I'm quite impressed by World Agriculture and the Environment (S589.75 .C53 2004), a World Wildlife Fund book that examines more than 20 commodities in considerable detail, including production, processing, market chains, market trends, and possible management improvements. A look at an interview with author Jason Clay on shrimp aquaculture will give you an idea of his approach. To quote a few bits, applicable far beyond the world of shrimp:
Shrimp farming isn't going to go away, so we have to make it better... First we had to get all the different people with different interests in shrimp aquaculture to get on the same page in terms of what the impacts are. Or at least what we know, what we don't know and what we agree on... You can find argumentation to support anything you want to say about shrimp aquaculture — good, bad or indifferent. So what we were really trying to do was to get to the truth of some of it, as opposed to just finding the data you wanted to support your argument.(the same approach can be applied very productively to just about any agricultural activity)We found that eight or 10 practices are the most significant, and they account for 70 to 80 percent of the impacts that most people care about. And of those, only three to five are significant on any single operation. These would be things like, "Is the operation built in the right place?" That's the most significant issue... So then the question becomes, "What are these better practices that reduce or mitigate these impacts, and what do they cost and why aren't people using them?" What we began to find as we documented some of the financial implications was that a lot of the better practices really pay for themselves, some almost immediately.
Before our attention is diverted from the idea of commodity chains it might be useful to point to a couple of key links that came up during the first assignment. Patrick found a very good summary of the issues that he links in his log but I will repeat here
Also see this FAO report from a recent meeting with lots of good data and discussion of commodity issues. Both of these are good basic references on this problem.
A remarkably candid look at farm subsidies, state by state. Many bodies buried in shallow graves... (from Environmental Working Group)
...and another that may be of interest: Trade Observatory (which has a "backgrounder on the Brazil/US cotton case")
A ruling by the World Trade Organization (WTO) on (and against) U.S. cotton subsidies is widely reported in the press. Here's a link to a clutch of stories from a pretty broad spectrum of news sources (found in Google News). Which one is "right"? Which news organizations do you trust? Here are Washington Post, Boston Globe, and Baltimore Sun takes on the news.
Through my research of the links I have listed on my log file, I have learned a lot about the history, production, manufacturing, and sale of chocolate. The history of chocolate is an interesting one, telling of the ancient Mayans and Aztecs planting and growing of the cocoa bean. It is also interesting to trace its uses in today's society and compare them with the ancient cultures in Mexico. Chocolate is sold all over the world by many different companies and in many different ways. It thus makes for an interesting case study for this project. I think I will keep chocolate as my subject for the project, but I will have to explore other ideas before making a final decision.
I found some really interesting sites regarding cattle and its commodity chain from producer to consumer. The most interesting site was one that was created by the catlle farmers as a venue to ask other cattle farmers questions. After reading through this page and the blogs that were entered, I felt I understood a lot better the problems that occur with raising a healthy cattle herd.
This is an interesing topic and I am going to pursue it. However, I always like to view a problem from several different angles and perspectives, much like what I did with my Log File. I plan on looking at cattle from an economic, social, consumer, producer, market, and environmental view.
The sources I found say that pasta probably originated in the Middle East about 10,000 years ago. This pasta website gives a timeline in the history of pasta. Another thing that I found interesting is that Italy is making considerable strides to improved their agricultural programs to make wheat production more efficient. This helps keep the price of pasta low in for buyers in Italy. The last thing that I found of particular intrest was a book called Pasta: The Story of A Universal Food. While you would obviously have to buy the book to read all about it, the website has small blurbs about the contents of the book. The abstract covers the physical harvest of pasta and the machinery involved in making the shape we all know and love. On another level the comentary talks about the cultural significance of pasta and the role it plays in the eating habits of the world today. The blurbs talk about how pasta not only enhances the Italian culture, but it also serves a mechanism to bridge cultures.
Through my research I traced the social life of rum and the structure of its commodity chain in a historical context as well as examining the modern implications of the globalization of the alcohol industry. As a primary player in the "triangle trade" between colonial America, Europe and West Africa, rum made in New England with Caribbean molasses was traded for slaves which were brought to America. The liquor skyrocketed in value during the 17th century because of its popularity as an important bargaining tool, and in some locales was considered to be close to a currency until the mid-1800s. With its history, one may find a wealth of social and economic consequences in its popularity and prevalence in West Indian trade.
Today, we find the alcohol industry to be a complex industry that has come to be an industry of globalization. In reaching new markets, corporations have targeted people all over the globe, including citizens of undeveloped countries. It is interesting to see that the implications of the alcohol trade have changed, yet have still remained for the most part.
Originally, I began looking at milk and the way it affects human nutrition. I found several sites more related to infant-feeding and many about goat's milk as an alternative. The pasturization process of cow's milk makes many of its proteins unusable to the human body, causing chaos in our biological systems. However, several sources claim that humans cannot digest milk at all and that it should be avoided due to its close connection with long-term diseases such as cancer. Interestingly, several sites promoted milk drinking as valuable to human nutrition. These sites tended to be government sponsored. For instance, the NIH posted one site on the benefits of milk. However, one site showed that such support may be initiated by the excessive amount of corn that government dollars go into creating. That corn becomes feed for the dairy cattle, and their products are necessarily marketed to American society as nutritious necessities. Still, further research is needed to fully understand the truth of whether milk truly does affect human nutrition adversely.
I want to focus my research on how food relates to human health, or how our American diets can be altered to rid ourselves of some of our ever-present diseases without drug intervention. This is a good starting point but I think I need to continue research to focus on another staple item!
I have found a few things about bananas and their history. I think I would like to stick with bananas for my project, possibly going into the political aspects of the banana trade. Here's my log file on bananas. The link Banana has some interesting info on coffee and various other commodities as well.
I have been exploring the cattle futures market. There are two catagories for cattle in this market. 1) Fat cattle- cattle ready for slaughter 2) Feeder cattle- 750 lbs. or less "cattle to be put out to pasture" I do not know yet if I want to make this my project. Check it out at my website home.wlu.edu/~longb/intr132
I've been looking into black sigatoka, a disease of bananas
Tuesday we'll start thinking about the origins of crops and the importance of diversity. Where did the food you studied in the assignment originate? Is that the same place is is grown today? Some notes introducing the subject.
Professor Blackmer provides these quotes from Brewster Kneen's book on Cargill
(quoting Whitney MacMillan, president and chairman of Cargill until 1995)
"There is a mistaken belief that the greatest agricultural need in the developing world is to develop the capacity to grow food for local consumption. That is misguided... Countries should produce what they produce best, and trade..." (10)
Cargill is a supplier of inputs, a buyer, trader and processor of commodities, and a speculator throughout the entire system. The arch enemy of Cargill is subsistence agriculture, self-provisioning, self-reliance, or whatever you want to call the alternative to being incorporated into its growing global system of dependency... (10)
If there are any questions or comments relating to the assignment you can post them here (or email me privately if you prefer) The assignment is to make a small collection of internet resources about a familiar food item of your choice, reviewing the information you found on the web that you thought to be most helpful in understanding 'the social life' of that food, its history, how its commodity chain is constructed and what had to happen for that food to get to you. We will review everybodies' collections on Monday
Some recent comments on the issue of maize and NAFTA were sent to the Sustainable Agriculture list:
NAFTA, GM, Corn and Mexico, Current Updates
which, among other things, tells us:
>U.S. corn is typically dumped in the Mexican market at up to 30% below
>the cost of production. In addition, corn buyers in Mexico are
>attracted to imported U.S. corn by the very favorable loan rates
>available to them through U.S. export agencies. In the years
>immediately following NAFTA's introduction for example, buyers that
>contracted with U.S. exporters had access to loans through the U.S.
>Commodity Credit Corporation at 7% for 3 years. Interest rates from
>Mexican lenders ran between 25 and 30% at that time. The availability
>of large amounts of U.S. yellow corn, combined with the favorable
>credit terms, has given a small number of
>large corn purchasers in Mexico tremendous leverage over prices in
>their dealings with Mexican producers; if the Mexican farmers will not
>sell them corn at their demanded price, the large producers - including
>Mexican corn mills and other food processors now part-owned by U.S.
>agribusinesses - buy U.S. corn.
...this one from Janet Collins's "Tracing social relations in commodity chains" in Commodities and Globalization (HF1040.7 .C65 2000):
What we eat is not naturally determined (although there are some natural limits and boundaries). Rather, as Sidney Mintz's (1985) classic treatise on sugar [Sweetness and Power: the place of sugar in modern history, GT2869 .M56 1985] has taught us, our consumption is a product of historically situated and shifting cultural preferences and economic interests. Chilean agronomists argue that "the essential new fact" accounting for the Chilean agroexport boom is dietary change in the first world, particularly the current emphasis on health, fitness, low fat, and freshness, which opens a new space for fresh fruits and vegetables... (105)
...Northern consumers, in constituting a market for a year-round supply of flawless fresh fruit and vegetables, underwrite the displacement of existing cropping systems by production regimes that are complex, irrigated, and highly technical... In the 1980s and 19990s, demand for luxury foods such as year-round fresh fruits and vegetables has become a new force that supplants both self-provisioning and the production of wage foods for local consumers. (106)
I ran across this in Jeffrey Pilcher's Que Vivan los Tamales! (TX716 .M4 P54 1998):
...as a result of this modernization, Mexicans have increasingly substituted sugar and fats for corn and beans. Indeed, one of the modern world's greatest ironies is that only the wealthy can afford to eat like peasants. Expensive restaurants serve organically grown produce while the masses subsist on pesticide-laden frijoles. (164)
One idea we are going to examine in the course is that of a commodity chain. When we look at a food we eat we need to see that it is merely the end point of a process that in some cases may have begun in another country. The path of that food from producer to consumer, as it is transformed along the way, is a complex technical, economic and social process.
As one article on the subject puts it "...What is eaten by the great majority of North Americans comes from a global everywhere, yet from nowhere that we know in particular. The distance from which our food comes represents our separation from the knowledge of how and by whom what we consume is produced, processed, and transported. If the production, processing, and transport of what we eat is destructive of the land and of human community--as it very often is--how can we understand the implications of our own participation in the global food system when those processes are located elsewhere and so are obscured from us? How can we act responsibly and effectively for change if we do not understand how the food system works and our own role within it?"
The idea of today's class about Chiapas is to give an idea about one of those places we are linked to without knowing it and to introduce you to some of the people who live there.
Today we will try to get everyone up and running on the web. The first assignment will be to put up a page of introduction about oneself, who I am and where I'm coming from and some idea of interests, academic and otherwise. Tomorrow I will talk a little more about my work in Chiapas, also as introduction and we can iron out any problems people have had with their web presence. Then I would hope Thursday we could start look at some of the tools we use to research a topic on the web. We can then look at an exercise on Friday, maybe based on the Chiapas material, to try out the tools and make sure everything is working for everyone. Then we should be on our way!
Meanwhile here is a summary of some things we should look at.
a community focused upon exploration of the food system? One which encourages active engagement in theh definition and pursuit of learning objectives that have their primary focus around HOW to learn --such that the outcome of the six weeks is a set of people who have different ideas about their own skills and knowledge than what they began with?
That's what I wrote after reading Alex Halavais' April 16 posting. And it's a grand objective for the course.
We want to start thinking early about project topics since the idea here is for each student to build his or her final page gradually, rather than trying to put it together in an all-nighter the day before its due. The strategy is to use the information and knowledge gathering tools we will look at to explore the ideas introduced in discussions and course reading material to develop your theme and present it in a webpage format.
The topics should relate to some major aspect of global issues related to food and agriculture. Some suggested topics:
chocolate
maize
sweeteners
fats and oils
animal protein
GMOs and biotechnology
ethnic cuisine
local food
slow food and/or fast food
your favorite food
Week One will primarily be devoted to getting set up and introducing ourselves and the course. There are a number of technical issues to solved and establishing the frame of reference of the course content, why we will be loosely focusing on a few aspects of food and agriculture as 'global issues' and getting people starting to think about their projects.
Week 1
April 19 (Nigh & Blackmer)
Introductions and setting up web environment. Brief introductions all around and overview of objectives and mechanics of the course.
Link students to course web page etc. We need to make sure students have web access, including a place to store their pages where we can all reach them, and access to the course blog. The pages will work pretty much as in the past, but the blog is more experimental.
Assignment: write a brief introduction to yourself, your intellectual and other interests and a sentence or two on your expectations about INTR 132 (this will be useful later) and post it on your page.
April 20 (Nigh)
A place called Chiapas. Where I work, the work I do and an example of how a local place is affected by and affects globalization. Video: Lacandona: the Zapatistas and the Rainforest of Chiapas, Mexico. (26 min)
Assignment: What do you know about coffee? How is coffee involved in your life? (like it, hate it, never think about it?)
April 21 (Blackmer)
How to find things. Introduction to coffee and the idea of commodities
Would this work? Introduce a few tools and use coffee as the example?
April 22 (Nigh)
Coffee, commodities and fair trade. Some basics about coffee production with reference to Chiapas, the coffe crisis 1989 and rise of organic/fair trade coops. (Video: Mut Vitz)
April 23 (Blackmer & Nigh)
Some more sophisticated tools. Thinking about projects.
It might be interesting and instructive to investigate how food gets to Lexington, and see how much of the chain of supply can be constructed. Of course this means pretty selective investigation, and will certainly produce dead ends ('we get xxx from our suppliers...', which is probably what the supermarkets would say) in many cases, but some merchants surely know and care more about where their supplies come from.
There are some interesting empirical questions, like: how much Fair Trade traffic is there? How about the campus coffee supply? Is it Fair Trade, or Organic?
These are just ideas, nothing engraved in stone:
Contemporary Global Issues: the food system
I. Intro and mechanics- Focus on food because it allows us to make interconnections and understand our world as interrelated.Look at some images?
Introductions, web set-up, blogging, course mechanics, grading etc.
(Lots of help from Blackmer)
II. Where I’m coming from, some work in Chiapas and a video
III. Some internet resources (Blackmer & Nigh)
IV. Assignment: Pick your favorite food or food issue. What is it made of? Where is it from? What other foods come from there? What is the food’s culture? Make a page about it. Where could you take it from here? Is your food a “commodity”?
V. Intro to Coffee and commodities (Blackmer) (another video?) (an hour is so short, but then there are 30 of them)
VI. Class discussion of assignment or project (every Monday)
VII. Chronotopes and Metaphors and the social life of food.
VIII. Chocolate! (field trip to the chocolate factory)
IX. Where does chocolate come from? Cacao issues.
X. Assignment: Blog on chocolate? Define project?
XI. Discuss. Global Banquet video
XII: Maize I: social life of the tortilla
XIII: Maize II. HFCS, NAFTA and US food industry
XIV: Maize III: what are GMOs?
XV
V. Chronotopes and metaphors of food
Consider chronotope implied by the metaphors of cyberspace vs. metaphors of globe, ‘whole earth’. We are immersed in cyberspace whereas, we observer the globe from ‘outer space’, ‘God´s-eye view, we are out of the world as globe vs the human view of 'me/us in the world'. ‘Global issues’ are something we are distanced from. Most “non-Western” people, “primitive” people think of themselves as in the world. But, the 'shamanic chronotope' postulates a radical cleavage, ‘two worlds’ ours and the spirit world. But there is a relation, mediated by the shaman, whereas in the fantasy chronotope there is not mediation apart from the novel itself. ‘Cyberspace’ might be a way we are trying to recover that sense of being in the world, rather than looking at it from outside.
Early world maps were made by people in the world and who then traveled in the world. Travel, movement is how we experience out world and thus construct our representations of it. When did we stop being in the world and adopt the god’s-eye view. The Renaissance with perspective? Maps stop placing the mapmakers home in the center with the world surrounding it, though ‘home’ may still be central as in link: Mercator projects.
(Example of the imposition of ideology over common sense: flat earth doctrine. We’ll come back to various examples of this process.)
Metaphor of the ‘food industry’ vs. metaphor of ‘agriculture’ (link: images), the culture of the land. When do we start taking ‘industry’ as a metaphor for growing food? link: Mumford: Technics & Civilization. The ‘Industrial Revolution’ 18th Century England. What chronotope is implied? Chronotope of ‘progress’ (development). “Free trade” and food commodities.
Mumford said the ‘organic’ metaphor would replace the ‘machine’ metaphor in our times. But now we have a new metaphor for the organism: the computer. The link: ‘post-humans’ chronotope, anything but “organic”.
In search of some more variety in the matter of food production, I did some looking into shrimp, with the usual consequences...
There is a profound, inescapable need for animals that is in all people everywhere, an urgent requirement for which no substitute exists. It is no vague, romantic, or intangible yearning, no simple sop to our loneliness for Paradise. It is as hard and unavoidable as the compounds of our inner chemistry. It is universal but poorly recognized. It is the peculiar way that animals are used in the growth and development of the human person, in those most priceless qualities which we lump together as "mind" . . . Animals are among the first inhabitants of the mind's eye. They are basic to the development of speech and thought. Because of their part in the growth of consciousness, they are inseparable from a series of events in each human life, indispensable to our becoming human in the fullest sense.
Paul Shepard, Thinking Animals
And an even stronger cup:
True human kindness can only be manifested in its pure and free form with respect to those beings who have no power. The true moral test of humanity (the most radical test, at such a profound level that it is beyond the reach of our vision) is our relations with those who are at our mercy: animals. And this is where we have experienced our greatest defeat, the fundamental debacle from which springs all of the others.
Alain Finkelkraft, Lost Humanity: An essay on the 20th Century
(my translation from the Spanish edition)
Several links to material on North American hog production, mostly from Successful Farming and North Carolina statistics
Thinking about the problem of lack of interest in food as topic/issue and about the first week of the course.
I am trying to use this format (ie blog) to come up with a program for the course that would turn into the 'web environment and tools' the students would use. I understand we can make "categories" here, so we can like have parallel threads going on here. Could each students blog be a category? Could we make a category of 'class notes' which would have an entry with links for each session in 'final' form. And then this thread can continue to be comments/brain storming on things as they come up? Is that clear? (no)
I. First session (with special guest speaker Prof. Blackmer! who I hope will be a fairly regular guest speaker.)
Introductions and setting up web environment. There is a lot to decide on here. One idea I had was that if students did blogs, rather than web pages, then other students could write comments write there. Of course the blob could link to student built pages as well. Also the class notes could be a blog, with linkes, where student could comment or ask questions directly. Dreaming?
II. Intro to work in Chiapas
Talk about our projects with organic agriculture and show a Video I have call Lacandonia, the Zapatistas and the Rain Forest or something like that.
III. Globalization
After looking at a very local place (Chiapas) and its response to global issues, lets look at the globe. I would like to show the images of world maps I used last year. Including Alexander's Empire of course, the earth at night (we seem to need a new link here) and the 'real' earth at night
[In one of the map collections we found some amazing maps of European colonization of the world circa 1890. Do your remember those? I would like to add them to the slide show]
Finish the session with the idea that colonization/decolonization actually built the context with think of today as 'global' (Mention Wallerstein and JWSR). How do we divide the globe up? 'Third World', 'wired core vs. unwired perifery' etc. Global as a metaphor and the chronotope of progress (development)
IV. Is there a Global Ecology?
Are we really interconnected or is the 'global' just a concept we use to make maps?
Let's take a look at ENSO and its connection to drought and famine (and thus introduce food system issues through the back door of food security).
Anartya Sen's notion of entitlements.
This would be based in part on Davis 'Origins of the Third World' approach
Lets look at the history of ENSO drought/famines, especially late 19th century episode in India, China and Brazil, (most of the 'Third world'). What is the role of 'government' in food security? The 18th century Chinese Qing vs the 19th century British Malthusians. etc (Maybe you'd like to tell us about China)
Take a pot shot at global warming?
First exercise: hmmm (to be continued)
Results of some searching on the current state of this corner of agricultural production.
A good summary of the process of and constraints in pork production in a passage from Centner's Empty Pastures. The nearest parallel I can think of in literature is Melville's "Paradise
of Bachelors and Tartarus of Maids"... see an especially creepy bit of that...
I'm reading Terence Centner's Empty Pastures: confined animals and the transformation of the rural landscape (S441 .C45 2004):
According to some estimates, only about 3 percent of our country's farms account for more than one-half our agricultural production. The largest 1 percent of our farms produces 30 percent of our food. (20)That's staggering. And one of the consequences is that almost no W&L students have any personal connection to farms or farming --it's a remote subject, and likely to remain so. And it's a hard sell when it comes to interesting them in the problems of farmers or the importance of the choices made at the primary production level.
later in the book:
...about 26.6 million pounds of antibiotics are administered to domestic livestock each year, whereas humans consume 3 million pounds. Less than 8 percent of the antibiotics administered to animals are used to treat active infections. The remaining quantities of drugs are intended to engance animals' growth and producers' profits... reducing the risk of disease and increasing digestive efficiency, and hence decreasing feed, are two major reasons that producers use antibiotics (39, 40)It does seem that each page has something worth quoting...
I want to fix the subjects and get the daily schedule mapped out so I can begin working up the electronic source materials. I suspect that Onfolio, if it turns out to be as useful as it looks, will become an important tool at some point.
One way is to think about the weeks.
I. Setting things up: Fundamental metaphors and chronotopes
II. Maize
III. Chickens
IV. Intensification and the future of growing food
V. Food and public health
VI. Student presentations
I. Setting things up
Introductions, the course as an electronic experiment in student participation
The web, accounts etc. Taking responsibility for your own wetware.
Industrial agriculture, the chronotope of develoment/underdevelopment
Biological agriculture, (chronotope? diversity and evolution?)
What is commodification? Is food a commodity?
Video: The Living Soil (MOA; I will bring it)
II. Maize - and diversity at all levels
Origins- maize and Mesoamerican civilization
Shattering video (section on Vavilov)
Why diversity is important, from soil to seed to culture.
Contrast 'milpa', traditional Mesoamerican maize polyculture with Iowa cornfield.
Maybe Global Banquet video here.?
Social life of the tortilla.
III. Chickens
Start out talking about our relationship to animals since the pleistocene (Paul Shepard) and what has happened since. Use chicken domestication in Asia as and example.
video material?
IV. Intensification and the future
Theories and metaphors of "agriculture intensification". Origins of "civilization" the so.called Green Revolution and the real green revolution, what role for GMOs and agroecology approaches. (Video: Troublesome Creek?)
V.Food and Health
Look at issues of diet and public health. The role of science. Examples, fats, diabetes. Avain flu. Mad Cow.
VI. Students
Just a first swipe at it..much to do, Add links