Choosing Causes

For the past couple of months I've been making an effort to follow the blogs of many of my classmates. I'm finding their writing really interesting and I appreciate how they are choosing to write on issues about which they really care. Still, there are some times when I can't help but get frustrated that there are serious events happening in Canada right now to which there is no attention being given. Yes, a representative was banned from speaking in the House of Representatives for two days, but was she given a death sentence? Yes, Oreo came up with a new marketing platform that is somewhat controversial, but is this really the cause behind which we want to rally ourselves?

What is missing is the human rights issues that are happening within our own country. Why? I think that our blog topics reflect what is being advertised in the media. We chose to write about stories that grab our attention, and for something to grab our attention it needs to be mentioned somewhere.

To my fellow INDEVOURS: I'm not trying to say that the topics you are highlighting are not a good choice. I know that some of you really care about these issues and I think you are all writing amazing things, but I think that sometimes we need to stop and ask ourselves: is this important enough to merit my time and attention? I know that the answer to this question would be "no" for some of my past blog posts, but from this point forwards I will make a point to ask myself that question before I post anything.


What prompted this? Today I read an article about the health coverage cuts the Conservative government is imposing on refugees in Canada. It was written by a Canadian pediatrician and I urge you all to read it. Samir Shaheen-Hussain gives some scenarios to get people to understand how dire the passing of Bill C-31 really is. Refugees are some of the most vulnerable people in Canada and it is their health coverage that the government is cutting as of June 30. Diabetes is not a communicable disease so insulin will no longer be covered. Leukemia is also not communicable so coverage for chemotherapy is being cut. Refugees from certain countries will not even be eligible for care if they suffer a heart attack.

Refugees are not just immigrants. They don't have the resources to pay for unexpected costs like illnesses. The government has quietly tried to implement these health care cuts for refugees. It's coming under the banner of "saving money for Canadian taxpayers". The kicker? This program costs each Canadian about $3 per year.

Let's use our voices to stand up for something we truly believe deserves our attention. The choice of topic may be different for each of us. We each have different passions and thoughts. I suppose what I'm trying to say is: Think about the issues that are not staring us in the face, but are quietly strangling our society.

Food insecurity... in Canada?

Most people in Southern Ontario don't really think about the origins of our food. It's readily available in grocery stores, corner stores, markets... Basically we can get food for a reasonable price at any time of day or night. That's really what being food secure means: we don't have to worry about sufficient food being available or affordable. Food insecurity is generally associated with countries in the Global South, especially those experiencing drought or crop failures.

Recently a representative from the United Nations embarrassed the Canadian government by saying that many people in Canada are not able to eat decently because food prices are unaffordable. This is particularly a problem in Arctic Canada where food prices are a significantly higher than they are here. For the past few weeks, people in Nunavut have been demonstrating in front of grocery stores to protest the high food costs. Research has shown that almost 3/4 of Inuit preschoolers live in homes without a sure supply of food. In fact, two-thirds of Inuit parents find that they sometimes run out of food and are not able to purchase more.

Think about that for a minute. What would you do if you were not able to afford food for your family? How must these parents feel when they aren't able to provide for their kids? Do we, as fellow Canadians, have a responsibility to make sure that everyone in Canada has access to affordable food?

Families in some northern communities have a grocery bill of up to $1000 each week? What is your average grocery bill? Have you ever worried about where you would get your next meal or if you would be able to afford it? Have you ever paid $7 for a loaf of bread? $6 for a cucumber? $15 for four litres of milk? $20 for 2 kg of rice? $28 for a head of lettuce? Some food prices have decreased in the past few years, but there is still a long way to go before there is food security in Canada.

Organic realities

The phenomenon of organic food has been growing as people start to learn more about how their food is being grown. In Canada the organic regulations were created through collaboration between organic farmers who created the growing standards for a farmer to be organically certified. Currently only about 5% of Canadian consumers buy organically certified food. This brings up questions. People can praise organic food, but are they really ready for the product they are going to be getting? Organic produce does not look as big or as good as conventional produce, but are people willing to pay a premium for a product that is in some ways inferior? Is there something in-between organic and conventional?

Personally, I believe that there is an option between conventional and organic products. That option is the use of the Integrated Pest Management System. For a number of years, I worked at the Guelph Farmer's Market selling apples and apple products for Brantview Apples and Cider. At Brantview, Jay Howell and his family use the IPM system to control pests and diseases in the orchard. I've heard Jay describe this program to customers a few times and I find it quite interesting.

On a weekly basis a person, often a university student, will go into the orchards to look for problematic pests and diseases. If the population of a pest exceeds a threshold (which is unique to each type of pest), then measures will be put into place to control its population. As long as a pest remains below its threshold they will leave it as pests will often become beneficial predators by eating more problematic pests later in the season.

To deal with pests that have passed their threshold there are different options. One unique method of pest control is the use of twist ties that are impregnated with female fruit moth pheromone. The ties are attached to the trees and the male moths who are searching for a female with whom to mate will find only a twist tie and will either leave or die. IPM uses various natural pest control methods, but if it is necessary Brantview will use pesticides to control pests that have gotten out of control. The interesting thing is that Brantview Apples is in the bottom 5% of pesticide spraying in the province- including organic apple growers!

What are your thoughts on organic growing? Is the use of a pest management system like IPM a viable option for our current food systems? Did you know that organic farming is not always the most environmentally friendly way of growing food? Try going to a farmer's market sometime and ask the vendors about their pest management strategies. You might hear some interesting responses!

The Case of the Colourful Cauliflower

What do kale, cauliflower, broccoli, cabbage, kohlrabi, and brussels sprouts all have in common? Did you know that they all originally came from the same plant?

Today, our class of Special Topics for International Development went on a field trip to Garden Party. We learned about the Community Supported Agriculture program that they run, discussed food challenges and opportunities, and even had the chance to help out in one of the gardens. This trip inspired me to write a blog post about food systems in Canada, but there is so much information and ideas about food that trying to condense everything into one post would not let me do justice to the topic. Thus, I will be starting a mini-series on food. For now I will focus mostly on Canada, but we'll see where we go!

We are not eating the same foods that our parents and grandparents ate. Our food has continually been altered to grow bigger and look better. Take a look at how corn has evolved over time:

In the past, changes to our food have occurred slowly through the process of selective breeding. People would grow a crop and select individual plants that had traits that they wanted in future crops to produce the seeds for next year's crop. The wild mustard plant is an example of how selection for different traits can be used to create completely different products over time. Cabbage, cauliflower, kale, kohlrabi, brussels sprouts, and broccoli all originally came from the same plant! Someone decided that they wanted to grow plants with larger flower clusters and selected for that trait while another person decided they preferred eating the leaves and selected plants with larger leaves. Pretty neat isn't it?

This process of selective breeding in plants has been used for thousands of years. In fact, the domestication of wild plants to be grown for food was really what allowed people to live a stationary instead of a nomadic lifestyle

One example of selective breeding that I found particularly interesting is the case of the colourful cauliflower. You can now buy cauliflower in a variety of colours including green, orange, and purple. The first coloured cauliflower was a genetic mutant that was dwarf-sized and orange. It was found in Canada in 1970 and was cross-bred with a traditional white cauliflower over the following three decades to create a product that looks exactly like a typical white cauliflower except for its bright orange colour. The beta-carotine that gives the vegetable its orange pigment also increases its nutritional value to give it a vitamin A content that is about 25 times the white version.

Some of you might immediately be thinking about the unnaturalness of colouring our vegetables, but the truth is that this is nothing new. Until the 17th century, most of the carrots eaten by Europeans were either purple, white, or yellow, or even red or black. The Dutch were the ones who created orange carrots, probably by cross-breeding a red and a yellow carrot, in order to celebrate the royal family. (And yes, I am proud to be Dutch despite our disheartening Euro cup appearance). Only recently have purple, white, and yellow carrots been making a comeback in our diets.

Do you know of any interesting foods that has been created through selective breeding? Do you have fundamental problems with eating colourful cauliflower? What about eating colourful carrots? Are there any other food-related topics about which you would like to read?

Happy eating!

Malawi: Caught between two worlds

This year, the 19th African Union summit was to be held in Lilongwe, Malawi, a responsibility that typically rotates among states that are members of the AU. Instead, this summit will be moved to the AU headquarters in Ethiopia. Why? Malawi refused to host the Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir.

Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir who is wanted for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide

 
President Omar al-Bashir has an outstanding arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court on charges of crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide. For this reason, Malawi had decided to ban him from attending the summit which is to start in July. The government then received a letter from the AU in which it was told that they had no right to dictate who could and could not attend the summit. Malawi was given the choice of allowing President Omar al-Bashir to attend or giving up their position as host country.

President Joyce Banda, the first female president of Malawi

In Malawi, the current President is Joyce Banda who came into power in April when the previous president died while in office. At a May press conference, President Banda said that a visit by the Sudanese President would not be acceptable to Malawi's international donors with whom she has worked to improve relations over the past couple of months. These international relationships had been strained by her predecessor, but she has been experiencing fairly significant success. Within the last month, President Banda has secured deals with the International Monetary Fund and the British government for various aid packages and has also established a relationship with the central bank of Britain to assist with currency devaluation challenges. This newly reacquired support would be lost if Malawi were to host President Omar al-Bashir.

President Banda has had some difficult decisions to make in her first couple of months in office. She has now found herself caught between the ideals of her donors and those of her fellow African Union countries, of whom only South Africa and Zambia have declared that they would arrest President al-Bashir if he were to enter their countries. I, and likely most of the people living in developed countries, would applaud President Banda in her decision. Nevertheless this leaves Malawi experiencing strained relationships with some of their neighbouring countries. This decision also poses huge business losses for Malawians who had invested in improving their hotel and transportation services in anticipation of the summit. Without an influx of people for the AU summit, these business people will have challenges repaying loans and other debts.

What are your thoughts on the African Union summit? Should Malawi still be allowed to ban individuals from attending or is the African Union right in its decision to relocate the summit to Ethiopia?

Changes and Challenges

 International development is a very volatile field. New organizations are constantly being started while others are unable to find the necessary funding to continue running and are closing. Even within an organization, people are always moving in and out, along with funding which can never really be predicted. Communication can be slow and misunderstandings are common. And these are only some of the challenges for people in the international development field. Overall, this is a very uncertain business.

This week Jeannette and I got a bit of a taste of what that is like. Yesterday morning we got our tickets to Ouagadougou. We will be flying out on September 9, having a layover in Paris, and landing in Burkina Faso on September 10 at 16:15 local time. This was pretty exciting news for us, as well as many of the other students in our class who also received their tickets yesterday.

Later in the day, we then received an email about the organization with which we were supposed to be working: AEAD. It turns out that they do not have the funding to get us out to visit the villages where we would be working with the farmers. For this reason, we are going to be working instead with l'Association Solidarite et Entraide Mutuelle au Sahel (SEMUS) which is also where Kevin will be working.

Jeannette and I will now be living in Yako instead of in Gourcy. These two towns are fairly similar in size and only about 30km apart so we will still be in the same region and dealing with similar environmental conditions. We will also have a different mandate. Because this is such a recent change, we are not yet sure what our mandate will be, but hopefully in the next couple of months we will be able to communicate with SEMUS about our work.

When you are getting excited about an opportunity and something changes, it's easy to be disappointed. I think both Jeannette and I are a bit uncertain and maybe a bit disappointed about our new placements. Nevertheless, I believe that any experience is only as good as you make it. Yes, it may take a week or two to become excited about my new placement organization, but I'll get there. Circumstances change and the way to make the best of these changes is to stay positive.