Sammy's Dot

Wow.

I really am surprised by this; given the clear nation-wide dissatisfaction with the decision to prorogue and Harper’s usual political acuity, I wouldn’t have expected quite such a blunt statement. And now I’m just waiting to hear Harper announce “L’état, c’est moi.”

“Prime Minister Stephen Harper is offering a new wrinkle on his reasons for suspending Parliament – the government can do more important work without MPs sitting in the Commons.”

In fact, it’s possibly true that the government can get more work done without the inconvenience of rowdy Opposition MPs demanding accountability. It’s just, you know, totally contrary to the democratic ideals that most Canadians hold. Parliaments exist to hinder the government in its quest to do whatever it pleases.

Although it’s an interesting new take on small government, I suppose, since the government does pay the MPs.

The Toronto Star ran a fascinating article in their Insight section today (albeit one with a baffling sub-header): “From Motown to Hoetown“.

The gist of it: approximately half of Detroit is sitting empty. It’s a food desert in perhaps the bleakest sense of the term: there is not a single chain grocery store left within the city limits. Given the obvious economic depression of the city, I suspect that locally-owned grocers are few and far between; most residents don’t have many options besides convenience stores for food.

Really, the answer is obvious, and both entrepreneurs and local food activists are proposing to turn the empty property into productive farms. (The bafflement of the sub-heading is that the article only very obliquely, if at all, covers conflict between activists and entrepreneurs. One presumes that the entrepreneurs are interested in factory farms?)

I, not surprisingly, am on the side of turning the empty land into community garden-style farms:

His D-Town Farm spans two acres of city parkland on Detroit’s western edge, where little bungalows with rusted awnings still line wide streets and a faded ice cream truck does laps of the yellowing boulevard. The volunteer team running it sells its leafy greens and radishes to local restaurants and farmers markets. Next year, it plans to hire two permanent employees.

“We’re trying to create an economic model, to show how agriculture could contribute to the economic recovery of Detroit,” Malini says, pushing into the brush to reveal a plastic greenhouse where oyster mushrooms will soon grow.

That model doesn’t include agribusiness. Replacing General Motors with Cargill isn’t the answer, he says.

“We’re activists. We’re concerned with the health, vitality and well-being of the black community generally. This is one part of a larger picture. So any proposal that brings in the corporate sector and disempowers community is problematic for us,” says Yakini, who spearheaded the just-formed Detroit Food Policy Council. “We’re much more in favour of smaller scale community-operated projects where people themselves have a vested interest and profit from the sale of the produce.”

Right on. No reason the farms shouldn’t be profitable to the people who operate them – but the profits should stay in the community, and the people who are working the farm should have control over what they grow and where it goes. And it should be accessible to them. Seems to me that the benefits would be much more immediate and tangible, and there would be benefits like this:

A woman up the street started sending her foster kids to help, and a movement was born. Covington erected four white boards to show movies on Saturday nights. He brought in chairs for reading sessions. He started a backpack program and hosted a harvest dinner for 90 neighbours.

Last year, he bought his old teacher’s home and the derelict store next door for $1 from the city, and $4,000 in back taxes. He plans to refurbish it into a community centre.

Looks at least some of the people in Detroit have a fantastic idea for how to rebuild their communities and their city as a whole. The article talks about the idea of planning for shrinking cities in recognition that nothing lasts (or grows) forever, and notes that North America really has no tradition of that kind of planning. I hope that Detroit’s municipal government is willing to get behind this plan.

Besides working on (for which read, procrastinating) my thesis project, I only have one course this semester: “Food, Land, and Culture.” So far, it looks like it will be a fascinating course. I’m not sure what could be better than hanging out for 3 hours a week with 30 or so people to talk about food and politics. But it is a discussion-oriented class, and that means figuring out what my opinions are.

An Agitator thread about Norman Borlaug and this op-ed from the LA Times have both been simmering away at the back of my mind, melding with the first week’s readings, to help shape some of those thoughts.

The op-ed (by Charlotte Allen) blasts Ellen Ruppel Shell’s book Cheap (which, to be fair, I have not read, though I have read a number of the other authors discussed in the article), and much of the article is concerned with food; specifically, the fact that right now in North America, food is cheap and on average, households spend a much lower percentage of their income on their food (though that average is key). However, Allen caricatures her opponents (Alice Waters and Michael Pollan, for example). She notes that they feel that food is under-priced, and then accuses them of wanting others to impoverish themselves, but ignores the rather important question of why they feel food is “too cheap.” By doing so, Allen demolishes a strawman quite nicely, but she certainly hasn’t convinced me that Waters and Pollan – and, presumably, Shell – are a bunch of elitist snobs trying to stomp down the poor in the name of foodie culture.

Meanwhile, Radley Balko posted a bit of a tribute to the late Norman Borlaug, who was one of the innovators of the “green revolution”. For those who don’t know, the green revolution encompasses a number of new developments in agriculture, including synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and hybrid high-yield crops. This is a significant challenge to the neo-Malthusian perspective; the green revolution makes it very clear that food production will not be inevitably outstripped by population growth.

The story of modern-day cheap food and the green revolution are deeply connected, and as is noted in the Agitator thread (by myself, among others), this is not an entirely bad thing. I’m an environmentalist, and I’m not an optimist of the Julian Simon school of thought; I do believe that the Earth is finite (although the limits are, to some extent, elastic), and I think that the human population will have to be limited in the long run, though I think the only way for that will work is if it’s voluntary. However, in the short run, whether or not we believe that the planet is over-populated, it is not right that people should starve if we can prevent it. And right now, we can, and industrial agriculture made that possible, both by increasing the food supply and lowering food prices. Garrett Hardin’s lifeboat metaphor is one of the foulest ideas I’ve ever heard associated with environmentalism, and criticizing industrial agriculture for enabling population growth without widespread starvation skirts dangerously close to that way of thinking.

That said, industrial agriculture should not be immune to criticism. What Charlotte Allen – and Radley Balko – overlook is that although industrializing agriculture made food prices lower in part through economies of scale and greater productivity, it also created a number of negative externalities. Tegtmeier and Duffy (2004), for example, examined the costs of soil erosion, water and air pollution, biodiversity loss, and human health impacts from conventional agriculture, and suggested that in total, 5 – 16.9 billion dollars are spent annually in the US to pay for the consequences of industrial agriculture. Those numbers are large, but they might be a reasonable price to pay to prevent hunger. However, the problems for which Tegtmeier and Duffy are evaluating costs are not static; for example, erosion imposes an annual cost, but the annual cost will go up as arable land is reduced and soil fertility is lost. When I go to the grocery store and buy a pint of strawberries that were grown on a conventional farm on the other side of the continent, I do not pay those extra costs. Society – and the surrounding environment – does.

We will pay those costs eventually – unless we take a critical look at industrial agriculture. Critical assessment doesn’t mean that we deny that industrial agriculture has helped people; it means we work to assess the unintended consequences to both environmental and human health, and look for alternative practices that can stave off those consequences while retaining the advantages. And there’s my Julian Simon moment – I think that there is plenty of evidence that with enough political will, sustainable agricultural practices can be implemented, and they do not mean either a low-productivity agriculture that will not feed our population, or a return to individual subsistence agriculture. Criticizing industrial agriculture for its well-documented environmental and health consequences does not mean that one must necessarily take an abhorrent moral stance with regard to the human population and our well-being.

It seems like Suaad Hagi Mohamud may still face some undisclosed hurdles to get back to  her home.

According to the Toronto Star,

Nothing in Canadian law stops the government from “picking and choosing” which Canadians it will help and who it will abandon, a former senior diplomat warns.

In the case of Suaad Hagi Mohamud, a Toronto woman who was detained in Kenya for 12 weeks, “overzealous” civil servants chose to abandon her, said former consular services chief Gar Pardy.

What’s worse, he said, is that Ottawa could just say, “`Sorry it happened’ and that’s the end of it” unless somebody ensures there is a “protection of Canadians act.”

That’s outrageous, and I believe it’s clearly true that the levels of support offered to Canadian citizens who are in trouble abroad is widely divergent.

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She is coming home.

However, I won’t be satisfied until I hear something about an apology, and compensation, and preferably a resignation.

I’ve been following the story of Suaad Hagi Mohamud since I first read about her on the Toronto Star in July. It infuriates me.

The short form appears to be: a Somalia-born Canadian citizen, in Kenya to visit her mother, was detained at the Nairobi airport when on her way home to Toronto. Airport security staff felt that she did not ressemble her passport photo, and apparently refused to accept Mohamud’s other identification, including several other pieces of photo ID, and she was not permitted to board her flight; she was held in airport custody for four days and in jail for eight before she was released on bail without travel documents. The Canadian High Commission in Nairobi was contacted.

At this point, in my opinion, events should have gone as follows: the consular officials arrange an interview with Mohamud, ask for references in Canada, and contact those people (it is, as will be described, quite clear that there were people in Canada who could vouch for her identity). Perhaps they examine her identification themselves. Then they help her get home.

Instead, the Canadian officials told the Kenyan authorities that Mohamud was an “imposter”, canceled her passport, and recommended that she be prosecuted; she was charged with fraud.

After the Toronto Star – which, along with the CBC, seems to be one of the few major media sources that has been covering the story at all* – got in contact with Mohamud’s family, including her ex-husband and son, and her work supervisor, among others, and began running articles about her, the government first insisted that she was not who she said she was, then agreed to check her fingerprints against the prints made when she arrived in Canada and made her refugee claim. More delays, and more people came forward in Canada to vouch for Mohamud.Then the Canadian officials said that the prints were no longer on file (“Officials then said they no longer had the file containing Mohamud’s fingerprints, taken during her immigration 10 years ago”, according to the Star. After more stalling, they agreed to a DNA comparison to Mohamud’s son in Canada. However, as of Saturday, “[S]pokespeople for the foreign affairs department and Canada Border Services Agency refused to say if the government would accept DNA tests as proof of identity”.

Our government has been stalling on this matter for two and a half months, while a child in Canada wonders if his mother will come home, and that mother wonders if she will face jail in a foreign country, or have a life to come back to here in Canada. (Incidentally, and disturbingly, no one from the federal government appears to have ever stated that, because people in Canada were asking for their loved one to come home, and they were alleging that the person who said she was that loved one was not, they were looking for her.)

There is no excuse for their stalling, and it must end, now. The results of the DNA test are in. Though DNA does not encode a name, the test results have told us that the woman stranded in Nairobi is the mother of a boy in Canada, whose identity and status as a citizen has also been ascertained. Enough is enough, and the government should recognize that they need to act now. Mohamud and her Canadian lawyer have already had to fight far more than they should have to get government officials to take action on her case, including filing multiple affidavits, providing multiple pieces of identification, and providing numerous references. The Canadian consulate should have new travel documents issued to Mohamud now, and they should pay for an immediate flight back to Toronto.

But the case should not end there. If Canadian citizenship is to mean anything, not one of us should let this go. The Harper government cannot redeem what has been done to Mohamud, and I for one have no doubt at all that it would not have happened to a white woman named Mary Smith.

I want to see a joint statement from both Harper and Lawrence Cannon on the front page of every newspaper in the country tomorrow, acknowledging that Mohamud was treated wrongly. “We wronged you, and we are sorry.” I want to see some indication that the consular officials who decided she was an “imposter” will be fired. Lawrence Cannon should resign from his post as Minister of Foreign Affairs; he is clearly unable to ensure that his department provides appropriate support to Canadian citizens. I want a statement that lays out what they will do in the future to ensure that Canadians in trouble abroad will receive adequate and timely assistance from their government (and without idle speculation from said government that perhaps a hypothesized sister is sharing a Canadian woman’s passport). I want to know how they will ensure that all Canadian citizens, regardless of whether they were born in Canada or are immigrants, regardless of whether they came here as refugees or through the points system, will receive that assistance and support.

I want to know that compensation will be offered to Suaad Hagi Mohamud for the lost time with her son, as well as the lost wages and the money she had to spend to obtain justice from her government for the two and a half months of her ordeal.

Mohamud’s lawyer has said that he will file for a court order to require her to be repatriated tomorrow, if necessary.

The just response is obvious. It shouldn’t take a court order.

*Though Dr. Dawg has, and that’s a blog that I’ll be following.

Let me be clear: I don’t have a lot of respect for the current municipal government in Toronto. I voted for David Miller in 2006, but only as a least-worst choice (I didn’t want to see the other two front runners for mayor, Jane Pitfield and Stephen LeDrew, take office). Royson James has summed up their focus on petty issues at the expense of substantive action on the real issues that are facing the city, and it’s worth a read.

However, John Baird’s “off-the-cuff” remark that “Twenty-seven hundred people got it right. They didn’t. This is not a partnership and they’re bitching at us … They should fuck off…” with respect to Toronto’s request for federal funding for new streetcars? That’s definitely showing off the class I’ve come to expect from the Conservatives.

According to the Star article, Toronto submitted a single request for funds for a fleet of new streetcars, which are very much needed, and the request was rejected because it did not meet the local job creation criteria that were written into the stimulus bill. I think that the criteria were written too narrowly in this case, because although no jobs would be created in Toronto, several hundred jobs would be created at the struggling Thunder Bay Bombardier plant. I would have been quite happy if the city government had included a few other infrastructure projects in their funding application – perhaps including the maintenance facility that is mentioned here – but the streetcars are needed, the deal is already in place, and it would benefit a significant number of people in one of Ontario’s Northern cities. It’s a shame the federal government set such a dogmatic rule to qualify, and so openly expressed their contempt for the city while they were at it.

The rejection of the request for stimulus funds means that the Toronto Transit Commission will not be able to close the deal on the streetcars unless cash is forthcoming from somewhere else (the deal must be funded by June 27), and Thunder Bay will not be able to benefit from the jobs created by the deal.

Mr. Baird, if your party is trying to win seats in this city, you’re doing it wrong.

The links between agriculture and human health are complex. Anyone who’s read Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel will be familiar with the notion that many devastating diseases – smallpox is perhaps the most obvious – crossed to humans from their livestock. However, those people who lived in close proximity to each other and to their animals eventually developed a degree of resistance.

There is, I think, a powerful tendency to imagine that this interplay between human and non-human is in the past, or at worst, still occurring in some parts of the world (China, Africa), but not North America.

One of my profs has done quite a bit of research into the outbreak of E. Coli O157:H7 in Walkerton, Ontario in 2000, and he would argue that’s certainly not the case. In a paper on the topic, Ali (2004) noted research that suggests that the virulence of that particular strain of E. Coli appears to be at least partly due to its ability to survive extreme environments, including the highly acidic environment of the stomach, and it may have acquired this ability through exposure to acidified soil and water. The acidic soil and water, of course, was the result of acid rain, caused by human activities which emitted sulfur dioxide into the air. Ali (2004) also stressed the fact that while the virulent strain of E. Coli is believed to have emerged first in Argentina, it is now widespread across North America. The human role in the transmission of the disease is better understood than our role in its creation. Many people have pointed out that E. Coli O157:H7 is particularly dangerous because it can survive high heat and freezing, and so poses a risk to anyone who buys meat which is contaminated; Walkerton also proved that a breakdown in the containment systems of intensive livestock operations or a breakdown in a water utility can put people at risk of illness or death.

With all of this in mind, it was interesting to read Nicholas Kristof’s column in The New York Times today:

One of the first clues that pigs could infect people with MRSA came in the Netherlands in 2004, when a young woman tested positive for a new strain of MRSA, called ST398. The family lived on a farm, so public health authorities swept in — and found that three family members, three co-workers and 8 of 10 pigs tested all carried MRSA.

MRSA is methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, a disease which I at least have always thought of as a disease one is most likely to contract in hospital. Kristof’s article suggests that assumption is a dangerous one. Even if one cannot contract MRSA by eating pork, which is likely as it is typically transmitted by skin contact, many people work in the livestock industry. They can transmit the disease to each other and to their families and friends as well as contract it from contact with their animals. They might also spread it to healthy animals, and in today’s agricultural system, livestock may be sold and transported across a distance, further increasing the number of potential infections.

Kristof’s story is not finished:

So what’s going on here, and where do these antibiotic-resistant infections come from? Probably from the routine use — make that the insane overuse — of antibiotics in livestock feed. This is a system that may help breed virulent “superbugs” that pose a public health threat to us all. That’ll be the focus of my next column, on Sunday.

And his story is raising old questions about the safety of antibiotic use in agriculture. But it’s one that needs to be asked continuously, because we have not yet addressed the potential harms of the way we raise crops and livestock. I don’t think anyone can deny the raise them – we too will be affected.at more food is available at lower cost – at least in North America – than in the past, but there are also unintended consequences, and we cannot escape them.

We need to remember that although we no longer share close quarters with the animals we raise for food, we are still embedded in the same, increasingly complex, ecosystem that they are. When those animals are afflicted by disease – partly because of how we raise them – we too are affected. Until we recognize this in our food policies, this will continue.

Ali, S. Harris. (2004) “A Socio-Ecological Autopsy of the E. coli O157:H7 Outbreak in  Walkerton, Ontario, Canada.” Social Science and Medicine 58(12): 2601-2612

I’m going to venture a wild guess, here: if you’re a psychologist, or a psychology student, terms like collectivist and individualist are very, very familiar. (So familiar you may be sick of hearing about the explanatory power of these concepts. So familiar that it seems like everything is being divided up into these two categories.) If you’re not into psychology, you can probably still make an accurate stab at what the two terms mean, but might not guess that they actually do seem to be useful ways to categorize (and explain!) our values and beliefs and behaviours. Since I was a psychology student, and I’m very interested in why different people behave in different ways when it comes to environmental problems, I was really fascinated to hear about the work that Donald Braman has been doing, along with Dan Kahan and a number of colleagues. (Kahan looks to be the principal investigator and I’m citing it as such, but I first heard of it listening to an interview with Braman in the course of an Ideas podcast.)

Their paper on the results of the Second National Risk and Culture Study, publicly available (in PDF format) from The Social Science Research Network, reviews several areas of public policy in which people’s willingness to accept seemingly objective facts turned out to be strongly associated with their cultural orientation.

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There’s a customer who comes in to my workplace regularly and likes to chat. She’s just a bit prejudiced. She’s been talking, loudly, for the past year, about how inexperienced and unelectable Obama is.

If I see her today, I may not be able to restrain myself from asking, “so how ’bout that John McCain, eh?”