human development, so-called cultural steamrolling globalization, "frontier colonialism", and mash-up cultural creation-A Letter From Guizhou

Hello Family and Friends (Profs count),

So I won't be too specific in this post, for cautionary reasons, but I've just a few ideas of many lately that I'd like to share with you. They may be redundant to your knowledge, or they may be strangely foreign. Hopefully they're complementary and clarifying, or at least eye-opening. I recommend you go out and search on the foreign, as I am not making a huge effort to explain a bunch of currently swirling and mixed ideas. (that would frankly take up more time than I currently have!)So I would just like to talk about a few development perspectives and concepts of human development.

Actually, so I just decided I'll list some names for you all to check out, since I have even less time than I originally thought I did...my apologies...the following are a few thinkers who have influence on my current honor thesis research here in Guizhou, China.
In no particular order:

Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek, Dan Klein, Paul Bauer--and Classical Liberal Economic Theory in general
Amartya Sen and fellow Human Development promoters (which take much from Classical Liberal perspectives)
Modernist and Postmodernist perspectives on political economy and development schemes in a "globalocal" context, namely Tim Oakes (and some others I currently forget...)
Development Skeptics and Economic Rebels--William Easterly (Paul Bauer is really his precursor)
Critical Poverty/Development/Methodology Scholars--Michael Woolcock, Christopher Gibson, Deepa Narayan.
Mash-Up Culture/Remix Culture--www.remixtheory.com--Eduardo Navas, Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault (and power theory, as far as Foucalt goes)

So I am currently navigating my way through Chinese bureaucratic waters, fraught with snakes and crocodiles of potential research impediment, but I will hopefully be village-side by this weekend, and will then be out of reliable contact for about 2 months.

Well, those are the only ones I can recall without my computer here, and I apologise for the frustrated brevity of the lot.

Off to take care of some things!
peace, love,

devin.
(and I leave with the nagging feeling that I've forgetten some important stuff...curse my crappy memory)

Managing Ecosystems to Fight Poverty--from the UN Development Programme, the UN Environment Programme, the World Bank, and the World Resources Insti.

Managing Ecosystems to Fight Poverty--from the UN Development Programme, the UN Environment Programme, the World Bank, and the World Resources Insti.
I have not read this document yet, but it looks to be an incredibly useful resource for environment and development issues, especially considering the authors.

My occular consumption

Howdy folks, and greetings from Guiyang, Guizhou, China. Been here for about 3 weeksish now, and i've been living for relatively free (connections, connections, connections), with limited internet (as in, i go to cafes to steal signals...and buy drinks every once and again). I've been doing much research, swimming in paper, as i would describe it. I just wanted to share some reading material with you great people, and hopefully expand your horizons on some subjects that perhaps you're not so familiar with. I certainly have much material to get up to snuff with. Well, here's just a quick list, as i fear the imminent crash of my internet access:

• The Elusive Quest for Growth, by William Easterly

• The White Man's Burden, by William Easterly

• Development As Freedom, by Amartya Sen

• "The Fiction of Development," by Michael Woolcock

• Several other BWPI working papers by Woolcock and colleagues (#12 on Mixed Methods for Assessing Social Capital in Low Income Countries, #8 on Empowerment, Deliberative Development and Local Level Politics in Indonesia) (BWPI=British World Poverty Institute)

• Some P-A Theory (Principal-Agent), International Relations whatnot

• "Human Rights as Cultural Practice: An Anthropological Critique," by Ann-Belinda S. Preis

• "What's Tourism Got to Do With It?: The Yaa Asantewa Legacy and Development in Asanteman," by Lynda Rose Day
• Various papers and angles on tourism policy development in China
• Primary sources on Guizhou's tourism development and character
• "Bathing in the Far Village: Transnational Capital, and the Cultural Politics of Modernity in China," by Tim Oakes (Tim Oakes is a great source on so-called 'frontier colonialism,' in historical Guizhou, and the social position of ethnic minority groups in relation to the nation and majority Han populations...and he relates this historical, cultural topography to the way development schemes and fdi then map onto such predetermined social conditions...)

Well, there's just a few things of late. Hope you enjoy! Have a stimulating summer my friends. I'll be gone for about 2 months in 2 weeks or so.
paz, amor,

devin.

Rethinking Poverty: Videos from TED

For all you video-watchers like me out there, I just found out that TED has a whole section dedicated to speakers on poverty. You can view them all here:

TED Theme: Rethinking Poverty

From the site, a description to give you an idea of what you're in for:

The catchphrase goes, "Make poverty history." But how? These speakers' innovative ideas may convince you to forget the traditional models -- grants, aid, charity -- and consider business, technology and trade instead.

Jacqueline Novogratz, founder of the Acumen Fund, argues for a combination of philanthropy and investment -- highlighting personal dignity and choice as the path to progress. Academic and policymaker Ashraf Ghani, meanwhile, urges us to rethink capital in terms of security, social connectivity and education. And Hans Rosling's dazzling, animated statistics reveal the true discrepancies between emerging and developed economies.

Iqbal Quadir explains how he improved a Bangladeshi business model -- by replacing cows with a new component: mobile phones. Majora Carter details her efforts to bring green space to the blighted South Bronx, offering an eye-opening look at how flawed urban policy allows ghettos to exist. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, meanwhile, lets us in on a secret: business in impoverished countries is viable, and a "few smart people" have already made millions of dollars.

Two of the videos that I've seen and liked so far are Hans Rosling on world poverty statistics, [in fact there are two-- here is the follow-up], and Bjorn Lomborg on priorities (he answers the question, "If we had $50 billion to allocate into one issue, which would be the most cost-effective?"

Miniature Earth

This is a breathtaking video that really drives home many of the common statistics we normally hear about poverty and the general composition of the world's population.

Miniature Earth Home

And for people who really love looking at numbers, World-o-Meters is a site that displays various world statistics in real-time.

Food Crisis 粮食危机

Ok folks, so I found the Economist's latest briefing on the Food Crisis, dubbed the "silent tsunami," wholly illuminating. I will just proceed to summarise its points and observations:

• The End of the Era of Cheap Food--Subsidies in rich countries and heavy distortions in the international food market will be leveled by the recent outburst of the slow but sure suckerpunch the world just received. It's odd, I remember reading about so-called "peak grain" in an article in a Chinese magazine (粮食危机 or something to that effect) last November, and reading about the Scandinavian Seed Bank construction, and I am ashamed to say that the component that then grabbed my attention was the Seed Bank. It appears that the root problems should have been what was on my mind, but more importantly, on the minds of those responsible for addressing policies geared towards mitigating the global expression of such a structurally massive humanitarian crisis. We are now at a point higher than our past equilibrium, and while the market will (hopefully) level out at a new equilibrium, with farmers producing higher yields to respond to the current high prices, the transition will be very painful (it already is. see Haiti, just one example of the extremeness of this current debacle).
• Retroactive Effects on Poverty Reduction--According to Bobby Z at the World Bank (President, and former U.S. WTO representative), the current "food inflation" has the potential to send 100 million back where they came from-poverty. This would wipe out "all the gains the poorest billion have made during almost a decade of economic growth" (2008. 5. 19. p.33).
• Response from "Smallholder" Farmers Needed--The world is home to some 450 million so-called "smallholders," farmers in developing countries, who, individually, due not farm much in terms of acreage, only a few a piece. Supposedly a supply-side response from these small-scale farmers is desirable, and for three reasons: 1. It would serve to reduce poverty. 3/4 of them live on $1/day, live in the remote countryside, and are heavily reliant on the health of their plots and yields of their crops. 2. Environmentally speaking, this makes sense. These smallholders manage a "disproportionate share" of global water and vegetation resources. Therefore, improving their productivity and efficiency presents a better alternative to cutting down more rainforest and creating new farmlands. Invest in existing ones, improving their outputs. 3. Supporting these smallholders is more efficient. For example, the Economist cites African grain output v European grain output as an example. "In terms of returns to investment, it would be easier to boost grain yields in Africa from two tonnes per hectare to four than it would be to raise yields in Europe from eight tonnes to ten. The opportunities are greater and the law of diminishing returns has not set in." (33) There is a helpful chart in the article that I am sorry I can not include here. Just go find the issue. It's a good one.
• Input Costs Present Barrier to Scaling Up--Unfortunately, there is not a "smallholder bonanza" as of yet. Apparently, in East Africa, farmers are actually scaling down their operations because of the rising costs of fertilizers (cost rise due to oil price escalations). India, however, is not a member of this trend. Neither is South Africa. Both have had boosts in output over the past year.
• Sticky Prices--A greater trend is that of the inelastic response of supply to rise in cost of their produced goods. Farmers are not, and currently can not, respond perfectly and in a timely fashion to the spike in food prices, a phenomenon that expresses increased global demand. Agriculture is special in this way. At the very quickest, response time from farmers takes a season (several months), and in reality, crop yields and increases are contingent on multivariate factors including, technology investment (e.g. irrigation and seed engineering). These are long-run trends, and rely on persistent research and development from both private and public sectors.
• Green Complacency--Following the "Green Revolution" of the 1960s, many governments, assuming that the food crisis had been successfully hedged against and invested in, actually cut back spending on farming by half (from 1980-2004). These cut-backs set in during the 1980s/90s. This neglect has had a gradual, yet terrible effect on seed strength, infrastructure, etc...and had contributed to the lag in supply and its subsequent sluggish response to the rapidly increasing global demand for grains, rice, and meat (wheat is a value-added component of meat, as cows are grain-guzzling machines, resembling developed-world nations' automobiles).
• Shrinking Farmlands--Another crucial factor at play here is the global trend of decreasing farmland acreage. This phenomenon is taking place quite clearly in the People's Republic (of China), with strictly agricultural-use land dipping below the supposed "red line" (the base line for self-sustaining national grain production) of 120 million hectares. Grain security has clearly been compromised, as more farmlands are razed for apartment complexes.

And these are the main issues covered, the main questions begging for answers, solutions. Try to meditate on these issues, and remind yourself every time you at a good meal, instead of a mud sandwich (no hyperbole). Just more food for thought folks.
peace, love,

devin.
I love the Economist.

Global Food Prices and Hunger Pt. 4

http://www.rgemonitor.com/blog/economonitor/252507/
great (general) article summing up recent events and trends in what seems to be a tragic coalescing of many disparate forces. what really interested me and was news to this kid was the bit about the raised food tariffs and export bans (e.g. India), and how such actions actually exacerbate the current crisis. also, i'll add some more based on the recent Economist's briefing on the "silent tsunami," as they term it.