Not even the rain has such small hands

Those of us with school-aged children probably respond especially strongly to stories about child laborers around the world, children much like ours but without the protections of law or economic security against exploitation, abuse, and exhaustion. My six-year-old daughter has terrific manual dexterity and loves sewing and crafts. Right now she fits these pursuits into her limited free time between school and activities, comfortable regular meals and bedtimes. Under other circumstances, she might be putting in 16-hour days making beaded clothing for a pittance. It’s an unbearable thought.

The March 10 Forbes has an extensive article on child labor, mostly in agriculture, and in particular detailing the problems of the GE cottonseed industry, undertaken by Indian farmers contracted to companies like Monsanto and Syngenta. According to the article, there are between 12 and 50 million children under the age of 14 working in India.

Cottonseed farmer Talari Babu is a slim, wiry man dressed, when a reporter visited him, in black for a Hindu fast. "Children have small fingers, and so they can remove the buds very quickly," he says, while insisting that he no longer employs the underage. "They worked fast, much faster than the adults, and put in longer hours and didn't demand long breaks. Plus, I could shout at them and beat or threaten them if need be to get more work out of them." He could also tempt them with candy and cookies and movies at night. Babu says that pressure from Monsanto and the MV Foundation, an NGO in Andhra Pradesh backed by the Dutch nonprofit Hivos, forced him to quit using child labor.

But many farmers still use children for this delicate and dangerous work.

The pollination work lasts for 70 to 100 days and is followed by cotton-picking staggered over several months. Children's hands are ideal for the delicate work with stamens and pistils. Their bodies are no better at withstanding the poisons. At least once a week, says Davuluri Venkateshwarlu, head of Glocal, farmers spray the fields with pesticides like Nuvacron, banned by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and endosulfan, methomyl and Metasystox, considered by the EPA to be highly toxic. Venkateshwarlu ticks off the effects of overexposure: diarrhea, nausea, difficulty in breathing, convulsions, headaches and depression.

In other parts of India, children are producing GM tomato, eggplant, okra and chili seeds for the American market, again under heavy pesticide regimens, and earning 5 to 10 cents per hour. Other young kids are doing dangerous stone work in quarries, turning out decorative stones and cobbles for American yards and gardens. The garment industry, of course, is a familiar offender, as well as producers of handmade carpets and decorative items. Here’s one group of very young boys who live together in a tiny Delhi room room making sparkly picture frames with sequins and bits of glass:

In one such room, where the only piece of furniture is a low workbench, 10-year-old Akbar sits on the floor and mixes two powders into a doughy adhesive, his fingers blackened by the chemicals. Another boy spreads a thin layer of the mixture on a photo frame and a third, seated on his haunches, starts pasting tiny pieces of mirrors and sequins along the border. He sways back and forth, a habit most kids have developed to keep the blood flowing through their limbs as they sit for several hours. Decorating one 5-by-5-inch frame consumes six child-hours. The boys, who all live in the room and cook their own food here, typically work from 9 a.m. to 1 a.m. for $76 a month. Many have teeth stained from cigarettes they smoke and tobacco they chew to relieve the tedium.

The whole article is worth reading.

While India has passed some limited child labor laws, they are only loosely enforced. Likewise, the many familiar corporations mentioned in the article—not only Monsanto and Syngenta, and Bayer, but the Gap, Lowe’s, Target, Ikea, Bloomingdale’s, and other importers of goods-- have policies against buying from contractors who exploit child labor. Clearly, having a policy on the books does not constitute sufficient oversight.

In the seed industry in particular, it is important to remember that a plant grown in the U.S. may still spring from seed harvested across the world by very young laborers, on behalf of companies who reap giant profits from the transaction.

One of many reasons to know where your food comes from.

Brief News & Links, 3/1/08

Seed-saving?

The Global Seed Vault was opened on February 26 in Svalbard, Norway.

Bored into the middle of a snow-topped Arctic mountain, the seed vault has as its goal the storing of every kind of seed from every collection on the planet. While the original seeds will remain in ordinary seed banks, the seed vault's stacked gray boxes will form a backup in case natural disaster or human error erase the seeds from the outside world.

Spain-based nonprofit GRAIN warns against overreliance on seed banks for conserving diversity while the world's farmers plant an increasingly uniform set of crops.

...relying solely on burying seeds in freezers is no answer. The world currently has 1,500 ex situ genebanks that are failing to save and preserve crop diversity. Thousands of accessions have died in storage, as many have been rendered useless for lack of basic information about the seeds, and countless others have lost their unique characteristics or have been genetically contaminated during periodic grow-outs. [...]

The deeper problem with the single focus on ex situ seed storage, that the Svalbard Vault reinforces, is that it is fundamentally unjust. It takes seeds of unique plant varieties away from the farmers and communities who originally created, selected, protected and shared those seeds and makes them inaccessible to them. [...] the system operates under the assumption that once the farmers' seeds enter a storage facility, they belong to someone else and negotiating intellectual property and other rights over them is the business of governments and the seed industry itself.

**

Action item:

The EPA has proposed a rule change eliminating required reporting of airborne ammonia and hydrogen sulfide emissions by factory farms. While manure pit emissions can cause respiratory and nervous system effects, the EPA has apparently come to the conclusion that reporting is "not useful."

See EPA page here.

The public comment period for this rule change ends March 28 (leave a comment here). Mine:

It is appropriate for airborne toxic emissions of ammonia and hydrogen sulfide, which have been shown to potentially cause respiratory and nervous system health effects, to be reported regardless of which industry is the source. Reporting of emissions is not an undue "burden on farmers," where farms are of the size likely to endanger air quality. The reporting requirements in this matter should not be eased, and doing so would be both a threat to public health and an unnecessary giveaway to factory farms, which must be held responsible for their environmental and community impacts.

**

Resource:

The Cornell Small Farms Program is offering a $200 online course for beginning farmers.

If we are ever to reclaim our country's tradition of small-scale farming, we will have to find innovative ways to educate a new generation of farmers in their work. Currently, the average age of U.S. farmers is 55, and only 6% are under 35.

**

Debt relief for (very) small farmers:

India's latest national budget will completely cancel the farm loan debt of all farmers with less than 2 hectares of land, at a cost of $15 billion. While some farm groups feel the land-size cut-off is too small, 80 percent of Indian farmers work less than 1 hectare of land, and the farm sector employs more than 60 percent of the labor force.

On the other hand, farmers have to have had access to credit in the first place for debt forgiveness to be helpful.

The Bench

When my parents visited this spring, I took them to the Cherry River Fishing Access, because it is near town, pretty, and small. It was important to go someplace small, because neither one was physically able to trek far. My mom has a long-standing disability that makes walking arduous. My stepfather was recovering from pneumonia, and he tired quickly at this high elevation.

My mom mostly sat on a picnic bench near the parking lot, some 50-100 yards away from the ponds frequented by waterbirds. The table is still a pleasant spot, but with tall cattails and grasses in the way, you can't see much of the wildlife from there. Meanwhile, I strolled a little with my stepfather; an urban-souled fellow, he was delighted to see and hear redwinged blackbirds, which he apparently viewed as a novelty.

That's one of many good excuses for keeping these small spots alive: they're physically-accessible to people who can't make it into the backcountry, and perceptually-accessible, too, to enthusiastic beginners with little knowledge or experience of their denizens.

After the visit, however, my mother understandably wished she could have sat closer to the ponds, so she, too, could have had a better view of blackbirds, coots, and ducks. Being of an enterprising character, she wrote a letter to Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, who administer the site, suggesting that a bench be placed on the path that runs between the two ponds, right alongside the edge of the southernmost. I wrote to them, too, offering to pay for the bench myself, as it was almost her birthday, and I didn't want the idea to be rejected based on cost.

MTFWP was surprisingly helpful and cooperative about the request. I was pleased to discover how responsive they were to communications from random persons-- answering promptly, giving suggestions serious consideration, and not a form letter in sight. Here's what simultaneously disappointed and pleased me most: I had already entered into a conversation about timing and price, when I got a follow-up email. Its key point:

"We have had a discussion about a bench location, and the opinion is that in the spring and summer time any disturbance between the two ponds is distrupting to nesting birds & waterfowl even by those walking thru on the trail let alone, sitting there."

I was disappointed, of course, because I couldn't make the gesture of buying that bench for my mother. It might have given her some pleasure during her occasional fair-weather visits, and provided a resting place for others who would have enjoyed the comfortable spot for watching birds and other animals.

But I was even more pleased that MTFWP so clearly had its priorities in the right place: with the needs of the wildlife. This is not always obviously the case in interactions with state wildlife agencies. But here they had turned down a free "improvement" to their parcel, one that had initially sounded attractive (or at least innocuous), because of thoughtful consideration of its impacts. I appreciated both their initial receptivity and eventual retraction of the offer. So here's a shout-out to Montana FWP, Region 3 Parks Staff.

That all having been said, though, the bench negotiation emblemizes-- in a small way-- a conflict that has arisen repeatedly in the recreational use of conservation lands. Most of the time, the argument is not over the placement of static objects like benches, but over motorized vehicle access. The problem is: do elderly and disabled persons, unable to hike, bike, or ski, have a just claim to access remote or rough areas by other means, even if those means have profound wildlife impacts? Which is more important, my mother's opportunity to watch ducks equally with able-bodied duck-watchers, or the ducks' opportunity to nest in greater peace? The Department of the Interior , for instance, does have certain civil rights obligations under the Americans with Disabilities Act. But, as so often in government bodies, they also have other, sometimes competing, mandates.

It's probably obvious, from the above story, that I have mixed feelings, as would anyone with a concern for both people and wildlands. All else equal, improved amenities for people who might otherwise lack access to wild landscapes are a worthy goal. But often, all else is not equal. Usually, access comes with a cost. These costs and benefits have to be carefully weighed on a case-by-case basis (as they were by MTFWP) if wise decisions are to be made. There's no sense in improving access to an area whose unique features would be gradually destroyed by that access; the long-term health of the place, in my book, outweighs the desires and convenience of any of its witnesses.

I say this not because there was anything wrong with my mother wanting a bench, but because the argument for handicapped access has been used widely and (in my opinion) often disingenuously by certain lobbying groups. Here's a statement from the president of the Property Rights Foundation of America, angry over New York state's decision to return the Hudson River Recreation Area to a more rustic condition-- and she's chosen to title it "Disabled Apartheid." (New York Dept. of Environmental Conservation's plan for the aforementioned area doesn't really sound so sinister to me.) This particular type of hyperbole has been common locally as well. MTFWP has a page summarizing access controversies.

Though a bench is surely not as disturbing to wildlife as a snowmobile trail or paved road, I am very glad to know that even such minor decisions are attended to with care by my local parks maintenance crew. May we enjoy such specificity always in the management of our lands.

Friday Night Newsy Links-- 7/21/07

Agriculture:
natasha at Pacific Views blogs yesterday’s vote by the House Agricultural Committee to continue to allow mandatory arbitration provisions in livestock contracts. Contracts between growers and processors that contain such provisions (as most do) prevent growers from taking their grievances to the courts, thereby solidifying the livestock company's control over smaller farmers.

*

Environmental Justice:
FEMA ignored hundreds of complaints and the results of its own testing in declaring its trailers safe to house hurricane victims despite high levels of formaldehyde fumes. The AP story notes:

The House committee unearthed documents in which one FEMA lawyer advised: "Do not initiate any testing until we give the OK. ... Once you get results ... the clock is running on our duty to respond to them."

FEMA tested one occupied trailer at a level of 1.2 ppm (parts per million); a concentration of .016 ppm, over extended periods, is considered an appropriate threshold for use of a respirator. For the math-impaired, the Mississippi trailer was at 75 times the “safe” level.

It’s worth noting, in passing, that this is the same problem plaguing the guards’ sleeping trailers at our new embassy in Iraq. Your government at work.

*

Conservation:
The BLM has agreed, as a consequence of pressure from state wildlife officials and environmental groups, to more closely review environmental impacts before issuing certain oil and gas leases in Montana. At particular issue is the well-being of the sage grouse, a species petitioned for ESA listing with significant populations close to many of the parcels. Says the AP piece:

“Grouse need vast swaths of undisturbed sage brush to thrive. In northeast and western Wyoming, southeast Montana, northern Utah and western Colorado, those swaths increasingly are crisscrossed by service roads leading to gas fields.”

*

Cranes:
This afternoon two sandhill cranes flew over me, calling to one another in their weird voices. You can listen to audio of their call here.