Life in the Ring of Fire Part 56: World Food Day

This week's Tautu language word is “nanen”. It means “food.”

So, this was a pretty slow week, so I'm just going to skip to the weekend (don't you wish you could do that in life? Just skip right to the weekend? That'd be pretty awesome). Friday had been deemed World Food Day by, I don't know, I guess the UN or whoever is in charged of declaring world awareness days. This year's focus was the challenges to food security from climate change. Specifically, the increased demand for crops to be turned into fuels as well as more generally the problems related to possible drastic changes in weather patterns ruining crops. Now, I don't get a lot of chances to catch up on news of the rest of the world, but I have heard that there have been some international stirs with regards to rising food prices, so maybe such a day of awareness would make sense in the US or in Europe or whatever, I don't know. Also, I'm not sure who, exactly, was responsible for suggesting/deciding that the Vanuatu government should take steps to raise awareness of these issues within Vanuatu. Perhaps it was an entirely Ni-Van initiated program, but I doubt it. I think it's considerably more likely that some representative from the Australian or New Zealand or other western government came over and suggested the idea and the Vanuatu government, ever polite and obliging, especially to governments whose aid is their largest source of revenue, agreed. A similar thing happened four or five months ago regarding smoking. I discussed this in a previous blog, but basically the government of Vanuatu, responding to a UN Department of Health recommendation, outlawed smoking in public places. This was ridiculous firstly because, due to a generally poor understanding of concepts such as private property or trespassing, basically all places in Vanuatu are public. Secondly, it's not like there are a lot of restaurants or bars or theaters around to get filled with second-hand smoke, most places are outside. Finally, and most practically, the majority of the country is so remote as to make sending police to arrest people for murder difficult, much less sending police to fine people for smoking at the beach. We also observed World Population Day, which focused on how to reduce the birthrate to prevent overpopulation. That's all well and good for China, but Vanuatu is an UNDER-populated country. It's current population is about one fifth of what it was before the Europeans arrived with smallpox. World Food Day struck me as a similar imposition: some committee thousands of miles away deciding that they know what's best for some country they've never been too or, even worse, a lot of countries they've never been too.

Here's the thing: there is no food shortage in Vanuatu. There's not going to be one for a very, very long time. Walking around, you have to be careful not to get beaned by falling food. I mean this literally. I was hit by a falling mango the other day. I've had a couple near misses with papayas. And a few times a year people are seriously injured by having coconuts fall on them (no joke. Image having that listed as your cause of death in an obituary). Bananas, mangoes, papayas, cucumbers, pumpkins and coconuts rot on the ground. Like I said before, Vanuatu used to support five times its current population in hunter-gatherer societies with no imports. Asking Vanuatu to worry about food security is, quite simply, absurd. But absurd is OK I suppose, I've gotten used to absurd. What was downright insulting, however, was bringing bio fuels into the picture. With some urging from the EU, the Vanuatu government is starting to look into producing fuel from coconut oil. The EU has even donated something like $3 million Euro towards setting up production facilities. OK, well, let's put aside for a moment the fact that the idea of producing fuels from food crops is inherently unsustainable because we don't grow enough food to offset any substantial fraction of our energy consumption, and we REALLY don't grow enough food to do this while still feeding ourselves, and focus more on the problems with this particular project. First off, in order to extract oil from coconuts, the coconuts have to, one by one, be split open with and ax and the meat scooped out with a knife (and it takes a lot of coconuts to make even a little bit of oil). Then the meat has to be dried over a fire for several days, being turned regularly. This whole process is done by hand. As far as I know, there are no machines in existence to mechanize the procedure. In other words, there's a reason why coconut oil is expensive at the grocery store: it's a pain to make. Secondly, from my understanding, in order for the coconut oil fuel to be cheaper than gasoline, the current fuel of choice for both stationary and mobile power generation, the production facilities would have to be buying dried coconuts (copra) for less than private buyers offer for the same product. So, either the coconut oil fuel would be more expensive than gas, or they'd be relying on people being willing to sell their copra at a lower price than they can get elsewhere. But even that's all more or less OK, I suppose. The EU is free to waste its money as it sees fit. The insult is this: Vanuatu imports a tiny amount of gasoline each year. They pay exorbitant prices to have it carried, in 55 gallon drums, on ships across thousands of miles of ocean so it can be used to power three power plants (and when I say power plant, that's kind of an exaggeration, they're just collections of two or three large diesel generators running constantly), maybe some thousand cars and boats (probably less), and perhaps a few hundred private generators. They do this for the oh-so-opulent privilege of having electric lights in their bamboo huts. And now, a group of western governments is telling them that, because of global warming, a problem which they (the western governments) are ENTIRELY responsible for and, because they are the largest consumers of energy, entirely responsible for handling, Ni-Vans have to spend thousands of man hours splitting coconuts with an ax to make an alternative fuel that COSTS MORE than gasoline. Personally, I think all of Vanuatu would be completely justified in telling the EU to go stuff it. But I'm just ranting. I guess I don't really have a right to get mad on behalf of my Ni-Van friends and family. They seem content to (at least pretend) to go along with whatever Australia or New Zealand or the US or Japan tells them to do. I feel like I know something that they don't, but maybe they know something that I don't. I guess we'll see.

OK, now that I'm done raving, let's move on the various humorous particulars of the event itself. It was being hosted at the market, which made sense because that's where all the food is sold. They were giving agriculture show style award for people bring in the best yam, watermelon, manioc, etc. Since there isn't anyone on the island that actually knows anything about how to judge produce, McKenzie was made the judge on the grounds that she's white and works for an organization that has something vaguely to do with agriculture. Most people who showed up for the market, of course, had no idea that the event was taking place, but they generally agreed to have their produce judged when they were told there was a chance to win 1000 Vatu (about $10). McKenzie circulated through the competing fruits, vegetables and root crops, nodding thoughtfully and scribbling on a piece of paper. When she was finished she sat down next to me. “How did you choose the winners?” I asked.
“I just went with the bigger ones,” she replied “but not the biggest, because you know, like, how sometimes the really big watermelons don't taste as good?”
I agreed with the wisdom of this scheme. After the judging, there were speeches. It's impossible to have any sort of event in Vanuatu without speeches. Speeches in Bislama tend to consist of several impassioned rants connected together by long, unnecessary ramblings (kind of like this blog entry). They also tend to go on a lot longer they need to (again, kind of like this blog entry). Most of the speeches tended to focus on how Ni-Vans need to stop eating imported foods and return to eating locally grown crops (this is actually a pretty relevant point to cover. A lot of Ni-Vans prefer rice over their various local root crops. You actually can't really blame them. With rice, you open the bag, dump it in the pot, boil it for 10 minutes and it's done. With root crops, the first step is generally digging them out of the ground). Most of the speakers also touched briefly on the use of bio fuels in a way that suggested that they had absolutely no idea what a bio fuel was or why they were being given money to produce them. The highlight however was someone working themselves up into a very passionate rant that ended with the shouting of “China is not going to feed us any more! We don't need their food and we don't want their food! China is not going to be feeding us any more!” Enthusiastic applause followed. Now, I'm not positive, but I'm pretty sure the Chinese are unaware of both the fact that they were supposed to be feeding Vanuatu and of the amount of resentment that this was creating.

The whole event was finished off by a display and sampling of a number of baked goods made with locally produced manioc flour (manioc, or cassava as it is known in some places, can be ground up to produce a flour which many Americans might recognize as tapioca flour) instead of imported wheat flour. Apparently, the ministry of agriculture had been running a large grinder capable of making said flour and interested Ni-Vans could bring in their manioc to have it ground for them. The whole point of the show was to publicize the existence of the grinder and the service they were offering with it, as well as showcase the fact that it's possible to make many of people's favorite baked goods (breads, cookies, pastries, etc) using manioc flour instead of conventional flour. Many of the goods on display were indeed quite good, and I probably wouldn't have been able to tell that they were made with a different flour had I not known in advance. All in all, it would have been quite an effective publicity move had the bake show not been immediately followed by the announcement that, due to the fact that not enough people were coming to use it, the manioc flour grinder was going to be removed to Vila. Such is life in Vanuatu I supposed.