Cross posted from Worldwatch Institute's Nourishing the Planet and written by Christi Zaleski.
Leaving Gambia's capital city, Banjul, you'll find a group of women standing road side offering up oysters for 15 dalasis a cup, or about 55 cents for approximately 75 pieces of oyster meat. These women in the community have been harvesting oysters from the extensive mangrove wetlands of Gambia for decades. Much of the harvesting is concentrated in Tanbi National Park, a Ramsar site, or wetland of international importance. Surprisingly, the mangroves themselves have undergone little change during the last thirty years, even as the population of the country, increasingly concentrated around Tanbi in the Greater Banjul Area, more than doubled during that period.
Although the mangroves remain healthy, the oyster harvesters have witnessed the effects of increased pressure on the oyster population first hand. The women report that oysters today are smaller and harder to find than thirty years ago or even ten years ago. Even with the increased effort required to harvest, more women are harvesting today than in the past. These women rely on oysters for their livelihoods and contribute to food security in a country that is heavily dependent on seafood for protein.
In 2007 a group of oyster harvesters organized themselves into a producer association called TRY Women's Oyster Harvesting Association. The first members decided to call the organization TRY, because it was an effort to do just that - try to improve the situation for oyster harvesters without much certainty that their efforts would pay off. After some initial success fund raising to buy boats, membership in TRY grew rapidly from fourteen women in just one village to 500 oyster harvesters from fifteen communities across the Greater Banjul Area today. This growth was no small feat. Although the women are all Jola, a minority ethnic group in Gambia, they are divided into different sects with distinct languages and heritages. Through TRY, the harvesters have been able to put aside these differences and work as a cohesive community making decisions by consensus and collectively prioritizing needs.
Two years later in fall 2009, TRY became linked with the USAID funded Sustainable Fisheries Project, Ba Nafaa. Ba Nafaa has helped TRY expand the scope of its mission and has worked to create a sustainable co-management plan for the oyster fishery that respects the needs of harvesters, consumers, and the environment.
In their short time together TRY and Ba Nafaa have already made some important strides in working toward improved livelihoods and fisheries practices. The women have collectively agreed to practices that may be difficult in the short run, but pay off over time. Traditionally, oysters are harvested during the dry season, with the wet months of July through December closed for harvesting. This year, the communities agreed to extend the closed season until March. When harvesting resumed in the spring, the women saw the benefits of the extended closure immediately, noticing a marked increase in the size of oysters for harvest. Additionally, each community agreed to close one bolong, or tributary, in their territory for the entire year to encourage regeneration of the oyster population there.
The women are also adopting practices to ensure that Tanbi remains a healthy mangrove ecosystem. Harvesters are learning about the ecological importance of mangroves and how destructive practices like cutting roots with machetes to collect the attached oysters damages the capacity of the ecosystem to support oyster populations and fish nurseries. They are sharing these lessons with one another and the Gambian public through short plays demonstrating proper harvesting techniques and sharing information about mangrove ecology. In a country stretched for resources, the oyster harvesters are also helping the Department of Parks and Wildlife Management police the wetlands by reporting observations of illegal fuel wood harvesting to local officials. The women are experimenting with shellfish aquaculture to help relieve pressure on wild stocks and limit the harm to mangroves.
One of the first accomplishments of TRY was to raise the price of oysters from ten dalasis per cup to fifteen. Customers have been willing to pay the new price, a partial acknowledgment of the value of these harvesters' effort. One of the big goals for Ba Nafaa and TRY, however, is to see that number grow exponentially by opening up new markets in the high end retail outlets serving tourists. This would be greatly aided by establishing a permanent market for harvesters who now must rely on customers stopping by the side of the road or at temporary markets in the major cities in the Greater Banjul Area. Eventually, the harvesters could develop an export market to the United States or European Union, which could yield prices high enough to create living wages for harvesters. In the meantime the oyster harvesters will continue to be found selling their catch along the road outside of Banjul, and working together to try to improve their situation.
Christi Zaleski is concentrating in environmental studies at Brown University and is spending the summer in Gambia working with the Gambia-Senegal Sustainable Fisheries Project Ba Nafaa.
Thank you for reading! As you may already know, Danielle Nierenberg is traveling across sub-Saharan Africa visiting organizations and projects that provide environmentally sustainable solutions to hunger and poverty. She has already traveled to over 18 countries and visited 130 projects highlighting stories of hope and success in the region. She will be in Burkina Faso next, so stay tuned for more writing, photos and video from her travels.
If you enjoy reading this diary, we blog daily on Nourishing the Planet, where you can also sign up for our newsletter to receive weekly blog and travel updates. Please don't hesitate to comment on our posts, we check them daily and look forward to an ongoing discussion with you. You can also follow us on Twitter and Facebook.
In Zambia, sorghum-a drought resistant cereal that thrives in the country- was considered a "poor man's crop" in the past, often shunned by small-scale farmers for the more commercially viable maize. But an article in the June issue of Farming Matters explains how a Zambian brewery with a new brand of beer is changing the way small-scale farmers think about sorghum.
While most clear beers such as lagers and pilsners are made with expensive, imported malts, the Zambian Breweries' Eagle Lager is made from sorghum. A subsidiary of the South African-based SABMiller, Zambian Breweries purchases sorghum from local farmers, increasing farmers' income and providing local grocery stores with an affordable lager.
To help farmers partner with the brewery, the Cooperative League of the United States of America (CLUSA), with funding from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), provides loans for farmers' start-up expenses, as well as agricultural training to make sure their crops meet the brewery's quality standards. With CLUSA's support, the brewery gets a consistent supply of sorghum to produce its beer and farmers gain access to a secure market, a fixed price for their crop, and a consistent income.
To produce larger crop yields of higher quality sorghum, CLUSA and the brewery, encourage farmers to implement conservation agriculture-a combination of simple techniques such as minimal or zero-tillage, ground cover, crop rotation and inter-planting. Conservation agriculture can reduce the need for inputs, including artificial fertilizer, pesticides, and herbicides. And it benefits the other crops farmers are growing by helping improve soil fertility, controlling pests and weeds, and improving water management. In Zambia, maize yields have been increased by 75 percent and cotton yields by 60 percent thanks to conservation agriculture. (See also: Using the Market to Create Resilient Agriculture Practices, To Improve Competitiveness of Rural Businesses, Linking Farmers to the Private Sector, and a Sustainable Calling Plan.)
While Zambia Breweries' collaboration with local farmers is working, not all partnerships between companies and farmers go so well. Without appropriate regulation, companies may take advantage of a monopoly; farmers can become indebted to the company and lose control of their farms and crops; and A BIG financial incentive to grow a specific crop can threaten overall crop diversity.
But in Zambia, more than 4,500 small-scale farmers in 14 districts are currently seeing an increase in their incomes due to their contract with Zambia Breweries. Recognizing the significance of this benefit, the Zambian government recently lowered taxes on Eagle Lager in order to encourage Zambian Breweries to continue working with local small-scale farmers. And SABMiller is trying to form similar partnerships with sorghum farmers in Uganda, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, and Mozambique.
Thank you for reading! As you may already know, Danielle Nierenberg is traveling across sub-Saharan Africa visiting organizations and projects that provide environmentally sustainable solutions to hunger and poverty. She has already traveled to over 18 countries and visited 130 projects highlighting stories of hope and success in the region. She will be in Burkina Faso next, so stay tuned for more writing, photos and video from her travels.
If you enjoy reading this diary, we blog daily on Nourishing the Planet, where you can also sign up for our newsletter to receive weekly blog and travel updates. Also, please don't hesitate to comment on our posts, we check them daily and look forward to an ongoing discussion with you.
At the Rural Development Foundation's (RDF) primary school in Kalleda, a small village in the Warangal district of Andhra Pradesh, India, students carry gardening tools, along with their notebooks and pencils.
All of the students work in the school's garden, cultivating and harvesting rice, lentils, corn, and cotton that is used to make the daily meals or sold to the village and to other schools. Students also take turns tending a field of marigolds and selling them in Kalleda. All of the profit goes back to the school.
And the students carry another important tool-a camera.
Cameras were provided by Bridges to Understanding (Bridges), a Seattle-based non-profit that uses digital technology to empower and connect children around the world. Students participating in the Bridges curriculum are taught to use cameras and editing software to develop stories about their community and culture. These videos, comprised of a photo slide show with a running narration, are then shared with the Bridges online community which is made up of schools in seven countries: Azerbaijan, Cambodia, Guatemala, India, Peru, South Africa, and the U.S.
For many students, it's the first time they have ever even held a camera. "When I first asked my students if they thought they could ever design, shoot and edit their own film they just shook their heads and said, 'there's no way," said Elizabeth Sewell, Bridges program coordinator at the RDF school in Kalleda.
But not only did her students successfully develop a concept for, shoot and edit a video about local water pollution, they are also participating in an online discussion about their school garden with another group of students at the Aki Kurose school in Seattle. Students at Aki Kurose are learning to grow corn, squash, and beans using traditional Native American practices. And they volunteer at a local food bank, a completely new concept to the students at Kalleda. "Thank you for your post about your school garden and information about your food bank," wrote Sewell's students. "We had never heard of a food bank before your post. We like the idea of a place where people can get free food."
Sewell explains that having a conversation about farming with students in Seattle helps students at Kelleda "realize what makes their community unique but also that there are other kids out there dealing with similar issues, providing a model or inspiration for alternatives and creating a global sense of solidarity in facing these problems."
And, according to Sewell, the Bridges video project gives students a concrete and achievable goal to strive towards as they grapple with larger questions about their role as "agents of change" in their community and the world.
"At first, the prospect of designing, shooting and editing a movie seems insurmountable but then they produce these beautiful films," says Sewell. "And then you knock down that barrier, you show them what they are capable of doing. And then they can start to approach other, larger and more institutional, problems the same way. Suddenly, in their own eyes, there are no limits to what they can achieve."
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The farmers of the Neleshi Grasscutter and Farmers Association (NAGRAFA) consider themselves not only farmers and businesswomen and men, but also conservationists. Grasscutters, or cane rats, are found throughout Western Africa and, as their name suggests, they live in grasslands. But many poor farmers in Ghana use slash and burn methods on grasslands to provide short term nutrients to the soil, as well to drive out grasscutters and sell their meat, which is considered a delicacy. To help preserve the grasslands and help other farmers increase their incomes, NAGRAFA offers free trainings to farmers and youth about how to raise, slaughter, and process grasscuttter and rabbit meat.
The group is made up of about 40 active members-both men and women-who have been working together to find better ways to raise grasscutters and rabbits on a small-scale. Their biggest challenges, says Farmer Brown (which is the only name he gave us), the leader of the group is finding inexpensive ways of housing and feeding their animals, finding better packaging for their products, and publicizing the health and nutritional qualities of their products.
NAGRAFA is also reaching out to youth to engage them in farming. Because the rabbits and grasscutters are cute, it's easy to get children and teenagers interested in them, according to Ekow Martin, one of the members of NAGRAFA. He's training 5 to 6 youth in his community about how to raise the animals-and earn money from the sale of the meat. And, Mary Edjah, another NASGRAFA farmer says that "we need more hands" to help raise rabbits and grasscutters. She and other members of the group are helping train 6 orphans about how to raise and care for the animals.
Ms. Edjah also says that raising grasscutters and rabbits helps "bring the family together" and "keeps the children at home." Raising these animals, says Mr. Martin, "changes everything." The family is happy, he says, because they're able to supplement their income, as well as improve the family's nutrition.
And like other livestock such as cattle and goats, grasscutters and rabbits are like walking credit cards, giving families the opportunity to sell them to pay for school fees or medicine, or eat them. Ms. Edjah says "that in times of need, women know they can slaughter the rabbits."
For more about NAGRAFA, check out the videos below.
This is the first in a two-part series about Nourishing the Planet co-director Danielle Nierenberg's visit with COMACO in Zambia. Cross posted from Worldwatch Institute's Nourishing the Planet.
One of the first things you notice about grocery stores in Zambia is the plethora of processed foods from around the world, from crackers made in Argentina and soy milk from China to popular U.S. breakfast cereals. Complementing these foreign foods, however, are a variety of locally made and processed products, including indigenous varieties of organic rice, all-natural peanut butter, and honey from the It's Wild brand.
It's Wild was started by the Community Markets for Conservation(COMACO), an organization founded over 30 years ago to conserve local wildlife. COMACO helps farmers improve their agricultural practices in ways that can protect the environment-such as through conservation farming-while also creating a reliable market for farm products. It organizes the farmers into producer groups, encouraging them to diversify their skills by raising livestock and bees, growing organic rice, using improved irrigation and fisheries management, and other practices, so that they don't have to resort to poaching elephants or other wildlife.
By targeting hard-to-reach farmers that live near protected areas, "we're trying to turn things around," says Dale Lewis, Executive Director of COMACO. For decades, many farmers in eastern Zambia practiced slash-and-burn agriculture and were involved in widespread elephant poaching. Farmers killed elephants and burned forests not because they were greedy, but because it was their only alternative, Lewis explains. Degraded soils, the lack of effective agricultural inputs, and drought left many farmers in the region desperate, forcing them to turn to poaching and environmentally destructive farming practices.
By training more than 650 "lead" farmers to train other farmers, COMACO hopes to not only protect the environment and local wildlife, but also help farmers increase their incomes by connecting them to the private market.
COMACO supports the creation of regional processing centers and trading depots to make it easier for farmers to process their crops and transport them to market. The group also offers a higher price to farmers who grow rice and other products organically, and for those use the conservation farming techniques they've learned from COMACO trainers and lead farmers. Where farmers "comply with COMACO, they see benefits," Lewis says, including improvements in food security and health.
The resulting products are then sold under the It's Wild brand in major supermarket chains across Zambia, such as ShopRite, Checkers, and Spar. Next year, COMACO plans to export its products to Botswana. The organization is trying to do as much of the product distribution as possible so that the money stays with the farmers and not middlemen.
COMACO has also gotten technical support from multinational food giant General Mills. The company paid for a COMACO food technician to visit its headquarters in early 2009 to learn how different food processing techniques can increase the nutritional and economic value of the foods that the organization is selling.
Lewis hopes that eventually COMACO will be self sufficient-and profitable-without the current heavy dependence on donor funding. But that's not easy for an organization that works with thousands of farmers and has high administrative, transport, and salary costs.
Stay tuned this week for more about Dale Lewis and COMACO's work.
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Care International's work in Zambia has two main goals: increase the production of staple crops and improve farmers' access to agricultural inputs, such as seeds and fertilizers.
But instead of giving away bags of seed and fertilizers to farmers, Care is "creating input access through a business approach," not a subsidy approach, according to Steve Power, Assistant Country Director for Zambia.
One way they're doing this is by creating a network of agro-dealers who can sell inputs to their neighbors as well as educate them about how to use hybrid seeds, fertilizers, and other inputs. At the same time, "we are mindful" of the benefits of local varieties of seeds, says Harry Ngoma, Agriculture Advisor for the Consortium for Food Security, Agriculture and Nutrition, AIDS, Resiliency and Markets (C-FAARM). Care and C-FAARM are working with farmers to combine high- and low-technology practices.
Care thinks that this "business approach" will help farmers get the right inputs at the right time, unlike subsidy approaches that give farmers fertilizer for free, but often at the wrong time of year, making the nutrients unavailable to crops. And Care's focus on training agro-dealers and giving them start-up grants allows the organization to remain invisible to farmers. Power says that Care wants to be a "catalyst to the market" and help transfer resources, without distorting the basic pricing structure.
Another component of Care's work is improving the production of sorghum and cassava. "Zambia is as addicted to maize as we are to Starbucks coffee," says Power. But by encouraging the growth of other crops, including sorghum, which is indigenous to Africa, Care can help farms diversify local diets as well as build resilience to price fluctuations and drought.
Care is promoting conservation farming in Zambia as well. The organization has been working in six districts since 2007, reaching 24,000 households. In addition to promoting minimum tillage practices and the use of manure and compost, Care is helping to train government extension officers about conservation farming so that eventually they'll be responsible-instead of Care-for training farmers.
According to Power, the key to Care's work is promoting business-like approaches to agriculture alongside more traditional ones, so farmers don't become dependent on the organization for gifts of fertilizer or seed. These sorts of programs, according to Care, will be more effective at feeding people and increasing incomes than traditional food-aid projects that rely on long-term donor support. This is a big challenge in a country-and a region-facing the impacts of both climate change and the global economic crisis.
Stay tuned for more blogs about how farmers are linking to the private sector.
This is the first in a series of blogs where we'll be asking policy makers, politicians, non-profit and organizational leaders, journalists, celebrities, chefs, musicians, and farmers to share their thoughts-and hopes-for agricultural development in Africa. Cross posted from Nourishing the Planet.
Last week, I had the privilege of meeting with the new U.S. ambassador to Zimbabwe, Charles Ray. Ambassador Ray was gracious enough to take the time to answer my questions about agricultural development in a country facing political turmoil, high unemployment, and high food prices.
What do you think is needed in Zimbabwe to both improve food security and farmers incomes?
Over the past decade, Zimbabwean small holder farmers have endured a litany of economic, political, and social shocks as well as several droughts and floods resulting in the loss of their livelihoods and food security. Poverty for small holder farmers has greatly increased throughout the country.
In order to restore farmers' livelihoods they need to be supported in a process of sustainable private sector-driven agricultural recovery to achieve tangible household-level impact in food security and generate more household income, as well to promote more rural employment.
The U.S. government through USAID is doing this by supporting programs that provide effective rural extension, trainings and demonstration farms in order to improve farm management by small holder producers. The programs also include support for inputs and market linkages between the farmers and agro-processers, exporters and buyers. These programs are broad-based and cover all communal small holder farmers throughout the country.
The result of this work is increased production, and productivity, lowered crop production costs and losses, improved product quality, and production mix and increasing on-farm value-adding. Together these programs are increasing food security and farmer's incomes as well as generating more farmer income and rural employment of agro-business.
At present, the U.S. is the largest provider of direct food aid in Zimbabwe. We are working with our partners to move from food aid to food security assistance which will use more market oriented approaches and combine livelihoods programs as noted above, which will reduce the need for food distribution.
Do you think Zimbabwe needs more private sector investment? If so, what are ways the U.S. government and other donors can help encourage both domestic and foreign investment?
Zimbabwe certainly needs more foreign direct investment. There is little chance that the country can internally generate the investments required to promote the economic growth it needs without it. But it is the government of Zimbabwe that is responsible for creating the business enabling environment to attract investment including both foreign and national.
At present, much more needs to be done in policy and the legal and regulatory framework and in the rhetoric and actions by the government in order to create the environment conducive to attract investment. Without the clear will of the government to be FDI-friendly there is not much that the donors can do.
Check out the most recent issue of the journal Science which takes a look at ways to improve food security as the world's population is expected to top 9 billion by 2050. To best nourish both people and the planet, the journal suggests a rounded approach to a worldwide agricultural revolution by encouraging diets and policies that emphasize local and sustainable food production, along with the implementation of agricultural techniques that utilize biotechnology and ecologically friendly farming solutions.
Jessica Milgroom isn't your typical graduate student. Rather than spending her days in the library of Wageningen University in the Netherlands, her research is done in the field-literally. Since 2006, Jessica has been working with farming communities living inside Limpopo National Park, in southern Mozambique.
When the park was established in 2001, it was essentially "parked on top of 27,000 people," says Jessica. Some 7,000 of the residents needed to be resettled to other areas, including within the park, which affected their access to food and farmland. Jessica's job is to see what can be done to improve resettlement food security.
But rather than simply recommending intensified agriculture in the park to make better use of less land, Jessica worked with the local community to collect and identify local seed varieties. One of the major problems in Mozambique, as well as other countries in sub-Saharan Africa, is the lack of seed. As a result, farmers are forced to buy low-quality seed because nothing else is available.
In addition to identifying and collecting seeds, Jessica is working with a farmer's association on seed trials, testing varieties to see what people like best. In addition, farmers are learning how to purify and store seeds (see Innovation of the Week: Investing in Better Food Storage in Africa).
Weevils, the farmers tell Jessica, are worse than ever, destroying both the seed and crops they store in traditional open-air, granaries. But the farmers are now building newer granaries that are more tightly sealed and help prevent not only weevils but also mold and aflatoxins from damaging crops.
Today, farmers and breeders alike have a greater respect for Mozambique's indigenous seed varieties. According to Jessica, one of the biggest accomplishments of the project has been getting breeders and farmers to talk to each other. "It's been interesting for both groups," says Jessica, "and it needs to be a regular discussion" between them.
Since the Reagan-era changes in the country's tax and regulation policies more and more of the wealth and income generated by our economy has been flowing upward to fewer and fewer people. We have now reached the point where wealth is at least as concentrated as it was in 1929. With similar consequences.
Just how concentrated is the wealth and income? The L-Curve website graphically illustrates the disparity. Here's how it works.
Picture a football field. Each of the 100 years is 1% of the population. At any point on the field you pile a stack of $100 bills to represent the income that a family in that percentile makes. So the median family income would be on the 50-yard line.
According to the site (old data), in 2005 the median family was approx. $40,000, and the stack of $100 bills would be about 1.6 inches high.
The family on the 95-yard line makes about $100K, a stack about 4 inches high.
99-yard line, $300K, about a foot high.
One foot line, top 1/3 of one percent, $1 million, 40 inches.
Now the slope of the graph starts to rise.
$1 billion is a stack 1 kilometer high. (Median family income was 1.6 inches.)
And then you start to get to the really rich. $10 billion is a stack the height of Mt. Everest.
The last few on the field have income representing a stack 15 kilometers high.
Two points:
1) This is old data. The concentration is greater now. The top incomes might not be as high this year.
2) The concentration of wealth is even greater than the concentration of income.
The societal consequences are dramatic. This happened as a result of wealth's ability to influence our country's decision-making. And that influence was used to increase the wealth of the influencers, which increased their influence. But this has come at the expense of regular people, whose incomes have stagnated, forcing them into increasing debt.
We have reached a breaking point where a consumer-based economy can no longer be sustained. But this has not led to any loosening of the grip that money has on our political system. If we don't force the political system out of that grip and restore democracy we will not be able to fix our economic system.
Once upon a time, education really was the key to opportunity and advancement in America. Although we did not collect comprehensive statistics throughout most of the era in which this was true, we do have some statistics from the tail end of that era, which I've summarized below. As you can see, non-high school graduates gained a small amount of ground from 1967 to 1973, while high school graduates and above gained 10% or more. "All" workers did better by over 10%, too, because the mix of workers was becoming more and more education.
Over the next 17 years, however, only those with a college degree or more showed any improvement (as a group, obviously individuals gaining experience and seniority did better, while some also did worse). High school drop-outs faced a drastic drop in income. Meanwhile, the super-high income groups--the top 0.1% and top 0.01%, who had been in the doldrums from 1967 to 1973, saw their incomes start to skyrocket:
(Note: p90 means 90th income percentile = top 10%. p95, 95th percentile = top 5%, etc.)
These changing trends only intensified in the years 1991 to 2008, although things were relatively good during the 1990s. Altogether, however, people with advanced degrees saw their incomes drop significantly over this time period--83.2% down for those with professional degrees, and 92.2% down for those with doctorates. Meanwhile, those in the top 1% and above showed strong to astronomical income growth:
We Need To Redistribute Wealth Through A Progressive Taxation System.
Interesting article in the London Review of Books entitled "What Matters." Link below. The author argues that efforts to eliminate or minimize racism and sexism and homophobia have had no positive effect in changing society for the better, except for the benefits received by the small, elite group of women and minorities and gays who are now members of higher-paid professions. The lack of focus on inequality in income and asset ownership, or class differences, and the focus instead of racism and sexism, has allowed the situation for most people to deteriorate over recent decades.
I think his position can be summarized as follows: assuming that the top 20% of our society owns 80% of the country's assets, and takes home 80% of the country's income every year, then the bottom 80% of society is economically unequal -- they are denied their fair share of wealth. If we succeed in eliminating sexism and racism so that the top 20% has a representative number of whites and minorities, but the distribution does not change, then society as a whole has not benefitted. Society is just as unequal, and unfair, for 80% of its members, as it was during the height of racism and sexism.
It's an interesting analysis. It may be that it's easier for people to demand "equality" based on natural-born characteristics, and harder for people to demand economic equality based on a government-sponsored redistribution of wealth. In other words, most people might agree that it is wrong to refuse to allow any woman to go to law school. But they might not be able to articulate an argument about it being wrong to allow some of our citizens to have no home, no food, no money, no safety net. It's almost as if the powers that be might be willing to give up racism and sexism, but would never consider income redistribution.
Income redistribution is the legitimate purpose of a progressive tax system. When people earn ten million dollars, for example, a progressive tax system should take most of that money for public purposes. There are many reasons for this, including the fact that we should try to prevent any group of people from accumulating so much wealth that they can, essentially, put every single politician on their payroll, and control the country without ever having run for office. Which is what's happened in our country today.
For example, we used to have laws that prohibited one person or company from owning multiple TV stations, radio stations, newspapers, magazines, believing that democracy is best served when many voices can be heard. But some scum-bucket like Rupert Murdoch comes into this country and starts bribing politicians, and suddenly the laws are changed to allow him to buy up much of the media in the country and use it to promote fascist propaganda. Rich people destroy democracy, and that is why they should not be allowed to get too rich.
For another example, if Bill Gates had been taxed at 90% on his "earnings," maybe he wouldn't have charged the public so much for his crappy operating system, maybe he wouldn't have been so eager to keep competitors from entering the marketplace, maybe he wouldn't have devoted so much time to getting H1b visas to bring in 6-year immigrant labor and pay them less than Americans, all being the types of predatory conduct of people who know they're not going to pay much in taxes, so they are motivated to get as much as they can.
Of course a percentage of our taxes, and those from every country with any wealth, should be turned over to an NGO supervised fund for development, and used to end poverty in the third world. Why should a few ultra-rich people in this country have gold-plated toilets and multiple homes, while millions throughout the world starve? Why is it considered radical to say that this type of inequality must be ended?
We have gone through a period in which we theoretically have a national commitment to being more "fair" to our own people, but the end result is more unfair. Fewer people run everything, the politicians are openly selling their votes, a few rich people own and control all the media, we have more people out of work, more people homeless, fewer people can afford to own a home, states and cities are bankrupt, schools are underfunded, the rich pay less in taxes, more people have been forced into poverty. This isn't progress towards a more fair society. It's just a bit more mixed in terms of gender and race.
"What Matters"
Walter Benn Michaels
"Who Cares about the White Working Class"
edited by Kjartan Páll Sveinsson
"... [I]t would be a mistake to think that because the US is a less racist, sexist and homophobic society, it is a more equal society. In fact, in certain crucial ways it is more unequal than it was 40 years ago. No group dedicated to ending economic inequality would be thinking today about declaring victory and going home."
"In 1969, the top quintile of American wage-earners made 43 per cent of all the money earned in the US; the bottom quintile made 4.1 per cent. In 2007, the top quintile made 49.7 per cent; the bottom quintile 3.4. And while this inequality is both raced and gendered, it's less so than you might think. White people, for example, make up about 70 per cent of the US population, and 62 per cent of those are in the bottom quintile. Progress in fighting racism hasn't done them any good; it hasn't even been designed to do them any good. More generally, even if we succeeded completely in eliminating the effects of racism and sexism, we would not thereby have made any progress towards economic equality. A society in which white people were proportionately represented in the bottom quintile (and black people proportionately represented in the top quintile) would not be more equal; it would be exactly as unequal. It would not be more just; it would be proportionately unjust. "... ...
"Thus the primacy of anti-discrimination ... performed the intellectual function of focusing social analysis on what she calls 'questions of racial or sexual identity' and on 'cultural differences' instead of on 'the way in which capitalist economies create large numbers of low-wage, low-skill jobs with poor job security'. The message of Who Cares about the White Working Class?, however, is that class has re-emerged: 'What we learn here', according to the collection's editor, Kjartan Páll Sveinsson, is that 'life chances for today's children are overwhelmingly linked to parental income, occupations and educational qualifications - in other words, class.' "
Walter Benn Michaels teaches English at the University of Illinois, Chicago. His most recent book is The Trouble with Diversity; his next will be The Death of a Beautiful Woman: Form Now.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n16/m...
A new study by Economist Emmanuel Saez revealed this week that income inequality in the U.S. is more severe today than at any time since World War I, and the current recession is taking its heaviest toll on the worst-off members of our society. As our government rebuilds the financial sector using taxpayers' money, it's important to remember that both financiers and the government are responsible to our communities, not just bank shareholders. If we want to strengthen our country's economic foundation, we need to demand better wages for workers and an end to all kinds of predatory lending.
Saez's new data on income inequality is, as Paul Krugman put it, "truly amazing." Saez, who teaches at the University of California at Berkeley, found that the top 0.01% of U.S. earners had 6% of total U.S. wages, more than double the level in 2000. Earners in the top 10%, meanwhile, took home an astonishing 49.7% of all wages. That gap is larger now than during the Great Depression or the Gilded Age of the Roaring '20s.
"We're seeing Depression-era inequality again-only now it's slightly worse," writes Steve Benen for The Washington Monthly. Benen also notes that this level of inequality is not an inevitable consequence of a market economy: It's an extreme historical aberration. In the U.S., prosperity for much of the 20th Century was shared. But in 2007, at the economic bubble's peak, the wealthy simply got wealthier.
In that context, it is beyond absurd that the government is allowing 8-figure bonuses to be doled out by bailed out banks. Writing for Salon, Robert Reich dissects the policy implications of Citigroup's plans to pay its top executives an average of $10 million this year and award over $100 million to its top trader, a man who literally owns a castle in Germany. Citigroup was one of the most reckless U.S. banks during the housing bubble, a major subprime offender that received $45 billion in direct bailout money, as well as hundreds of billions in federal guarantees. How much is $45 billion? With the median U.S. home price at $174,100, that's the full market price of over 258,000 foreclosed homes. The company says that $10 million a head is necessary to attract and maintain top "talent," which Reich notes is a somewhat misleading term, given recent history. The problem is not just that Citigroup and other Wall Street firms are paying tons of money to a few people, it's that these people are being rewarded for the same kind of activities that got us into this mess to begin with: Risky, highly leveraged securities trading.
"Over the last several years Wall Street has exhibited a truly astonishing lack of talent," Reich says, noting that, "The Street is back to the same, relentlessly untalented tactics that made it lots of money before the meltdown-which also forced taxpayers to bail it out, caused the world economy to melt down, and tens of millions of people to lose big chunks of their life savings."
In truth, Reich argues, most large financial firms in the U.S. are much more like public utility companies than private-sector businesses. Even in good times, they depend on government guarantees and other support systems to function. In bad times, we bail them out. Instead of paying financiers tens of millions of dollars to reinforce a flawed system, Reich argues that we should impose rules that result in salaries similar to the public utilities sector, where top earners are generally restricted to 6-figure incomes.
The American Prospect features two pieces emphasizing problems in the current financial sector. Under a law known as the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), enacted in 1977 we require banks to make loans in communities where they collect deposits. The loans have to be to dependable borrowers and they have to be relatively inexpensive. The law works very well-institutions covered by it made only a tiny fraction of the high-interest subprime loans that brought down the financial sector, as National Community Reinvestment Coalition President John Taylor notes for the Prospect. But CRA only applies to actual banks. You know, the places where you deposit your paychecks. CRA does not apply to subcompanies owned by the same corporation, and it does not apply to giant Wall Street securities firms like Bear Stearns and Goldman Sachs. Taylor says we need to expand CRA to cover these other big players in the financial world.
Why? As Alyssa Katz details in a piece for the Prospect funded by The Nation Institute, many Wall Street firms are bidding on foreclosed properties and selling them at rip-off rates to low-income borrowers.
But as Mary Kane notes for The Washington Independent, banks have also devised several methods of making money without making a loan. By charging tremendous fees on borrowers for minor infractions, banks generate billions of dollars without producing anything of social value. One of the worst forms of abuse, Kane writes, comes in the form of overdraft fees. When you withdraw too much money from your bank account, the bank fronts you the money, and then charges you a fee for this "protection." The trick is, banks almost never tell you that this has occurred, and often play around with the timing of your charges and deposits to maximize the fees they collect. Banks are on track to collect $38.5 billion in such fees this year alone. The worst part is, the fees come from the poorest customers-rich people don't overdraw their bank accounts, because they have tons of money.
In the case of credit cards, banks routinely slap borrowers with outrageous fees and interest rate hikes when the borrowers are making payments on time. Over the years, banks have targeted younger and younger credit card customers, as Adam Waxman notes for WireTap. After years of declining wages for all but the wealthiest citizens, consumers have been turning to pricey plastic to finance basic necessities.
Sadly, corporate America does not seem very focused on helping workers establish their financial independence. The Real News talks with Richard Wolff, an economist with the New School who emphasizes that, while worker productivity has jumped in recent months, wages have not made the corresponding increases. Quarterly productivity numbers tend to jump around a lot, but the trend of not compensating workers for improved efficiency has been around for years.
In a consumer-driven economy, major problems can't be fixed by giving lots of money to a few people, especially if those few people are already rich. To support broad, meaningful economic growth, we need to tailor our policies that empower those on the lower rungs of the economic ladder. And when we bail out giant corporations with taxpayer money, we need to make sure those companies arrange their business to improve the lot of taxpayers.
That's what leading progressive economist Dean Baker calls it, noting:
Senator McCain is filling the airwaves with commercials telling the public that Obama's tax increases will slow growth and cost the economy jobs. It's pretty scary stuff to anyone who takes it seriously.
This chart alone is enough to show what a load of hooey it is:
That steep ascent from 1993 to 2001 is the Clinton Adminstration, adding over 22.7 non-farm jobs to the American economy--an increase of over 20%. And after that? That uneven landscape atop the sharp Clinton rise? That's GW "Taxcut" Bush territory, with a measely 5.53 million jobs added throuhg January of this year--an increase of just over 4%.
"But wait!" you might say, "That's only seven years. Clinton had eight." And you'd be right. But since the beginning of the year, the Bush "taxcut" economy has lost over 1/2 million jobs. And this is what we're supposed to be scared to death of losing???
Anyone who's bee watching the new lately knows that there's something of a property tax revolt going on in Indiana. Hundreds of thousands of Hoosiers have seen their property tax bills skyrocket, and if you follow the media narrative, you'd think that there's been a massive growth in government spending that's at fault here. The truth though is that there hasn't been a tax increase in Indiana, but there has been a massive
tax shift.
STATE BLOGS
Leaving Gambia's capital city, Banjul, you'll find a group of women standing road side offering up oysters for 15 dalasis a cup, or about 55 cents for approximately 75 pieces of oyster meat. These women in the community have been harvesting oysters from the extensive mangrove wetlands of Gambia for decades. Much of the harvesting is concentrated in Tanbi National Park, a Ramsar site, or wetland of international importance. Surprisingly, the mangroves themselves have undergone little change during the last thirty years, even as the population of the country, increasingly concentrated around Tanbi in the Greater Banjul Area, more than doubled during that period.
In 2007 a group of oyster harvesters organized themselves into a producer association called TRY Women's Oyster Harvesting Association. The first members decided to call the organization TRY, because it was an effort to do just that - try to improve the situation for oyster harvesters without much certainty that their efforts would pay off. After some initial success fund raising to buy boats, membership in TRY grew rapidly from fourteen women in just one village to 500 oyster harvesters from fifteen communities across the Greater Banjul Area today. This growth was no small feat. Although the women are all Jola, a minority ethnic group in Gambia, they are divided into different sects with distinct languages and heritages. Through TRY, the harvesters have been able to put aside these differences and work as a cohesive community making decisions by consensus and collectively prioritizing needs.
The women are also adopting practices to ensure that Tanbi remains a healthy mangrove ecosystem. Harvesters are learning about the ecological importance of mangroves and how destructive practices like cutting roots with machetes to collect the attached oysters damages the capacity of the ecosystem to support oyster populations and fish nurseries. They are sharing these lessons with one another and the Gambian public through short plays demonstrating proper harvesting techniques and sharing information about mangrove ecology. In a country stretched for resources, the oyster harvesters are also helping the Department of Parks and Wildlife Management police the wetlands by reporting observations of illegal fuel wood harvesting to local officials. The women are experimenting with shellfish aquaculture to help relieve pressure on wild stocks and limit the harm to mangroves.
In Zambia, sorghum-a drought resistant cereal that thrives in the country- was considered a "poor man's crop" in the past, often shunned by small-scale farmers for the more commercially viable maize. But an article in the June issue of 
At the 
The farmers of the Neleshi Grasscutter and Farmers Association (NAGRAFA) consider themselves not only farmers and businesswomen and men, but also conservationists. Grasscutters, or cane rats, are found throughout Western Africa and, as their name suggests, they live in grasslands. But many poor farmers in Ghana use slash and burn methods on grasslands to provide short term nutrients to the soil, as well to drive out grasscutters and sell their meat, which is considered a delicacy. To help preserve the grasslands and help other farmers increase their incomes, NAGRAFA offers free trainings to farmers and youth about how to raise, slaughter, and process grasscuttter and rabbit meat.
One of the first things you notice about grocery stores in Zambia is the plethora of processed foods from around the world, from crackers made in Argentina and soy milk from China to popular U.S. breakfast cereals. Complementing these foreign foods, however, are a variety of locally made and processed products, including indigenous varieties of organic rice, all-natural peanut butter, and honey from the 
Last week, I had the privilege of meeting with the new U.S. ambassador to Zimbabwe, Charles Ray. Ambassador Ray was gracious enough to take the time to answer my questions about agricultural development in a country facing political turmoil, high unemployment, and high food prices.
Jessica Milgroom isn't your typical graduate student. Rather than spending her days in the library of Wageningen University in the Netherlands, her research is done in the field-literally. Since 2006, Jessica has been working with farming communities living inside Limpopo National Park, in southern Mozambique.
