkets and has monthly sales of less than $2000. But in the three years since he began production, Velanet has steadily expanded the company and has started to purchase surplus rice from nearby sub-sistence farmers. Yet often, Velanet finds that farmers resist his encouragement to increase production.

He explained, “Rice is our staple food. Everybody eats it, and everybody knows that we need to grow it. But there’s that apprehension, like, ‘If I grow too much, will I actually benefit from it? Will I actu-ally be able to sell it, or will it rot? Am I wasting my money?’ I think you’re going to continue to see that trend where farm-ers don’t want to grow rice until they get that linkage between themselves and mar-kets.”

Then he clarified: “It’s the roads. We just don’t have ‘em. Even if you could grow extra rice, there’s no way to get that rice to a market. Literally no way. Once the rains come, the best you could do is maybe get a bike to the farm, but that’s not going to work too well.”

In Kingsville, 40 minutes outside the capital, there exists proof of what Li-berians can do when their fields sit

beside a smoothly paved road. Beside the street, scrubby brush suddenly gives way to lush rice patties. The 20-acre fields form part of a seed farm and training center run by BRAC, a Bangladeshi NGO that has op-erated in Liberia since 2008. The paddies are test sites for new strains of rice under development, and BRAC recruits farmers from rural areas to practice cultivation in the Kingsville fields and attend trainings in the center.

In one session, Ousman Dorley, a BRAC employee, taught 20 rice farmers from Grand Gedeh County about everything

from making homemade fertilizer, to us-ing tabacco leaves to prevent insect in-festations during storage, to choosing attractive and protective packaging for the finished product. During a mid-ses-sion break for crackers and tea, Josiah, one of the Grand Gedeh farmers, praised BRAC’s training sessions.

“Education never ends,” he said, lean-ing forward in his chair. “I am old, but my mind still learns. I live in the lowlands, and BRAC teaches me how to grow rice in them. It’s my first experience with BRAC, and they are fine, fine, fine. I learned so many things.”

The center’s gleaming tile and stucco facility, the productivity of its fields, and its easy access to Monrovia’s markets show that BRAC can give farmers the resources that Subah and his Ministry cannot. But BRAC’s successes are not necessarily replicable in Liberia’s more isolated areas.

BRAC uses a network of local coor-dinators to draw farmers into its train-ing program, but those representatives cannot reach every rural community in the country, and they cannot provide the equipment, like irrigation pipes and mechanized harvest tools, that is avail-able at the Kingsville facility. Moreover, training alone cannot lure back the thou-sands of Liberians who left their farms for the city as refugees during the war and have not returned, choosing to stay in Monrovia for its educational and employ-ment opportunities. The Grand Gedeh farmers at the BRAC training represent the lucky few; most of their peers remain on small, isolated farms, stooping to tend their fields with dull cutlasses and their bare hands.

BRAC’s limited reach in remote ar-eas––and the government’s inabil-ity to step in––became spectacle on

the eve of Liberia’s July 26 Independence Day. An excited crowd gathered around a stage in a field outside Voinjama, the capital of Lofa County. President John-son Sirleaf and a cohort of political and business elites sat in a cluster of folding chairs, while the rest of the spectators crouched in the grass, swatting away mosquitoes as they watched the song and dance show that kicked off official Inde-pendence Day celebrations.

“They call Lofa the breadbasket of Li-

beria,” the emcee thundered into the cool jungle night. “But this next group wants to tell you how intensive rice farming re-ally is!”

From the darkness, four men inched onto the stage, chopping down invisible weeds as they went. Pantomimed rain began to fall. Five women, their heads wrapped in white scarves and their legs swathed in patterned lapa, crept on stage, pretending to plant rice seeds to the beat of a beaded gourd. The line of women snaked across the stage, preparing for a rice harvest that, had it been planted in real fields, likely wouldn’t come.

“This is our message for the Ministry of Agriculture today,” the emcee pro-claimed. “We can do better with improved

agricultural tools!”But the government didn’t hear the

message that night. Before the dance ended, President Johnson Sirleaf and her companions left the show, the high beams of their SUVs sweeping over the crowd as they drove off.

It wasn’t the first time the govern-ment had turned a blind eye to the prob-lems plaguing farmers. In 2003 the Libe-rian government signed onto an African Union declaration that encouraged states to allocate 10 percent of their annual bud-gets to agricultural development. By 2005, Liberia ranked dead last among the dec-laration’s signatories in terms of actual funds put towards farm improvements. According to Subah, the government’s $460 million 2011 budget contained only $1.5 million for the Ministry of Agricul-ture. Some citizens cry corruption, but

others more generously attribute the slow progress to the government’s lack of funding and resources. Whatever their explanation, though, few Liberians con-sider current state-led efforts to promote domestic rice production adequate.

“They’re trying,” admitted Subah, “but our budget is not enough. It will never be enough.”

So, for the foreseeable future, rice still enters Liberian markets not from the land and the farmers, but through the vast Freeport of Monrovia and the merchants who import foreign rice. At the shipyard, armies of workers sling sacks of the grain onto trucks, for delivery to the distribu-tion centers that line Monrovia’s main streets and market squares.

These shops are run by people like Mistress Mulbah, who owns a distribu-tion center on Tubman Boulevard, Mon-rovia’s main thoroughfare. Prices, Mul-bah said, are set by the government and vary by grain quality: Chinese butter rice costs 33 dollars per 100-pound bag, for ex-ample, while U.S. parboiled rice goes for 36 dollars.

Mulbah turns a healthy profit––she declined to give exact figures––but she too wants to see her country grow its own rice, even if doing so would put her out of business. She admitted most Libe-rians cannot afford to buy her rice, and claimed domestic production would both make rice more affordable and also pro-vide more income for farmers.

“If the government would only provide machines, or put in more interest,” Mul-bah complained, shaking her head as she gestured to the bags of rice being loaded onto a truck. ‘Product of China,’ the bags read. “Our soil is better than theirs,” Mul-bah lamented.

That may be true, but rice production cannot be extricated from the tangle of post-conflict obstacles that remain. Eight years after the last shots were fired, the need and desire for recovery are there. The rich, rust-red soil is there. But the roads, tools, and funds aren’t, and until they are, neither is the rice.

JESSICA SHOR ’13 is an Anthropology ma-jor in Ezra Stiles College. The research for this article was made possible with the support of

the Kingsley Trust Association Fellowship and the Tristan Perlroth Prize.


The problem is not just that

the rice comes from abroad,

but that it is astronomically

expensive for Liberians: It car-

ries a typical price tag of 30

cents per serving, in a coun-

try where average per capita

income hovers around $1 per

day.

34 FOCUS: THE FARM the yale globalist: summer 2012

I

Back to the GrassrootsAn alternative model of rural development takes root in India

By Dan Gordon

ndia has forgotten Gandhi. His face might be on the rupee note in everyone’s pockets, but his philoso-phy of self-reliant small villages is rarely on any-one’s lips. Gandhi’s once-

prominent dream for a nation of agricul-tural villages is now regarded as nothing more than a pastoral fantasy. Policymak-ers have instead opted for rural develop-ment policies that align with the Green Revolution’s principle of maximizing crop output—which inevitably places less emphasis on im-proving the small farmer’s situation.

As rural discontent sim-mers, poverty grows. And as the exodus into the me-ga-cities continues, there is little doubt that India must find new models for agricultural development. In ram raj, Gandhi’s vision of a prosperous and inter-connected village republic, NGOs and activists may have found just that model. But faced with political cor-ruption, poor policy, and the state’s prejudice against tra-ditional farming techniques, it will take a near-miracle to turn Gandhi’s ram raj into a reality.

In the 1960s, India’s Green Revolution modernized and mechanized farming practices, and moved India towards food security, even weaning the country off imports and assuaging the once ubiqui-tous fear of famine. For all its successes, though, the Green Revolution has brought a slew of unintended consequences. Today, its legacy is one of the main roadblocks to creating a Gandhian countryside.

Enter Tushir Gandhi. The great-grand-son of the Mahatma, fiery Mr. Gandhi, a crusader against corporate greed and government corruption, is wary of adopt-ing modern technologies associated with the Green Revolution. “We have to be very careful when rushing to newfangled tech-

nologies,” he warned, adding that policy-makers’ greed for genetically modified (GM) crops and other technological nov-elties threaten traditional farming tech-niques.

Bharat Bhosale, who works in the In-dian province of Maharashtra for a local NGO, takes issue with GM crops in par-ticular, which were a major innovation of the Green Revolution. “Hybrid seeds—there are some different problems. They are having tasting problem, they require high fertilizers. The nutrient requirement

is also more. They degrade the soils,” he explained. Taste aside, the new seeds re-quired a novel, energy-intensive farming technique. Farmers were forced to aban-don traditional—and oftentimes more sus-tainable—agricultural practices.

Compared to heartier local varieties and strains, GM crops could not survive the intense heat and aridity of the dry season without enough water. So farmers, with the help of the government, began building complex irrigation systems that made water scarce and expensive. Chemi-cal pesticides replaced the use of natural pesticides like neem oil, and synthetic fertilizers supplanted intercropping tech-niques, in which farmers would plant two crops in one field to confuse pests and re-plenish the soil.

Although irrigation systems, artificial fertilizers, and chemical pesticides can be used responsibly to increase yields, their indiscriminate use in many places has low-ered water tables and exhausted the soil. As Mr. Bhosale exclaimed, “Every year we end up planting hybrids in the same soil, and that is dangerous.” Over the years, the Gandhian ideal of environmental trustee-ship has fallen victim to increasing crop output. Yesterday’s solution to India’s famine problem—the Green Revolution—has became today’s ecological crisis.

Besides spoiling the envi-ronment, the Green Revolu-tion has also harmed the live-lihoods of farmers, driving them into debt. Disappoint-ing yields, the result of abus-ing the soil, are not uncom-mon in India. In recent years, dismal harvests and the debt burden have caused an epidemic of farmer suicides across the country. Gandhi’s rural villages, where they do exist, are crumbling under the weight of environmental and financial troubles.

True to his namesake, Mr. Gandhi finds a solution to these woes in tradition. “Lots of people are working

with traditional farming practices and traditional agricultural methods and con-servation of traditional seeds. And they shouldn’t be brushed off as madcaps or il-lusionists.” Fostering sustainable farming methods in the villages and showcasing their successes might be the best way to win over doubtful farmers and push poli-cymakers towards solutions that respect less energy-intensive cultivation tech-niques.

The Green Revolution was a top-down policy endeavor, but new models of eco-nomic development must be participatory, including the small farmer at all stages. When policymakers listen to the farmers’ voice in the planning and implementation process, development tends to be more eq-uitable, helping not only the corporate

Organic and sustainable projects, like this greenhouse outside of Pune, contribute to less than five percent agricultural output in India. (Gordon/TYG)

growers but also the small farmers. In-clusive projects also tend to be more sus-tainable, since farmers will invest in devel-opment schemes that improve their lives and livelihoods, long after the government has left.

BAIF, the Bhartiya Agro-Industry Foundation, offers one model of how to create inclusive agricultural development projects. An offshoot of Nature Cure Ash-ram, which Mahatma Gandhi established in 1946, BAIF now has a national footprint, working in 15 Indian states. Their track record is internationally lauded. Over 70 percent of the families they worked with have climbed above the poverty line.

On a small hill in a village outside Jawhar, Maharashtra, an unassuming building contains a seed bank that BAIF established. Hot and dusty inside, it hous-es around 230 strains of local crops in plastic bags and large bins. The seed bank employees educate farmers and conserve seeds that might otherwise disappear. A scientist affiliated with the seed bank also works to identify the characteristics of each strain, discovering which varieties work best in which soils in order to sus-tainably increase yields.

At the end of the harvest, farmers sup-ply the bank with their seeds. Several months later, at the beginning of planting, the seed bank redistributes the seeds to farmers, and the cycle contin-ues. “This is not like a university or government center, but it is a participatory center for farmers,” noted Bhosale, an employee of BAIF. The local seeds might not provide the highest yields, but they do produce re-liable yields, since they require lower en-ergy inputs than GM seeds and preserve the soil quality for future years.

Off a nearby dirt road, under the shad-ow of parched hills, sits a rural village that is home to another one of BAIF’s projects. Over the course of several years, BAIF has transformed this once subsistent village into a surplus economy, moving India one step closer to Gandhi’s vision of a thriving village republic. Along the hills, mango and cashew trees spring up, which receive better prices at market than traditional crops. Below the terraces, small green-houses hold mango saplings while jasmine flowers, soon to be gathered up and sold in city markets, grow on more level stretch-es. Nearer to their homes, farmers grow vegetables for their own consumption.

BAIF has also provided infrastructural solutions for the village. Up the steep hills lie a labyrinthine series of micro-dams, channels, drip-irrigation hoses, and ter-races that supply water for the crops, im-proving water conservation. Closer to the village, value-added processing sites pro-vide another source of income for farmers, allowing them to make liquor from cashew flowers, for instance. Although the village is poorly connected with other population centers, a small financial cooperative even enables farmers to transport and sell their goods in Mumbai a few hours away.

Kashinga, a middle-aged farmer in the village, used to go to Mumbai as a sand dredger, until BAIF gave him land and helped him build his farm. “I used to go out to work for other people. Now other people work for me,” he said with a large smile. Kashinga’s success is not an isolated inci-dent. Most land laborers in Maharashtra make at most 100 rupees per day, about two dollars. Over the course of a few years, many of the farmers benefiting from the BAIF scheme make more than three times that amount—and are more sure of a sta-ble future income.

BAIF has been successful in this village and in the seed bank experiment because it has provided technical expertise that is congruent with the farmers’ cultural and traditional practices, unlike Green Revolu-tion policies.

However, most farmers in Maharashtra do not receive such generous assistance. A policy bias towards top-down decision making, increased mechanization, and corporate farming prevent the BAIF mod-el of tailored participatory development from being implemented on a larger scale.

“Opportunistic politicians are the big-gest hindrance to farm liberalization be-cause they pander to the rural rich, the big farmers with large holdings,” Mr. Ghandi said. In this political climate, national poli-cies usually promote corporate farming and perpetuate the failures of the Green Revolution.

At the same time, “overhead” problems such as a lack of transportation linking ru-ral and urban areas, the isolation of farm-ers from markets, the shortage of market information, the absence of cold storage facilities to prevent spoilage, and the dis-tance between farms and processing fa-cilities all hinder the ability of farmers to raise their standards of living.

Mr. Gandhi, at least, believes that new

and better policies can create solutions. “I think what we require is some out-of-the-box thinking as far as policymaking for the agricultural sector goes. And I think that will be in tune with the Gandhian philoso-phy of mixing tradition with moderniza-tion, whenever necessary.”

Distancing the government from de-velopment projects might work best. The success of NGOs like BAIF, along with the government’s failures to help small farmers and its collusion with industrial-ists and corporate farmers, all point to the need for a decentralized development plan. Without inclusive and steady devel-opment, rural discontent could turn vio-lent—as is already happening. As recently as March 27, a roadside bomb, the work of Maoist Naxalites, claimed the lives of 12 central reserve police force troopers in eastern Maharashtra. India is no stranger to rural reactionaries.

Change will not come quickly to India. Corporate farming will grow larger. Cor-ruption will go on. Environmental abuses will remain the norm. In short, the Green Revolution, which has only lived up to half

its name, will tow the country down the dangerous path of higher yields and any cost.

For the much-needed Gandhian rural revitalization to work, it must proceed as Gandhi did: through crisis. Gandhi manu-factured his own crises by undertaking voluntary fasts to mobilize the country. Rural India may have found its own emer-gency in the countryside’s suicide epidem-ic, environmental troubles, and violent protests.

When disaster, in whatever form it takes, does strike India’s hinterland, the children of the Green Revolution, politicians and farm-ers alike, will awaken to announce a counter-revolution, one green not in name only, but in deed. For now, though, India will continue to await a Greener Revolution.

DAN GORDON ’14 is a History major in Dav-enport College. Contact him at daniel.p.gordon@

yale.edu.


“Every year we end up planting

hybrids in the same soil, and

that is dangerous.”

Summer 2012: The Farm

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Transcript of Summer 2012: The Farm