DISCUSSION
GROUP
UNFAO chief: Battle to end hunger is winnable
Spiegel Online 01/16/2012
Gains in the battle against malnutrition have been made in many countries, but a concerted effort to slash the number of people around the world facing food shortages is still needed, Jose Graziano da Silva, the new head of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization says in this interview. Da Silva is supporting tighter regulations on speculation, which has been broadly tagged as a major contributing factor to rising food prices.
Speculation Is an Important Cause of High Prices
In a SPIEGEL interview, José Graziano da Silva, 62, the new head of the United Nations aid organization FAO, discusses his plans to combat hunger as well as his efforts to limit speculation and the impact it has on dramatically fluctuating food prices.
SPIEGEL: Mr. da Silva, as the new head of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), you have made it your chief goal to eradicate hunger in the world. Isn't this an extremely ambitious objective, in light of skyrocketing food prices, a continuallygrowing world population and ongoing economic crises?
Da Silva: My plan is ambitious. But you can only motivate people with big objectives. This is precisely what we have to achieve -- to mobilize all parts of society and the international community in the fight against hunger. The FAO or a government alone cannot eradicate hunger on earth.
SPIEGEL: Declarations of intent have been around for a while. In 2000, the United Nations announced its intention to cut the percentage of hungry people in half by 2015. But in reality their numbers have actually increased, from 826 million to more than 925 million.
Da Silva: We have also made some progress. In my native Brazil, in Vietnam and, most of all, in Ghana, among other countries, the fight against malnutrition has been very successful. The biggest difference between now and 2000, however, is that ever since the Lehman bankruptcy, the world has understood that we all live on one planet, and that each country depends on others. There is a new sort of solidarity.
SPIEGEL: Where exactly do you see evidence of that?
Da Silva: Nowadays, the world reacts much more quickly to hunger catastrophes. There are special funds available for emergency efforts. This sort of solidarity reflects a new will. Everyone has recognized that no one benefits from hunger. And only if everyone works together can the hunger problem be solved -- as with the financial and debt crisis.
SPIEGEL: Wouldn't it be more effective, as an immediate measure, to enact legislation that would exclude speculators on Wall Street and elsewhere from the food trade? After all, speculation in commoditiesis seen as one of the main causes of the price increases that drove many millions of people below the poverty line.
Da Silva: In my view, speculation is indeed an important cause of the heavily fluctuating and very high prices. It only benefits banks and hedge funds, but not producers, processors and buyers -- and certainly not consumers. The FAO can only do two things. It can supply the market with data, studies and statistics, thereby making markets more transparent. And it can encourage governments to invest more in agriculture.
SPIEGEL: Why don't you just call for a ban on speculation in food products?
Da Silva: We need stricter regulations, but not just in the area of food. New rules are not the only solution. There are other, important areas, such as the latest round of trade negotiations, the Doha Round among the members of the World Trade Organization. The industrialized countries should finally open their markets and get rid of their agricultural subsidies. It's not that I'm overly optimistic in this respect, but it would be the right approach.
SPIEGEL: How does eliminating subsidies lead to less hunger?
Da Silva: For example, when the United States decided to end subsidies for corn-based ethanol last summer, the price of corn dropped immediately. It was felt in poor countries, like those in Central America, where corn is used for both food consumption and the feeding of livestock, and in Eastern Africa where corn is a key staple. The American decision had a direct and positive effect on the food situation.
SPIEGEL: Why are you reluctant to push back the financial industry?
Da Silva: I'm just saying that it's not enough to restrict individual markets. But I'm also saying, just as clearly, that the deregulation of the financial markets contaminated the food market and made speculation possible in the first place. We have to regulate all markets where there is evidence of such excesses.
SPIEGEL: Then the people who are now hungry will have to be patient for a while.
Da Silva: I'm more optimistic than that. The euro crisis has shown that governments can agree to common goals very quickly. International regulations have been in place for a long time in other areas, such as in the financial sector. Now we also have to take this important step with food security, putting in place regulations also for the food sector and create a global governance system for food security. It isn't the ultimate solution, but the beginning of a worldwide mobilization, which we need when it comes to this issue.
SPIEGEL: Where do you get your optimism?
Da Silva: One of the few good things about rising food prices is that they have created a global awareness of how fundamentally important it is to feed the world -- the other is that higher prices give farmers incentives to produce. Put differently, hunger is finally being given top priority. We should and can take advantage of this, by coming up with a global strategy for food security.
SPIEGEL: Those are nice words ...
Da Silva: ... which can and will be followed by actions. The decisive factor is access to food, or to land, so that people can buy or produce food themselves. Globally, there is enough food for everybody, but for many people, especially the poor, it's simply too expensive. They are going hungry, even with full shelves of food.
SPIEGEL: So the food crisis is really a financial problem?
Da Silva: Of course. And, in a first step, it can be solved with money. Using cash transfer programs, we have provided cash to the poorest families in Brazil, Mexico and Colombia since 2005, so that they can have a minimum income and feed themselves. The needs of about 120 million people were met in this way, and they survived the first food crisis, with its sharply rising prices, more successfully than in other countries. We should continue this sort of program -- not to react to current crises, but to avoid future ones.
SPIEGEL: But that's probably not enough.
Da Silva: At the same time, farmers were supported so that they could sell products in regional markets at reasonable prices. Local farming is the crucial point. Those who produce regionally are less dependent on currency fluctuations, speculation, transport costs and even climate-related disasters. Instead of buying milk, sugar and rice at high prices on the world market, countries should resort to local products. Central America could focus on beans, for example, Chile on quinoa, and so on.
SPIEGEL: International food conglomerates like Cargill and ADM, which produce on an industrial scale, won't like this.
Da Silva: Don't be deceived in this regard! The big companies can also make money in local markets. In light of rising oil prices, long-distance shipping is becoming less and less worthwhile. Besides, promoting innovation is virtually part of the genetic code of businesses. McDonald's now sells fresh salad that is often purchased locally. In doing so, the company does a lot for its image -- and its bottom line.
SPIEGEL: McDonald's might be an exception, but what about the agriculture multinationals, which grow food in massive monocultures for export all over the world?
Da Silva: We are in the midst of a transformation process. Since the so-called "Green Revolution" in the late 1950s, we have pursued high-performance agriculture with industrial means. We have used fertilizer, pesticides and machines without considering the side effects. We know today that many of these things are unnecessary and don't produce the desired results. Monocultures led to soil erosion, depleted fields, over-fertilization and poisoned groundwater.
SPIEGEL: Are you picking a fight with industrial agriculture?
Da Silva: We need sustainable agriculture tailored to regional conditions. In tropical countries, industrial plowing destroys the humus layer in soils. Seeds can no longer thrive. In Argentina, one of the key producers of corn, wheat, grain and soybeans, more than 90 percent of fields are no longer plowed today. In addition, the use of pesticides and chemical additives is being reduced more and more. Instead, farmers are relying on old methods like crop rotation, as well as planting traditional types of grain suited to regional requirements. All of this saves energy and brings down transportation costs and prices ...
SPIEGEL: ... and, as a result, the profits of the agriculture multinationals decline.
Da Silva: The big companies will not be opposed to these ideas. This shift toward small farms and local cultivation methods is a global issue, an issue for the future. They will not be able to ignore it in the long run. But consumers also have to change. We need a new kind of consumption, in the interest of the environment as well as our health.
SPIEGEL: What exactly do you mean? Eat less? Eat better? Eat differently?
Da Silva: Hunger isn't the only problem we have to address. The number of overweight people has also risen to alarming levels. They too are malnourished, but in a different way. They lack essential minerals, and they get sick. They die. We have to address this.
SPIEGEL: How?
Da Silva: We have to reestablish a relationship to food. My grandmother still grew her own tomatoes. She knew exactly how to cook pasta pomodoro, and how to make wonderful noodles. People who shop in supermarkets today don't even know where the food comes from anymore. They have no idea what they're eating. Getting the right nutrition has become a problem for the young generation. And just think of all the victims of bulimia! Anorexia is also an issue. All of this will be the challenge of the future.
SPIEGEL: You envision major changes. How can the relatively small FAO afford this?
Da Silva: The rise in food prices and the financial and economic crisis have increased awareness of poverty and hunger issues around the world. The international community is mobilizing to eradicate hunger. The Committee on World Food Security (CFS), hosted by FAO, has become a key forum for governments, the private sector, civil society and international organizations to address the issues of hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition. This gives us an important foundation for building an effective global food governance system.
SPIEGEL: Your predecessor, Jacques Diouf, was in office for 18 years and did not achieve very much. What time frame do you think in?
Da Silva: Transformation processes always take time. But eliminating something usually happens more quickly. It took us 100 years to introduce chemistry into agriculture. We can get rid of it much more quickly.
SPIEGEL: Mr. da Silva, we thank you for this interview.
Interview conducted by Susanne Amman and Michaela Schiessl
Fri
13
Nov
2015
Are Languages Products of their Environment?
DISCOVER MAGAZINE published this very interesting article:
Languages Are Products of Their Environments
The characteristics that make each language unique may actually be adaptations to the acoustics of different
environments.
Tue
03
Jun
2014
The Case for Reparations
The Case for Reparations
Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.
By Ta-Nehisi Coates
May 21, 2014
Chapters
- I. “So That’s Just One Of My Losses”
- II. “A Difference of Kind, Not Degree”
- III. “We Inherit Our Ample Patrimony”
- IV. “The Ills That Slavery Frees Us From”
- V. The Quiet Plunder
- VI. Making The Second Ghetto
- VII. “A Lot Of People Fell By The Way”
- VIII. “Negro Poverty is not White Poverty”
- IX. Toward A New Country
- X. “There Will Be No ‘Reparations’ From Germany”
Mon
02
Jun
2014
A Look At 19th Century Children In The USA
PHILADELPHIA — DINNER with your children in 19th-century America often required some self-control. Berry stains in your daughter’s hair? Good for her. Raccoon bites running up your boy’s arms? Bet he had an interesting day.
As this year’s summer vacation begins, many parents contemplate how to rein in their kids. But there was a time when Americans pushed in the opposite direction, preserved in Mark Twain’s cat-swinging scamps. Parents back then encouraged kids to get some wildness out of their system, to express the republic’s revolutionary values.
The New York Times
Sunday Review
By JON GRINSPAN MAY 31, 2014
American children of the 19th century had a reputation. Returning British visitors reported on American kids who showed no respect, who swore and fought, who appeared — at age 10 — “calling for liquor at the bar, or puffing a cigar in the streets,” as one wrote. There were really no children in 19th-century America, travelers often claimed, only “small stuck-up caricatures of men and women.”
This was not a “carefree” nation, too rough-hewed to teach proper manners; adults deliberately chose to express new values by raising “go-ahead” boys and girls. The result mixed democracy and mob rule, assertiveness and cruelty, sudden freedom and strict boundaries. Visitors noted how American fathers would brag that their disobedient children were actually “young republicans,” liberated from old hierarchies. Children were still expected to be deferential to elders, but many were trained to embody their nation’s revolutionary virtues. “The theory of the equality” was present at the ballot box, according to one sympathetic Englishman, but “rampant in the nursery.”
Boys, in particular, spent their childhoods in a rowdy outdoor subculture. After age 5 or so they needed little attention from their mothers, but were not big enough to help their fathers work. So until age 10 or 12 they spent much of their time playing or fighting.
The writer William Dean Howells recalled his ordinary, violent Ohio childhood, immersed in his loose gang of pals, rarely catching a “glimpse of life much higher than the middle of a man.” Howells’s peers were “always stoning something,” whether friends, rivals or stray dogs. They left a trail of maimed animals behind them, often hurt in sloppy attempts to domesticate wild pets.
And though we envision innocents playing with a hoop and a stick, many preferred “mumbletypeg” — a game where two players competed to see who could throw a knife closer to his own foot. Stabbing yourself meant a win by default.
Left to their own devices, boys learned an assertive style that shaped their futures. The story of every 19th-century empire builder — Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt — seems to begin with a striving 10-year-old. “Boy culture” offered training for the challenges of American manhood and a reprieve before a life of labor.
But these unsupervised boys also formed gangs that harassed the mentally ill, the handicapped and racial and ethnic minorities. Boys played an outsize role in the anti-Irish pogroms in 1840s Philadelphia, the brutal New York City draft riots targeting African-Americans during the Civil War and attacks on Chinese laborers in Gilded Age California. These children did not invent the bigotry rampant in white America, but their unrestrained upbringing let them enact what their parents mostly muttered.
Their sisters followed a different path. Girls were usually assigned more of their mothers’ tasks. An 8-year-old girl would be expected to help with the wash or other physically demanding tasks, while her brother might simply be too small, too slow or too annoying to drive the plow with his father. But despite their drudgery, 19th-century American girls still found time for tree climbing, bonfire building and waterfall-jumping antics. There were few pretty pink princesses in 19th-century America: Girls were too rowdy and too republican for that.
So how did we get from “democratic sucklings” to helicopter parents? Though many point to a rise of parental worrying after the 1970s, this was an incremental change in a movement that began a hundred years earlier.
In the last quarter of the 19th century, middle-class parents launched a self-conscious project to protect children. Urban professionals began to focus on children’s vulnerabilities. Well-to-do worriers no longer needed to raise tough dairymaids or cunning newsboys; the changing economy demanded careful managers of businesses or households, and restrained company men, capable of navigating big institutions.
Demographics played a role as well: By 1900 American women had half as many children as they did in 1800, and those children were twice as likely to live through infancy as they were in 1850. Ironically, as their children faced fewer dangers, parents worried more about their protection.
Instead of seeing boys and girls as capable, clever, knockabout scamps, many reconceived children as vulnerable, weak and naïve. Reformers introduced child labor laws, divided kids by age in school and monitored their play. Jane Addams particularly worked to fit children into the new industrial order, condemning “this stupid experiment of organizing work and failing to organize play.”
There was good reason to tame the boys and girls of the 19th century, if only for stray cats’ sake. But somewhere between Jane Addams and Nancy Grace, Americans lost track of their larger goal. Earlier parents raised their kids to express values their society trumpeted.
“Precocious” 19th-century troublemakers asserted their parents’ democratic beliefs and fit into an economy that had little use for 8-year-olds but idealized striving, self-made men. Reformers designed their Boy Scouts to meet the demands of the 20th century, teaching organization and rebalancing the relationship between play and work. Both movements agreed, in their didactic ways, that playtime shaped future citizens.
Does the overprotected child articulate values we are proud of in 2014? Nothing is easier than judging other peoples’ parenting, but there is a side of contemporary American culture — fearful, litigious, controlling — that we do not brag about but that we reveal in our child rearing, and that runs contrary to our self-image as an open, optimistic nation. Maybe this is why sheltering parents come in for so much easy criticism: A visit to the playground exposes traits we would rather not recognize.
There is, however, a saving grace that parents will notice this summer. Kids are harder to guide and shape, as William Dean Howells put it, “than grown people are apt to think.” It is as true today as it was two centuries ago: “Everywhere and always the world of boys is outside of the laws that govern grown-up communities.” Somehow, they’ll manage to go their own way.
________________________________
A National Endowment for the Humanities fellow at the Massachusetts Historical Society who is writing a book on the role of young people in 19th-century American democracy.
Mon
21
Apr
2014
Investigating Family's Wealth, China's Leader Signals a Change
From The New York Times
By CHRISTOPHER DREW and JAD MOUAWAD
APRIL 19, 2014
HONG KONG — His son landed contracts to sell equipment to state oil fields and thousands of filling stations across China. His son’s mother-in-law held stakes in pipelines and natural gas pumps from Sichuan Province in the west to the southern isle of Hainan. And his sister-in-law, working from one of Beijing’s most prestigious office buildings, invested in mines, property and energy projects.
In thousands of pages of corporate documents describing these ventures, the name that never appears is his own: Zhou Yongkang, the formidable Chinese Communist Party leader who served as China’s top security official and the de facto boss of its oil industry.
But President Xi Jinping has targeted Mr. Zhou in an extraordinary corruption inquiry, a first for a Chinese party leader of Mr. Zhou’s rank, and put his family’s extensive business interests in the cross hairs.
Even by the cutthroat standards of Chinese politics, it is a bold maneuver. The finances of the families of senior leaders are among the deepest and most politically delicate secrets in China. The party has for years followed a tacit rule that relatives of the elite could prosper from the country’s economic opening, which rewarded loyalty and helped avert rifts in the leadership.
Zhou Family Ties
Fri
13
Nov
2015
Are Languages Products of their Environment?
DISCOVER MAGAZINE published this very interesting article:
Languages Are Products of Their Environments
The characteristics that make each language unique may actually be adaptations to the acoustics of different
environments.
Tue
03
Jun
2014
The Case for Reparations
The Case for Reparations
Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.
By Ta-Nehisi Coates
May 21, 2014
Chapters
- I. “So That’s Just One Of My Losses”
- II. “A Difference of Kind, Not Degree”
- III. “We Inherit Our Ample Patrimony”
- IV. “The Ills That Slavery Frees Us From”
- V. The Quiet Plunder
- VI. Making The Second Ghetto
- VII. “A Lot Of People Fell By The Way”
- VIII. “Negro Poverty is not White Poverty”
- IX. Toward A New Country
- X. “There Will Be No ‘Reparations’ From Germany”
Mon
02
Jun
2014
A Look At 19th Century Children In The USA
PHILADELPHIA — DINNER with your children in 19th-century America often required some self-control. Berry stains in your daughter’s hair? Good for her. Raccoon bites running up your boy’s arms? Bet he had an interesting day.
As this year’s summer vacation begins, many parents contemplate how to rein in their kids. But there was a time when Americans pushed in the opposite direction, preserved in Mark Twain’s cat-swinging scamps. Parents back then encouraged kids to get some wildness out of their system, to express the republic’s revolutionary values.
The New York Times
Sunday Review
By JON GRINSPAN MAY 31, 2014
Mon
21
Apr
2014
Investigating Family's Wealth, China's Leader Signals a Change
From The New York Times
By CHRISTOPHER DREW and JAD MOUAWAD
APRIL 19, 2014
HONG KONG — His son landed contracts to sell equipment to state oil fields and thousands of filling stations across China. His son’s mother-in-law held stakes in pipelines and natural gas pumps from Sichuan Province in the west to the southern isle of Hainan. And his sister-in-law, working from one of Beijing’s most prestigious office buildings, invested in mines, property and energy projects.
In thousands of pages of corporate documents describing these ventures, the name that never appears is his own: Zhou Yongkang, the formidable Chinese Communist Party leader who served as China’s top security official and the de facto boss of its oil industry.
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