This is kind of funny, if it wasn't so sad. Obviously this is Lizard_King 's fault. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/16/vegans-stomach-unpalatable-truth-quinoa
Yet another example of the limits of our our understanding regarding developmental ec. In theory the increased price/value of quinoa would enrich those who farm it such that their community would be equally better off. In reality that never seems to happen. Man I can't wait for my development ec class at Rutgers!
Maybe it's because it all gets skimmed off before it gets to the farmers, because they have no bargaining power?
Frankly there's probably a bajillion reasons it went to shit. As far as I can tell - and I'm not an expert (yet) - developmental ec has basically been almost as big a mess as macro.
They are not really different fields in terms of their core philosophical conceits, except that the victims of development-focused macroeconomics have even less agency in protesting their fates at the hands of free trade, faux protectionism, and run-of-the-mill raw deals from middlemen.
This reminds me of acai berries, the global market swallowing up fruit from a limited production area that supplies nutritious food to the indigenous people. All the worse when you consider the exaggerated health claims made about it. The nutritional inflation doesn't play out with quinoa, but the story seems hauntingly familiar.
Except - at least as I define the subject - that's very much a failure of developmental ec. I get the cynical interpretation that it's all about enriching already powerful types, I just think that's a bug, not a feature.
Probably the shortest version of the seemingly infinite development failure explanations I've read for this case is "if your majority food source is your export crop, and you don't have enough infrastructure to import or distribute anything else, and you're too underdeveloped to find labor market alternatives in response to price shifts, if the price skyrockets you come out behind." All you eat, all your cash income, can't get another job if the price jumps because you're a rural uneducated farmer.
Pretty much. Add on the fact that non-market type infrastructure (good government, etc) was until very recently totally ignored and you end up with the fairly awful outcomes we're all familiar with. To be fair, as I understand it developmental ec has been realigning lately to focus more on institutions and less on free markets uber alles, but that's a rather new thing.
Given that the article also notes that soy, once touted as a rainforest-saver compared to beef, is also kind of dicey, does anyone have any idea what ARE reasonably healthy and socially conscious choices for vegetarians? I'm not a vegetarian, but it'd be good to know. Edit: Obviously quinoa isn't a price-conscious choice, but what price-conscious ones are less likely to be destructive?
Whether or not Bolivians are suffering because of quinoa consumption in the West, that article is terrible. It throws around accusations against groups the author clearly doesn't like, and doesn't back it up with any facts. I think this comment on the article sums up my concerns: Which he then follows up with a more studied response:
You could probably either grow your own food or buy local. A lot of regions have CSAs (Consumer Sponsored Agriculture) where you buy a share of a farm's or co-op's produce for the upcoming season and get a weekly box of whatever it is that farm is harvesting fresh from the ground. In terms of eating responsibly, eating food grown near where you live that's being farmed with good practices is probably at the top of the charts.
I'm assuming that you're asking about protein sources, since that's what most soy products are used for as far as vegetarian diets go. If not, ignore me. With the caveat that I don't know *for a fact* that these are necessarily less expensive, but on a super strict government food budget where 7/10 people on my team were strictly vegetarian, we went through a lot of beans (black beans and chickpeas especially), peanut butter, and dairy products (yogurt, cheese). Tofu was considered a special treat and generally was prepared as part of one or two meals a month we served meat. Though I know chickpeas aren't seeing heavy production in the US relative to the other chickpea-producing countries, I imagine the rest of those foods can be or are already produced here.
This article is really doing the rounds on the social networks, but it brought to light another "Bolivians can't afford Quinoa because of stupid hipsters/vegans/insert hated group here" article from NPR. This is an open letter from someone who is actually in Bolivia making a documentary about Quinoa production.
Rice is one of the most economically solid and broadly produced crops in the world. Eat all you want, they'll grow more. There are something like 9.8 trillion people picking rice in Asia even as you read this post, not to mention all the other places it is produced (pro tip: every where not littered with basalt, permafrost, or moonrock). It is hella affordable, simple to make and eat, and is a healthy complex-carb. Also: vegan. Second also: many different delicious varieties. Beans, grains, and cereals pretty much rule the roost when it comes to quality staples that are cost effective and farmer-supportive in farm-to-fork terms. Leafy greens are probably the healthiest class of food on the planet, but they require more effort/energy to deliver to the consumer in the aggregate (production can be especially water/pesticide intensive). Corn is problematic because of grotesque market distortions in the US market due to ethanol, corn syrup, and corn-as-feedgrain efforts so while cheap and delicious it really sucks on the socially conscious scale. Wheat is actually great but requires processing (potentially degrading its health to the end-eater) and there is the gluten problem for many. For someone who is more concerned about socio-economic impact, the winning argument in today's world is IMO the "buy local" movement. So whether you are buying rice and spinach or non-vegan foods like beef, you are doing so from someone with a broadly similar economic environment, fewer trade barriers/tariffs, and a probable need to reinvest that purchase money back into the local community. Here I mean "local" to include up to the state/provincial level; for instance we have farmer's markets in CA (and I saw many in NY) from 6-8 hours drive away but based in the same state.
The OP article was focused on how the common people in Bolivia cannot afford to buy their staple local grain anymore. That open letter was countering this point with how profitable quinoa has become to the farmers and folks involved with the production/export chain. No shit, but that still doesn't respond to the issue, unless the common people in Bolivia are all quinoa farmers or there's some distribution of quinoa export profits that is benefiting everyone in the country. Also, corn is an important crop because it's hit the evolutionary jackpot. It's one of few C4 plants that evolved a much more efficient method of fixing carbon dioxide than most other plants and thus requires less water to produce the same amount of grain given the same amount of sunlight as, say, rice. If you consider that most food grown basically represents a biological form of solar power generator/battery, corn is a really damn optimal way to go about doing it.
It's also worth noting that buying local isn't necessarily the "greenest" option. It's important to take into consideration transportation efficiency. A tomato that travels 20 miles in the back of an old truck carrying 30 crates of tomatoes may have a larger carbon footprint than a tractor-trailer hauling 5 tons of tomatoes 1500 miles. There are certainly good reasons to buy local -- support your local farmer, the food may taste better, etc. But being "green" isn't always one of them.
It's hard to pinpoint the issue here. Are we objecting to some farmers and workers in Bolivia becoming wealthy at the expense of other people? If so, I'd say that's an issue of capitalism rather than veganism/vegetarianism. Are people objecting to vegans and vegetarians? Because we can find lots of issues with any subset of eaters. Localvores have no sense of how expensive it is to eat locally. Meat eaters don't care that raising animals for meat is insanely inefficient, to the point where we use enough food to feed these animals to take care of human starvation (ignoring supply logistics). People who eat organic don't have a sense of how inefficient mass-organic farming is compared to industrial agriculture. Those who don't eat organic don't have a sense of the horrible effects fertilizer has on rivers, lakes, and oceans. And so on. So what can we do about the problems? In the case of quinoa, do we just stop eating it? That would hurt the Bolivian economy as a whole, though perhaps also make quinoa more affordable. Keep eating it? Only buy Colorado quinoa?
One of the things I always found bizarre growing up in Idaho, a state famously known for potatoes, was how few places in the state you could get the really good spuds at. And by that I mean the beautiful, smooth russet potatoes that weigh a pound each and bake up so fluffy that you almost don't need to add butter. Generally if you went down to your local supermarket you'd be buying Washington state potatoes, and the place I remember having the best potatoes required you to drive across the border into Washington and eat at local prime steakhouse to get the true Idaho beauties. I've found as I've moved around the country that it's easier to get Idaho potatoes in the Midwest or in Georgia than it is to get them in Idaho itself.
I just assumed it was in pointing out the irony of quinoa eaters which you'd assume would correlate heavily with socially conscious individuals being unable to enjoy their hippie grain without the commercialization causing harm to some subset of people. Perhaps the issue is merely in pointing out the futility of taking a stand against global capitalism. More fun can be had looking into the "organic" "fair trade" coffee movement, with corporations trying to jump on the bandwagon so they can claim they only serve "fair trade" coffee, and thus how valuable that endorsement has become that the certification organizations can extort fees that many growers who otherwise grow the exact products the movement is intended to support cannot afford to have their product certified and can't sell it.
Just a reminder, famine is almost always due to lack of access to a cash economy for poor farmers, not lack of food per-se.
I ate some quinoa last night and bit into a fucking pebble that caused my head to ache for the rest of the night. Luckily I don't think any damage was done. I know you're supposed to sort through it, but do you know how fucking hard it is to spot a tiny brown pebble that's mixed in with dried quinoa? They're all tiny brown pebbles!
Good link, but that's not really an "Unless..." assertion. Any crop can have price shocks over short periods especially as brought about by famines, droughts, irrational fears, and market distortions; even more especially during a worldwide pricing glitch among most major staple foods. Speaking of "grotesque market distortions" due to corn in my previous post, your wiki article doesn't mention how rice production suffered both in the early 00s and again as a result of Bush's 2006 address pushing ethanol, resulting in rice production not rising with population as foreign farmers rationally chose to grow what would be in higher demand. Another reason I vote to stake corn farming. It's hard to find figures in five minutes of Googling, but here are a few links that help to put a high-level view together: US crop acreage 2000-2010 (scroll down to Figure 1). Doesn't show rice but shows the huge jump in corn acreage from 2006-07. Geohive tonnage tables comparing rice and corn, note where all the new growth happened in 2000-2010. This site has tons of raw data in XLS format, the seventh and eighth ones down compare corn, wheat, and rice worldwide in both tonnage and acreage; note the conspicuous growth winner (rice acreage = effectively flat since 1999). Scroll about 18 down and you can get data on world food prices (by category) monthly since 1990; note the conspicuous spike and subsequent volatility after being more or less flat or declining for over a decade. eta: Also check out the FAO (type in "rice" in that main search on the left hand side ot search their media archive) and note the article from early 2008, that very period of rice "crisis" predicting higher world output of rice than before. Basically: lol at artificial price shocks due to fear. Reminds me of gasoline. So yeah, basically fuck corn. But setting that aside to get back to the OP, a vegan could feel both healthy and socially responsible eating the fuck out of some rice despite the minor inconvenience of only being able to buy two 20-lb bags at a time from Costco when a "crisis" hits.
It isn't really a binary "grow corn or grow rice?" choice like you seem to be making it out to be, though. Rice takes A LOT of water to grow, for example, and there are plenty of places where growing it instead of corn or another grain would be utterly wasteful.
I'm not talking about converting a corn-ideal environment to rice but a rice-ideal environment to corn, which is significantly easier. In any case, the economic distortion of the world food market in staple crops by the US's dependence on corn was only a self-inflicted tangent to the OP that triggered my knee-jerk. For the record, I love quinoa and keep a bag of it in my otherwise rice-and-beans pantry.
Science is currently working on creating a C4 variant of rice that would have the same efficiency as corn. Assuming people would be willing to eat it, that could be a gamechanger in terms of worldwide food production.
Actually the OP linked to an article that was a rambling attack on all kinds of things relating to veganism and health foods, which started off with a rant about Quinoa production. The article I linked was a response to another article, which like the one the OP posted doesn't appear to have any data to back it up, but instead is based on a report of a report of a report. Unlike the both journalists he focused on data he could draw directly from his experience of documenting Quinoa production in Bolivia. He also does respond to the wider issue by questioning where the article was sourcing its data from, which is a valid criticism.
Slate has a rather lackluster rebuttal to the OP. And yes, the OP article really does seem framed around "LOL vegetarians/people who think about their food" in the sort of unprofessional way that the Guardian adopts when baiting clicks. I'm not sure where Banquo's quote or this article fit into that, but I'm pretty sure they're on at least equal footing.
"Africa" was used for different reasons. The second hit for c4 variant rice was this information on the Gates grant to a rice-focused research institution.
My Colombian mom, who should know better, pronounced it that way. But it isn't Spanish, it's Quechua, so I guess all the vowels are not pronounced....
