Agricultural biodiversity weblog has a great post, with links to articles, etc., on the where and when of rice domestication. Exciting stuff.
Global Voices Online posted an article about contemproary Cambodian rice politics (especially at the borders)
And somewhat unrelated, DAS notes that Phnom Penh air quality blog rotten chunks – literally.
A few important links from the last week:
Rice Production is up. Along with the promise of an international-standard mill for Cambodia, this could be good news. Let’s not get too enthusiastic yet, huh? [via PPP]. We’re talking seven million tons.
Life on Burma’s border with Thailand f**king sucks. While not a surprise, the numbers and actual assessment are pretty disheartening. Via Rule of Lords.
Over half-a-million people in eastern Burma are living in temporary dwellings, forced out of their villages as a result of fighting, insecurity and the whims of local army commanders. Around 100,000 are hiding in jungles, valleys and hills.
That is the latest assessment of the Thailand Burma Border Consortium, which brings international and local donors together in a common effort to support and work with people in some of the most militarized areas of Burma.
Alison in Cambodia has some truly fantastic pictures of the 55th National Independence Parade, with floats from all the ministries. The Ministry of Cults and Religion had two floats with real (?) monks!
Another link dump below the fold:
I had an excellent conversation with a renowned sociologist this last weekend (I’m not saying whom, so as not to smear him by connecting him to me), in which we connected, briefly over one of my key points: that the so-called history of lowland-highland cultures in Southeast Asia has never been a one-way street, in which increasing numbers of hill-tribes were incorporated into the labor-intensive empires of wet-rice agriculture, what I call the agro-imperial imaginary. Instead, the divide has been a membrane across which people have continually traveled, changing subsistence methods and culture as they did so. He also referred me to Condominas‘ concept of emboîtement, which I had neglected, since my major interest in Condominas is his magisterial We have eaten the forest. I guess I should say that Buddhism is part of the toolkit that constructs and repairs that box into which uplanders are continually lured.
It was positively uplifting to have my thoughts so fully reciprocated by such an eminent thinker, and someone whom I have admired for a long time. Then I found out he’s publishing a book on the topic, and soon. Ah well. At least I’m in good company.
And as much as I see wet-rice agriculture, over the long term, as a tool of imprisonment, I just loves me some rice porn!
Andy Brouwer’s holding. Here’s a teaser:
I have done some fieldwork in this location, and somewhere have a picture taken from almost exactly this angle, during the dry season. Cambodia is a very, very small place.
Thanks for making my world a little brighter today, Andy!
I was playing hooky today, even saw a movie in a theater for the first time in…well, years. Thus, only enough time for a few quick, but worthwhile, links.
For the moment, let’s set aside our curiosity about what Jesus might do in a given circumstance and wonder what our Founding Fathers would have done at Saddleback Church. What would have happened to Thomas Jefferson if he had responded as he wrote in 1781:
“It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”
Would the crowd at Saddleback have applauded and nodded through that one? Doubtful.
By today’s new standard of pulpits in the public square, Jefferson — the great advocate for religious freedom in America — would have lost.
It’s enough to make you wonder, What Would Thomas Paine Do?. I personally have had enough of sweating “under god,” or at least under his sweaty, earnest believers, who cooly program theocracy while denying they are doing any such thing. [via the good rev. Danny Fisher, who would no doubt gently disagree with my own stridency]
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Because of poor storage, a lot of grain decays or is eaten by rodents. Because of poor roads, Cambodia’s surplus is unevenly distributed. Chan says it’s particularly hard on the landless peasants and urban poor, who buy rather than grow most of their food.CHAN SOPHAL: In the past three years, we have generated 50 percent surplus. However, this doesn’t mean every household has food sufficiency. And there’s a level — a high level of inequality of land ownership. Twenty percent of rural households don’t own any land, I mean, agricultural land.
Not the incisive coverage this issue deserves, in my humble opinion. And blaming the issue on poor roads is completely backwards. Farmers certainly do want access to markets, but they want them on their terms, and increased connection to the metropole for poor farmers has regularly made their poverty and food insecurity worse, not better. There’s also a horrendous irony in the way the program was introduced:
JIM LEHRER: Now, turning Cambodia’s killing fields back into rice fields. Special correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro has the story.
I don’t know who thought that that was a cute way of discussing Cambodia’s Democratic Kampuchea history, but they are morons. If the DK period was characterized by anything more than the application of sheer terror for political control, it was characterized by a frantic attempt on the part of DK leadership to convert every last parcel of possible land into rice production. DK promoted the expansion of rice cultivation, at the point of guns and machetes, and at the expense of lives and everything else.
Southeast Asia-related:
A nice interview with Duncan McCargo over at New Mandala that’s worth reading. He’s been all over the place lately, with the success of his recent writings and the coincidental (or not?) rise in high-profile Thai activities lately.
Short article on the suddenly low price of rice in Vietnam, which has resulted in Vietnamese farmers leaving their crops piled up in the fields. Yeah, the ‘free market’ is a great way to deal with global hunger and food distribution. Really.
Does anyone remember the food riots just a few months ago? Doesn’t this seem strange to free-market cheerleaders, or are they so besotted with their own high-end commodities that they just don’t notice?
Academic News
Inside Higher Ed reports on the dumbass (but predictable) efforts of a new business to ‘certify’ adjunct faculty as teachers. (their degrees don’t count apparently). The service only costs $395, a price that must seem a steal for adjuncts living without health insurance and feeding their kids on food stamps. Marc Bousquet has already weighed in, and extended the story nicely, but for my money, the best quote comes from within the Inside Higher Ed story itself:
Others appeared skeptical, with one person writing: “Is there perhaps a Society of Indentured Servants as well? Complete with certification. Pay money and someone will count and certify the number of holes in your head.”
If the idea of faculty on foodstamps seems like hyperbole to you, it’s time to wake up. Just over a year ago, my own family of four stopped being homeless and stopped buying our groceries with not only food stamps, but also WIC subsidies. Thank god we live in the relatively progressive state of Minnesota, so that we also received good subsidized health insurance. It ain’t pretty out there, folks.
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