La Primavera Mexicana

25 May

I spent most of the month of April in Mexico waiting for something interesting to happen that I could write about in The Global Kiosk. I chatted about the upcoming elections with cab drivers, hairdressers, friends and neighbours, and everyone said more or less the same thing: that they were not going to vote for the Institutional Revolutionary Party’s Enrique Peña Nieto, but that he would undoubtedly win. Early surveys – the election is July 1 – also put him 20 points ahead of the next candidate down for the race to the presidency.

Then, in May, I come to Haiti – and interesting things start bubble up in Mexico. A bit of a kerfuffle for Peña Nieto at an elite university, the Ibero Americana. Okay. Maybe a bit of an embarrassment for a man who disdains education and use of the brain in decision-making, but no big deal. The young people shouting “Out Peña Nieto” were but a rabble-esque minority, said his campaign people and the self-styled pundits at the country’s main television news provider, Televisa. Let’s get on with our taking over the country again.

Then, as I say, the reactions started to bubble up, and seep into the national conscience. The tech-savvy Ibero students began to counter the image invented for them by the PRI and their wealthy mouthpieces at Televisa. They began to put out the real story on Twitter and Facebook and even made a short film – 131 Students of the Ibero Respond – that got more than 1.2 million views within a week.

Then the street protests began, with student marches in more than 20 cities on the 19th. Another big demonstration in the Zocalo of Mexico City the following day organized by the PRD contender, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador – a candidate whom the students were clear about indicating they wouldn’t necessarily back. And then another big anti-establishment – for lack of a better word – demonstration last Thursday night.

Suddenly we are paying attention.

And the details to which we are paying attention are interesting: as a new article by my husband, Luis Porter, in U2000 points out, if the original rejection of Peña Nieto had occurred at the country’s largest public university, the UNAM, it would have died on the spot. People expect that kind of thing from the leftist hotbed it is supposed to be.

But the kids at the Ibero are the children of Mexico’s ambitious middle and upper classes. They study hard, work hard and want to succeed in life. (In every issue of business magazine Expansion’s annual list of the nation’s top entrepreneurs, almost everyone is an Ibero grad.) They aren’t used to being shoved to the sidelines with the suggestion they don’t know what they’re talking about or have been bought off by Peña Nieto’s opponents.

But it is now clear that this sense of youthful indignation is not confined to students whose parents can afford to send them to a private university. It is being felt by young people all over the country. They all want their vote to mean something. They are all fed up with being told what to think by a media empire (and how the on-going Rupert Murdoch saga now springs to mind as well) that trades in cheap sentiment and biased reporting in lieu of informing a populace so that it can make its own decisions. They are not buying the soap opera narrative of the young, good-looking politician with the actress wife and lovely family returning the country to the stability of days gone by.

In fact, there is much about the protests that remind me of the Occupy movement. Somewhat like Occupy’s “We are the 99%,” the movement in Mexico is calling itself “I am #132,” each protestor adding him or herself to the original group that pointed out that they had the right to voice an opinion, to demand more than good looks and mega-corporate backing as qualifications to run their country.

They’re not telling anyone who they should vote for, or even who they will vote for, only that times have changed. That they represent a new generation of Mexicans that has gone outside the traditional media to inform themselves, and that they care about the direction their country is going.

And it’s pretty clear that they don’t want a society where illegal immigration is the normal response to low wages or unemployment, where monopolies and duopolies hog economic activity, and public spending is a till filled with the many hands of the corrupt. They don’t want to be told that the July 1 election is already, as so often in the past, a fait accompli.

They are so far the sole indication that business as usual, whether by the dinosaurs of the PRI or any self-interested politician, is standing on ever more fragile legs in Mexico right now.

Is this the sign of  a Mexican Spring? We don’t know yet. But the power of mobilization the youth of Mexico have brought into play is, I think, something no one is going to denigrate, or forget, anytime soon.

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The Road to ‘Ivwa’

24 May

The Experimental Coffee Tree Nursery; photo courtesy my interpreter, Jacques Yoldy

The road to Ivoire begins with a right-hand turn from the coastal town of Mont Rouis, and rises steeply and windingly over a continuous bed of rocks, past chalk-coloured cliffs, stony fields and farm women with donkeys. It also leads from the kind of agricultural foreign aid projects that last a few years and may or may not work out very well to a vibrant, people-driven initiative that makes Ivoire, or Ivwa as people spell it in Creole, a truly special place.

It is part of a community of villages where crops are generally pretty good – last year’s severe drought taking a toll nonetheless – no-one goes hungry, water is filtered and clean, seeds are saved and stored to avoid paying the usual 200% interest rates for borrowing, and five schools allow children to study up to Grade 9 instead of Grade 2. There are even literacy classes for adults in the afternoons.

It is also a place where families are much smaller than usual in rural Haiti. “Before the organization,” said 30-year-old Marie- Clemita Jean- Baptiste, “there was a huge birthrate. Women were having children often and had really no control over their sexual domain.” Malnourishment, even kwashiokor, was not uncommon among children.

“Now,” said Marie Clemita, “ we have introduced family planning, the kind of plan that permits us to discuss with the whole family, to  say, this is we are going to proceed.”

The organization she was referring to is – in short form – OPD-8. Since 1994, the peasant farmers of the 8th section of the commune of Archahaie have been forging and refining this effective organization to bring about their own development, with guidance and encouragement from an NGO now known as Parternaires de Development Locale. It took two years of discussions and building small groups of 20 families into blocks, and the blocks into an association of about a thousand families. Together they set up the seed bank, a tool bank, improve their land and do reforestation. A dairy is next on the list.

OPD-8 is so in charge of its own community and regional development, they can actually take foreign aid projects that are not well designed and alter them so that they can be. Take the tool bank. A Canadian NGO called CECI donated the community a number of free tools, but instead of handing them out, OPD-8 sold them – at a subsidized price – to community farmers and used the money to buy more tools. This does a lot more than earn the organization some money; it removes the top-down, “White-Saviour complex” that is inevitably put into play when someone who is poor receives something for free from someone who isn’t.

With PDL, said Pierre Osmil Stiven, “we have been able to work together. We unite to plan the projects that need to be carried out. So we work together to decide what we will do, how much it will cost and what we will accomplish with the projects. There are always lots of discussions so that the final ideas are the ideas of each group, of the community and the NGOs.”

“On the contrary,” with other NGOs, he added, “we didn’t get round to discussions, or to planning what the project is really about. So it was them who imposed it – we’ll get together 500 people and we’ll do this, or that or the other.”

In Ivoire, the results are still coming in. But in many ways, they are  already as obvious as the enormous contrast between the beginning of the road to Ivwa – where farming is like cultivating a gravel pit – and the end: an undulating landscape of verdant foliage,  high up over the brilliant blue waves of the Caribbean Sea visible in the distance.

(A friend of mine made a short video of her journey to Ivoire last March.)

But at least, like the somewhat erroneously named dry Chaco of Paraguay, there were no deep trenches of treacherous puddles – like the one that once had me and an Equinox magazine photographer stuck for several hours in 1992.

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Life … at Ste. Catherine Laboure

8 May

Yesterday I spent the day in Cite Soleil, a populous shanty town on the shores of the Caribbean in Port au Prince. Part of the afternoon took me to the Cite’s only hospital, Ste. Catherine Laboure.  It is a state-run hospital with green and cream painted walls and a big wrought iron green gate, and a friend of mine, Dr. John Carroll from Peoria, Illinois, volunteers his time there periodically throughout the year.

So he showed me around: the Salle d’Urgences with its three gurneys and beat-up grey cabinet of meds, the puddle filled ground floor courts and corridors, then up an outer set of stairs to the wards.(There also a few operating rooms but they are in disuse now.)

Ste. Catherine was run for almost two years after the earthquake by Doctors Without Borders. They managed the place, supplied equipment and medicines and offered their services for free. Last December, the Haitian health ministry took it over again and everyone still working there has noticed the difference. With a combination of user fees and inadequate supplies, the flow of patients as diminished considerably, I was told. The user fees aren’t high – and are now dispensed with for children under 5 — but for people with no money, prohibitive nonetheless.

But the really shocking thing about Ste. Catherine is the fact that for a district of 300,000 people, this is all there is: three gurneys, maybe 30 or 40 hospital beds, no OR, and worse, a small, vastly underpaid staff that leaves at 4 pm.

We walked through the upper wards that, not surprisingly, were filled mostly with babies and children. Dr. Carroll told me the nurses there earned about $70 a month. And as we looked around the walls with their peeling paint and uncapped electric outlets and empty oxygen tanks, it struck me that the one good thing the Haitian government might do would be to turn Ste Catherine into a star hospital. Clean it, re-paint it, fix the wiring and install the best equipment. Double the pay of the staff so that it would be a magnet for good doctors and nurses. Keep it open 24 hours a day and do everything in its power to show people not only that it is there, but can be run better by Haitians than the famous foreign doctors of DWF/MSF.

As we spoke, Dr. Carroll suddenly cut himself off mid-sentence and walked over to a tiny baby lying in a yellow-painted iron crib, inert and no longer breathing. As he applied CPR to the delicate chest, I could see the lack of response, the closed eyes, the miniscule lips slowly turning blue. I went for a nurse and Dr. Jeanty, the pediatrician, searched around to find a hand-held breathing apparatus. After what seemed an interminable amount of time, the baby began to breathe again.

The baby’s name was Robertson, and his 16-year-old mother, Genevieve. Shortly after four, the staff having left for their bus home, she remained there, like all the other patients and their family members, alone with her sister and fragile baby. Whether Robertson would make it through the night, no one could say.

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Argentina’s Recuperated Factories: now a feature film

6 May

There have already been some interesting documentaries made about the dramatic process of workers on the edge of poverty taking over the factories, schools and other workplaces that employed them before hitting the financial skids. And then running them just fine.

Now there is a feature film as well – albeit one with a name that could well be a documentary — Industria Argentina: Las Fabricas para Quien Trabajan.

It is the first feature film of a young man named Ricardo Diaz Iacaponi, who worked as sound man on a 2004 doc on the same subject (I’m guessing it was ‘The Take.’) In this case, however, Diaz wrote a script based on numerous conversations with people now successfully running their own workplaces, including the Hospital Israelita, the Viyetes icecream factory and the Navales Unidos ship yard, to name just a few. And he hired well-known actors like Carlos Portaluppi and Soledad Silveyra to play the roles of workers, their family, plant managers and lawyers.

I’m not surprised that a feature film has now come out of the factory recuperation movement. As I myself found when I was interviewing people from the MNFRT for the final chapters of Broke But Unbroken, the personal circumstances and challenges and emotional turmoil they all went through were indeed epic.

Every  single one of them was at some point brought to edge of a Spielberg-like abyss, where it was a question of either be captured by the villains – i.e. accept defeat and  the bleak prospects of permanent unemployment — or leap across, and running the factory.

The real story, moreover, comes with a happy ending worthy of any movie: whatever the ups and downs of the Argentine economy and the particular workplace, the rewards have been huge — and life-changing —  for all those workers whose collective history has now inspired a movie.

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Maritime Disaster 2.0

19 Apr

Photo by Yannick Garcin

It has not been easy, I admit, to link the two main things that have been on my mind over the past week: the media preoccupation with all things Titanic and the invasion of factory trawlers in Atlantic waters along the west coast of Africa.

The Titanic docs have been both awful and fascinating – with bad metaphors, stuff we already knew and use of  the word ‘fateful’ spun into overdrive. Last week, even the New Yorker ran a big feature on our ongoing obsession with the tragedy and kept me occupied during at least half my flight to Mexico. But with all of this commemoration/exploitation there has come a kind of anxiety, a depressing sensation of knowing how it all ends. All those new anecdotes, photos or scientific explanations that seem to have been dug up especially to herald this dreadful anniversary — it doesn’t matter.

The real and overwhelming ‘take-away’ of the story of the Titanic is not fascinating. It’s hugely messed up and horrific. It’s the hundreds and hundreds of people left to drown in frigid waters in the middle of the night because no-one insisted on there being enough lifeboats on board. And that most of them were poor.

Almost nobody, meanwhile, has paid any attention to another maritime disaster, the unfolding tragedy off the coast of Africa. It’s a sad tale of hapless fishermen in wooden pirogues sinking deeper into poverty as ocean liner-sized behemoths scoop up anything with a fin within miles of coastline running from Morocco to Sierra Leone.

One of the countries affected is Senegal. I recall how surprised I was when I went there a few years ago, and learned that its two main sources of national revenue were ground nuts and fish.

Groundnuts and fish? How could any country run itself on ground nuts and fish, I asked an economist one afternoon at the Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar – a question, I noticed, that only seemed to elicit a sort of irritated sigh. “Well, it does,” he said.

But now their catch is down by a massive 75 percent, according to the Guardian, as European Union ships, subsidized by the taxpayer to the tune of a billion euros a year, take in “235,000 tonnes of pelagic species and tens of thousands of tonnes of other species” annually.

And it’s not just Senegal that is suffering. The FAO estimates that 1.5 million local fishermen in several nations are sunk in this dilemma, unable to compete with the trawlers from developed nations from around the world. Some companies have purchased contracts to fish from African governments, but an equal number are apparently pirate ships, in their waters without permission.

And speaking of pirates, the collapse of the East African fishing grounds is cited by many – although some organizations refute this – as the source of actual piracy. In Somalia, the falling apart of government and the invasion of bigger, better equipped fishing boats left many fishermen with nothing much else to do but join the dangerous and well-armed gangs prowling for another kind of fish –  sailors for whose lives they demand million-dollar ransoms.

But if all that were not serious enough, the real potential tragedy – the conclusion I can just see coming – is the utter depletion of yet another series of fish stocks. The rabid greed for sea life, the paradoxical situation whereby, for example, half of Britain’s North Sea catches are thrown back dead because they are not the right species, is set to destroy our oceans.

Worst of all, there seems little average people can do about it. Who knows the context out of which the fish we see for sale on supermarket beds of ice came? How long will it take for the Japanese, to name just one super egregious example, to heed the international approbation and stop killing whales and dolphins because they just feel like it? What happens to all that fish anyway? Does it get eaten, or does a lot of it get thrown away?

It’s like we’re all stepping up the gangplank of the Titanic assuming that the people who have the power to do things also know what they’re doing, that they’ve thought about the possibility of looming disaster. For humans and their oceans, however, looming disaster may be just another ‘fateful’ plot twist we are, yet again, powerless to stop.

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Wiki-Solutions for a Hungry World

7 Apr

Sculpture: Natalia Porter

This month AlertNet, the Thomson Reuters Foundation’s news site for humanitarian issues, is posting submissions from the general public for its multi-media special report on  solutions to global hunger. This is my “silver bullet” idea:

A tragic paradox envelops the lives of small holding farmers throughout the Global South. They want to make a living from the land, but the economics of small scale farming force them to migrate to constantly expanding urban slums. Food prices rise as millions of peasant farmers lack the means — from enough land to sound eco-agricultural advice — to produce enough of a surplus to sell to the hungry. The world needs farmers while at the same time they make up the majority of its poor.

Yet the answer to the dilemma rests with peasant farmers themselves, and in ever increasing numbers, they know this. They are organizing themselves in democratic grassroots movements throughout the developing world, not only demanding but also working for change. From Indonesia to Senegal, and from Haiti to Brazil, the landless and the land poor are finding solutions to the contradictions of today’s macro-economic imperatives.

Here are just a few examples: The Serikat Petani Indonesia is not only working with their 700,000 members to reclaim land stolen during the Suharto dictatorship, but encouraging increased yields using organic techniques that cost nothing. In Senegal, regional farmers organizations, like the Union of Peasant Groups of Mehknes, ask all members to surround their plots with trees and to grow the drought-resistant crops their forefathers planted. Participation in Brazil’s Landless Rural Workers Movement, or MST, has permitted more than 350,000 families to own land and to run cooperatives, schools and small enterprises. Even in Haiti, where land is at a premium and instability a seeming fact of life, peasant organizations working with La Via Campesina and Partenaires de Developement Locale are taking the initiative and breaking free from both top-down solutions to improve and manage better production methods. The government of Brazil, for example, is basing all of its agricultural foreign aid to Haiti on advice from the La Via Campesina and the MST.

These are just a few of the many organizations flowering throughout regions we typically associate with poverty and helplessness. Other developing world nations with national peasant organizations include the Philippines, Thailand and Mozambique.  While their members don’t lack ideas, a sense of initiative or  a determination to succeed, finding the funding to expand their outreach is always a challenge.

Meanwhile, little of the billions of dollars affluent nations spend on foreign aid is going to support farmers and their families.  Rather, too many First-World development policies comprise a vision of letting giant agri-business conglomerates take care food production and leaving farming families no choice but to join an already vast labour force that will struggle to survive on cut-rate wages in modern factories and sweatshops. No wonder donors are asking themselves why so much poverty still exists in the countries to which they have been sending their money for decades.

At the same time the effectiveness and purpose of so many aid projects are being questioned, simple solutions are at hand — and have been for quite some time.

Just imagine if those of us in the rich countries could help the millions of small farmers in the developing world achieve land justice and plentiful crops.

Try and picture the results in farming villages when agriculturalists embrace their knowledge and abilities to produce healthy crops to sustain themselves and their urban counterparts.

Ask the average person who donates money to charity, and they are likely to react with enthusiasm at the idea, at the image of productive land, life-giving clusters of woods, decent schools and clinics, and vibrant markets filled with the fruits of the peasant farmer’s labour rather than wasted aid dollars, pounds and euros.

It is time to change the picture of rural poverty to one of rural power. Along with our donations to those NGOs that concentrate on empowering farmers, we can also pressure our governments to switch from foreign aid conditionalities that impoverish Third World economies to ones that insist on meaningful re-distribution of fertile land. In the United States, Canada and Britain, average people can tell their governments that we no longer want our tax money to spent on food dumping but on buying locally produced food for feeding programs and on practical help for farmers. How? Using a number of methods, from social media and the Internet to Amnesty International-style letter-writing campaigns, average people can influence government policies.

Aside from alleviating rural poverty, two immeasurably valuable consequences will come with this. First of all, we will find peasant farmers themselves taking on the task of conserving and protecting local forests and other fragile habitats. Environmental protection is already a hallmark of most if not all peasant movements.

Secondly, as their livelihoods improve, rural populations will feel empowered to demand accountability from their governments, insisting on honest and wise use of their nation’s financial resources.

The rural poor don’t want handouts and they don’t want banishment to dysfunctional lives in a slum. They want to land to till, fair markets in which to sell the fruits of their labour, and respect.  We can and must make it clear to our leaders and policy-makers that we want the same.

What do you think can be done to alleviate global hunger? I would love to hear your comments and your own ideas.

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Earth Hour Smearth Hour

2 Apr

Call me an Earth Day Grinch if you will but I find the whole notion of thinking there is any benefit at all to turning off our lights and appliances for an hour one day a year is just absurd. The local news photos I saw of Dundas Square in Toronto just before and during Earth Hour — the only reason I know it even took place — seemed to sum up the futility of the exercise pretty well.

During Earth Hour, only a few of the scores of the scores of towering, blindingly bright signs, screens and ads that have become the hallmark of this strange Tokyo-like space were darkened or turned off. Giant backlit posters continued to attempt to convince hapless consumers that if only they could buy the outfits or gadgets portrayed, their lives would be truly wonderful. Cars still rushed up and down Yonge Street, contaminating the urban air, and pedestrians remained glued to their energy-sucking cell phones.

Electricity use province wide only dropped by 2.7 percent apparently, and I’m not surprised.

Earth Hour is another one of these easy-way-out endeavours that require practically nothing from us, and as such, do nothing to really address or begin to address our voracious mining of the earth’s fuels and minerals. The vast majority of us in the world’s affluent nations don’t want to change our lifestyles in any meaningful way, so that per capita we consume and toss away use far more non-renewable resources than people in the developing world.

The Conservative government, meanwhile, clings to its horrible tar sands project as if it were it were capable of working miracles and now, having left the Kyoto Accord, act like environmental standards are just a sort of nuisance bone to throw to those inconsequential few who didn’t vote for them in the last election.

Next month I will be in Port au Prince, where every hour, just about, is Earth Hour and people would love to have even one tenth of the commodities and services we enjoy and take for granted here.

But I think if we really want to do the earth a favour, we ought to leave on the lights and think about the big picture, dark as it is.

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