Still Pushing for DREAM (Inside Higher Ed)
“This week, news reports have suggested that Congressional Democrats are pushing ahead to take up immigration reform legislation, which would most likely include measures aimed at putting students who spend at least two years in college on a path to permanent residency,” Inside Higher Ed reports. “It was with this sense that such change might finally be in the offing, after close to a decade of false starts, that the National Forum on Higher Education for the Public Good, based at the University of Michigan, and the Kellogg Fellows Leadership Alliance convened for ‘Challenges and Opportunities: Future Pathways Towards Immigration and Higher Education,’ a three-day conference designed to build support for policies aimed at helping college students who are also undocumented residents of the United States.”
This post originally posted to FinancialAidNews.com on April 28th, 2010.
Sustainable Agriculture Thrives in Cuba
Miguel Salcines Lopez is a farmer of the 21st century. With a stylish jean jacket and rakish cowboy hat adorning his six-foot frame, Miguel looks more like a Cuban John Wayne than a stooped, tired farmer. That’s part of his game: he wants to make agriculture attractive, especially to the younger generation.
Miguel is the president of Organoponico Vivero Alamar, Havana’s largest and most successful organic garden. Actually, at 11 hectares, it’s more of an urban farm than a garden. Recently, I visited Vivero Alamar with several other Kellogg Food & Society fellows. “In the past,” Miguel told us, “agriculture in Cuba was demonized. People preferred to do anything but agriculture.” But today, Cuban farmers, especially urban farmers, have become respected members of society, some earning three times as much as doctors.
Why the sudden shift in cultural values and pay scale? I asked that question at each of the three Havana organic gardens I visited in mid-February. Mostly, the answers I heard contained exalted phrases like, “Organic agriculture is the privilege of the Cuban people,” which sounded to my Yanqui ears a bit like socialist propaganda. Cubans did seem proud of their organic gardens and had ample reason to be. But in my view, the country’s sudden shift to organic agriculture, and the accompanying shift toward more respect and better pay for farmers, can best be described in one word: necessity.
At one time, the Soviet Union was Cuba’s main trading partner, supplying the island with not only meat and grains but also fertilizer, pesticides, tractors, and oil; all the standard trappings of industrialized agriculture. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Cuba was left scrambling to feed itself. Food disappeared from the shelves. Over the next three years, which Fidel Castro euphemistically dubbed “The Special Period in a Time of Peace,” the average Cuban lost 30 pounds. Cubans had to learn to grow food without all those inputs simply because they had to. Call it organic-by-default.
And judging by the success of places like Vivero Alamar, they’re doing an amazing job. The garden is a cooperative, which Miguel describes as a “private ownership model with socialist, egalitarian tendencies.” Of the 164 workers, 22 have university degrees, two of which are doctorates. Seventy percent of the profit is distributed among the workers, 20 percent goes to farm infrastructure, and 10 percent goes to the state. The vegetables and fruit grown at Vivero Alamar are sold six days a week to the people in the neighborhood, and the garden also has contracts with Havana hospitals, rest homes, and schools.
Miguel describes the benefits: working hours have been reduced to seven hours a day in summer and six hours a day in winter. There are coffee breaks and free lunches, and workers can take home 1.5 pounds of vegetables each day they work. Workers can also gather after work for a beer at the on-site cantina, and bring their families there on weekends. The garden is both workplace and community center. “We even have hairdressers and manicurists for our women workers,” Miguel said. Women hold prominent leadership roles. “We men get easily ruined by rum and cigars,” Miguel laughed. “Women are better workers.”
As you might gather, there is a waiting list to work here.
In 15 years, Cuba has become “the world’s largest working model of a semi-sustainable agriculture,” according to U.S. writer and activist Bill McKibben. At least in terms of vegetable and fruit production like the kind I witnessed at Vivero Alamar, Cuba is a model to emulate, demonstrating how an entire society can convert its agriculture to organic methods and thrive.
Granted, Cuba still imports between 76 and 85 percent of its food and is far from being food-secure. But in the city of Havana, nearly all of the vegetables and most fruit now come from within a 30-mile radius, an accomplishment of which few cities in the world can boast. Talking with Miguel, it’s also clear that whatever crisis led Cuba to organic farming in the first place, there are few backward glances.
Never Forget the “Public” in Public Policy
Filed under: Coble, Forum '11 - Civic Engagement, KFLA Programs
I want to tell you a story about where my interests in civic engagement in general and policies affecting the aging in particular come from.
One of the best teachers I ever had was a professor at Duke University named Bruce Payne who taught a course called “Humanistic Perspectives in Public Policy.” One of the main assignments in that class was to go somewhere at least once a week and talk to people who were unlike yourself and then write about what you learned every Friday. The students in that class did some marvelous things. They talked to tobacco workers at the old Liggett & Myers Tobacco warehouses, they talked to truck drivers at truck stops on Interstate 85, and they talked to the down-and-out in local bars in Durham.
For my part, I went to a local high-rise housing project for the elderly every Tuesday. I asked the residents there about their views on Social Security, religion, retirement, and how government affected them. And it taught me a lasting lesson about never forgetting the public in public policy.
Join us at Forum 11 in Washington, DC from March 2-5, 2011. More information soon at kfla.org/forum11.