|
Post by auntieannie on Sept 27, 2009 10:41:53 GMT
Look at this blog's entry for 19th September 2009 (the latest at time of writing). It did make me think about my ways, even though I always try hard to avoid buying food coming from afar if it can be grown here. www.smallholdinginsomerset.blogspot.com/
|
|
|
Post by bjd on Sept 27, 2009 12:37:57 GMT
Not that I think we should buy food produced far away, but that blog is rather misleading. The flowers and beans in Kenya are being produced around Lake Naivasha, the drought-stricken area is hundreds of kilometres away. That photo implies that Western consumers of Kenyan beans and flowers are depriving the Masai (who don't live anywhere near the drought area either) of their livelihood.
As much I as I was unhappy to see the lake surrounded by greenhouses producing flowers for export, it's also true that many local people, particularly women, have jobs there.
|
|
|
Post by lagatta on Sept 27, 2009 19:45:29 GMT
Yes, I try to buy locally as well, but there sure ain't no coffee grown hereabouts.
We do have to be better informed and find out which productions are actually environmentally or socially harmful. I do buy fairtrade coffee (I know someone who was involved in certifying productions in Central America - it is no miracle solution but the workers do get a living wage by local standards and provision has to be made for improving the community of producers - a school, a clinic etc.
|
|
|
Post by Deleted on Sept 27, 2009 19:55:57 GMT
There have been a few articles pointing out that the carbon imprint of a cargo plane full of goods from halfway around the world is sometimes smaller than that of similiar goods on a bunch of old trucks from 50km away carrying the same goods to your town, added to the inefficiency of small scale production, etc.
I really hate it whenever that sort of thing is true.
|
|
|
Post by auntieannie on Sept 28, 2009 12:05:38 GMT
It is a difficult issue, hence why I posted here about it, to pick your brains. There are so many angles and it is easy to be mislead. Also the media plays their part, or at least here in the UK, with a "this is good for you (and the world)/this is bad for you (and the wold)" culture, without further information. I find it hard work to find the independant truth and usually end up hoping for the best and get on with it.
|
|
|
Post by thewoollyshepherd on Sept 29, 2009 15:50:51 GMT
Hello Having found all you folks looking at my blog mentioned above I thought I would tell you why its not misleading! Take a look at this report news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/8057316.stm makes interesting reading!......not simple is it? It is complex....take a look at this too envirovore.com/content/view/220/9/However the thing I am trying to highlight is that the fertile areas that are not as yet drought ridden should be providing the aid and food for the areas that are....not exporting to bring in foreign currency......and importing aid! The way I see it is that if half of Britains livestock had died, and people in the north and Scotland were starving and depending on foreign aid......and the good folks of the southwest were still ok and exporting produce, whilst the government was importing food aid for the north from say the USA.....we would all be saying it was nuts!......wouldn't we???
|
|
|
Post by Deleted on Sept 29, 2009 16:55:14 GMT
Thanks for dropping in here. I hope you will stick around, because this is a subject that interests a lot of us.
I myself have been horrified watching all of the milk being poured out everywhere during the milk strike, when it is a product that is so desperately needed in so much of the world, unlike, say, artichokes.
|
|
|
Post by bixaorellana on Sept 29, 2009 17:04:51 GMT
Thank you for those two links, TheWoollyShepherd, and for your cogent remarks. (and of course ~~ welcome!)
I think the two links together speak forcibly to a number of situations that long ago reached crisis proportions. Setting aside the most obvious for a moment -- that of global deforestation and its consequences -- Kenya's handling of the settlers in the Mau Forest is a pressing issue. If they are merely evicted to wander elsewhere, they will create yet another group of people unable to produce and reliant on aid. From my extremely inadequate knowledge of the overall situation, it would seem that they need to be resettled somewhere where they can start productive new lives. This settlement could potentially be attractive enough that they would go willingly. And rather than the government becoming bogged down in reviewing cases, they might use the money dedicated to maintaining that kind of bureaucracy to buy traditional crops from the farmers in the fertile areas in order to provide aid to the suffering parts of the country.
|
|
|
Post by bjd on Oct 6, 2009 15:46:36 GMT
Well, the article about deforestation in the Mau forest in Kenya is very interesting. That is exactly the part of Kenya I went to when my son spent 4 months teaching in an Ogiek village. What the article doesn't tell you is that every day except Sunday, at 6 am trucks start heading into the forest and bringing back tree trunks of trees being cut down -- not by the local farmers but by big companies owned by the Kenyatta family and others with connections to the Moi family. Both were presidents of Kenya -- between them for nearly 40 years.
Sure, you see people sitting on the side of the road selling bags of charcoal, but they are not the chief culprits. Looking from my son's house, and walking around in the countryside -- it was all green but from closer up, everywhere was fields of grass and tree stumps, where the loggers had been at work. The only places they could not reach with their machines were the steepest river beds.
The Ogiek mentioned in one of the letters to the editor used to be hunter-gatherers. Now there is no forest, so they have to make small plots of cabbages or other food to survive. The problems in Kenya are not only ecological -- there is a huge problem of political corruption.
|
|
|
Post by bixaorellana on Oct 23, 2009 14:07:55 GMT
I'm putting this article here, as it directly addresses the Swedish consumer's ability to make informed decisions about what foods to purchase in order to lessen environmental impact. "The Swedish effort grew out of a 2005 study by Sweden’s national environmental agency on how personal consumption generates emissions. Researchers found that 25 percent of national per capita emissions — two metric tons per year — was attributable to eating." click on picture to open article
|
|
|
Post by bixaorellana on Nov 15, 2009 22:31:54 GMT
More on the fate of the Ogiek. Be sure to read reply #8 above by Bjd, as well. click on picture for articlecross-posted here
|
|
|
Post by bjd on Nov 16, 2009 9:58:39 GMT
Thanks Bixa. I was about to link to that article. As you can see on the photograph, the little bumps you see are tree trunk stumps that have been grown over with grass. The village the dateline is from, Marashoni, is the village my son worked in and where I stayed.
|
|
|
Post by bixaorellana on Nov 16, 2009 15:27:07 GMT
Oh ~~ thank you, Bjd. The problem with linking news stories is that I always wonder if what I'm passing on is truly accurate. Your informed comments make the picture above truly devastating. Looking at it before, I thought it was a well-done photograph of two local people in the terrain. Looking at it now, it becomes a portrait of humans lost on permanently scarred land. Multiplying the scale of the photo to encompass the destruction you describe, it's easier to understand how global climate is changed by this kind of altering of the landscape.
|
|
|
Post by lagatta on Nov 26, 2009 14:13:15 GMT
I'm glad to come back to this thread. I'm working to a deadline so can't read the two articles this morning - will do. Just the contrast between the Swedish and the Kenyan pictures is very telling. Indeed I never thought of Kenya as forest - more savannah.
|
|
|
Post by Deleted on Nov 27, 2009 17:44:48 GMT
Deforested land is not necessarily permanently so. In the 19th century, when France was perhaps in the same state of development as rural Kenya, it only had 9 million hectares of forest. That was the high point of agriculture before the industrial revolution depopulated the rural areas. In 1950, France had 11 million hectares and in 2005, it was up to 15.5 million hectares. That's 28.2% of the country. France is 4th in European forest area (behind Sweden, Finland and Spain) but remains the largest agricultural producer.
Agriculture has been confined the the most fertile and easily mechanized areas, making it much more efficient, even if giant farms are not as charming as family plots.
There is no reason to believe that the same thing won't happen sooner or later in Kenya, Brazil or other countries that are still destroying their forests. Of course, it is a problem in places like the Sahel, where the disappearance of the forest allows the desert to advance. And naturally it is a shame to see these countries making the same mistakes that the countries of Europe made 150 years ago.
|
|
|
Post by spindrift on Nov 27, 2009 23:32:56 GMT
I have driven the length and breadth of Kenya only missing out on Lake Rudolf and the big soda lakes .... Any Masai that I saw were in their areas from Llongonot to the Masi Mara and into Tanzania. They were perfectly happy tending their cows in their Rondavels surrounded by thorn bushes to deter hyaenas and lions. They'd walk miles and miles across the countryside, holding a long stick/spear and dressed in blankets. I'll put some pics up of when I visited one of their villages long before tourists arrived en masse in Kenya. The younger men always dressed with great flair and presentation, it's amazing how many ways you can wear a blanket, and they were handsome fellows. The women were kept busy tending the cows, dealing with the grain and fetching and carrying water from goodness knows where. Now and again we'd see the odd Masai standing around the centre of Nairobi being photographed and paid for it. I thought they were very goodlooking. I can't imagine them working in farms producing beans, strawberries, roses and such. But I lived there 30 years ago and I suppose much has changed.
|
|
|
Post by bjd on Nov 28, 2009 13:09:13 GMT
I went to Kenya in 2003. The Masai men still stand around looking picturesque while the women do the work, although I think that is not limited to the Masai. Some have gone to the coast where hotels for tourists are to work as guards, but in general they are not really qualified to do much. They are known for not sending their children to school.
When I went to Masai Mara, on the last afternoon, the guide asked me whether I wanted to go on another game drive or go for a walk with one of the Masai guards. I said I would go for a walk. The guy was interesting -- he spoke English quite well. Told me that he had left the area and joined the police force. He was based on the coast for 5 years but said that the climate didn't agree with him so he returned. I can understand that since the coast is hot and humid and the Masai Mara area is at 2500 m and really pleasant. What I did find interesting too was how much he knew about politics and was interested in American bases being put in Kenya. I had thought they would be rather cut off from any information like that.
Spindrift, have you read the book "The White Masai"? It's about a Swiss woman who goes to Kenya on holiday and falls in love with a Masai and marries him. I think she was nuts but it's quite a good read.
|
|
|
Post by bixaorellana on Apr 20, 2010 18:19:47 GMT
And now, this: Jehad Nga for The New York TimesVegetables for Europe's supermarkets are dumped in Nairobi. Companies do not want produce with their labels to be given away."If farmers in Africa’s Great Rift Valley ever doubted that they were intricately tied into the global economy, they know now that they are. Because of a volcanic eruption more than 5,000 miles away, Kenyan horticulture, which as the top foreign exchange earner is a critical piece of the national economy, is losing $3 million a day and shedding jobs. The pickers are not picking. The washers are not washing. Temporary workers have been told to go home because refrigerated warehouses at the airport are stuffed with ripening fruit, vegetables and flowers, and there is no room for more until planes can take away the produce. Already, millions of roses, lilies and carnations have wilted." Click on the photo to read the full story.and Filed at 1:49 p.m. ET: NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) -- Daniel Oyier has been eating only once a day since an ash-belching volcano more than 5,000 miles away caused him to be laid off from his $4-a-day job packing red roses and white lilies for export to Paris and Amsterdam. Some 5,000 day laborers in Kenya who have been without work since the ash cloud from Iceland shut down air traffic across Europe, showing how one event can have drastic consequences in distant lands in today's global economy. click here for the rest of the AP story.
|
|
|
Post by auntieannie on Apr 20, 2010 19:04:53 GMT
How can we help? How can we prevent this?
|
|
|
Post by Kimby on Apr 22, 2010 17:00:48 GMT
Daniel Oyier has been eating only once a day since an ash-belching volcano more than 5,000 miles away caused him to be laid off from his $4-a-day job packing red roses and white lilies for export to Paris and Amsterdam.
I hope they are at least using the unsellable produce to feed their laid off workers.
|
|