On February 14

On this day in ...
... 2001 (10 years ago today), by a vote of 338 to 52, the Parliament of the European Union approved a measure to regulate genetically modified organisms. Cast amid "intense suspicions" about GMOs, the vote in favor of regulations on testing, planting, and distribution paved the way for an end to "Europe's unofficial moratorium on bioengineered seeds and food."
... 2007 (4 years ago today), this blog was soft-launched by means of the following wee post, entitled IntLawGrrls' Hearfelt Hello:

Our world is a jumble of peoples, a mix of culture and custom, a marketplace of markets as well as ideas. We come together in amazing ways, yet clash in ways that bring destruction and dismay. Women now have a hand in our world’s affairs: think Albright and Arbour, del Ponte and Higgins, Ginsburg and Rice. Yet our voices remain faint, in backrooms and in the blogosphere. IntLawGrrls – women who teach and work in international law, policy and practice – hope to change all that. We embrace foremothers' names to encourage crisp commentary, delivered at times with a dash of sass. We welcome replies, and we look forward to fresh dialogue on the matters of the day.
It's our world, after all.
In gestation beginning February 14, 2007
Due date March 3, 2007 – Grrls’ Day in Japan

(Prior February 14 posts are here, here, here, and here.)

On February 2

On this day in ...
... 2011 (today), is celebrated what French speakers call Chandeleur; English, Candelmas; Italian, Candelora; Spanish, Candelaria. A Christian holiday derived from pagan traditions, it's long been a day to try to break out of winter doldrums by divining harbingers of summer. Thus do many North Americans look to groundhogs for inspiration on this day, while other northerners consult other hibernating mammals. Some cultures take a tastier tack, feasting on foods that remind them of sunny summer: crêpes (photo credit) or tamales or ... you get the idea. Enjoy!

(Prior February 2 posts are here, here, and here.)

'Nuff said

(Taking context-optional note of thought-provoking quotes)

Time will tell whether the legal framework for liability and redress for damage caused by [living modified organisms] will be governed primarily by public actors concerned with preserving both biodiversity and sovereignty or largely by private multinational actors concerned with preserving open markets.

-- Our colleague Anastasia Telesetsky (below right), Associate Professor at the University of Idaho College of Law, in an ASIL Insight. She details recent international legal efforts to regulate the production and distribution of living modified organisms – biotech products like disease-free mosquitoes. (credit for Centers for Disease Control photo of genetically engineered mosquito) Such products are known in the field as LMOs, but perhaps more commonly as GMOs, or genetically modified organisms. (prior post) The most recent international legal effort, and the focus of Telesetsky’s Insight, is the Nagoya-Kuala Lumpur Supplementary Protocol, a multilateral treaty that won the support of 116 states at a October 2010 session including parties to the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity and to the 2000 Cartagena Biosafety Protocol to that convention.

North African People Power

After more than 23 years in office, Tunisia’s President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, “Zinochet” as he was dubbed, was forced from power yesterday by popular protests.
These protests began after Mohamed Bou’aziz, an unemployed university graduate in the town of Sidi Bouzid, attempted to burn himself to death on December 17 when the produce he sold on the street to earn a living was confiscated. (He later died of his injuries.)
How could Mr. Bou’aziz know what the implications of his desperate act would be in just one month’s time? His sacrifice inspired huge demonstrations that spread across the North African country, organized in part through resourceful use of Twitter and Facebook. These were met with brutality by the security forces, a grim reality that simply provoked more protest. Unarmed demonstrators were regularly teargassed. Many were arrested. As many as 70-80 people were shot or beaten to death. But the protesters marched on.
This largely peaceful, democratic revolution (on the side of the opposition at least) was not led by or inspired by the fundamentalist movements that have tried to claim the oppositional space in many Arab and North African contexts in recent years. It was instead, by all accounts, a largely secular appeal for real political reform and for social justice. As reflected in today's front page of the Paris daily Liberation (above; credit), women, many unveiled, were increasingly visible in the protest marches.
One can hope that today’s initial victory of North African people power will serve as an example of what is possible in other countries in the region. This is what Noam Chomsky has called the threat of a good example. One dictator brought down by popular revolt – no dictator is safe now.
Hope is a powerful, incandescent force. Hope in the political realm has been a rare commodity of late in this part of the world. Bou’aziz’s revolution may have brought that back. But, just as the power of hope should not be underestimated, neither should the danger of hopes unfulfilled.
It is unclear exactly what the future holds for Tunisia now.
Mohammed al-Ghannouchi, the Prime Minister who has also been in power since 1999, has taken over as President since the departure of ousted President Ben Ali, whom Saudi Arabia "'welcomed.'" A state of emergency was declared, with soldiers guarding public buildings, tanks on the streets of Tunis, and prohibitions on public meetings.
The government must respond to the grievances that first provoked these events – creating jobs, meeting human needs, fostering equality of all kinds, enabling freedom of expression and association, institutionalizing real social democracy – rather than simply engaging in window dressing that preserves the Tunisian system with a different figurehead. The international community, and the U.S. government, should support this process.
The biggest external impact of events in Tunisia could come in neighboring Algeria, which I visited twice last fall, and which witnessed scattered, sporadic émeutes – riots – throughout 2010. The country has just experienced a week of widespread, intensive youth protests that seem to have been the result of a similar long-simmering anger over high unemployment, corruption, economic disparities and la hogra, the arrogance with which officials often treat ordinary people. (photo credit) However, the immediate catalyst was likely the sharp increase in the price of staples like cooking oil and sugar at the beginning of the year. See this useful discussion of the possible causes by journalist Chawki Amari writing in El Watan, one of Algeria’s leading daily newspapers.
Some have suggested that the initial disturbances may have been provoked – perhaps by private interests that control the sugar and oil markets and were unhappy over government regulatory action in this arena. It is hard to say. However, even if this were the case, legitimate popular anger clearly took over from there. Some - only some - of the recent protests turned violent with young rioters throwing stones at police and passing cars, burning tires and looting shops.
Unfortunately, the avenues for peaceful protest are stifled in Algeria due to the continuing imposition of a state of emergency since 1992.

For example, following the week’s protests, last Sunday, January 9, a civic group called the Intercommunal Association of Aïn Benian-Staoueli tried to hold a peaceful gathering in the coastal town of Staoueli about 20 kilometers outside of Algiers. Their efforts were forcefully thwarted by “preventive” arrests. Algerian writer and journalist Mustapha Benfodil, who was attempting to cover the event, was among those arrested. He later recounted his experiences in El Watan, offering an eyewitness account of la hogra in action. As he notes, those picked up by the police that day were suspected of the rather kafka-esque offense of “attempted peaceful gathering.” (They have since been released – though across the country many young protestors remain in jail.)
While the roots of Algeria’s emergency law admittedly lie in the terribly real struggle with armed fundamentalism that consumed the 1990s and claimed as many as 200,000 lives, and the fight against terrorism in Algeria remains a concern in light of the current activities of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, today’s emergency regulations are often used instead against peaceful government critics who have nothing whatsoever to do with such movements. (During the recent protests, attempts by fundamentalists to rally demonstrators to their banner failed resoundingly.)
In fact, the Algerian government now uses the state of emergency to justify the banning of public gatherings of all kinds.

For example, when I visited Algiers in late November to attend a meeting on a proposed draft law on violence against women, the meeting was declared officially non-authorized the day before it was to take place in the central Hotel Safir. Hence, it was held quietly instead in a small room at a more remote location, with many participants unable to attend. It is shocking that a meeting of women working to stop violence against women requires an official permit. Who exactly is being protected by “emergency” legislation in this scenario?

For Algeria’s democratic opposition, the current challenge is to find a way to translate this month’s explosion of youthful anger into positive political change, and to maximize the jolt of energy from events in next door Tunisia. According to Benfodil, the former task requires the mobilization of civil society, trade unions, academics, the middle class, NGOs and others, “if they truly want to transform this impetuous winter into a democratic spring…”

Some believe that it may be difficult to make a real political transformation as long as Algeria’s government possesses the significant material resources it uses to selectively placate sectors of the population. But attempts to publicly speak out for change continue, as witnessed by a peaceful youth demonstration today in Algiers. And it remains to be seen what the impact of the winds blowing from Tunisia now will be.
While in life Mr. Bou’aziz was given little opportunity to have an impact on society, in death he may have helped to change not only his own country, but the entire region.

(Part 1 of a series)

Maybe rename it World Hunger Day?

Happy World Food Day.
In his 1964 Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. challenged the world to confront the problem of hunger. He stated:

I have the audacity to believe that people everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for the minds and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits.

(Watch the speech here.)

Almost 50 years later, we are still waiting.

It's not like nobody else noticed that we had a Hunger Problem.

The right to food has been at the heart of international discourse as long as the international community has been discussing human rights:

► Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognized the right to food as a basic human right.

► Article 11(2) of the United Nations Convention on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights recognizes the right to be free from hunger. (The United States is still not a signatory to that convention).

► The 1974 World Food Conference declared that "every man, woman and child had an inalienable right to be free from hunger and malnutrition." It committed the international community to eradicating hunger by 1984. (Report available here.)

► The World Food Summit of 1996 set a goal of halving the number of chronically people by 2015.

► The Millennium Development Goals set a target of halving the proportion of people living with food insecurity by 2015. (Notice how much less ambitious the goals have become over time.)

In 1979, the Food and Agriculture Organization declared its intention to designate October 16th -- the date of its founding in 1945-- to be World Food Day. The reason for World Food Day was to "heighten public awareness of the world food problem and strengthen solidarity in the struggle against hunger, malnutrition and poverty." In 1980, recognizing that "food is a requisite for human survival and well-being and a fundamental human necessity" the U.N. General Assembly, in Resolution 35/70, endorsed observance of World Food Day.

Today marks World Food Day's 30th celebration. The clock ticks ever closer to the 2015 deadline for achieving the Millennium goals and the World Food Summit Goals.

So, how are we doing?

In its report entitled the State of World Food Insecurity 2010, the FAO states that almost 1 billion people are undernourished. That is more, in absolute terms, than were undernourished in 1979, and roughly the same in percentage terms.

How can it be that in all those years, with all those international proclamations, and all that investment we have made, basically no progress?

Or, phrased differently:

We produce more food today than ever before in the history of the world. So, why are more people hungry today than ever before in the history of the world?

Perhaps the problem is that we are thinking about hunger the wrong way.

This year, the Agricola Medal was given posthumosly to Dr. Norman Bourlag, the man commonly credited with starting the Green Revolution. (prior post) Dr. Bourlag was right when he said that

the first essential component of social justice is adequate food for all mankind.

With all due respect to Dr. Bourlag, who devoted his life to eradicating hunger, no amount of new and better technology will solve this problem -- because it is not a food production problem. The problem with Dr. Bourlag's technology-based approach is that today's hunger is a food distribution problem. We already produce enough food to feed all the people on the planet. We just don't use that food to feed the people who are hungry.

Hunger today revolves around the way that global trade is structured. Indeed, since the global food price crisis of 2008, Olivier De Schutter, the United Nations' Special Rapporteur on the right to food, has been cautioning about the need for structural measures to address food price increases. Even though this year's wheat crop is one of the largest ever recorded, food prices are skyrocketing. The Special Rapporteur identifies main culprits responsible for increasing prices in a time of plenty seem to be commodity speculation on international food markets, disinvestment in social protection schemes, and a global governance scheme that hinders the ability of governments to mitigate price shocks.

Perhaps we should rename it World Hunger Day.

(Personal note: About 195 million children are part of that 1 billion who suffer from food insecurity. As I watched my 4 year old eat her dinner after writing this post, all I could think about was the unbearable pain that a parent unable to feed her child must suffer. I made a donation to Doctors Without Borders' Starved for Attention campaign. Please consider doing something similar.)

Beets banned

The most common sugar beet planted in the US is now banned.
Planting of Monsanto’s “Roundup Ready” sugar beets—a form of beet genetically modified to be resistant Monsanto’s glyphosate-based weedkiller Roundup—was banned Friday, by a federal judge in San Francisco, until the U.S. Department of Agriculture complies with the requirements of NEPA, the National Environmental Policy Act.
The ruling came in a lawsuit filed by environmental and organic farming nongovernmental organizations. The NGOs challenged the decision of the Agricultural Department to deregulate genetically engineered sugar beets without preparing an Environmental Impact Statement. Deregulation means that the crop could be planted freely throughout the United States, with no further regulatory oversight from the USDA. Critics complain that the department has routinely determined that genetically modified crops pose no threat to the environment without conducting an adequate assessment of the environmental risks posed by these crops.
In September 2009, the Court agreed with these critics. It found that the department's decision to deregulate genetically modified beets without first completing an Environmental Impact Statement violated the National Environment Protection Act. Friday’s ruling:
► Vacated the USDA’s deregulation of biotech sugar beets; and
► Prohibited any future planting or sale pending the agency’s compliance with NEPA and all other relevant laws.
The ruling allows the sugar beets already in the ground to be harvested, but bars further planting until the Environmental Impact Statement is complete. USDA has estimated that such a statement may be ready by 2012.
This decision comes on the heels of an 7-to-1 judgment issued by the Supreme Court in June (J. Breyer took no part in the decision). In that decision, Monsanto Co. v. Geertsons Seed Farms, the Court overturned a similar ban, on the planting of genetically modified alfalfa, again until the USDA completed an Environmental Impact Statement. The majority concluded that the scope of the injunction—which prohibited any partial deregulation of the biotech alfalfa until the statement was completed—was too broad.
The federal ruling issued Friday took Geerstons into account. Specifically, the judge was careful to leave room for interim measures that might allow planting to proceed, so long as:
► Interim measures adequately protect the public’s interest in completion of a thorough environmental assessment; and
► No irreparable environmental harm occur in the interim.
Unlike gentically modified alfalfa, which had yet to be commercialized, genetically modified beets currently make up the vast majority of the United States' crop.
Among the benefits claimed for the new technology, are the assertions that genetically modified beets

require fewer herbicide applications to effectively control weeds. Fewer trips across the field mean reduced greenhouse gas emissions, reduced soil erosion, reduced soil compaction and enhanced water conservation. These sugar beets are helping growers manage weeds, improve productivity and lessen impacts on the environment, while preserving a sustainable and geographically diverse supply of sugar.

Supporting Monsanto, the sugar beet industry also asserts:

Independent scientific analyses conducted by internationally recognized laboratories showed that the sugar from Roundup Ready sugar beets, which are enhanced through biotechnology, is identical at the molecular level, to the sugar from other, comparably grown sugar beets.

Even if true, molecular equivalence of the ultimate food product says nothing about the impacts that genetically modified beet plants might have on their environment.
In particular, the technology’s critics contend that gene flow between genetically altered crops and conventionally grown food, or wild relatives, might result in irreversible genetic pollution. This concern has particular traction with sugar beets because genetically modified beets have been embraced by farmers and now representing about 95% of the sugar beet crop, accounting for about half the United States' annual sugar production.

Genetically modified crops in the United States fall in a nether zone—a patchwork of federal regulation under the auspices of the Agriculture Department, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Food and Drug Administration. In theory, no genetically engineered organism is approved for commercial use until its proponent has demonstrated that the GM organism conforms with the standards set by federal law. Unfortunately, the gap between theory and reality is significant. Part of the problem is that no regulatory agency has a clear statutory mandate to regulate agricultural biotechnology. As a result, no coherent, overarching government policies ensure that this new technology is safely explored and exploited.

The regulatory regime governing biotechnology crops dates back 25 years, to 1986, when the Office of Science and Technology finalized the Coordinated Framework for Regulation of Biotechnology.

The Coordinated Framework, a product of the sharply anti-regulatory Reagan administration, embraced the notion of “substantial equivalence”—that genetically modified organisms were functionally equivalent to their unmodified counterparts and should be treated accordingly. Thus, the Coordinated Framework proclaimed that no new laws were needed to respond to challenges posed by this new technology. Instead, regulatory authority was parceled out to various agencies based on their existing statutory authority.

At its most superficial, the regulatory regime established by the Coordinated Framework is very easy to describe: Food and Drug Administration is responsible for food safety; Environmental Protection Agency is responsible for microbes and pesticides; and the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, an agency within USDA, is responsible for all plants. Each agency concentrates on its own narrow piece of the genetic modification universe. With no single agency considering the full range of problems posed by genetically modified crops, regulatory gaps are inevitable. Critics assert that overarching safety questions go unexplored. Because of the assumption of substantial equivalence, the burden of proof is on the authorities to prove that a genetically modified organism is unsafe before they may impose use restrictions.

This ruling highlights a significant breaking point between the supporters and opponents of genetically modified crops.

Supporters point to molecular similarity of the endproducts, while opponents focus on differences in the plants themselves. The approval standards in the United States don’t require consideration of some key environmental concerns. This leaves big gaps and unknowns in the science.

Whether this lack of information as reason for concern or reason to relax depends significantly on one’s perspective about whether regulation should be precautionary or reactive.

Indeed, the United States and the European Union have differed sharply on this point, leading to a 3,000-plus-page World Ttrade Organization dispute resolution decision that, while it ruled for the United States, left this key question unanswered.

There is a difference between a demand for certainty, and a demand that appropriate questions be explored. The former focuses on results—do the fruits of exploration point so conclusively to a particular outcome that no other explanation is tenable. The latter addresses process—has the exploration been structured in a fashion likely to uncover relevant information. Both sets of demands can be obstructionist—the insistence of the Tobacco Institute insistence that the link between cigarettes and cancer was “not proven” is perhaps the best example of how a demand for certainty can be wielded to prevent otherwise reasonable social actions. However, to suggest that demands for more or more appropriate study are always or even predominantly obstructionist is to caricature wholly legitimate and important public participation in public decisionmaking.

The lack of a transparent, well-organized regulatory system threatens public trust in biotechnology and, more fundamentally, in government itself. The success of agricultural biotechnology depends fundamentally on society’s willingness to accept and consume food produced via this technology. This willingness hinges on the level of trust that the technology is being developed and used in a safe manner. Adequate regulatory oversight and information gathering are central to the future of the technology.

Climates, Crops, and Migration

We've blogged before about the phenomenon of climate-induced displacement; in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, three Princeton researchers take a first stab at quantitatively estimating how the impact of climate change on agricultural productivity will effect migration levels. Specifically, they explore past responses to climate-driven crop failures in Mexico, and rely on statistical modeling to estimate that a 10% reduction in crop yields will lead an additional 2% of the population to emigrate. The authors predict that, depending on the warming scenarios and adaptation levels one assumes, anywhere from 1.4 million to 6.7 million adult Mexicans are likely to emigrate as a result of declines in agricultural productivity alone over the next 70 years.

Though I don't take issue with the methodology, statistical models are inherently limited in their ability to fully capture the complexity of real world decisions -- here, choices concerning migration. Given the number of factors involved in migration choices, similar crop failures in the future might not have the same impact as past failures. Despite these limitations, the study offers compelling evidence that international migration due to climate-driven crop failure is likely to be significant over the coming years. How should we respond?
As IntLawGrrl guest/alumna Jane McAdam has explained, the international law of migration offers no solutions for those displaced due to climate change. As greater and greater numbers of migrants are forced to move due to crop failure and other consequences of climate change, developed nations will need to develop a coherent response or risk being overwhelmed by irregular migration flows. In migrant-producing states, the study suggests that governments could assist subsistence farmers to become more effective -- and of course migrant-receiving states and international organizations could assist in this task. In both of these approaches, the particular needs of and risks faced by women migrants must be taken into account. Particularly with respect to displacement driven by crop failure, which will impact the very poorest women, legal solutions should ensure the physical and financial security of female migrants, and development strategies should focus on empowering rural women.

Sub-Saharan development & business laws

(Thanks to IntLawGrrls for the opportunity to contribute this guest post on research to be published as "Informal-Sector Entrepreneurs, Development and Formal Law: A Functional Understanding of Business Law," 59 American Journal of Comparative Law (January 2011), as well as my dedication below to two foremothers)

While discussing the policies of the prior US administration towards his country, a respected Senior Barrister in Cameroon trotted out the old adage:

'Give people fish, and you feed them for today. Teach them to fish, and you have fed them for a lifetime.'

He was, of course, asking that donor institutions and donor states provide tools that reinforce independence rather than mere handouts. This perspective does seem consistent with a trend by the World Bank, among others, to encourage business, including smaller businesses.

Indeed, prodded by economists seeking to encourage development by facilitating business, this international financial institution has over the past half-dozen years paid very serious attention to the role of business laws. Consider, for example, the World Bank’s “Doing Business” reports, annual compilations of studies focused on the contribution of law to the business environment in emerging economies.

It is easy for us in the global North, especially as we endure the deepest financial crisis since the Great Depression, to be cynical about the ability of business laws to facilitate development. Business laws have failed to protect the overall business environment, including the availability of credit.

As we consider what regulations to impose on the largest financial and other companies here, politicians and economists are contemplating the long-term impact on the entire business community. Thus, small businesses should care about the regulations constraining the most powerful actors in their economy. Still, their daily ability to work in sanitary, lighted, safe environments, and to expect the machinery of government to support their commercial contracts, continues to be protected.

In Sub-Saharan Africa,

► To what extent can law restrain the excesses of the most powerful agent, typically the state, while facilitating business on the ground?

► To what extent can laws help create a business environment that most closely mimics that of the global North — where, in the best of circumstances, the most powerful actors are adequately controlled?

The Sub-Saharan business climate is, of course, fundamentally different.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, the informal sector represents 40-60% of gross domestic product, according to a study by Friedrich Schneider. International Labor Organization figures state that this sector employs as much as 93% of non-agricultural workers.

The informal sector thus is highly important. Yet formal law does not penetrate easily or predictably there. For this reason, simple transplantation of classic business law from the global North will not be sufficient to protect and support the business either of an informal-sector-market woman or street vendor, or even of the many business people who have a foot in both the formal and informal sectors.

The focus has to be on functionality.

The goal is to serve the informal sector with laws that accomplish there what classic business laws do for the smaller businesses of the global North. Specifically, laws should increase the predictability of transactions while limiting abuse from government and other powerful agents.

The attack should be two-pronged.
► Formal law both can constrain formal-sector actors, such as some landlords transacting with informal-sector businesses, and can mandate that formal-sector actors provide pro-business realities that Northern businesses enjoy, including sanitary work environments. Precisely because these actors are in the formal sector, they are subject to government regulation — even if the landlord is in fact the government.
► The second prong still cannot directly affect the informal-sector nano-entrepreneurs, those self-employed workers who typically operating alone or with family, and with very modest sales. These workers will not be directly affected because, almost by definition, they are at best unpredictably subject to formal laws and regulations. On the other hand, nano-entrepreneurs do tend to have a legal regime, or a quasi- legal traditional regime, that affects businesses.

This second prong, in turn, deploys two strategies to allow formal law to have as direct an impact as possible on the informal sector.
►► The first strategy aimed at the informal sector is to have formal laws that reinforce existing business norms. These laws are the most likely to support effectively a North-style predictability, since the informal-sector nano-entrepreneurs are primed to comply.
►► The second strategy aimed at the informal sector emphasizes the importance of encouraging coordination of consumers of law. This strategy is especially important when the applicable legal system is highly centralized — as is typically the case in Sub-Saharan Africa. (Discussion of relatively developed countries and their formal economies may be found in Law & Capitalism: What Corporate Crises Reveal about Legal Systems and Economic Development around the World (2008), by Columbia Law Professors Curtis J. Milhaupt and Katharina Pistor.)

Laws promoting coordination include West and Central Africa’s Economic Interest Group (specifically, Sections 869-885 of the OHADA Commercial Companies and EIG Uniform Act), as well as other laws that promote cooperatives. A case in point is the self-coordination effort in the Ghanaian chocolate industry, described here. (credit for photo of woman in Ghana holding fair-trade chocolate) (Prior IntLawGrrls post on problems in the chocolate industry.)

In short, the additional strategy aimed at the informal sector workers is to facilitate the formation of cooperatives.

The goal is for business-related laws to achieve in Sub-Saharan Africa the functionality that classic business laws offer, in the best of times, to businesses of the global North.

On February 22

On this day in ...
... 1630 (380 years ago today), in what's now the United States of America, English settlers discovered the delights of an indigenous treat, popcorn (left), "when Quadequine, brother of
Massasoit (chief of the Wampanoag tribe), brought a deerskin pouch of the stuff to them." The puffy morsel was called "popcorn" as a derivation from "the AmerIndian phrase 'maize blown up by fire.'"

(Prior February 22 posts are here, here, and here)

Read On! Bubbly biography

(Read On! ... occasional posts on writing worth reading)

Today's Valentine's Day.* 'Round the world thoughts turn to celebration of love and friendship. No doubt some will feature "a bottle of the Widow," as the British used to call the bubbly treat to the right. No better time, then, to post on the recent biography of the woman behind the bottle. The title says it all: The Widow Clicquot: The Story of a Champagne Empire and the Woman Who Ruled It (2009).

In a scant 200 pages, the book illuminates a central fact: the signature on each bottle's egg-yolk-orange label, "V Clicquot Ponsardin," is not the autograph of a fictitious woman conjured, like Betty Crocker, by an office-full of admen. Rather, the signature belongs to a real woman who lived a full and real life, Barbe-Nicole Clicquot Ponsardin (below left).

Born in 1777 in Reims, a city in France's Champagne region, Barbe-Nicole lived in a period marked by the political tumult of Revolution, Empire, Restoration, Republic. Marriage arranged at 21 ended when Barbe-Nicole was widowed at age 27, her husband rumored a suicide. Single mother of a young daughter, she eschewed remarriage for a path far less tread by women of the day: she made champagne, 1st for elite imperial palates, and eventually, through her manufacturing and marketing innovations, for a vast and thirsty middle class. In painstaking research of records maddeningly devoid of personal details, author Tilar J. Mazzeo (below right), Assistant Professor of English at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, could find no evidence that Barbe-Nicole ever left France. Yet energy and hard work -- plus a keen competitive edge that finds her running contraband wine through wartime blockades -- made Barbe-Nicole, by age 40,

one of the wealthiest and most celebrated entrepreneurs in all of Europe and one of the first businesswomen in history to lead an international commercial empire.

(p. xvii) It was a role unique for the time (approached perhaps only by Louise Pommery, a somewhat younger Frenchwoman who invented the brut style of champagne). Curiously, it's a role away from which Barbe-Nicole steered her own surviving heirs, a daughter and granddaughter. Thus it would take generations before women of business looked to la Veuve for inspiration. Yet before her death at age 89 she urged her granddaughter to excel in other pursuits, as is evident from this letter (p. 181):

'The world is in perpetual motion, and we must invent the things of tomorrow. One must go before others, be determined and exacting, and let your intelligence. Act with audacity. Perhaps you too will be famous...!!'

To those words and the woman who wrote them, a Valentine's Day toast.

* It's also the 1st day of the Lunar New Year of the Tiger (prior post), but that's another story.

Food Insecurity and Climate Change

As the world gathers in Copenhagen to “get it done,” and deliver a meaningful climate change agreement, let’s hope the delegates keep in mind the catastrophic effects that unmitigated climate change will have on food insecurity. The 1996 World Food Summit defined food security as "all people at all times hav[ing] both physical and economic access to the basic food they need." Today, according to the United Nations High-level Task Force on the Global Food Security Crisis, one billion people, one out of every six, cannot lay claim to that kind of food security.
Even though we currently produce enough food to feed all the hungry people, rhetoric about the right to food as a basic human right never seems to get to the implementation stage. That is not to disparage the multi-faceted nature of the problem.
Food insecurity results from a host of interconnected political, social and economic factors. For example, in November, the USDA announced that food insecurity 2009 was the highest level since the government began tracking it in 1995. (prior post) The New York Times reports that almost 28 million people in the United States now depend on food stamps. This rise in food insecurity is clearly related to the domestic unemployment rate, and to rising food prices. But, at least they have something of a safety net, in the form of government assistance, food banks, and soup kitchens. In Guatemala, by contrast food insecurity related to low rainfalls has produced a rise in cases of acute malnutrition among children. The news is equally grim around the world.
Reaching the Millennium Development Goal of halving food insecurity by 2015 is already a daunting task. Climate change adds yet another level of complexity, one that is likely to exacerbate the already precarious food situation confronting fully 1/6 of the world’s population. Australia is already facing record drought attributable to climate change as are parts of Africa, while Britian, other parts of Africa, China and parts of the US have faced epic flooding. Unfortunately, as global precipitation patterns change, and as the ocean acidifies, the level of food insecurity attributable to climate change is likely to increase.
This is not a domestic problem, it is not a developing country problem. It is a structural problem built into the world’s carbon economy, and the existing trading and governance system. Maybe Copenhagen will mark the beginning of a new global commitment to confronting these problems once and for all. Food insecurity, and the factors that create it, are not confined by national borders. As the world warms, that will become clearer than ever.

Condoms against climate change

'Women are on the front lines of many societies buffeted by climate change -- and research indicates they tend to be more vulnerable to these impacts.'

So said Robert Engelman, author of a report by the U.N. Population Fund, quoted in a CNN article. Entitled The State of World Population 2009, the report was released yesterday as part of the runup to COP15, the U.N. Climate Change Conference due to be held in Copenhagen, Denmark, from December 7 to 18.
The report focused on climate change and women; in particular, older women less able to leave communities suffering from drought and other ill effects.
As reported by the Associated Press, the Population Fund
did not recommend limiting the number of children a woman should bear, yet said:

'Women with access to reproductive health services ... have lower fertility rates that contribute to slower growth in greenhouse gas emissions.'

That reference to contraception (photo credit) drew the ire of Caroline Boin (below right), a Conservative critic and property rights advocate at the London-based International Policy Network, who told CNN:

'Whatever the problem, UNFPA repeats the same old mantra -- the culprit is population and the solution is condoms. Food scarcity, water shortages, and health problems in poor countries truly are threats for women. Population and climate control policies are not the solution, and if anything, will give governments an excuse to remain complacent in addressing poverty.'

On November 18

On this day in ...
... 1964 (45 years ago today), a New York Times writer reported the easing of food shortages, which had spurred riots in India's Kerala state, in dark orange at right. The shortages had resulted from the government's decision earlier in the month to ration food supplies -- the 16 million inhabitants of the southwestern Indian state became "'panicky,' because rice, their chief food, had disappeared from the markets." The failure of the rationing system also had provoked black-market trading, followed by "summary trials" for persons suspected of such trading. In a marker of that Cold War era, the Times informed its readers that Kerala was a "Communist stronghold."

(Prior November 18 posts are here and here.)

Food insecurity at home

Fewer than 3 weeks away from the 20th anniversary of the adoption of the Convention on the Rights of the Child comes this news:

Between the ages of 1 to 20 years, nearly half (49.2%) of all American children will, at some point, reside in a household that receives food stamps. Households in need of the program use it for relatively short periods but are also likely to return to the program at several points during the childhood years. Race, parental education, and head of household's marital status exert a strong influence on the proportion of children residing in a food stamp household.

So states the abstract for Estimating the Risk of Food Stamp Use and Impoverishment During Childhood, an article by Drs. Mark R. Rank & Thomas A. Hirschl just published in the periodicial Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

The Children's Convention obligates states parties to "recognize the right of the child to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health"; to "pursue full implementation of this right" they must "take appropriate measures" for "the provision of adequate nutritious foods," Art. 24.

Even in the United States -- 1 of very few countries not to have ratified this Convention -- news that food is not always plentiful disturbs. (image credit) Rank said of his own research:

'Food stamp use is a clear sign of poverty and food insecurity, two of the most detrimental economic conditions affecting a child's health.'

Not everyone, however, is disturbed.

A spokesman for the Heritage Foundation told USA Today he found no cause for worry in findings of occasional resort to food stamps:

'That's effectively like saying that at some point in a 20-year period, a parent would be unemployed for a month or so. ... There's no evidence that even consistent poverty in the U.S. produces a nutritional risk.'

He'd no recorded comment on the finding that 9 out of 10 black children will grow up in families needing food stamps, a proportion nearly 3 times greater than that for white children.

End of the Revolution: RIP Norman Borlaug

Nobel Peace Laureate.
Presidental Medal of Freedom winner.
Congressional Gold Medal winner.
National Medal of Science winner.
Father of the Green Revolution.
Creator of the World Food Prize.
The life of Dr. Norman Borlaug (left), who died this weekend at age 95, lent itself to superlatives. Depending on whom you ask, he is either the man who saved a billion lives or the man who unleashed the violence of unsustainable agriculture on the developing world.
Neither caricature does justice to this complex and brilliant man.
Borlaug was an agronomist and microbiologist. His primary claim to fame was his work developing 'the 'semi-dwarf'' plant variety -- plants that had a shorter, more compact stalk that could support a larger head of grain without falling over from the weight. The varieties he developed doubled, and sometimes quadrupled yields. Hence, the "father of the green revolution" moniker.
It is hard to imagine what kind of world we would have today without Borlaug’s pioneering work. Borlaug's high-yielding varieties or their progeny are currently grown on 200 million acres worldwide. Without them, food production might well have lagged far behind a burgeoning global population. (photo credit: the World Food Prize)
To be clear, his work did not usher in a utopia of food security. The problem of inequitable distribution remains as daunting as it ever was. Nevertheless, the Nobel Committee was surely justified when it declared:

'More than any other single person of this age, he has helped provide bread for a hungry world.'

Borlaug’s disease-resistant varieties helped Mexico become self-sufficient in grain. His varieties were then exported to India and Pakistan, where yields doubled. The technology spread to Africa (where it had significantly less success), to the Middle East, and to Latin America. In the process Borlaug built the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre, (CIMMYT) into one of the world’s most important research centers. Now almost 50 years old, CIMMYT remains a key international agricultural research and training institute under the auspices of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research . (photo credit: The Borlaug Institute)
The fairy-tale version of the Green Revolution and of Dr. Borlaug’s work ends here, with the good doctor riding off with his well-deserved 1970 Nobel Peace Prize.
Unfortunately, not everyone lived happily ever after.
The newly developed higher-yielding varieties required tremendous fertilizer and pesticide inputs, and these generated dramatic social and environmental consequences. Fifty years later, we are still coping with that part of Borlaug’s legacy. Overuse of fertilizer has created vast dead zones in aquatic ecosystems. Pesticides routinely poison land, water and people. And, because poorer farmers could not afford the critical inputs, the spread of high-yielding varieties pushed the most marginal of farmers into an even more precarious situation. Borlaug typically dismissed these critiques as the murmurings of the "elite." In his later years, he was a passionate advocate for "the gene revolution," which he saw as the natural successor to the Green Revolution.
Perhaps Dr. Borlaug's death might be a moment for bridging divide in the agricultural world over how best to end hunger. Instead, surely we can all agree that Dr. Borlaug was right when he said:

'[T]he first essential component for social justice is adequate food for all mankind.'

The Story of Rum

(Part 3 of a series; here's Part 1 and Part 2)

Rum has long been associated with the sword-wielding, one-eyed pirate of days past. No one has done more to transform that image than Don Facundo Bacardi Massó. But the story of Rum is about more than just one man. It is the story of a man, a company, and a country. The story of Rum is the story of the Caribbean.
The patriarch of the Bacardi clan, Don Facundo Bacardi Massó, was only sixteen when he migrated from Spain to work in the family's hardware store in Cuba. The streets of Santiago de Cuba in the 1800s was an intriguing place, and it wasn't long before young Facundo found himself traveling the narrow cobblestone alleys and long, winding roads in search of the heart of Cuban culture.
Rum, of course, was at the very center of that enterprise. But it was a harsh, dark brew with "an unpleasantly musty taste and smell." Aguardiente, as the Cuban Rum of the era was called (literally "burning water"), was shunned by polite society.
Bacardi dreamed of refining Rum and opening up vast new markets for its consumption. He experimented with various distillation methods and began aging the Rum in oak barrels. Soon, he and his wife Amalia purchased a distillery on the outskirts of Santiago to expand production. The story goes that when Amalia first walked into the distillery, she was greeted by a colony of fruit bats intent on making their presence known. Bacardi immediately realized he had found a logo for his new company. Bats were the symbol of good health, fortune, and family unity. It wasn't long before Bacardi Rum found its way into the most exclusive Gentlemen's Clubs and drawing rooms in both the Old and New World. But just as Facundo Bacardi ushered in a revolutionary new era in Rum production, Cuban freedom fighters were brewing their own rebellion.
By 1895, the grumbling discontent Cubans felt for the repressive Spanish colonial regime had developed into all out rebellion. Revolutionaries like Antonio Maceo, Maximo Gomez and Jose Marti fought for independence on the battle front. The Bacardis fought their own clandestine war. Emilio Bacardi, who would take over the company from his father, provided funds to the freedom fighters. Equally as perilous, he would often refuse to pay the taxes levied by representatives of the Spanish Crown.
It was in the Cuban struggle for independence against Spain (1895-1898) that the Bacardi family's revolutionary spirit was born. That spirit lived on long after the Spanish were gone. The Bacardis were again active participants in the seminal battle for the future of Cuba: The Cuban Revolution of 1959. Initially, the family supported Fidel Castro in his efforts to overthrow the despotic rule of U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista. But it soon became apparent the two sides had deeply divergent interests.
The Bacardi family fled Cuba and dispersed to The Bahamas, Puerto Rico and elsewhere in the Caribbean and the United States. It is said that on the day they left Cuba, the fertile coconut palm tree that graced the entrance of their Cuban distillery withered and died. “As long as the palm tree grows, Bacardi will live on in Cuba,” had been the family's mantra. The death of the palm tree was to have marked the end of Bacardi's ties to Cuba.
Those of us who study international trade recognize the battle between Cuba and Bacardi has never truly ended. The warring parties have simply moved the battlefield into the courtroom and the political arena. For years, Bacardi and the Cuban government have been locked in conflict over who legally has the right to market the name "Havana Club." The original trademark was owned by a Cuban family who sold the rights to Bacardi in 1997. Alas, "Havana Club" is also produced in Cuba by a company that benefited when Fidel Castro nationalized private Cuban businesses back in 1960.
The question of who owns the rights to Havana Club has become an international sensation embroiling Cuba, the United States, Spain, France, Japan, Nicaragua and the European Union. It is a question that has winded its way through the Spanish courts, as well the U.S. federal court system. (For a taste of the U.S. dispute, see Havana Club Holding, S.A. v. Galleon S.A., 203 F.3d 116 (2d Cir. 2000)). The issue has been subject to much political posturing and late night machinations leading to the adoption of The Omnibus Consolidated and Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act of 1999. The Bacardi-Cuba battle is one without end. Rum serves merely as a proxy in the love/hate relationship of a family, a company, and a country forever intertwined.
My visit to Bacardi's Puerto Rican distillery was the last in a whirlwind seven-day tour of the Caribbean. As I stood in the company's famed courtyard, reminiscent of a Spanish colonial grand home, I could not help but reflect on how much of the Caribbean experience was represented in those walls. Bacardi is firmly planted in Puerto Rico, but like immigrants the world over, it longs to go home. It's Puerto Rican distillery holds many relics from the Old Country -- down to a plastic replica of the famed palm tree.
The story of the Caribbean is one of forced migration and of loss, but it is also a story of love. No matter where you come from, or how you find your way to the Caribbean, you cannot help but fall in love with the region and her people. And when you leave, you long to go home again . . . if only for the occasional visit.
Luckily, a good bottle of Rum preserves the memories until the next Caribbean interlude!


*pic of my sister and I at a point in which the Atlantic Ocean meets the Caribbean Sea

Exploring a law that's all about rural women

(My thanks to IntLawGrrls for the opportunity to contribute this guest post)

For the past several years, my scholarship has explored the legal relevance of rurality. One of my goals has been to expose rural difference — which is often also rural disadvantage — with respect to a range of domestic legal issues, e.g., abortion access, youth substance abuse, intimate partner violence, and availability of health and human services. My work reveals a pervasive presumption of the urban in culture, law and legal scholarship. Rural women have been the focus of a great deal of my writing, including an article that theorizes the intersection of gender with the rural-urban axis.
My most recent publication goes international with this “critical legal ruralist” (and feminist) project. Entitled Migration, Development and the Promise of CEDAW for Rural Women, it has just been published in Volume 30 of the Michigan Journal of International Law. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first publication to look in any systematic way at Article 14 of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. If you are a human rights scholar and the mention of Article 14 leaves you scratching your head, trying to recall the topic of that provision, your response may support my point about a pervasive presumption of the urban. You may have overlooked Article 14 because it is all about rural women.
For a self-proclaimed ruralist like me, Article 14 was a very exciting find. I am delighted that a recent symposium of the Michigan Journal of International Law, entitled “Territory without Boundaries”, provided a timely opportunity to write about it. While U.S. law largely ignores the rural-urban axis, here in an international human rights instrument is an express legal recognition of rural difference — accompanied by a call to action.
My new article looks at the travaux préparatoires to explore how this marginalized population got included in CEDAW and how drafters determined which particular concerns of rural women got addressed. Several developing nations first put rural women on the CEDAW agenda, and they were apparently motivated to do so because of women’s role in food production. What ultimately became Article 14 was sponsored by Egypt, India, Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan, Thailand, and — interestingly — the United States.
The fact that an international human rights instrument such as CEDAW expressly acknowledges rurality and rural difference should not be a great surprise to us. The United Nations attends to rural people and places in many contexts. Some examples are here, here, and (implicitly) here. This U.N. attention seems highly appropriate, given that about half of the world’s population is still rural. (Compare that to just under a fifth of the population of the United States, where rural interests get systematic government attention only within the U.S. Department of Agriculture). After all, “rural” is to some degree synonymous with undeveloped and primitive, just as “urban” connotes civilization and development. Plus, a great deal of the content of international human rights law arguably targets developing nations, compelling them to adopt the norms of the developed world. In the same way, CEDAW’s Article 14 seeks to secure for rural women the same rights urban women get, e.g., healthcare and education, while also recognizing rural-specific needs.
A very recent U.N. recognition of the significance of rural women came with the United Nations’ observance of the first International Day of Rural Women on October 15, 2008. According to the U.N. declaration, the day’s designation recognizes “the critical role and contribution of rural women, including indigenous women, in enhancing agricultural and rural development, improving food security and eradicating rural poverty.” (See this post on my Legal Ruralism Blog.) In the developing world, rural and agricultural are much more nearly synonymous than in the developed world. Indeed, the focus of my new publication is the Article 14 guarantees that are linked closely to women’s roles as the so-called architects of food security. These rights include land ownership, inclusion in development planning and implementation “at all levels,” and access to credit, marketing facilities and agricultural technology and extension services. To better understand the potential of CEDAW to enhance rural women’s livelihoods, I examine the most recent country reports of four member states: China, Ghana, India, and South Africa. All have significant rural and urban populations; in a sense, all are simultaneously developed and developing.
My discussion of CEDAW’s Article 14 is situated in the context of massive rural-to-urban migration worldwide. In fact, its publication comes just months after demographers report that, on a global scale, urban dwellers began to outnumber those living in rural areas. As globalization creates conditions that induce migration, causing the populations of cities to burgeon and their territories to sprawl, those same forces shape rural places, too. Although that which is rural is often thought of as quintessentially local, rural livelihoods around the world are buffeted by economic restructuring, migration, and climate change. I thus consider CEDAW in relation to migration’s consequences for the women who are left behind: enormous challenges, but also opportunities for empowerment.
Among other observations, I laud the priorities and framework of CEDAW’s Article 14 in terms of the ways in which they seek to foster women’s agency and material well-being. Many of the enumerated rights are of the socioeconomic variety rather than of the civil and political type. It is thus not surprising that Member States’ responses to Article 14 tend to be more often programmatic than in the nature of law reform.
I also discuss the potential for CEDAW’s Article 14 to accommodate legal pluralism, which can be particularly relevant in rural places, where custom and local sources of authority tend to be more entrenched and influential than in urban locales. I further suggest that the population churn associated with migration represents an opening for the renegotiation of gender roles and other cultural practices in rural places. I argue that migration enhances the prospect of raising the collective consciousness of rural communities regarding national and international legal norms, while also facilitating enforcement of rural women’s rights by fostering their access to formal legal actors and institutions at higher scales, usually in urban places. Finally, throughout the Article, I consider parallels between developing and developed nations with regard to rural-urban difference, population trends, the industrialization of agriculture, and the social and economic consequences of these phenomena.
Migration, Development and the Promise of CEDAW for Rural Women is hardly the last word on CEDAW’s Article 14. My analysis of the intersection of development, migration and human rights law for rural women raises many more questions than it answers:

► Among these questions is the impact of rural spatiality — including a relative absence of formal legal institutions and actors — on the ability of rural women to realize the promise of international instruments such as CEDAW and the domestic laws and programs that respond to its mandate.

► Another is the extent to which development efforts entail or encourage urbanization and how CEDAW’s vision for empowering rural women might influence the trajectory of development.

► A third is the wisdom of development strategies that fuel migration’s urban juggernaut by promoting the industrialization of agriculture. Such strategies — which I argue reflect an urban bias — seem wrong headed at a time when the developed world’s food production priorities are shifting to value and emphasize sustainable agriculture.

I hope other scholars who are interested in gender, how we feed ourselves and the planet, and maybe even rurality, will join me in exploring these and other issues related to Article 14 of CEDAW.

(Cross-posted at Legal Ruralism Blog.)