by Richard Gowan | Aug 20, 2010 | Europe and Central Asia, Off topic
Wondering what to cook this weekend? How about beans?
If you like beans, Macedonia is the place to be. The small village of Sarchievo, with only four houses and nine inhabitants, last week welcomed ten thousand people who gathered to see the new Guinness world champion cooking and preparing beans, the most popular national dish in the small Balkan country.
In a huge cauldron holding 2,600 liters of water some 400kg of beans, 91kg of bacon, 70 litres of oil, 40kg of onion, 9kg of salt, 3.6kg of red peppers, 1.5kg of pepper and a hundred tufts of parsley simmered for seven hours.
The official Guinness judge, dispatched to the scene from London, proclaimed that Sarchievo had indeed set a new world best by preparing 3,150 litres of beans. Until now the record was held by students from the US town of Horace, North Dakota, who in 2002 managed to prepare 1,342 litres of beans.
As a service to readers, here is a recipe for a smaller Macedonian bean-feast:
Ingredients needed:
– 500g of white beans
– 1 onion, 1 red paprika
– 100ml of cooking oil
– 2-3 pieces of red dry capsicum
– pepper, salt, plain flour, parsley, mint
Wash the beans and leave them to stay in water over night. After that cook them till it starts boiling, drain the beans and put them in another pot of hot water. Then add chopped onion (1/2 of it) and capsicum.
Continue to cook it till the beans are soft but integral. If there is too much water left, drain the beans.
Fry the chopped onion (the other 1/2) and paprika with one spoon of plain flour in cooking oil and then add this to the beans. Put everything in a pottery saucepan and then pour some parsley, mint, pepper and salt on it. Put the saucepan in oven and bake for a while (the beans shouldn’t be too dry).
Do let us know if you try it.
by Richard Gowan | Aug 20, 2010 | Cooperation and coherence, Economics and development, Global system, South Asia
China has been accused of being “stingy” for offering its Pakistan just $2 million in flood aid. India is being more generous, and Pakistan will accept help from its old foe:
Pakistan says it will accept $5 million in flood aid from India, a rare gesture of goodwill between the longtime rivals as Pakistan deals with one of the worst disasters in its history. In an interview with India’s NDTV television Friday, Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi called the aid a “very welcome initiative.” Spokesman for India’s foreign office Vishnu Prakash called the flood aid a “goodwill gesture in the spirit of solidarity” with the people of Pakistan.
Delhi’s offer has stirred up controversy in India, as Nitin Pai noted earlier this week:
‘Politics,’ some said, should be set aside in the face of the enormous tragedy that has befallen the Pakistani people. Others argued that giving aid will change the ‘politics’ itself, for when ordinary Pakistanis see India as among those who helped them during their time of need, hearts and minds will change, undermining the anti-India position of their government.
On the other side were those, like Atanu Dey, who offered the compelling logic that since money is fungible, giving money to the Pakistani government for flood relief is equivalent to giving money to that government to fund cross-border terrorism or build nuclear weapons. Moreover, another argument goes, since the wishes of the Pakistani people are weakly expressed in their government’s policies, changing hearts and minds won’t make the military establishment stop terrorism directed against India.
Nitin makes the interesting point that “wherever you stand on this issue, what you will notice is that people implicitly assume that when it comes to foreign affairs ‘India’ means only the Indian government.” He thinks that this is a mistake:
Indians should stop seeing the government has having a monopoly on foreign affairs. There is nothing to stop individuals, NGOs and media from taking an active interest in the world outside India’s borders. There is nothing to stop us from standing up for whatever cause we like. There is nothing to stop us from drawing attention to the plight of the world’s oppressed people, collect funds, mobilise volunteers, build institutions, lobby foreign governments and deliver social services beyond India’s shores.
Sure, we could also persuade the Indian government as part of our activism, but what stops us from getting on with it in spite of the Indian government? A large number of NGOs at home do valuable work despite the government. Why should it be any different abroad?
In fact, it is in India’s national interest for civil society to become a foreign policy player in its own right. Governments are constrained by realpolitik. They follow the grammar of power. Civil society does not have the same constraints. It is free to speak the language of values. The Tibetan struggle, for instance, is one area where India’s overall policy has benefited from citizen activism. Similarly, after the 2005 earthquake, Infosys announced that it would provide Rs 10 million in aid to Pakistan. Many of us donated money for Haiti’s earthquake victim through the Red Cross and through religious institutions. These are, however, isolated and sporadic instances.
We should ask ourselves why India’s civil society is not a significant international player? The primary reason, I would say, might be the mindset that sees the government as the Grand Solver of Problems. As long as this mindset is dominant, lesser hurdles like lack of financial resources, organisational capabilities and channels of action will appear insurmountable. Another reason is our tendency to contemplate our collective navels, for there are innumerable, seemingly intractable problems at home that deserve our attention.
A salutary reminder not to talk about “rising powers” as if they are monolithic entities or assume that their rise will be linear, rather than complex and multi-faceted…
by Alex Evans | Aug 19, 2010 | Climate and resource scarcity
Over at the Archdruid Report, John Michael Greer – one of the best thinkers out there on what happens after oil production peaks (see also the excellent Gregor Macdonald, whom I’ve just discovered) – makes the useful and important observation that when we think about agriculture, we have to think about two agricultures, not one. Before industrialisation, he writes,
Each farm [in the US] had, apart from its main acreage for corn or wheat or what have you, a kitchen garden, an orchard, a henhouse, and a bit of pasture for a cow or two. Those had a completely different economic function from that of the main acreage, and they were managed in a completely different way. Their function was to produce food for the farm family and farmhands, where the main acreage was used to produce a cash crop for sale; and they were worked intensively, while the main acreage was farmed extensively.
Extensive farming, he continues, “involves significant acreage”, and “maintains soil fertility through crop rotation and fallow periods, rather than through fertilizers or soil amendments”;
the crops that you can grow with extensive farming in temperate regions, in the absence of cheap abundant energy, are pretty much limited to grains, dry beans and dry peas, but you can produce these in very substantial amounts, and they store and ship well, so they make good cash crops even if the only way to get them to market is a wagon to the nearest river system and a canal boat from there.
Intensive farming, on the other hand, is a different story. It “has to be done on a much smaller scale”; the labour it requires is “too substantial to be applied to acreage of any size”; it “maintains soil fertility by adding whatever soil amendments are available – compost, manure, leaf mold, a fish buried in every corn hill, you name it – and the basic tools of the trade are a hoe and somebody who knows how to use it”.
The crops you can grow in an intensive garden account for everything other than grains and dry legumes, from the first spring radishes to the leeks you overwinter under straw; the chickens, the cow, and the fruit from the orchard all belong to this same intensive sector and participate in its tight cycles of nutrients. In an age without fossil fuels, very little of what can be grown intensively can be transported over any distance without spoiling, so intensive growing is always done close to where the food will be eaten.
So far, so good. But significantly, Greer thinks that as peak oil approaches and is passed, it’s on the intensive farming front that change is most urgently needed – and that developed countries will face the biggest challenge:
For the world’s nonindustrial nations … the end of the industrial age thus ushers in a difficult but ultimately positive shift in which the mechanisms of foreign export, along with the wild distortions of political and economic power they produced, come apart at the seams. For the world’s industrial nations, on the other hand, the end of a system that kept shoppers happily supplied with strawberries in January promises to usher in a time of food crisis in which a system of intensive local production will need to be revived in a hurry.
And here, I think that Greer and I part company – because it seems to me that (a) it’s very much developing countries who are most in the firing line, and (b) that the challenge on extensive farming is every bit as demanding and urgent as the one on intensive farming. (more…)
by Alex Evans | Aug 18, 2010 | What we're watching
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3SuooQ-1T0&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]
