This is intriguing enough to almost make me want to watch the original Star Wars series. An excellent parody in favor of organic farming.

Fair Trade gets a boost in Britain

It's a start. Cadbury has announced it is now going to buy fair trade chocolate from Ghanaian farmers for its Dairy Milk bars, apparently the top selling chocolate bar in the UK (according to this, that translates into 300 million bars a year in UK and Ireland). Why is this such good news? Two reasons. First, the cocoa fields of Ghana produce 40% of the country's total export revenues, yet cocoa farmers are living in abject poverty because most of the production occurs on plantations (you remember that word, right? one step below sharecropper) and individual, low volume producers are not able to get high enough prices to make their (very basic) bare essentials meet. Second, child labor on cocoa farms in West Africa is an enormous human rights problem. According to the International Institute on Tropical Agriculture, cited here:

An estimated 284,000 children are working on cocoa farms in hazardous tasks such as using machetes and applying pesticides and insecticides without the necessary protective equipment. Many of these children work on family farms, the children of cocoa farmers who are so trapped in poverty they have to make the hard choice to keep their children out of school to work. The IITA also reported that about 12,500 children working on cocoa farms had no relatives in the area, a warning sign for trafficking.

Robert Beckford has done an excellent -even highly entertaining - documentary that explores cocoa as well as rice and gold production in Ghana, The Great African Scandal. The kids working at fair trade farms do so after school, not in place of it; the difference this affects in the kids themselves is striking, on top of the fact that these farms are part of a community coop with all the atmospheric contrasts one might expect under that framework.

The fair trade farmers Beckford visits say that by the time it gets to the market, only 3-4% of all fair trade cocoa is actually sold at fair trade prices. The rest gets dumped together with 'regular' cocoa, sold at typical slave trade prices. Another victory for SAP (the IMF's Structural Adjustment Programs): liberalize the market but don't regulate the price structure. However, opening things up did create a situation in which daring farmers could take more control of their fate, which led eventually to the establishment of Divine Ltd in the UK, Ghana's first fair trade, coop-owned, cocoa company. Their products look a lot more appealing than Cadbury's, and the company now has a US section as well, but the idea here isn't that fair trade companies outcompete each other. The point is that ALL cocoa should be sold at fair trade prices, so kudos to Cadbury for taking this step and let's hope that more chocolatiers follow suit.

The Price of Mud

Somebody please tell me this isn't really happening, because i don't know how much more guilt i can Zen into oblivion every time i consume a piece of fresh fruit. Haitians are now eating mud cakes as a dietary staple. ("Bad Haitians! How dare you make me feel wretched for living in a land of affordable produce plenty!") Guardian reporter Rory Carroll uses the term misery index when discussing the state of impoverishment in Haiti, a nice economist-friendly indicator to tell us where on the scale of getting fucked by global capitalism a population finds itself. i'd like to think this is his own phrase, yet i fear that it's probably taken from some World Bank report used to justify the continuing strangulation of a functioning society in Haiti and who knows where else: we're past the First World -Fourth World framework now, it's all misery without much company. Does one hope to move up or down the misery index? i've been thinking about this all morning and still can't be sure.

Adding to the insanity of this situation, Carroll writes:

Trucked in from a clay-rich area outside the capital, Port-au-Prince, the mud is costlier but cakes still sell for 1.3p each, about the only item immune from inflation. "We need to raise our prices but it's their last resort and people won't tolerate it," lamented Baptiste, the Cité Soleil baker.

Yes, you read that correctly, mud bakers want to raise their prices... i suppose to cover the ever-rising fuel costs related to trucking the clay into the city. This so sickening and disheartening, i am virtually stupified, speechless. Time to take out our pencil-margined copies of Fanon once again and consider the circular nature of oppression and despair. If i weren't so busy this week, i'd track down the 1970's film Burn! with Marlon Brando, just for a little shot of dominant paradigm subversion - but without the popcorn, that would be too cynical under the circumstances.

Eat the Rich

i don't normally cut and paste other people's writing here, but Patricks Wintour and Barkham, writing for the Guardian, have captured the gross hypocrisy of G8 elites' excessive gorging at their Pacific island party with just the perfect amount of sarcastic disdain... Are you not also disgusted that individuals like W Bush and Silvio Berlusconi are treated to this kind of publicly-funded splendor, when they do absolutely nothing to help the world's poor and subpoor? (Silvio should be thankful the Japanese don't force him to take the trash this "meeting" is surely generating back to Italy for disposal; where would he dump it, Naples?) Expanding on the point i tried to make yesterday morning, if these people were really serious about implementing solutions to the growing list of really, really serious problems plaguing our planet and societies, i might not be so outraged by their opulence. However, these meetings do not produce results - other than an agreement by the elite to continue stuffing their own faces and bank accounts - so we are wasting a huge amount of resources on a bunch of people who deserve less than a McDonald's happy meal to keep their stomachs from growling.

As Vandana Shiva said, "Food rights of people have to be protected; the rights of the poor have to be protected. That is the only obligation governments have. Any democratic government that fails in that duty will only be part of the problem of creating food wars and food riots." Indeed. At this point, if any group of starving people opted to break into a presidential palace and stick their forks into one of these folks, i say let them have at it.

Here's part of the Guardian piece linked to above:

As the food crisis began to bite, the rumblings of discontent grew louder. Finally, after a day of discussing food shortages and soaring prices, the famished stomachs of the G8 leaders could bear it no longer.

The most powerful bellies in the world were last night compelled to stave off the great Hokkaido Hunger by fortifying themselves with an eight-course, 19-dish dinner prepared by 25 chefs. This multi-pronged attack was launched after earlier emergency lunch measures - four courses washed down with Château-Grillet 2005 - had failed to quell appetites enlarged by agonising over feeding the world's poor.....

After discussing famine in Africa, the peckish politicians and five spouses took on four bite-sized amuse-bouche to tickle their palates. The price of staple foods may be soaring, but thankfully caviar and sea urchin are within the purchasing power of leaders and their taxpayers - the amuse-bouche featured corn stuffed with caviar, smoked salmon and sea urchin, hot onion tart and winter lily bulb.

Guests at the summit, which is costing £238m, were then able to pick items from a tray modelled on a fan and decorated with bamboo grasses, including diced fatty tuna fish, avocado and jellied soy sauce, and pickled conger eel with soy sauce.

Hairy crab Kegani bisque-style soup was another treat in a meal prepared by the Michelin-starred chef Katsuhiro Nakamura, the grand chef at Hotel Metropolitan Edmont in Tokyo, alongside salt-grilled bighand thornyhead (a small, red Pacific fish) with a vinegary water pepper sauce.

They have told their people to tighten their belts for lean times ahead, but you feared for presidential and prime ministerial girdles after the chance to tuck into further dishes including milk-fed lamb, roasted lamb with cepes, and black truffle with emulsion sauce. Finally there was a "fantasy" dessert, a special cheese selection accompanied by lavender honey and caramelised nuts, while coffee came with candied fruits and vegetables.

Leaders cleverly skated around global water shortages by choosing from five different wines and liqueurs.

Earlier, the heads of state had restricted themselves to a light lunch of asparagus and truffle soup, crab and supreme of chicken served with nuts and beetroot foam, followed by a cheese selection, peach compote, milk ice-cream and coffee with petits fours.

Fresh from instructing his population to waste less food, it can only be hoped that Gordon Brown polished off every single morsel on his plate.

túl sok eső.... raining here for days, my sinuses will never dry out.... playing around with some images, trying to place Radnóti in (perhaps) broader consciousness/context... at the edge of a river soon to overflow its banks? China, Burma, Iowa all submerged while polar bears sunbathe on melting chunks of ice... hungarians tell me that if it rains on 8 June, expect 40 more days of it. 40 days. that's of biblical proportions. i'm absolutely sure neither i nor anyone i know on the pannonian plains can possibly warrant enough of anyone's attention to be the butt of an epical plague. ok, it's not biblical, calm down. we're talking climatic chaos, don't leave home without mask & snorkel, maybe just don't leave home at all.... does anyone dare go to a Pacific Rim country without packing an earthquake emergency kit? recently read that the FAO wants us to eat more insects, that's how they solved a locust plague in Thailand and now thais want to keep tossing them in their woks. this disgusts me. sorry to be a culinary elitist when we and our crops are being struck down by these legendary plagues, but i really find insects repulsive as appetizer or entrée.... in Uganda people were scarfing down fried white termites, i´m glad they find them scrumptious and i reserve my right to steer clear of land animals with exoskeletons... the other night at friends´home in the countryside a hedgehog came along to clean out the cat´s dish. cute, hedgehogs. back in USSR times, i was on a train from Moscow to Kiev with a woman smuggling out a russian hedgehog, one with needled armour that fit in her handbag. a foreign thrill, but i wouldn´t think about spearing one of them for dinner, either.... anyway, that was severe digression, i started out with Radnóti's thoughts on our interconnectedness and that's where i'd like to leave this. the blog passed the 500 hit mark today (ok, this includes me logging in to post and edit) somebody out there's reading this stuff and so a shout out to whomever you may be, wherever you may be, cuz i appreciate serving as someone else's entertainment escape hatch while i'm close to drowning here in my own aqueous nightmare.

Mugabe madness update

As a few people pointed out to me after the March election, getting Mugabe to go quietly was a pipe dream... ergo and admittedly: i was far too optimist, far too soon. The madness has continued, with CARE recently having their operations suspended amidst accusations that distributing food and other services to 500.000 needy Zimbabweans was "an alleged political activity." In some respects, this is the other side of the failure recently dealt in Rome with respect to the food crisis: it's important to rethink the whole biofuels plan, but lack of equitable food distribution is also crucial and the situations in Zimbabwe and Somalia probably exemplify this right now better than most other places (tho it's obviously a far-reaching aspect of the global starvation crisis). Under different circumstances, one would assume that starving people out is not an effective strategy for winning a run-off vote, but Mugabe is among that vile breed of dictators who believe that dead or incapacitated voters are the best assurance of electoral victory... and if they refuse to die, then just stuff the ballot boxes again.

i'd like to say this is just a desperate old man struggling with the notion of retirement, but that would be far too forgiving. The international community is ranting at him to ease up on the entire range of outrageous restrictions he continues to impose - arresting foreign diplomats recently got a lot of worldwide media attention, and for good reason, but it's hard not to think that the persecution of diplomat personnel pales in comparison to what most of the country's poor are experiencing. Tsavangiri was arrested again, though the Guardian reports that Mbeki was able to apply enough pressure to secure his release. The election is set for 27 June, so this kind of anti-MDC/opposition activity is likely going to worsen. The sickest aspect of the crackdown on food aid is that CARE apparently understands Mugabe is using the food as "baits for votes." The BBC is reporting that Human Rights Watch has completely written off free elections as impossible in the current climate of massive intimidation. HRW also claims Mugabe's Zanu-PF has set up torture camps. Absolute madness, literally.

Foot-in-Mouth Footprints

There’s been down time recently, my mind’s been scattered, looking for a holdfast. If you read Spanish, then you know i’ve just come out of crisis mode over acquiring a Hungarian visa. The good news is that they did bestow one upon me, so finally getting the Magyar Lite experience: pay into the system and have an insurance card, but not be expected to eat fish soup on Christmas eve. The bad news is that the delay generated a fair amount of panic. If you’ve ever been in an about-to-be-deported situation you’ll understand immediately the madness it generated: impossible to make any plans for the here and now (emphasis on HERE), and even more difficult devising a contingency plan for some other country in which i have neither home nor job, possibly no friends. i found myself stuck in a conundrum of not being able to treat anything too rigorously, yet knowing full well that a pending deportation requires great seriousness, presence of mind. A period of unrelenting self-management schizophrenia which i probably would have dealt with better under a therapist’s nose, but it’s over now and i’m again listening to something besides Blues. Following 2 years of total border insecurity working in the West Bank, my energy for coping with impermanence has been completely expended, and i really do mean completely.

Circumventing absolute self-absorption – or maybe just trying to keep things in morbid perspective - as Arlo Guthrie said, when you see someone who’s got it worse than you, it makes you feel better - ??? - i’ve been reading about fuel poverty in Europe and food scarcity around the globe. For the past while, i’ve been on a mission to rid my diet of carbohydrates and suddenly, in at least 30 countries, people are rioting or at least starting to freak out over dwindling wheat and rice stocks. (There’s material for an adbusters graphic in there somewhere: diet-crazed gringo snobbishly passing over what the starving world depends on for calories.) That this is all happening in the framework of meeting energy needs only makes it more difficult to digest (that idiom too offensive?). A sound understanding of how the food scarcity problem could be dealt with also means understanding the energy industry, how best to meet the world's ever-increasing energy needs.

i’ve been finding this impossible to write about. Food is so personal and cultural and preferential - by which i mean that some people have access to lots of it while others nearly none. Not long ago, but before the “food crisis” hit the mainstream headlines, i was standing in line at my little neighborhood delicatessen, which is a bit pricy because they carry a lot of organic produce and what Hungarians tend to call specialty foods: chutneys, Thai sauces, 30 kinds of French mustard and all those delicioso Italian spreads that are 30% olive oil. Ahead of me in line was an American-Israeli woman holding a wad of 10.000 forint bills, buying nearly one of everything, and asking about the little square designer sausages in the counter case. She spoke no Hungarian, so i offered to help translate: are the sausages spicy? Then she asked about the price and mentioned that they were for her dog. “You’re buying those sausages for your DOG?” Of course, she wasn’t prepared for that, and nervously explained that she was training him and wanted something really special to reward good behavior. Immediately i apologized, saying it was out of line for me to pass judgment. What came out was simply my immediate, uncensored gut response to someone spending so much on something for a pet that i would only get for a special occasion and even then, only if i was feeling flush. Was my reaction thus borne out of jealousy that some dog has easier access to good food than i do? i don’t think so, but….

This is what i mean about it being difficult to talk or write about food. For myself, very aware of the many homeless and underfed people in this beautiful, rich capital city, just as i was in San Francisco, CA, and coming recently from Palestine, where food availability fluctuates and prices are relatively high for basic staples, the idea of a wealthy person buying a specialty food item for a pet seemed wrong somehow. Not exactly selfish, but unthinking. Yet, i also understand that someone who has the money to buy whatever she wants for whatever purpose she has in mind has the right to get fancy foods for her dog. i’m not against dogs being well-fed and i knew that she was looking at me and thinking if i really cared about unequal food distribution, i should start by streamlining my own diet - fair enough. So, in this one impromptu, ridiculous interaction, all or at least some of the hypocritical aspects of me or someone like me writing about food were crystallized.

Whatever one person says about another’s dietary choices, eating habits, restaurant preferences, etc. is immediately going to have to be self-reflective, and who among us is above reproach? i like a good bottle of vino as much as anyone, i’m willing to pay for it and if you come to my house, i’ll gladly share it with you so we can engage in bad scarcity-era behavior together. Or is that really bad behavior? Arguably, it is better to have fewer high quality foods than a lot of low quality (and often high calorie) stuff on the kitchen shelf. So i walk out of the wine shop and pass a dirty homeless woman ogling me with that gaunt seriously deprived look the homeless tend to have, i say i can’t give her any money but she knows very well what’s in the slim paper bag i’m holding… yes, guilty as charged.

i’ll end this by pointing readers to a new interactive feature at Global Footprint (open "Your Footprint" link), in which you enter information about your lifestyle and obtain an assessment of how many earths are required to provide you with the resources needed to sustain it. My own results were 1.9 Earths, but of course that’s based on how i’m living now and doesn’t include all the resources i’ve expended driving all over the US, or flying all over the world. Still, it’s an effective awareness-raising tool and left me committed to being less lazy when it comes to carting my plastic to the nearest recycling depot, about a kilometer away. The reduction in resources from vegetarian diets was also substantial, so i’m going to finish up the prociutto now in my fridge and try to steer clear of meat in the future. Or maybe i’ll get a dog before the year’s over, and feed it tasty food meant for humans so that i can just say i’m sharing my dog’s food, rather than buying meat for myself. Certainly nobody cares about the canine footprint.