Purely out of interest, I decided to meet with a manager at Bank of India, who was admittedly only the stand-in for the actual head of Agricultural Finance of the Bank's Maharashtra branch. For purposed of anonymity, I will just refer to him as Kaka (Marathi word for Uncle).
I'm always amazed by how tiny a city Pune actually is. What looked on the map as a pretty good distance took me about 10 minutes in a rickshaw. So I was left to kill an hour outside the bank. Just my luck, there was nothing to do around there. Except walk, and walk, and walk, and I did. I think I walked around the entire city. And for some reason, on that particular day, I couldn't find ONE chai stall.
Anyways, back to the story. First of all, I trudge in to this bank, kinda sweaty from my hourlong chai-search. I did wear a collared shirt ...but on jeans. I had my backpack on, and even on a particularly unshaven day, I look 20 at best. So its understandable that this guy was not overly interested in giving me the time of day.
With that said, Kaka was the quintessential government employee. Hardly making eye contact with me, he shuffled papers back and forth on his desk to look busy, and made me wait a couple minutes at an adjoining desk. Then, when he was ready for me, he shuffled over. I think 'shuffle' is a good word for everything he did. Even his speaking was..shuffly.
Unlike others who I've spoken to in the field, Kaka answered each of my questions- intentionally open-ended- with curt answers. His suspicion was not hidden very well, he looked at my notepad with the kind of regard a US Immigration officer would give to a beard.
The conversation was largely disappointing, and it would be unfair for me to make any significant conclusions or generalization about Bank policy from it. However, the recurrent theme from the conversation which I managed to drag out for about 30 minutes, was that the bank basically executes policy from above- the RBI. There were some significant contradictions- on one hand, he said that there was no role for NGO's or groups closer the ground for determining agricultural finance policy- experts in the bank could handle it. On the other hand, he said the rural branches, and even local/state branches, did not determine criteria for loans/funding, but rather simply carried out central policy. Confusing, to say the least.
At the end of our conversation, as I offered him a smile, he finally figured out that I was no threat, and even extended an invitation for me to come 'whenever I wanted to ask more questions.'
Good touch, Kaka.
-Nikhil
Saturday, December 13, 2008
Department of Food
Here's an article I found interesting from the NYTimes, by one of my favorite editorialists Nicholas Kristof..
Op-Ed Columnist
Obama’s ‘Secretary of Food’?
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As Barack Obama ponders whom to pick as agriculture secretary, he should reframe the question. What he needs is actually a bold reformer in a position renamed “secretary of food.”
A Department of Agriculture made sense 100 years ago when 35 percent of Americans engaged in farming. But today, fewer than 2 percent are farmers. In contrast, 100 percent of Americans eat.
Renaming the department would signal that Mr. Obama seeks to move away from a bankrupt structure of factory farming that squanders energy, exacerbates climate change and makes Americans unhealthy — all while costing taxpayers billions of dollars.
“We’re subsidizing the least healthy calories in the supermarket — high fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated soy oil, and we’re doing very little for farmers trying to grow real food,” notes Michael Pollan, author of such books as “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and “In Defense of Food.”
The Agriculture Department — and the agriculture committees in Congress — have traditionally been handed over to industrial farming interests by Democrats and Republicans alike. The farm lobby uses that perch to inflict unhealthy food on American children in school-lunch programs, exacerbating our national crisis with diabetes and obesity.
But let’s be clear. The problem isn’t farmers. It’s the farm lobby — hijacked by industrial operators — and a bipartisan tradition of kowtowing to it.
I grew up on a farm in Yamhill, Ore., where my family grew cherries and timber and raised sheep and, at times, small numbers of cattle, hogs and geese. One of my regrets is that my kids don’t have the chance to grow up on a farm as well.
Yet the Agriculture Department doesn’t support rural towns like Yamhill; it bolsters industrial operations that have lobbying clout. The result is that family farms have to sell out to larger operators, undermining small towns.
One measure of the absurdity of the system: Every year you, the American taxpayer, send me a check for $588 in exchange for me not growing crops on timberland I own in Oregon (I forward the money to a charity). That’s right. The Agriculture Department pays a New York journalist not to grow crops in a forest in Oregon.
Modern confinement operations are less like farms than like meat assembly lines. They are dazzlingly efficient in some ways, but they use vast amounts of grain, as well as low-level antibiotics to reduce infections — and the result is a public health threat from antibiotic-resistant infections.
An industrial farm with 5,000 hogs produces as much waste as a town with 20,000 people. But while the town is required to have a sewage system, the industrial farm isn’t.
“They look profitable because we’re paying for their wastes,” notes Robert P. Martin, executive director of the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production. “And then there’s the cost of antibiotic resistance to the economy as a whole.”
One study suggests that these large operations receive, in effect, a $24 subsidy for each hog raised. We face an obesity crisis and a budget crisis, and we subsidize bacon?
The need for change is increasingly obvious, for health, climate and even humanitarian reasons. California voters last month passed a landmark referendum (over the farm lobby’s furious protests) that will require factory farms to give minimum amounts of space to poultry and livestock. Society is becoming concerned not only with little boys who abuse cats but also with tycoons whose business model is abusing farm animals.
An online petition that can be found at www.fooddemocracynow.org calls for a reformist pick for agriculture secretary — and names six terrific candidates, such as Chuck Hassebrook, a reformer in Nebraska. On several occasions in the campaign, Mr. Obama made comments showing a deep understanding of food issues, but the names that people in the food industry say are under consideration for agriculture secretary represent the problem more than the solution.
Change we can believe in?
The most powerful signal Mr. Obama could send would be to name a reformer to a renamed position. A former secretary of agriculture, John Block, said publicly the other day that the agency should be renamed “the Department of Food, Agriculture and Forestry.” And another, Ann Veneman, told me that she believes it should be renamed, “Department of Food and Agriculture.” I’d prefer to see simply “Department of Food,” giving primacy to America’s 300 million eaters.
As Mr. Pollan told me: “Even if you don’t think agriculture is a high priority, given all the other problems we face, we’re not going to make progress on the issues Obama campaigned on — health care, climate change and energy independence — unless we reform agriculture.”
Your move, Mr. President-elect.
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