Crossposted from BorderJumpers, Danielle Nierenberg and Bernard Pollack.
Originally featured in the North Carolina News Observer.
It's not every day you meet someone from Raleigh while traveling in Lusaka, Zambia. Dale Lewis might not have intended to spend decades in the landlocked African country of 12 million, but his passion for protecting wildlife and for conservation led him there - and his entrepreneurial spirit and desire to lift farmers from poverty while protecting the environment compelled him to stay.
How does Lewis, who attended Broughton High School and whose parents were longtime Raleigh residents, help alleviate hunger and poverty in Zambia's most rural areas?
By making peanut butter, and lots of it!
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), which Lewis founded over 30 years ago to conserve and protect local wildlife.
COMACO helps farmers improve their agricultural practices in ways that can protect the environment while also creating a reliable market for farm products. It organizes 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 who live near protected areas, "we're trying to turn things around," Lewis says. For decades, many farmers in eastern Zambia practiced slash-and-burn agriculture and were involved in widespread elephant poaching. It was their only option. Degraded soils and drought left many farmers in the region desperate.
By training more than 650 "lead" farmers to train other farmers, COMACO hopes not only to protect the environment and local wildlife, but also to help farmers increase their incomes by connecting them to the private market. The organization supports creation of regional processing centers and trading depots to make it easier for farmers to process their crops and transport them to market. It also offers a higher price to farmers who grow rice and other products organically and for those who use the conservation farming techniques they've learned from trainers and lead farmers.
Lewis says that when farmers comply with COMACO, they see benefits, 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 Minneapolis-based 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 the organization is selling. Lewis hopes that eventually COMACO will be self-sufficient, and profitable, without the current 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.
He says that he is 70 percent there and is determined to show that his model is not only sustainable, but also profitable.
Danielle Nierenberg is a senior researcher at the Worldwatch Institute and co-project director of "State of World 2011: Nourishing the Planet." Bernard Pollack is a travel writer from the District of Columbia, currently based in Africa.
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Ever since the financial sector bailout process started seven months ago, there has been quite a lot of talk about socialism. Over the past 30 days, Google News records 8,251 matches for "socialism" or "socialist" within American media outlets along. Most of this talk has been extremely naïve and uninformed. The most frequent abusers of the term, conservatives, have lobbed the charge around as though there was a switch governments flip in order to change from "capitalist" to "socialist." The general presumption seems to be that an economic system is either socialist or capitalist, and that the two systems are mutually exclusive.
This is, of course, hogwash. Every economic system in the modern world has elements that are both capitalist (private ownership and / or administration) and socialist (public ownership and / or administration). The two co-exist alongside each other, as they have done in every economic system since the beginning of time. Unless you want to make the postal service, police and fire departments, military, and education 100% private, then you are proposing a certain level of socialism. The fundamental ideological debate over economics is not whether the economy should be socialist or capitalist, but what proportion of it should be capitalist and what proportion should be socialist.
Currently, the best available projections for 2009 are that the United States will be 44.7% socialist, and 55.3% capitalist, for the year. This is determined by the following formula:
(total projected 2009 public expenditures minus intra-governmental transfers / projected 2009 Gross Domestic Project)
Now, one area where the conservatives are not wrong is that we are witnessing an increase in socialism in America. Last year, America was only 37.0% socialist, and 63.0% capitalist. From 2002-2007, the standard range was 35.3%-35.7%. In 2000, the year before Bush took over, the USA was only 33.0% socialist. Since the mid-1970's, public expenditure a as a percentage of GDP has consistently hovered in this 33%-36% range, no matter which parties controlled Congress and the White House, and no matter if there was split or single-party government. However, with the various government bailouts, the jobs / stimulus package, and President Obama's expanded budget, the last year has seen a break with a longstanding 65%-35% capitalist / socialist split in America. Currently, we are roughly a 55%-45% capitalist-socialist country, with future numbers probably settling around 60%-40% capitalist-socialist, as our various bailouts and wars (hopefully) wind down, and (hopefully) economic growth picks up again. (Yes, socialism can also be right-wing, even if it means war spending funneled to private contractors.)
Given that we are only talking about a temporary, 10% increase in socialism in America, and a long-term 5% increase, one might wonder what all the brouhaha about socialism is these days. However, if you consider that the entire range of mainstream socialist vs. capitalist debate in all wealthy democracies on Earth is over where whether we should be 29% socialist (South Korea), 61% socialist (France), or somewhere in between, a 10% shift in one year is a pretty big deal. As I show in the extended entry, the recent shift noticeably alters the location of the United States in the socialist-capitalist continuum relative to other major nations.
So, Erick Erickson of Red State wants people in Washington State to start dragging state legislators into the street, and beat them into a bloody pulp, over a new law mandating higher environmental regulations on dishwasher detergent. Or, maybe that isn't exactly what he wants, but he certainly implies that he wouldn't object on the off chance that people reading his blog might actually decide to start doing that. Such action is worth considering, according to Erickson, and he is going to give his gun a good cleaning.
Given a longstanding record of assassinations, terroristacts, and even aborted coups in this country, American conservative incitements to violence should not be shrugged off. However, there is still an element of comic puniness to these current threats, giving the actual increases in civil unrest around the world right now. For every Erick Erickson or Michelle Bachmann making what are probably empty threats of civil unrest over the expansion of the public sector, there is an angry mob actually threatening to topple a foreign government, and actually pissed off workers holding their company's managers hostage. Such events have risen in frequency during the economic downturn, putting real lives and real governments at risk.
In light of this increase in civil unrest, today I am bringing you the first of what I hope will become a regular series here on Open Left: "Civil Unrest Watch." Perhaps I am starting this series to offer context and contrast to the current incitements to violence from American conservatives. Perhaps I am doing this to demonstrate that while talk of angry mobs may have been reduced entirely to the metaphorical in the United States, they are still actually real in many places around the world. Perhaps I am doing this simply out of a morbid fascination with civil unrest itself. Whatever the reason, I just feel compelled to write a regular round-up of civil unrest worldwide. If Open Left readers find it interesting, I will make it a regular feature.
In today's edition of civil unrest watch: a revolution / coup in Madagascar, protesters in Thailand attempt to overthrow the prime minister, some G-20 protesters trash banks and clash with police, and managers are being taken hostage in France on multiple occasions. Details in the extended entry.
STATE BLOGS
It's not every day you meet someone from Raleigh while traveling in Lusaka, Zambia. Dale Lewis might not have intended to spend decades in the landlocked African country of 12 million, but his passion for protecting wildlife and for conservation led him there - and his entrepreneurial spirit and desire to lift farmers from poverty while protecting the environment compelled him to stay.