Weekly Pulse: DIY Abortions on the Border, Pawlenty Screws MN on SexEd
by Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger
Women on along U.S.-Mexico border are buying black market misoprostol to induce abortions, according to a new report by Laura Tillman in the Nation. The drug is easily available over the counter in Mexico.
In addition to hoes and shovels, more and more farmers in sub-Saharan Africa carry another agricultural "tool": a cell phone.
Over the last decade, cell-phone use in Africa has increased fivefold, and farmers are using their phones to gain information about everything from markets to weather. For example, farmers can find out prices before they make the long trips from rural areas to urban markets, giving them the option to wait to sell until prices are higher. Agricultural extension agents and development agencies also use mobile phones to communicate with farmers, letting them know about changes in weather that could affect crops.
Farmers and agribusiness agents in Zambia are also using cell phones as bank accounts, to pay for orders, to manage agricultural inputs, to collect and store information about customers, and to build credit. Mobile Transactions, a financial services company for the "unbanked," allows customers to use their phones like an ATM card, says Mike Quinn, Mobile Transactions General Manager. An estimated 80 percent of Zambians, particularly in rural areas, don't have bank accounts, making it difficult for them to make financial transactions such as buying seed or fertilizer. But by using Mobile Transactions, farmers are not only able to make purchases and receive payment electronically, they are also building a credit history, which can make getting loans easier.
Mobile Transactions also works with USAID's PROFIT program to help agribusiness agents make orders for inputs, manage stock flows, and communicate more easily with agribusiness companies and farmers. Perhaps most importantly, the partnership helps agents better understand the farmers they're working with so that they can provide the tools, inputs, and education each farmer and community needs.
In addition, e-banking and e-commerce systems can help make better use of agricultural subsidies. Mobile Transactions worked with AGRA and CARE to develop an e-voucher system for obtaining conservation farming inputs. Farmers receive a scratch card with funds that they can redeem via their phones to purchase tools or other inputs from local agribusiness agents. Unlike paper vouchers, there's no delay in moving the money, and farmers can get what they need immediately, such as seed during planting season or fertilizer when it can be used most effectively. And because donors are using Mobile Transactions to distribute the vouchers, they're acting as a stimulant to the private sector, rather than distorting the market.
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Eating Liberally Food For Thought
by Kerry Trueman This week, a Q & A with our favorite Iowa farminist, sustainable agriculture advocate Denise O'Brien (pictured right, with me), who sets down her spade to take up our questions about all things ag, including the implications of Obama's remaining cabinet appointments:
KAT: Progressive foodies have been vigorously debating the "who should be Obama's Secretary of Agriculture?" question for several months now. There's been a movement to draft Michael Pollan, who has no interest in the job, and a letter to President-elect Obama, signed by nearly ninety luminaries in the good food movement galaxy, imploring him to buck the Big Ag/biotech brigade in favor of some more sustainably-minded candidates. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof weighed in on the subject this week with a terrific column explaining why this appointment is so critical.
This is all well and good, but we want to know what you think. Big Ag had a big fit back in 2006 when you ran for Iowa's Secretary of Ag and nearly beat your Republican opponent, a conventional commodity crop farmer. You went on to advise John Edwards about food and ag policy. What are you hoping for from this new administration?
... Last month, 45 U.S. food-processing groups, representing firms whose raw material costs have gone through the roof, demanded that the U.S. agriculture secretary release farmers from their contractual obligation to maintain a portion of their land for wildlife preservation. The U.S. baking industry's trade association, representing firms such as Kellogg Co., Sara Lee Corp. and Interstate Bakeries Corp., plans a march on Washington by the firms' employees later this month to press for a reduction in U.S. wheat exports. ...
Brilliant. Let's further degrade our declining natural resources to compensate for a crop growth pattern that degrades our natural resources. And by 'natural resources', I mean the human species' life support system.
What's plain to any reasonable observer is that conservation programs, which already tend to enroll marginal and previously degraded land, aren't the problem with declining wheat availability. In addition to the export concern (an issue because a lot of other countries are closing off exports after a bad world harvest generated a bumper crop of buyers,) this is:
... The milling industry has been resistant to using such genetically modified wheats, so wheat plants have to be improved the old-fashioned way, by laboriously selecting those with the desired qualities in test plots. That is an expensive and time-consuming process.
Even then, there is no assurance that farmers will buy the seed year after year. That is because of the nature of the wheat plant, an unusually complex organism originating in the Middle East thousands of years ago. Unlike hybrid corn, which loses its productivity after the first year, seeds from improved wheat varieties can be saved and replanted for several years without significant loss of yield.
Syngenta, a large seed company, is still working to develop improved wheat, but Rob Bruns, who heads the North American cereal seed operation, acknowledged that it's difficult to create "enough critical mass to pay for the higher tech investments."
The upshot is that most wheat research is now consigned to public colleges with limited amounts of federal and state funds. ...
Human beings have been adapting plants and animals to our needs for millenia. We're really good at it by now, when we put our minds to it. But the environment is not a blank slate onto which we add crop organisms; competition from pests, weeds and disease never stops.
Farmers used to save their own seed and do the kind of breed tinkering that now gets done mostly in corporate or university research plots. Though as you read above, that activity is mostly centralized in the hands of a few companies who may not bother with it for all grains, and often adapt varieties more to brands of chemicals than to local growing conditions.
Even the editors of The Economist, who've clearly all got certificates from the Condoleezza Rice School of How Could We Ever Have Known, were compelled to let the following truth slip onto the 34th page of their April 19th-25th, 2008, issue, in an article entitled, "The new face of hunger." Emphasis mine:
I'm fond of dogs, but there's one breed that makes me gag: the Bush Dog Democrat. Bush Dogs evolved from the sadly not-yet-extinct DINO (Democrat in Name Only) and you'll find them dutifully toddling along at the heels of our Heel-in-Command, taking the Decider's side, and generally pooping on their party's principles.
Take Collin Peterson, the Minnesota Democrat who's chairman of the House of Representatives agricultural committee. Last week, Peterson pooh-poohed the notion that the farm bill should offer more support for organic farmers, telling the Financial Times that organic farming's share of the market is doing just fine and dandy without any assistance:
It is growing, and it has nothing to do with the government, and that is good...for whatever reason, people are willing to pay two or three times as much for something that says 'organic' or 'local'. Far be it from me to understand what that's about, but that's reality. And if people are dumb enough to pay that much then hallelujah.
Well, he's only head of the ag committee, and he did grow up on a farm, so it's not unreasonable to think that Peterson might be conversant with the issues that compel so many consumers to seek out -- and pay more for -- organic and local foods.
Yet Peterson pretends to be puzzled by the boom in organic food sales, and can only conclude that those of us who frequent the farmers' markets and pay a premium for organic foods must be morons.
This would be merely galling if Peterson were just some agribiz flunky. Coming from the head of the House ag committee, though, it's appalling. Here's the guy who has the power to rewrite our agricultural policies to encourage more sustainable farming practices, healthier school lunches, revitalized rural communities, better land stewardship -- you know, all that crunchy granola stuff that forms the mainstay of the liberal elite diet -- and he turns out to be, well, an agribiz flunky.
STATE BLOGS
In addition to hoes and shovels, more and more farmers in sub-Saharan Africa carry another agricultural "tool": a cell phone.
