I never expected the word ‘agriculture’ to appear on my resume as often as it does. In fact, when the concept of a resume first met my unwitting mind, agriculture was probably the least likely word to appear on it. As a child and then a teenager, I never gave much critical consideration to what sort of job I wanted to have when I would grow up. For a long time a combination of action toys, war movies, and a victor’s reading of history planted in me the idea of being a soldier. That vague plan was abandoned sometime during adolescence when I realized that there is no black and white in world affairs, and there is no such thing as a glorious battle. For a couple of years, perhaps from the ages of nine to ten or eleven I was drawn to becoming a comic book artist, but my talent never passed far beyond the ability to create scruffy looking faces in the margins of my notebooks. My interest in the comic books themselves waned in the middle school years, and that fancy died out.
My one distinct memory of agricultural planning occurred when I was perhaps five or six years old, sitting in the back seat of my mother’s car with a good friend. I decided that we would one day have a farm together. This decision was predicated on my then love for animals, and the premise that on a farm one could have a wide assortment of them. This experience was the only mental preparation I had done for a career quite literally in the field. Beyond these passing thoughts, no real plans for employment ever developed in my mind. School always seemed to provide something to do the next year. Now, some twelve years or so from the time I first tried vainly to encapsulate experience on a sheet of paper in order to get a job, the amount of time I have spent wandering through fields with farmers is somewhat astounding. It is odd both in that such an experience ever happened to a kid from the suburbs with little applicable knowledge, and in that said kid kept going back.
I enjoy my time in the field. I enjoy growing plants, hoeing rows, plowing up an acre of land, and walking around inspecting crops. I enjoy driving tractors and planning management schemes, thinking about logistics and having my hands in the soil. Yet there are many things I enjoy just as much as the aspects of agricultural work that have not kept me in their respective fields. I enjoy languages, but I’m not a linguist. I enjoy games, but I’m not a game designer, nor a gambler. As much as I enjoy being on farms and would love to have my own, those things that I enjoy about the field are not what have kept me there. What have kept me going back are the small farmer, and the idea of justice.
In comparison to the world I come from, there is a beauty in the relationship between the farmer’s labor and the fruit it bears. I do not intend to romanticize the condition of billions of people living in poverty. Quite the contrary, I have found in my years working with populations of small farmers that there is nothing romantic about the life. It does strike me, however, as a lifestyle of reason. There is a clear relationship between the labor, the weather, the crop, the animal, and the land. You take what you are given, and you do what you can with it. There is a meritocracy in it, not to say that a farmer deserves too little rain or poor soils, but that given those conditions, a farmer can affect their outcomes in a way that is proportional to their knowledge and labor. Obviously, no amount of labor can make up for the rains not falling, but the inputs and outputs of the small farm are close and understandable.
If, as John Rawls put it, justice is fairness, then provided inputs are in fair and direct proportion to the outcome, it is a just outcome. A farmer puts labor into growing a crop. Without that labor, the crop would not bear fruit. Up to the natural limits available to the farmer, such as the amount of water or nutrients he or she can access, the farmer’s labor is the factor that makes the difference in the outcome. There is a just relationship between the labor and the outcome, provided that the labor is the limiting factor, not the elements. Does this mean that for some people, poverty is a fair outcome? For those who put no effort in, is it just that they live in poverty?
The failure of our world to reach this ideal of justice is not in its outcomes; it is in the opportunities provided and the lack of balance in the relative inputs and outcomes for various people. A small farmer can work very hard, strive to attain more knowledge, put that knowledge into practice, and still earn a dollar a day. An investment banker can work very hard, strive to attain more knowledge, put that knowledge into practice, and earn thousands upon thousands of dollars a day. The difference between the two is not the amount of labor they put in nor intelligence they possess, but the opportunities available to them. Equality of opportunity is the goal to strive for if one wants to live in a just world; equality of outcomes is not.
Perhaps the relationship between the inputs and outcomes of various jobs is skewed and unfair, providing more fiscal compensation than their true value merits. CEO compensation packages spring to mind. Overcompensation, however, is not the heart of the matter; it is a symptom. The problem is that the limiting factors themselves, the opportunities, are unfairly distributed to begin with. I would like to live in a world without poverty, but I would rather live in a just world. In a just world it is possible that there would be no poverty, but the burden would lie upon each person, not upon society. If society can provide the conditions for justice- a fair opportunity- then the outcomes would be up to the intelligence and labor of the individuals.
It is likely that educating small farmers and providing them with opportunities is not the most efficient way to a just world, but I never claimed to be the most intelligent person on earth. Going the other way by telling people in certain professions that they are overcompensated for their labor will not get you very far. The small farmer’s is the one profession I know to have a fair field to play upon, all other things being equal. The problem is that not all other things are equal, and poverty is a terrible outcome.
Showing posts with label agriculture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label agriculture. Show all posts
Sunday, November 28, 2010
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Town and Country
Pelé, Hermán and I were up well before the break of dawn. We would spend the morning in the field, from around six until around one p.m. Then we would go back to their home for lunch and a siesta. Sometime around three they would head back to the field and I would move on to visit another farmer or family. This morning we were up early and the weeding had to be done. The cotton field that Pelé and Hermán worked together was a good kilometer away from their home, and we would set out after drinking máte, just as the sky was getting lighter over Misiones to the east.
Before leaving the patio where we often ate together, Pelé took a small plastic bottle from his coat pocket and took a swig. He offered it to Hermán and I, and we each refused, so he took another in our honor. To start the motor, he said. The old soda bottle was refilled on a daily basis with caña, a sugar alcohol like rum only sweeter. Pelé spent a good amount of his time in a mild state of inebriation, and several times a week was stumbling drunk. He was not an angry drunk, nor a mean drunk. If anything he was a happy-sad drunk, who delighted in the company of others, resented his position as the town drunk, and had no idea how to not be seen as a bit of a buffoon. He was a short, strong, and funny man, not a deep thinker, but a quick wit, and despite him being some thirty or forty years my senior and perpetually intoxicated, he was one of the best friends I had in the two years I lived in southern Paraguay.
Pelé was far from the greatest farmer in the world, and he never took to my suggestions of planning crop rotations or using green manures. But despite his alcoholism, which likely inhibited any large leaps forward in his lifestyle, he provided his wife Dominga and daughter Vicki with a decent standard of living. The amount of work done was greatly improved by Hermán’s arrival as the son-in-law, but even without Hermán, Pelé managed. Outside of the occasional day labor on the nearby ranch, he will never be employed by anyone. He owns no land. If he lived in the United States, he would likely be a homeless man.
In the developed world, there are few if any positions in the professional workplace where it is acceptable to arrive under the influence of drugs or alcohol. This does not mean that people do not get away with it, or that functioning alcoholics don’t manage to keep their problems under wraps, or that some people never look the other way at such behavior. Overall, though, in a developed economic system that has amounted centuries of specialization in multitudes of professions, there is no place for a person to be operating as inefficiently as they do when they are drunk.
The world of the small farmer, either at a subsistence or small holding cash crop level, does not have the same professional culture. Showing up on time is not an issue. Of course you go to the field early, because it is incredibly hot in the middle of the day. But if work needs to get done in the middle of the day, it will get done. If that work can be done at another hour, it will likely get done at the other hour. You can hoe a good number of rows with a few shots of hard alcohol in you. You might not do the best you can, but it will get done. You take a break when you want to take a break. You drink when you can afford it. There is always work to do.
A job is a different cultural animal. A job tells you when to work. It tells you when to stop. It tells you how you must be while doing that work. At the organization I work for in Kenya, our extension agents range from those around twenty years old to those in their fifties who have spent all their lives working on a farm, and from those fresh out of high school to those who did not complete middle school. In that population the difference between the developed economy sense of work and the small farm sense of work manifests itself in myriad ways.
Two weeks ago we fired one of our field extension agents for showing up drunk. He apparently is an alcoholic, and his intoxication at work had occurred several times before being brought to the attention of his superiors. Today I ran a training session at his farm, and when I greeted him he seemed cheery and not at all upset over the matter. Perhaps he was covering up disappointment, or perhaps for him the idea of a job was a novelty that just did not work out. I was reminded of my friend Pelé, whom I last saw a couple of years ago while working back in Paraguay. He had not changed too much in the intervening years. He still holds his own in the manual labor department, and still makes lewd jokes at regular intervals. He still spends his pocket change on caña, he still makes a lot of noise or falls off his horse when drunk, and he still gets into the occasional yelling match or fistfight with his rivals of forty years. But he does look older, Dominga looks a little more tired, and Hermán and Vicki have long since moved to Buenos Aires in search of jobs.
Viewed in a harsh light the history of development is one of people being left behind. In a way it is the inevitable flip side of someone getting ahead. You can’t have one without the other. You go to the town; you leave the country. Like the law of conservation of matter and energy, it can appear that development is a zero-sum game. But in the face of that cynical equation stands the human being. The ability to learn and grow is the ability to empower one’s self without disempowering others. It may not always work out that way, but the potential lies waiting, not only in the youth getting his or her first job, but also in the farmer of forty years, open to the possibilities that are out there.
Before leaving the patio where we often ate together, Pelé took a small plastic bottle from his coat pocket and took a swig. He offered it to Hermán and I, and we each refused, so he took another in our honor. To start the motor, he said. The old soda bottle was refilled on a daily basis with caña, a sugar alcohol like rum only sweeter. Pelé spent a good amount of his time in a mild state of inebriation, and several times a week was stumbling drunk. He was not an angry drunk, nor a mean drunk. If anything he was a happy-sad drunk, who delighted in the company of others, resented his position as the town drunk, and had no idea how to not be seen as a bit of a buffoon. He was a short, strong, and funny man, not a deep thinker, but a quick wit, and despite him being some thirty or forty years my senior and perpetually intoxicated, he was one of the best friends I had in the two years I lived in southern Paraguay.
Pelé was far from the greatest farmer in the world, and he never took to my suggestions of planning crop rotations or using green manures. But despite his alcoholism, which likely inhibited any large leaps forward in his lifestyle, he provided his wife Dominga and daughter Vicki with a decent standard of living. The amount of work done was greatly improved by Hermán’s arrival as the son-in-law, but even without Hermán, Pelé managed. Outside of the occasional day labor on the nearby ranch, he will never be employed by anyone. He owns no land. If he lived in the United States, he would likely be a homeless man.
In the developed world, there are few if any positions in the professional workplace where it is acceptable to arrive under the influence of drugs or alcohol. This does not mean that people do not get away with it, or that functioning alcoholics don’t manage to keep their problems under wraps, or that some people never look the other way at such behavior. Overall, though, in a developed economic system that has amounted centuries of specialization in multitudes of professions, there is no place for a person to be operating as inefficiently as they do when they are drunk.
The world of the small farmer, either at a subsistence or small holding cash crop level, does not have the same professional culture. Showing up on time is not an issue. Of course you go to the field early, because it is incredibly hot in the middle of the day. But if work needs to get done in the middle of the day, it will get done. If that work can be done at another hour, it will likely get done at the other hour. You can hoe a good number of rows with a few shots of hard alcohol in you. You might not do the best you can, but it will get done. You take a break when you want to take a break. You drink when you can afford it. There is always work to do.
A job is a different cultural animal. A job tells you when to work. It tells you when to stop. It tells you how you must be while doing that work. At the organization I work for in Kenya, our extension agents range from those around twenty years old to those in their fifties who have spent all their lives working on a farm, and from those fresh out of high school to those who did not complete middle school. In that population the difference between the developed economy sense of work and the small farm sense of work manifests itself in myriad ways.
Two weeks ago we fired one of our field extension agents for showing up drunk. He apparently is an alcoholic, and his intoxication at work had occurred several times before being brought to the attention of his superiors. Today I ran a training session at his farm, and when I greeted him he seemed cheery and not at all upset over the matter. Perhaps he was covering up disappointment, or perhaps for him the idea of a job was a novelty that just did not work out. I was reminded of my friend Pelé, whom I last saw a couple of years ago while working back in Paraguay. He had not changed too much in the intervening years. He still holds his own in the manual labor department, and still makes lewd jokes at regular intervals. He still spends his pocket change on caña, he still makes a lot of noise or falls off his horse when drunk, and he still gets into the occasional yelling match or fistfight with his rivals of forty years. But he does look older, Dominga looks a little more tired, and Hermán and Vicki have long since moved to Buenos Aires in search of jobs.
Viewed in a harsh light the history of development is one of people being left behind. In a way it is the inevitable flip side of someone getting ahead. You can’t have one without the other. You go to the town; you leave the country. Like the law of conservation of matter and energy, it can appear that development is a zero-sum game. But in the face of that cynical equation stands the human being. The ability to learn and grow is the ability to empower one’s self without disempowering others. It may not always work out that way, but the potential lies waiting, not only in the youth getting his or her first job, but also in the farmer of forty years, open to the possibilities that are out there.
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