Good food at school

"We are learning that when schools serve healthier meals, they solve serious educational and health-related problems. But what's missing from the national conversation about school lunch reform is the opportunity to use food to teach values that are central to democracy. Better food isn't just about test scores, health and discipline. It is about preparing students for the responsibilities of citizenship." (Thanks Mike)

I tried it this year: I asked the cafeteria to serve only local, Lebanese food. We had a nutritionist draw menus for 6 months based on traditional recipes. I also talked to the students about it, and allowed them to use the cafeteria kitchen one evening a week to cook whatever they like. Carbonated soft drinks and juice made from powder were banned. It worked well with the menus and the nutrition, but the student's were craving burgers and hotdogs and junk food throughout the 6 months. We also faced the problems of drinks with food: many are used to something more than water, and after mid April, oranges become too expensive for fresh juice. We made a lot of fresh lemonade, but this is full of white sugar. we tried youghurt drinks, but few people like it. We also made rose water drinks and mulberry drinks, but the basis is also a lot of white sugar. Also, good food is more expensive and this could be an important consideration. But I carry on with the traditional local food in the cafeteria.

Africa and the food crisis

"OLIVIER DE SCHUTTER: Hunger is usually seen by the international agencies either as a production problem or one of availability – the FAO seeks to encourage more production, and the WFP to deliver food where it is needed, for instance following bad harvests or resulting from conflict situations… The root causes of hunger are discrimination and marginalisation, lack of accountability of governments to the needs of their population, or in adopting of policies that aggravate hunger instead of alleviating it. A framework based on the right to adequate food obliges us to include these questions – questions of governance if you like, or of accountability – into our answers to the hunger issue. Without this – without accountability mechanisms and a protection of the entitlements of the poorest – our solutions will remain short-term, insufficiently targeted, and ultimately ineffectual. It may result in increased production but completely fails to reduce the scourge of hunger. The right to food is therefore a vital part of the panoply of answers we have to develop against hunger." (Thanks Daniel)

If you've ever doubted that Zionism is racism

Then check the comments on this article. (Thanks Adeem)

The title alone is telling: Gaza's sewage directly threatens hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, but it is an issue because it may pollute the beaches in Occupied Palestine.

The Global Water Challenge

With thanks to Laila

Iraq: salted Faw

"Local inhabitants say that wildlife, including palm trees and Faw’s famous henna trees, as well as agriculture and livestock are already dying as a result of the crisis, resulting in severe economic difficulties for those living along the water." (Thaks Layla)

Superstars 2009

From today's front page of Al Akhbar

Menassat again

For those interested in the Menassat issue, check Nicolien's comment on my previous post. It is true that I do not have all the facts for this particular case, but we seem to agree that "who pays the piper calls the tune". I still maintain that those of us who want to sing the social change tune should carefully select who pays the piper, or even better, play for free. Menassat or no Menassat.

Keep the pressure

"As members of the Canadian and international film, culture and media arts communities, we are deeply disturbed by the Toronto International Film Festival’s decision to host a celebratory spotlight on Tel Aviv. We protest that TIFF, whether intentionally or not, has become complicit in the Israeli propaganda machine.

...

Furthermore, what this description does not say is that Tel Aviv is built on destroyed Palestinian villages, and that the city of Jaffa, Palestine’s main cultural hub until 1948, was annexed to Tel Aviv after the mass exiling of the Palestinian population. This program ignores the suffering of thousands of former residents and descendants of the Tel Aviv/Jaffa area who currently live in refugee camps in the Occupied Territories or who have been dispersed to other countries, including Canada. Looking at modern, sophisticated Tel Aviv without also considering the city’s past and the realities of Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza strip, would be like rhapsodizing about the beauty and elegant lifestyles in white-only Cape Town orJohannesburg during apartheid without acknowledging the corresponding black townships of Khayelitsha and Soweto."

Look at the list of signatories, it includes Naomi Klein, Slavoj Zizek and even...Jane Fonda who, as my friend Angry Arab always says, came to cheer the Israeli troops when they invaded Lebanon in 1982...The wind is turning?

Meanwhile the Slow Food people are still celebrating the Tel Aviv farmer's market. How myopic can these major players in the "Food Movement" be?

More Menassat

More on the Menassat issue, by Rita Barotta, with whom I agree: she raises strongly the issu of donor dependency.

Badael-Alternatives

This week in Badael: my editorial "From craddle to grave, farming in the fertile crescent.". Robert Abdallah on an initiative to renew traditional bread in Akkar and the people behind it. The article raises an important issue: should the rebirth of traditional food and local development be praised if it does not change anything to the exploitation of the workers who make it? Mohammad Muhsin wrote about cactus (subbayr, barbary figs).

Touffar, my favorite Arab rap band

The newest song: al wasakh al tijareh (the commercial dirt, a play on word for al wasat al tijareh: the commercial district also known as Beirut Central District, or Solidaire area).

wasakh tijareh

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMpIwkW3VQo

Shaggileh: an ode to the peasants and farmers and fighters from the Bekaa

shaggileh

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pc23cVdEUkk&feature=related

Madinet al Shuhada, which I have linked to earlier

madinet el shuhada

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeEw3RfNuCU&feature=related

Understanding Yemen

"With every day that passes, we come close to believe that the war in Sa’ada is a Saudi-Iranian war, not a Yemeni one.

...

Yemenis are dying for the sake of foreign agendas. Killing each other to please an outside party is what both Houthis and the government have been doing over the last six years. Is a Yemeni citizen so cheap in front of its leaders?"

I have been looking for a while for a lead to write on the ongoing conflicts in Yemen, and here it is, courtesy of the Yemen Post.I have lived for 2 years in Yemen, very intense years, before unity with South Yemen and after unity, between 1989 and 2001. These were some of the most formative years of my life, and I spent them traveling through the Yemeni countryside, from Saada to Hadramawt. I have been back several times since, and I still have many friends, some of whom are like family (especially I.S.).

Before we go any further, we must remember a few things:

1. Yemen is a country of deep social stratifications, but this is mostly the case in what used to be North Yemen. At the bottom of the ladder there are the Akhdam, who are the servants; the intouchable cast who are said to be "not Arabs". I have posted earlier on al akhdam here and here. The top of the ladder is disputed: until the 1962 Imam Ahmad ruled the country and kept it closed to external influence. He was a Zaydi, a Shi`a sect, which is said to be "Sevener" rather than "Twelver" like the Jaafarite Shi`a of Iran and Lebanon and Bahrain. I leave the reader to wiki the difference between the 2 Shi`a sects, but I can attest that Twelvers and Seveners almost thought about each others as heretics when I used to live there. More than half of today's Yemen are Sunnis, mostly from the Shafi`i sect. When the Imam was overthrown by the army in 1962, the Zaydis, especially the Sada among them (the high learned class) were oppressed and many had to leave the country. Many went to Saudi Arabia and some to Lebanon. They were later reintegrated into the state by Ali Abdallah Saleh, and they held (and still do) high offices. The Hawthi fighting government forces in Saadah in the North are Zaydi (Saadah is a strongly Zaydi region, and there were also previously many Jews there, before Ben Gurion and Imam Ahmad agreed on Operation Flying Carpet. But that is another story.)

Yemen is also a very tribal country, and this has to be kept in mind when understanding the country. The current president Ali Abdallah Saleh comes from the army and is not from a prominent tribal sheikh family. The head of the tribes was Abdallah Ibn Hussein al Ahmar, who founded the Islah party (Islamic, close to Saudi Arabia), who was head of parliament, and who passed away a few years ago.

South Yemen has a very different modern history: From Aden to the Bab el Mandeb straights, the region used to be under British rule until 1967 when it became the People's Republic of South Yemen, closely allied with the USSR and the rest of the Eastern block. The 2 Yemens united in 1989, then there was a civil war and then the countries united again, under the domination of what was previously North Yemen.

A few days ago, I met a friend who has worked in Yemen for over 25 years and who was recently there. I asked him about the situation and this is what he told me:

"A big part of the problem with the Hawthi in the North has to do with the struggle for power between Ali Abdallah Saleh (the current president) and his relative (no one seems to be sure how they are related) Ali Muhsin. Muhsin was one of the officers who carried out the coup against the Imam but the story is that he let Saleh rule as he was bound to fail, and then Muhsin would take over and pacify matters. But Saleh did not fail in establishing his rule and in consolidating it, and Muhsin remained an influential army general. He now commands the Northern army units, fighting the Hawthi in Saadah.

Saleh is getting old and is probably tired. He is grooming his son to replace him. Ali Muhsin considers himself to be the more deserving than Saleh's son, especially that the latter has zero popularity and charisma and no one would recognize him in the street without his motorcade. So whenever Muhsin wants to put pressure on Saleh, he commands the army to engage the Hawthi who are always ready for a fight. As long as the fighting goes on, Saleh is under popular pressure.

Why are the Hawthi angry? One is the perception of the Zaydi as having been stripped from whay they believe is their right (to rule) and are now living inn eed and poverty (like all the rest of Yemen, one of the poorest countries in the World, in spite of oil). Another reason is their constant friction with the Salafi. Muhsin is close to Zandani, the head of the Salafi movement, himself close to Saudi Arabia, and who, it is alledged, has ties to al Qaida (which has a strong presence in Yemen). As someone once said: if there is anything Al Qaida hates more than the US, it is probably the Shi`a. Apparently the Salafi movement, protected by Muhsin's army, has been angering the Zaydi Shi`a by establishing check points in their areas, and by generally being annoying and insulting.

But what about Iran in all this? Why do we hear about Iranian support, which is surprising to many as the Iranians are Twelvers and the Zaydis Seveners? Regardless of the Iranian agenda in the region, I was told that the relationship between the Hawthi and Iran was encouraged by...Saleh himself. This is how the story goes: The Zaydis had formed a party called the Al Haq party (Justice party), which brought together many intellectuals and aimed at modernizing Zaydi thought. Saleh didn't look favorably at that and decided to foment a split in the party. He "adopted" the youth movement of the Al Haq party, the Shabab, who were seeking "a revolution" and requested Iranian aid for social development in the poor region of Saadah, through funding the Shabab, who later on became the Hawthi. The Iranians established contact with the blessings of the state, but it wasn't long before the Shabab were accused of treason and the Al Haq with them and there was an excuse for repressing everyone.

A further complication is added in Yemen (previous North Yemen) was the death of Sheikh Al Ahmar (see above). He tied together Islam (through al Islah), the parliament and the tribes. After his death, his 3 sons divided his legacy among themselves: one took charge of al Islah, another of parliament and a third of the tribal relations. It does not work too well.

As for the revolts in the South, my friend told me that the main reason behind it is class: the South was never truly integrated with the rest of the country, socially or economically, and the rebellion is about that."

I know this might sound utterly complicated, but to someone who follows Middle Eastern politics (or politics in general) this is a plausible scenario. At least, it is a departure from the vapid cliche the Lebanese have excelled at: "we are fighting other people's wars on our soil". In Lebanon as in Yemen, everybody is fighting their own battles. How these battles intersect with external interests is a different matter.

Focus on Gaza

"In August 2009, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) published a special report titled: "Locked In: The Humanitarian Impact of Two Years of Blockade on the Gaza Strip." It focuses on import and export restrictions, the travel ban on "livelihoods, food security, education, health, shelter, energy and water, and sanitation." It explains how violence and human rights abuses increase the suffering of 1.5 million people.

...

On March 22, 2009, Israel nominally lifted food entry restrictions, but its decision remains unimplemented. Many items are still prohibited and most in short supply even though more staple items are permitted. Still, over 80% of Gazans remain aid-dependent, mainly from the World Food Program and UNWRA, and most have sub-nutritional diets."

Read this excellent summary of the UN report by Steve Lendman. For those who have doubt that Zionism is racism.

http://baltimorechronicle.com/2009/090209Lendman.shtml

Agribusiness?

"...the World Bank report strongly advocates the formation of producer organisations and cooperative schemes as a way, supposedly, of achieving economies of scale.

The benefits of such organisation should include greater smallholder participation in markets and increased producer bargaining power, and thus should enable cooperating farmers to share more equitably in the profits generated by agribusiness. However, Amanor demonstrates that such producer organisations would still be embedded within existing disadvantageous market structures and entrenched hierarchical global production systems. Moreover, the World Bank’s effort to promote and integrate producer organisations into global value chains ultimately spreads confusion about the fundamental differences between the market-based governance relations of food chains, which are inherently hierarchical, and democratic governance, which should be empowering." (Thanks Karin)

This is an extract from the excellent "Development Viewpoint focusing on the World Bank's approach to "Agribusiness for Development", and summarizing articles from a special issue of The Journal of Agrarian Change. Required reading.

http://www.soas.ac.uk/cdpr/publications/dv/file53490.pdf

Syria: more bad news from the previously fertile crescent

"Thousands of Syrian farming families have been forced to move to cities in search of alternative work after two years of drought and failed crops followed a number of unproductive years.

"The situation has now got really severe; we are talking about desert, rather than farming land," said Abdel Qader Abu Awad, MENA (Middle East and North Africa) disaster management coordinator for the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC). "People cannot live in this environment any more and their final coping mechanism is migration."

Syria's drought is now in its second year, affecting farming regions in the north and east of the country, especially the northeastern governorate of Hassakeh. Wheat production is just 55 percent of its usual output and barley is seriously affected, according to the UN's drought response plan, drawn up following two recent multi-agency missions.

Blamed on a combination of climate change, man-made desertification and lack of irrigation, up to 60 percent of Syria's land and 1.3 million people (of a population of 22 million) are affected, according to the UN. Just over 800,000 people have lost their entire livelihood, according to the UN and IFRC." (Thanks Bessma)

http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?Reportid=85963

Iraq: more bad news from the previously fertile crescent

"The salinity level has made it impossible to use the water for drinking and irrigation, animals and agriculture. This is a real and serious catastrophe and it will probably affect the down-town area of Basra soon," he said." (Thanks Rania)

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=85987

Funding alternatives sought

A month ago, I wrote a post on Menassat, the news website based in Lebanon. Here's an extract:

When my friend Jax told me a couple of yers ago that he was working for Menassat, I asked who the funders where, and I showed disbelief that Menassat would be able to free itself from the autocensorship common to aid recipients. He defended Menassat and assured me that they have editorial freedom. Since then, Menassat has been publishing good stuff, not ultra radical, but radical enough. Here, they are at the center of a controversy for a report they collated from the Lebanese Press criticizing the Arab Human Development Report. The Jerusalem Post did not like the way the report was written, and is putting pressure on the Dutch government, Menassat's funders. Menassat courageously responded with this article carrying a great title.

Today Layal Haddad reported in Al-Akhbar on the Dutch government withdrawal of its support from Menassat. Layal is mourning Menassat but the title of the article: "Between surprise and sadness, what lies behind the closure of Menassat?" is very telling about the relationship between donors and recipients, where the recipients delude themselves into believing that funding has no strings attached and that it is all for a good cause. This is at best naive. The funders of this project, the Dutch Government, has a political agenda, and it does not include exposing Zionism. Rather, it includes staying chummy with Israel. One could also say that of all states offering aid (except, of course the Iranian state). So if we want to retain our integrity and independence, we should actually be pleased to see funding withdrawn and not sad. and we should start looking for alternatives, rapidos.

Do not trust them hypocrits

"It’s not surprising really, considering Whole Foods eco-healthy image. It’s likely many of their customers take at face value the company’s identity as a leader in “socially responsible” business. Accordingly, they might also have assumed that a wealthy businessman whose success stems from promoting “natural foods” and “healthy living” would be on the side of progressive health care reform.

Of course, they would be mistaken in that assumption." (Thanks Daniel)

Leaser faire

"Saudi Arabia is in talks with Pakistan to lease an area of farmland nearly twice the size of Hong Kong in a bid to ensure food security, an official from Pakistan's ministry of agriculture said yesterday." (Thanks Ramla)

The destruction of Iraq

"Decades of war and mismanagement, compounded by two years of drought, are wreaking havoc on Iraq's ecosystem, drying up riverbeds and marshes, turning arable land into desert, killing trees and plants, and generally transforming what was once the region's most fertile area into a wasteland.

Falling agricultural production means that Iraq, once a food exporter, will this year have to import nearly 80% of its food, spending money that is urgently needed for reconstruction projects. " (Thanks Layla)

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-iraq-dust30-2009jul30,0,3137832.story

They talk about the war as if it was a natural catastrophe that has happened to Iraq. Who made the war on Iraq? Who fomented the Iran-Iraq war? Who is responsible for the destruction of Iraq'a food producing abilities? Compare Iraq with Syria: they both have transboundary water problems, both suffered the doughts, both from centrally planned economy background and both food self sufficient until the war. Syria is still nearly self sufficient, and Iraq is the new dust bowl.