Letters: Readers Respond
(PRODUCT) RED
Dear Heifer,
I am a concerned thirteen-year-old who has given a great deal of thought to such global issues as hunger, poverty and child labor. I have tried to make a difference in the world by buying Fair Trade products and donating to Heifer International or Free The Children.
After reading the article entitled "(PRODUCT) RED: The Power Of The Consumer" written by Austin Gelder for the November/December issue of the World Ark magazine, I had several different reactions and felt compelled to share my thoughts about it. I do agree that one innovative and effective way to create awareness about the AIDS virus is to contribute a portion of profits from the sales of everyday items such as clothing, shoes and cell phones. In addition to this, one would hope that consumers might be encouraged to participate in further efforts to eliminate hunger, poverty and rampant disease. Indeed, it seems sensible to me that while purchasing everyday products a consumer would have the ability to contribute to a worthy and lifesaving cause.
However, while the (PRODUCT) RED campaign is helping some, it is our consuming habits that are harming many. There is considerable evidence to substantiate the claim that developed nations such as the United States are consuming a vast amount of resources at an unsustainable rate. At the same time, we are creating a great amount of waste and pollution while furthering unsafe and inhumane labor practices throughout the world. The very products with the (PRODUCT) RED label on them are saving lives on the one hand, while on the other hand they are being manufactured under conditions which violate both human and labor rights. The tricky fact is that unemployment is a huge issue across the world and in many cases any job is better than no job at all. Unfortunately, oftentimes the only work available to those who are impoverished and desperate is tedious and exhausting, with pay falling far below minimum wage. Employees working for factories that produce clothing for Gap (among many other companies) are often extremely young—14, 15 or 16 years old—and work an average of 13 hours a day, while barely making enough money to survive, thus being forced to live in constant debt. With thousands of workers in need of employment, and new locations popping up across the globe where the workers are younger, faster and more desperate, job security is hardly a reality.
When companies promote and we purchase products for lower and lower prices, which are manufactured under such exploitive conditions, we are contributing to an unfortunate global phenomenon referred to as "the race to the bottom." This represents the "race" between corporations to provide a bargain price, while driving wages lower, labor standards lower, and the ages of workers lower.
Although the donation of money to help fight the AIDS virus through the sales of various products does indeed help a number of people who are desperately in need, the approach is only partially addressing a much greater issue, i.e., what is our responsibility to other fellow human beings, and in what ways can we most effectively make a difference, while creating the least negative impact? It is our responsibility as consumers to vote with our dollar, using it in a way that creates a "good deal" for every one. We must first decide if our level of consumption is sustainable, and then we must pause to think about who and what our choices are affecting, both positively and negatively.
Sincerely,
Simone Prince-Eichner
Lummi Island, Washington
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Dear Simone,
In your letter, you raised several important points that we wanted to address directly.
As you outline, allowing consumers to participate in the fight against AIDS via everyday purchases has proven to be an incredibly effective model for generating funds and awareness. Since (RED) launched in 2006, (PRODUCT) RED partners have contributed more than $60 million to the Global Fund to invest in African AIDS programs. This is more than twelve times the amount business had given to the Global Fund in its first four years. The (RED) model was designed to make good business sense for companies and to give consumers an easy, effective way to participate. It needed to accomplish both of these goals in order to be sustainable and deliver money over a long period of time. The amount raised to date demonstrates that this has been accomplished.
You ask 'what is our responsibility to other fellow human beings?' At (RED), we believe this responsibility is very high. That is why we work to put the marketing power of the largest companies and the consumer power of many nations to work for people who can not afford AIDS medicine.
It is why our partners are committed to socially responsible business practices. And it is why they invest in Africa for sourcing and manufacturing as much as possible -- helping to develop local economies and infrastructure and create hundreds of jobs.
The belief that every human life is of equal value is at the heart of the work (RED) and our partners do every day.
Sincerely,
Susan Smith Ellis CEO, (RED)
Letters: Readers Respond
January/February World Ark
Dear Editor,
A couple of years ago I got a mailing from you and thought your approach to helping others was most worthy and unusual. Resultantly, I sent some contributions and I find that others I know have done so too.
So I was stunned when your magazine featured Lester Brown and Wendell Berry, two such pessimists about the future. If their analyses are valid, you ought to shut down your program because there is no way we are going to keep the folks you are helping alive.
Brown opposes high yield farming and, of course, genetically modified seeds (I attach an opinion editorial George McGovern and I wrote several years ago about such seeds). Beginning in the 70's Brown wrote that soil erosion would lead to mass starvation and sought to return to organic farming - which would surely lead to far lower yields and mass starvation. He has been consistently wrong for decades.
I suggest you feature Norman Borlaug in your next edition. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his role in starting the Green Revolution that led to higher yields world-wide. I joined him at a press interview some years ago and the reporter introduced himself and then remarked that Borlaug had saved more lives in the 20th Century than any other living person. Even now in his 90's Borlaug's forward looking vision stands in marked contrast to both Lester Brown & Walter Berry who you featured.
Rudy Boschwitz
U.S. Senator (R-MN, 1978-91)
U.S. Ambassador to the UN Commission on Human Rights (2005)
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I received my first copy of World Ark (Jan/Feb 2008/ from a friend, and within the first few pages noticed three references to places in Portland, Oregon, where I live. All of them were on the 'good life' page. One was a reference to Ikea, which merely has a location in Portland (among many places). The other two are far more interesting. Nike, which apparently will turn non-reusable running shoes into athletic flooring, has its main headquarters located in the Portland area, and gDiapers, which is located in downtown Portland. We used gDiapers for quite some time before switching to full-fledged cloth.
I found it astounding to find how close global care is to me and my family, and am warmed by this information. Thanks for your wonderful work and publication. Already can't wait for the next issue.
Regards,
Dacia Houser
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As a supporter of World Ark, I can't understand why you included the interview with David Korten in the Jan./Feb. issue of World Ark. Do you imagine that all of your readers are ready to believe corporations ("the Empire") to be the Devil incarnate and their leaders "psychologically incapable of moral behavior"? In fact, your supporters no doubt include many business people. You know, those terrible folks who make cloth, clothes, bicycles, airplanes, washing machines, trains, telephones, and computers--not to mention the paper and the printing presses that produced the World Ark. The folks whose businesses your 401(k) and 403(b) plans invest in. Fortunately, there are still countries that haven't been ruined by this "system in which a small ruling class holds the power and controls the resources"-- for example, North Korea, Zimbabwe, or Myanmar. Skip the political rants and stick to your knitting; you can help a lot of people without destroying the world economy.
Carla Marceau
Ithaca, NY
Letters: Readers Respond
Urban Agriculture Q & A
I read with interest the article in the January/February issue about urban farming. In the mid 1990's I lived in Kenya and saw people farming in all kinds of places. Certainly it's good to make crops more available and certainly people in the cities need produce and protein available. I lived in a more rural area, but when I was in Nairobi it really disturbed me to see some of the crops that were grown right beside the roads. The car exhaust on the road verges and in the medians was significant and yet plants were grown even there. We used to wonder which of the toxins released into that air were being absorbed in a significant way into those crops. At the time I remember thinking that I wouldn't want to drink the milk from the cows that were fed with the cattle grass grown in such places and I especially wouldn't want it given to children! Is there research being done on this phenomenon and any planning in large cities to assure that the crops grown in the "in-between" places are really safe?
Valerie Silva
Richland, WA
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In my opinion, agriculture most definitely belongs in the modern American city. It is already there, in many cities, and thriving. That is because a significant number of city dwellers still feel a connection to the land and want to be more involved with raising their food, even though they might live in a city. Perhaps their grandparents were farmers, or their mother was a gardener. There are many paths and pasts that lead city-dwellers to raise their own food.
As a teacher of urban agriculture, my classes are brimming with urban folks who want to learn; people who feel a calling or an urge to be more connected to their food source and to be more self sufficient.
Fortunately, city officials are listening and regulations are changing across America. (I advised a group in a nearby town that has resulted in the changing of local laws regarding chickens). The appeal of locally raised food is growing exponentially in this country and city dwellers are increasingly involved. This movement bodes well for everyone, including rural farmers. I see this in my students all the time. As they begin to make small changes and raise some of their food, they feel a greater kinship and connection with the rural communities and land nearby. They care more deeply and personally about urban sprawl, farmland preservation, and clean water.
Agriculture in the modern American city is an idea whose time is here.
Kelly Simmons,
Director Boulder Sustainability Education Center
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Absolutely yes! Without agriculture, humans lose a sense of connectedness to their world and their habits. As a veterinarian and 4H leader who is an avid community educator on sustainable agriculture (we own our own organic sustainable farm on 5 acres) there are too many people out there who have no idea where their food comes from. Our nation will crumble when we can't feed ourselves without the aid of processing plants, manufacturing and shipping or trucking routes. Whether it be from poor nutrition related diseases (diabetes is a current major threat), the skyrocketing cost of fresh fruit and vegetables due to trucking costs, increased use of pesticides and toxins on our food and in our soil on large factory farms, or erosion and pests created when one crop alone is farmed without consideration of the damage it can cause to the land - we will all one day regret a lack of agriculture in or near our homes.
Jennifer Paige Pongratz DVM
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Dear World Ark,
Thank you for an inspirational magazine!
Your article about urban farming in other parts of the world made me think that it would not happen easily in American cities because the cultural impetus is not great enough. Are the benefits like reducing health risks, improving social skills, and improving the environment enough to overcome the fast food nutrition mentality marketed to Americans by agribusiness? As mentioned in your article, cities and suburban American communities are not designed to accommodate agriculture, and American industrial agriculture is certainly not designed for the city.
Yet, small scale urban garden programs are on the upswing. Immigrant populations in American cities contribute, environmentalists seeking "a responsible connection to their food sources" (in the words of Wendell Berry) contribute, and well run non-profit programs like Heifer International contribute to the growing popularity of sustainable agriculture. Urban garden programs include neighborhood community gardening, farmers markets, hydroponics, spin-farming and simple container gardening. All benefit the city environment, the economy, and the people.
Suburban agriculture should also be promoted, from teaching more people to grow their own vegetables...to teaching them the importance of supporting local farmers by buying local. A few generations now have only known the supermarket as their source of food. They need help to learn about growing methods, composting and dealing with pests. As a Master Gardener with Penn State Cooperative Extension I do community education programs that empower people to be self-directed and manage their resources. Both urban and suburban environments will benefit from the development of sustainable agriculture, and I believe that if we work at it agriculture will become more a part of American cities.
Peace,
Sharon M. Gross
Collegeville, PA
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I very much appreciated your featuring the views of David Korten, Lester Brown, Wendell Berry and the Worldwatch Institute’s paper on Urban Agriculture – That is one issue that won’t end up in my recycling bin!
These giants are pointing the way towards the radical changes we need to make for humanity’s survival in the face of peak oil/ global climate change. This leads right into my views on urban agriculture in the USA.
Even before I read any of the articles in the Jan’08 issue, I determined I would write to tell you that it is my firm belief that we must widely adopt urban agriculture in the USA in this decade if we are to survive the peak oil/ global climate change crisis. The nation of Cuba has modeled for the rest of the world what happens when you must drastically curtail your fossil fuel addiction overnight. The US embargo of Cuba resulted in an unprecedented economic crisis for the country as their supply of oil dropped overnight to half what they were accustomed to.
Previously their agriculture was nearly as highly industrialized as ours was, and almost exclusively rural agribusinesses. Malnutrition was rampant for a few years as they scrambled to come up with ways to feed themselves, get to their jobs, and continue to provide essential services. But because they cooperatively turned to Urban Agriculture and public instead of private transportation, they came through the crisis stronger than ever, actually becoming leaders in sustainable living, education, and health care.
Cuba’s example gives hope to the world that humanity can adapt in time to avert disaster, but it also raised a lot of concerns for me that if our nation were put to the same test, we wouldn’t come out of it nearly as well, because of culturally ingrained attitudes that in many places have become fossilized in local ordinances which discourage food cultivation in the city. Public transportation and cooperative ventures/ political problem solving are also looked on with suspicion and equated with communism. It really bothers me that so many people have swallowed the government line that national security means sacrificing our youth in overseas wars, and snooping in our luggage and our private communications/ lives, and yet we still allow our government to avoid addressing the real sources of our national insecurity – that for most Americans, almost nothing of what we need to survive comes from right around our homes. Instead everything arrives to us over very centralized, convoluted, strung-out supply chains that can be so easily disrupted by a multitude of problems both natural and man-made, from the weather to terrorism. We need to shift to decentralized, local sourcing of almost everything we need to survive, and that means urban agriculture, renewable energy and energy efficiency, public transportation, and local businesses, media, & governance.
We have more than enough space for food-production in our cities and suburbs – we can stop wasting water & energy on ornamental lawns and landscaping, even of corporate and civic spaces, and instead plant edible landscapes, and give jobs to those lacking one to tend and harvest and distribute/sell the produce locally to the neighborhoods.
Edible living roofs are another option, if the roof has extra structural capacity and wind speeds across the roof don’t damage the plants too much. And I believe small livestock should be allowed throughout our cities to consume kitchen and yard wastes and help return organic fertilizers to the earth. We also need to recognize the waste of nutrients and water in our sanitation systems for treating human wastes, and make it possible to close the loop on the nutrient/ water cycle much closer to home – by the time our flush toilets deliver our wastes to a centralized treatment plant it is contaminated w/ nasty toxins and heavy metals from our streets and industries, and is no longer fit to be used for agriculture. We have the compost toilet and greywater treatment technology to recover the nutrients at home safely without polluting water, but the regulatory and economic barriers are often formidable.
One of my concerns for Heifer Project’s Mission is that more animal based agriculture is not necessarily the most sustainable solution to the problem of feeding humanity worldwide on dwindling land, water, and energy resources. I believe animals can be part of the needed solution, but the impacts of exponential increases in animal husbandry can be devastating, not only to the environment, but also to human health. The USA is a prime example of what happens if ever-increasing amounts of animal proteins in the food supply is regarded as an unqualified good.
Confined animal feeding operations are polluting our land, air, and water to unprecedented extents, animals are tortured and miserable, workers are psychologically scarred from participating in such acts, huge amounts of land, water, and fossil fuels are consumed to produce cheap animal protein (when the same amount of vegetable protein consumes only a small fraction of the same resources), and Americans are suffering and dying of heart attacks, strokes, diabetes, cancer and osteoporosis (much less common in vegetarian societies).
I’m not asserting that it is wrong to eat animal proteins, but we only need a tiny fraction of what the average American consumes in order to get the required amounts of vitamin B-12 needed for good health (sufficient proteins can be obtained entirely through plant sources). To the extent that Americans can start raising their own meat, eggs and milk in their backyards, or get it from local farmers, we can get our consumption of animal proteins back to a level that is healthy for us and the planet, while eliminating the waste of land, water, and energy in the animal agribusiness industry, as well as its pollution. If we select our livestock to complement our own dietary niche, so that the urban farm animals are consuming biomass that we cannot eat or that we prefer to discard, the animals are part of the solution for humanity’s survival. If we are importing lots of grains and other feeds for livestock which humans could eat directly, the scale could easily tip the other way. I would really like to hear more often about how Heifer Project is teaching people to consider these sustainability issues in determining how many animals it is appropriate to raise, and what is appropriate to feed our livestock.
I rejoice to see people receiving animals which give them a means to raise themselves out of poverty and supplement their nutrition, but I would like to be sure that Heifer is also educating people as to the hazards of getting too much of a good thing, so that project participants don’t progress in just one or two generations from malnutrition due to a lack of animal proteins all the way to obesity, heart disease, cancer, osteoporosis, and all the other diseases which result from a surplus of animal proteins. “Developing” nations shouldn’t have to repeat our mistakes if we focus (both at home and abroad) on an agricultural education that emphasizes finding a sustainable balance of taking just what we need, and paying attention to where things come from and where they go to when we are done with them.
Again, glad to see the strong sustainability focus starting to come through your publication, and I hope the trend continues and grows stronger yet, Christina Snyder, RA Sustainable Spaces
Christina A. Snyder
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Does agriculture belong in the modern American city? I certainly think so, at least in the suburbs that make up much of American cities.
I don't think agriculture has disappeared from U.S. cities as much as it has gone underground in response to the opposition it engenders. During the last Newcastle Disease outbreak in Southern California I was assigned to canvass the residential neighborhood around the initial case.
No one who answered their door would admit to having any poultry, even when roosters could be heard crowing in back. When neighbors reported one house as having sick chickens I insisted on having a look for myself.
I was reluctantly allowed in the back. What a zoo! In addition to 70 chickens in individual cages there were five steers, twenty rabbits and a potbellied pig as well as a vegetable garden, all in the back portion of a small residential lot. Once in the back yard I could see into all the other back yards. Every house on the block had chickens! Just down the street someone was keeping six horses in small stalls. With no room for exercise, he exercised them by riding down the city street.
This is just one instance of the many examples of urban agriculture, usually well hidden from public view, that I came across in my 34 years working as a veterinarian for the state of California. The family milk cow, a few pigs are not as uncommon as you might think. I even once ran across a person in Sacramento raising 1,000 chinchillas in his garage just a few blocks from the capitol.
One would think that growing vegetables and other crops in the suburbs would not be as controversial as animals, but this is not always the case. When I moved into a condominium I soon learned that my next door neighbor from New York City thought that concrete and asphalt were there to protect her from wild and uncontrolled nature. She was horrified at the vacant lot across the street. Each condo was allotted a four foot square section of earth to plant things in. She filled hers in with gravel. Mine already had a nice pine tree and I added a grapevine and some tomato plants. The war was on. My tree dropped needles on her patio and the grapevine attracted wild birds. She never quit trying to have my tree cut down and the grapevine removed. When I finally moved ten years later I was asked to take the grapevine with me. The tree was cut down before the new owner could move in.
More recently another neighbor of mine planted trees to sell. He made the mistake of hanging a big sign on his fence advertising his trees. This attracted the attention of zoning enforcement officers and he was told he couldn't have a commercial business in a residential zone.
I'm not sure what the answers are, but we need to get out of a 1920's prohibition mindset where people are making bathtub cheese instead of bathtub gin.
Robert C. Hargreaves
Bakersfield, CA
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While I was living in Fresno, CA there was a consortium of aid agencies that met once a month to inform each other as to what they were doing. I attended regularly as a representative of the Fresno Adult Literacy Council and heard all the reports on Hmong refugees.
After the end of the Vietnam War in 1975 there was a deluge of over 50,000 Hmong refugees settling in Fresno, Merced and Modesto in California. Most had been recruited by the CIA for their secret SOG Troop battalions. Their experience living in the jungles of Laos made them ideal for this purpose but they were ill prepared for the American city. Most had never attended public school and were unable to read and write in their own language. They had never driven a car, were unfamiliar with city buses and even found getting their food in a supermarket to be a new and bewildering experience. The majority were on welfare and crime soared.
The one transferable skill they had was growing vegetables. They knew nothing of modern large scale farming and had no experience with farm machinery, but they could make the tiniest piece of land blossom with a cornucopia of vegetables. The yards of the houses they rented were soon filled with cassava, lemon grass and other veggies. With the help of churches and other agencies they expanded to vacant lots throughout the city.
Thirty years later their small plots are still thriving. Most have moved outside of the city to more affordable land, but they are still going strong. Their success came largely because this was initiated by the Hmongs themselves and not pushed on them by outside agencies.
Robert C. Hargreaves
Bakersfield, CA
