Climate Citizens. FAO´s hunger & paradigm shifts
Frank A. Hilario
November 15, 2009
The Food and Agriculture Organization, FAO has launched an online anti-hunger campaign (fao.org). Director General Jacques Diouf of FAO announces his personal concern and declares he is going on a 24-hour hunger strike and calling on a global 24-hour hunger strike against worldwide hunger. The FAO is holding a 3-day world summit on food security 16-18 November 2009 in Rome; almost at the same time, 16-19 November 2009, in Manila, a world conference on rice genetics will be held, led by the International Rice Research Institute, IRRI (prweb.com). More genetics to feed more of the hungry. Well, I wish the FAO and IRRI luck. They will need more than a 24-hour hunger strike, more than even a 3-day conference of world leaders and science experts, but my wish is all I can command.
"Eradicating hunger is no pipe dream," Diouf says. "The battle against hunger can be won" (quoted by Ariel David, boston.com). Of course! That´s why I want more than just to eradicate hunger. And IRRI can breed us a dream crop: Golden Rice, with Vitamin A. Certainly! But I want more than just dream the possible. There is no challenge in that. I want to dream the impossible!
Pay attention now: My creative mind tells me that any strike for or against hunger is calling attention to hunger. Creative thinking gives me this paradigm shift, and so I´m calling on the capitalists to invest more wisely than just invest in hunger, and my double-bladed advice is:
(A1) You want to invest in hunger? Please don´t!
Because you have better use of your TIME: time, intellect, money & means, and energies (including biofuels). To spend TIME eradicating hunger is investing in hunger. You are assuming that hunger is a given, that it should always be there. The hungry we have always with us because we think so poorly of them, those of us who think not on an empty stomach but on an empty head.
You know why you are fixated on hunger? You´re too logical, left-brain-right-brain thinking. You are too focused, I mean, you´re paying too much attention to the same things you have heard so many times before. You are thinking critically, not creatively. You are not looking at the problem with a bird´s-eye view. The birds always have a better view of things: they can see forward and backward, including cause and effect. If birds can think, they must be doing what Edward de Bono prescribes: lateral thinking. Surely, you are more intelligent than a dog that practices vertical thinking: He digs exactly the same hole but deeper and deeper? He doesn´t know enough to explore the horizon and dig more holes to find more bones. So, explore the horizon for better bones, bonehead!
No Sir, hunger is not the problem; rather, hunger is the symptom. You don´t try and eradicate the symptom, because that´s palliative, like getting rid of the headache when you have a mouth infection. Eradicate is also too negative, too strong a treatment. To think more creatively now, don´t think hunger; instead, think food. ICRISAT does. IRRI does.
You know why the poor we will always have with us? Because we think of the poor - we don´t think of the rich. We invest on the poor, when we should invest on the rich!
Instead, why not deal on the positive and invest in the opposite of hunger, which is abundance? So:
(A2) Instead, invest in the opposite: Plenty.
Considering the capitalist world in its long-standing incarnation, that´s an impossible dream. But listen to Microsoft´s Bill Gates espouse and expand on creative capitalism. Among other people, I told you about it already a year ago – see my "Bill Gates, Nobel Prize for Economics 2008! Well He Inspires US to Creative Science" (28 October 2008, americanchronicle.com).
Paradigm shift: He didn´t ask the capitalists to save the poor; instead, he asked them to serve the poor. Very practical-minded sort of guy. A genius. That´s starting not from the perspective of the poor but from the rich. When it comes to knowledge diffusion or technology dissemination, creative capitalism is the only capitalist tool I love and would like to take advantage of!
"Creative capitalism," explain Tracy Williams, Michael Deich & Josh Daniel, "starts from a fundamentally different premise - working with the incentives faced by business to find common ground between their interests and those of the poor" (creativecapitalism.typepad.com). Since it´s hardly ever explored and yet it promises salvation, this has to be sacred ground!
So, as a businessman, how do you invest on the idea of poor being rich? Simple. Let´s take the farmers of the tropics, especially those in the dryland areas; for instance, if you help the farmers:
(a) Produce more? You will buy & sell more.
(b) Create more with less? For a bank, this multiplies resources.
(d) Do more conservation agriculture? Then they can save more of US. The farmers feed us in the Philippines, but we don´t treat them like they do in the United States: with enough love, and with more subsidy.
For all that, we have more climates to change; here are a few more:
(hypo)critical attitudes
lack of political will
pandemic mendicancy
First-World liberalism (meaning licentious)
Third-World journalism (meaning third-rate).
If you are in the art & science & business of agriculture, can you improve on the example of the International Center for Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT)? You can make the paradigm shift and help change:
(1) The climate of water management. Global climate change means the coming of more droughts in the tropics in the future. So, breed those crops that can tough it out with the long, hot summers. ICRISAT has bred varieties of water-miser pearl millet, sorghum, pigeon pea, peanut, and chickpea.
(2) The climate of fertilizer application. Since people tend to apply more fertilizers than they should, to get them to use the recommended amounts is already an achievement. But you also know that chemical fertilizers contribute to global warming, so when you prescribe micro-dosing - the technology of ICRISAT - to me you are prescribing climate citizenship. It´s a patriotic thing.
(3) The climate of credit control. They call it warrantage, and the FAO and ICRISAT and partners initiated it in West Africa (September 2007, entomology.unl.edu). Also called inventory credit, it´s an old idea whose time has come again:
Warrantage is a credit system in which farmers stock their produce at harvest when prices are low with a local entrepreneur, and receive cash on credit. Together, they sell the produce about 4 months later when prices are much higher, and achieve up to 40% (higher) profitability. The system allows farmers to raise cash to buy farm inputs including fertilizers and improved seeds (for the next cropping).
(4) The climate of science at work. In 2006, from Medak District, Andhra Pradesh in India, ICRISAT and Rusni Distilleries reported success in their joint attempt to produce commercial quantities of bioethanol using the patented extraction technology of Rusni and the sweet sorghum breed of ICRISAT (icrisat.org). The bioethanol plant, costing US$ 7 million, now benefits 3,000 Medak farmers directly, not to mention the multiplier effect of the value added by bioethanol to sweet sorghum. That´s why I wrote, "Sugarcane is sweet, but sweet sorghum is sweet smart" (see my "Smart Revolution," 16 January 2008, americanchronicle.com).
(5) The climate of empowerment working. You haven´t heard of empowerment through technology (icrisat.org). At the village of Umra in Maharashtra State in India, ICRISAT has touched off a second non-violent Indian revolution. I didn´t see it like this a year or two ago but now I say this is a flowering of ICRISAT´s mantra, Science with a human face (icrisat.org). At Umra, the ICRISAT groundnut (peanut) production package has improved yields, incomes - and, if unexpectedly, social relations. This is India surprising even the Indians! One thing had led to another: Better science led to better crops that led to higher yields that led to higher incomes that led to higher demand for labor that led to higher in-migration of labor that led to higher wages that led to better working conditions. Ah! And the balance of political power shifted - the landowning households (mostly upper caste) "consciously began improving relations with the labor community, and for the first time a lambada (tribal) became deputy head of Umra´s village government," Cynthia Bantilan reports. And more marriages and family ties with those outside Umra. You must know India, the land of the caste system, a revolution waiting to happen. So now it has begun to happen, thanks also to ICRISAT.
But leave hunger alone, please. Hunger is mine!
This time, my hunger is different. I hunger for the sharing of Filipino leaders who want to change the political climate of my country:
Share with me, Noynoy Aquino, what you have that the other would-be candidates for President don´t? So far, you have demonstrated popularity – of the Aquino name.
Share with me, Manny Villar, how can you propagate entrepreneurship? So far you have demonstrated your entrepreneurship.
Share with me, Gibo Teodoro, how can you cultivate scholarship with soldiership (and vice versa) at the same time? So far you have demonstrated yours.
Share with me, Chiz Escudero, how can you convince the youth to act like they are the hope of the fatherland? Because they are, unless you show them otherwise.
And I hunger for the mass media in the Philippines, including the blogging community, to stop flaunting press freedom and start changing their message from bad to good. Surely, Catholics or Protestants, they can recognize dreadful from grateful; they can differentiate construct from destruct. Unless - they´re verbally challenged.
I hunger for the sharing of the newspapers who want to change everything:
Share with me, Philippine Daily Inquirer, how can you contribute to national development aside from cutting down people to the quick or to the size you want? So far, you have demonstrated editorial pride.
Share with me, Philippine Star, how can you develop the power of the printed word to convince Filipinos to contribute to the benefit of their country instead of to her misery? So far, you have demonstrated being #2.
Share with me, Manila Bulletin, how can you excite us when you write about exciting news in agriculture in a boring manner? So far, you have demonstrated the journalistic prose of 50 years ago.
It´s time for climate change in the mass media, my other impossible dream:
Stop the shaming and start the sharing!
Or as our international singing sensation Charice puts it in another context, and with a smile: "Share, share."
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