Blog: 2011

Friday, December 2, 2011

Bolivia Diaries: Days 14 & 15: Loose Ends

This will be the final diary describing my 2011 trip to Bolivia. Our last day together as a group was somewhat of a bust. That is, we were supposed to go to a touristy town called Porongo to get a taste of what this area looked like during colonial times. We got to Porongo and nothing went as planned. The next day, I flew back to La Paz for one final day there, because I couldn't bear to leave Bolivia without one last visit to my favorite city. I spent that day stuffing myself with street food. It was great.

As I noted above, our last day was intended as a trip to Porongo. We met a guide, a Costa Rican woman who I think was named Leslie. She had been living in Santa Cruz for a while now, married to a Bolivian with a cattle ranch.

One conversation from that day stands out as notable. Somewhere along the way to Porongo, someone in our group mentioned that the breakfasts in our current hotel were terrible. I agreed. Tanya, the American who was leading our group, asked what was wrong with them. I replied bluntly, "The food is bad." Tanya, who has spent an awful lot of time in Bolivia, was shocked. So we started complaining: white bread, cake, Nescafe instead of real coffee...

That's when Leslie cut in. "That's posh bread!" she said. We're talking about, like, Wonder Bread - or its Bolivian equivalent. And the Nescafe too. This nasty processed stuff that we didn't want to eat is seen as superior, as more modern and expensive, than more nutritious homemade stuff like rolls or filter coffee.

When we got to Porongo, we learned that it was famous for producing a fruit called achachairú. According to a book I bought in Bolivia:

In Bolivia, the name achachairú is given to at least 10 species of the genus Rheedia, including: Rheedia brasiliensis, R. achachairu, R. arubayensis, R. laterifolia, R. macrophylla, R. acuminata, R. floribunda, R. gardneriana, R. madruno, and R. rogaguensis. All of these species are characterized by medium sized trees, up to 10 meters, which present with grayish bark grayish and more or less smooth, yellow resin. Its leaves are simple, elliptical or oval shaped and its flowers are in small clusters. There are hermaphrodites and unisexual flowers on the same tree. Its fruits are round, cylindrical yellow berries with two seeds and white edible flresh that is sweet and slightly acidic. The peel is harder in some species, but generally looks similar to leather. Fruit size varies from 2 cm in R. achachairú to the size of an orange in R. macrophylla. They bloom from August to September, with the fruit maturing between November and February.

As we were there in August, the trees were in bloom. So were the mango trees, for that matter. I noticed mango trees everywhere that day. Another notable species was the gallito (little rooster) tree, named for the appearance of its beautiful red flowers.

When we arrived in Porongo, the place was dead. There was absolutely nothing going on, and a guide who was to meet us and give us a tour did not show up. Plus, it was freezing. We arrived in Santa Cruz during a "suraso" - blast of freezing Antarctic air that results in temperatures in the 50s and 60s. None of us were dressed well enough to be in the cold.

We ended up gathering in a restaurant that had a sign outside announcing they had patasca, a soup made from boiling an entire pig's head overnight. At some point, the head is removed and the flesh is cut off and put back in the soup, and the rest of the head is not. But we didn't order that. Instead, we had coffee, hot chocolate, and empanadas to warm us up. Ultimately we just decided to go back to our hotel because of the cold. I used the opportunity to head next door to a pastry shop that came highly recommended.

I spent my last day stuffing my face with salteñas, a Bolivian street food I love.

Salteñas

Inside my salteña

I stocked up on a few other types of street food to bring on the plane too.

I know nothing about this other than that it tastes good. I ate several of them.

And I finally gave in to my huge desire to taste mocochinchi, a drink made from a dried peach boiled with cinnamon, sugar, and water:

Mocochinchi

The only other notable bit from my last day was a chart I found in one of the stores showing all of the plants used for dyes for traditional Bolivian textiles:

So that's it - that's my whole trip. As usual, the flight home was a nightmare. In this particular case, I flew from La Paz to Miami as planned and then it went to hell. I nearly missed my connecting flight to Chicago and wasn't able to get anything to eat. Since I won't eat the plane food, I ate chocolate and cookies from Bolivia. The only catch is that the cookies were made with maca, an Andean root that makes you horny. I got the cookies because I wanted to try maca, not eat the whole thing in one sitting!!! And then the Miami to Chicago flight got in late and I was stuck spending the night in Chicago. I swear, I hate air travel.

Thursday, December 1, 2011

Bolivia Diaries: Day 13, Part 2 - "Responsible" Soy Production in Santa Cruz

This diary is part of a series describing my trip to Bolivia to study food sovereignty, agroecology, and climate change. On our thirteenth day, we traveled around the agricultural area of Santa Cruz with Productividad Biosfera Medio Ambiente (PROBIOMA). This diary is about our visit to a "responsible" farm in Santa Cruz.

"Model Farm: Managed with criteria of social and environmental responsibility. Proprietor: Francisco Gonzales. Supported and certified by PROBIOMA."

The farm we visited was owned by a man named Francisco. His idea for his 16-hectare farm is to "do something totally different" from the monoculture soy around him. Previously, they were growing soy, corn, potato, and sunflowers here. Like so many in Santa Cruz, Francisco was a highlander who came to the lowlands looking for land. And he was lucky. He met and fell in love with his wife, whose family had come from Potosi years before - also looking for land. This land was in her family.

Francisco with a beet

A view of the farm, including its two buildings.

As you can see in the photos below, the farm was anything but a monoculture. The farm had two small buildings, each containing just one room. One seemed to be a bedroom, the other a kitchen. These might be the home of Francisco and his wife, but I think it's likely they have a home elsewhere and just use these buildings for cooking and sleeping when they are at the farm.

Francisco grows citrus trees, and just about every vegetable under the sun - potatoes, beets, peas, eggplant, squash, you name it. He also grows sunflowers, corn, and wheat. As you can see, he does not intercrop. He plants in long, straight rows of single crops. However, he has so much variety that no crop is very far from several other plant species all around it.

Potatoes

Citrus and Peppers

Beans

Onions

Cilantro

Squash

Eggplant

Wheat

Wheat and corn

Tractor... you don't grow wheat and corn like that by hand.

Beet

Sunflowers

Francisco told us a funny story about his neighbor. At first, when he began farming using organic methods with a polyculture, his neighbor got mad at him for growing sunflowers. The neighbor came over to complain that Francisco's sunflowers would cross-pollinate his. However, when he got to Francisco's farm and saw the quality of Francisco's sunflowers, he asked Francisco to grow sunflowers for him and sell them back to him.

He says that his neighbors have come around to ask questions a lot. They want to know what he's doing, where he gets his plants, and why he is doing this. He thinks they are curious and that they might switch to farming like he does if he can prove that he is financially successful over time.

At the front of his property (along the road), Francisco grows a number of trees, like mahogany and teak. While these are valuable as lumber of course, Francisco grows them for a different reason. His 16 hectares are in the shape of a long rectangle. Perhaps two thirds of the way across his land, he left a patch of natural forest. Beyond it, there are two hectares that sit in between two such patches of forest, which act like windbreaks. Francisco says that no matter what he grows, the land between the forest areas always yields higher. So he is attempting to create a similar sort of windbreak for the rest of his land by planting these lumber species in the front.

Trees

Close-up of one of the trees

After our tour, we went back to the house for our lunch. Don Francisco's wife prepared a traditional style lunch for us, a delicious soup made from one of her chickens.

House

Chickens... one of these guys became lunch.

Francisco's wife preparing lunch

After we ate, Francisco asked if we'd like to see his patch of jungle. Of course we would! As we walked over there, he asked me if it was true that the U.S. has no monkeys. Yes, I said. And, he continued, is it true that the U.S. doesn't have trees? No, I told him, That's not true. We walked a long way across bare soil that had been prepared for planting, or perhaps just planted. As we walked, he pointed out a few trees that he left standing for one reason or another. I think they were important species.

Bare field prepared for planting, with a tree

Another tree Francisco chose to leave standing.

A look at the jungle as we approached it.

Jungle

Once in the jungle, I was delighted to see a passionflower I had been looking for, a pachío.

Pachío, a wild passionflower that produces edible fruit

Another view of the pachío.

Another view of the pachío.

Then, all of a sudden, we saw a little monkey in a motacú palm! He scurried away quickly, before anyone could get a picture. We watched the tree for a little while but he did not show his face again.

I saw a monkey! He's right up there, in that tree! (Just hiding)

Don Francisco showed us some banana trees he had. He also planted banana trees in the forest. His theory is that if the monkeys have bananas for themselves in the forest then they will leave his banana trees alone. He showed us where a bunch of bananas had been cut off and stolen and joked that some monkeys with machetes had come to take his bananas.

Bananas

A nest

While near the jungle, Francisco proudly showed us a tiny plant. At first I could not imagine what kind of rare and valuable plant it was that he took such pride in. Coca, that's what. He somehow got a seed or a cutting (probably a seed) and this is his one, precious coca plant from which perhaps some day he can grow his own coca leaves for chewing.

Coca

I have two last pictures that don't fit very well in this story, so I am throwing them in here. The road was DUSTY. Horribly dusty. It was a dirt road and every vehicle that passed kicked up a huge cloud of dust. Check this out:

You might have noticed that when I called this "responsible" soy - which is how it was presented to us - I put the word "responsible" in quotes. It's not because Francisco is doing anything wrong. He's amazing, truly. But this land was all forest and it was all cleared. As was all of the other land for miles and miles around.

A major problem in Bolivia is that instead of redistributing land that is already in agriculture, they let the super-rich keep what they have and then help the poor clear more forest to grow food. With these 16 hectares Francisco is a smallholder. The average large landholder in Santa Cruz has 16,000 hectares. That's average! When I was visiting corn and soy farms in Iowa, the average farm in the area I visited was only about 1000 acres, or about 400 hectares. And the land isn't even used very well. We were told that the cattle ranches here will have about one cow per five hectares, which is far more land than you need per cow.

The colonization and deforestation of the eastern lowlands of Bolivia were actually a U.S. brainstorm, dating back to the "Bohan Plan," a plan written in the 1940s (I think) by an American that more or less instructed Bolivia to do exactly what they did. And Bolivia, after its 1952 revolution, followed that advice.

Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Bolivia Diaries: Day 13, Part 1 - Industrial Ag in Santa Cruz, Bolivia

This diary is part of a series describing my trip to Bolivia to study food sovereignty, agroecology, and climate change. Our thirteenth day, we traveled around the agricultural area of Santa Cruz with Productividad Biosfera Medio Ambiente (PROBIOMA). There, we saw a little responsible soy production and lots of irresponsible soy production.

This is a diary that I have been both anticipating and dreading, because I swore that when I wrote it, I would commit to giving up sugar for a month, with minimal cheating by substituting honey and maple syrup. You'll see why as you take a look at Santa Cruz's industrial agriculture below.

Our trip through the industrial ag region of Santa Cruz was depressing. We weren't able to visit any large soybean producers or any other large scale producers either for that matter.
For our look at "irresponsible" production, we had to be content with what we could see from the bus window, and what our guides from PROBIOMA told us. I picked up a book on soy production in Bolivia, so at some point in the future I will write up what I learn in that book.

Santa Cruz was not very well populated until a push for colonization of Bolivia's eastern lowlands began after the 1952 revolution. The wealthy and well-connected got huge landholdings here, but many peasants came from the highlands hoping to get some land here too. The majority of people here moved here from somewhere else, or else their families did before they were born.

In Santa Cruz, a "smallholder" is one with 20 hectares of less. The average landholding of a large producer around here is something like 16,000 hectares (nearly 40,000 acres). There was a successful referendum that limited landholdings to 5000 hectares, but it was not retroactive. Also notable: 70% of land in Santa Cruz does not have a legal title.

We often saw enormous mounds, which are anthills large enough that you could comfortably sit on them, were it not for the ants. Ants like open spaces and poor soils, which is what there is a lot of here in this area that used to be forest. The ant hills are a sign of soil degradation.

This area is almost entirely deforested.

Hello, monoculture

As we drove, we saw fields and fields of monocultures on both sides of the road, interrupted now and again by billboards or shops for agrochemicals, processing plants, and a house or tree or two here and there. It was terribly dusty and every vehicle would kick up enormous clouds of dirt. Here's a shot I took of one of the processing plants we passed - a soy processing plant, I believe:

Processing plant

Honestly, what made an impression on me even more than soy was sugar. Soy is something I avoid when possible. Even most of the animal products I consume come from animals that did not eat soy, although it's very possible that the cows that make the organic milk I drink get some soy in addition to the grass they eat. But sugar, on the other hand... oh man do I eat sugar. And now that there are genetically engineered beets on the market, the sugar I eat is cane sugar.

We passed field after field of sugarcane. I did not take pictures because it's boring and not worth it. I've taken pictures of sugarcane before, in the Philippines. And if you've seen one field of sugarcane, you've seen 'em all. Then we came to a sugar processing plant. It STUNK. Bad. Here's a photo of the enormous area where the trucks come to drop off their loads of sugarcane:

Trucks carrying sugarcane

More trucks carrying sugarcane

Truck carrying sugarcane

These pictures were taken during a low traffic time of day. Later, we passed this spot again when there was a full-fledged sugarcane truck traffic jam. Truck after truck after truck, full of burnt cane. They burn the fields to get rid of all of the leaves, making it easier to harvest the cane. Burning is bad in a number of ways. When they do the burning, there are emissions of gasses, and sometimes all of the nearby homes are covered with smoke. But the burning is also very harmful to the soil.

In the past, there was a push for self-sufficiency in sugar and rice in Bolivia. These days, there's a resurgence in sugar production, and now sugar is replacing other crops like soy, corn, wheat, and even some ranchland. The area we were passing through used to grow wheat in the winter and soy in the summer, but now it was growing sugarcane.

In March of 2011, there was a sugar shortage and the price went up. The government responded by restricting exports of sugar. Producers and processors responded to that by turning the sugar into ethanol and exporting it that way.

Sugar processing plants only pay US$50 per tonne of cane, but only if the cane has 12% sucrose. For every percent less than 12% of sucrose, the producer gets less money for the sugarcane. It costs $800 per hectare to plant sugarcane, and that must be done every 5 years because it's a perennial. It yields about 60 tonnes per hectare, or US$3000 per hectare if it has 12% sucrose. Sugarcane is harvested annually.

The processing plant, as I said before, STUNK. It was impossible to drive past it without wondering about the overpowering smell. The plant is a source of air pollution, but it also produces effluent because it uses a lot of water. In addition to all of the water used, the plant also uses chemicals to whiten the sugar. The effluent from the plant is very contaminated, and it sits around in oxidation pools, which is what caused the smell. When it rains, the pools overflow, resulting in fish kills. The plants are powered by burning bagasse, which is the term for sugarcane after the juice containing the sugar has been extracted.

In addition to sugarcane, I also asked about a few other crops. Our guide told us that farmers would spend $350 to plant a hectare of soy, yield 2 tonnes per hectare, and sell the soy for about US$400/tonne. That means each year a farmer would net about $450 per hectare, less any interest paid on loans. For corn, a farmer would spend $280 to plant each hectare, yield about 35 quintals, and sell them for 90 Bolivianos apiece. That equals 3150 Bolivianos (US$455) per hectare (gross), netting the farmer $175 per hectare.

As we drove, we saw one man spraying pesticide. We could smell it inside our bus, and the man was wearing no protective clothing whatsoever. The most popular herbicides around here are glyphosate (Roundup), 2,4-D, paraquat, and atrazine. Popular insecticides are cypermethrin, methamidophos (banned in the US), chlorpyrifos, endosulfan (which is banned in Bolivia but people use it anyway), aldrin, dieldrin, and endrin. Many of these are highly toxic.

The other major site we saw were pesticide ads:

"Before planting, kill weeds"

Syngenta's Bolivia site is under construction, but in Mexico, Doblete Super is made from Paraquat and Diquat. In other words: VERY TOXIC.