I stayed up late last night to watch Niteline with Ted Koppel. He was doing a piece on the documentary Stolen Childhoods (www.stolenchildhoods.org), about international child labor. Child labor on cocoa farms in West Africa is what first piqued my interest in fair trade chocolate (www.divinechocolate.com) . So I was happy to see that one of the abuses highlighted was that of child coffee pickers in East Africa. The kids’ families can’t afford to send them to school, and the kids are earning a pittance for picking these coffee berries. Children are preferred over adults for this work because they can climb into the trees and get at more berries, but they often get scraped and cut doing this. They’re exposed to lots of pesticides in the process.
As they pointed out in the documentary, buying fair trade/organic coffee is one way to fight this abuse. Fair trade beans are bought from cooperatives that pay workers a decent wage, support community development, and ensure against child labor. (www.globalexchange.org/campaigns/fairtrade) The same is true of the fair trade chocolate I mentioned above.
A couple other situations they documented were children (mostly girls) making gravel and mud bricks in India, working long hours for little pay, exposed to rock dust and forced to carry huge loads on their heads. They showed a situation in Sumatra where young boys are working in fishing, stuck for three months at a time on these piers in the middle of the ocean with Dickens-esque foremen. Many fall off the piers and drown.
Another place they focused their cameras was the United States. Yes, right here! Migrant farm workers in the U.S. are often whole families, with young children (a 9 year old girl was featured) working long days even when they’re sick and getting exposed to lots of pesticides. Buying organic is one way to mitigate the effects.
It would be great to see the whole documentary sometime. Ted Koppel interviewed the two men who faced a lot of opposition (e.g., authorities at the filming sites wanting to beat them up) to make the documentary. Pretty brave work. Koppel had a powerful closing argument himself…
“It wouldn’t require a military invasion or even intervention in the internal affairs of another country. Just a little research. Anything produced by child labor, slave labor or a combination of the two is unfit for the American market. (And, incidentally, that means cleaning up our own mess at home first. Those migrant children working on our ranches and farms belong in school.)
“I understand the equation. All of us consumers love a bargain. Some cheap labor, though, is just too expensive to tolerate.”
Sounds like a social justice issue to me.
washingtonpost.com
Groups Unite Against Military Recruiters
By MARYCLAIRE DALE
The Associated Press
Friday, June 17, 2005; 12:57 PM
PHILADELPHIA — Nancy Carroll didn’t know schools were giving military recruiters her family’s contact information until a recruiter called her 17-year-old granddaughter.
That didn’t sit well with Carroll, who believes recruiters unfairly target minority students. So she joined activists across the country who are urging families to notify schools that they don’t want their children’s contact information given out.
“People of color who go into the military are put on the front line,” said the 67-year-old Carroll, who is black.
A provision of President Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act requires school districts to provide military recruiters with student phone numbers and addresses or risk losing millions in federal education funding. Parents or students 18 and over can “opt out” by submitting a written request to keep the information private.
But critics say schools do not always convey that message. In New Mexico, the American Civil Liberties Union chapter sued the Albuquerque Public School District last month, charging it does not adequately inform parents of the opt-out provision.
Some critics oppose the federal law on privacy grounds, but others say it provides an unfair opportunity for the military to sway young minds _ especially in economically depressed communities.
“They’re not going to all the schools. They’re going to the schools where they figure the kids will have less chance to go to college,” said Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash. “It’s an insidious kind of draft, quite frankly.”
Carroll, who is raising three grandchildren in a working-class neighborhood of Philadelphia, agrees that the practice is unfair. “I wouldn’t want them to join,” she said of her grandchildren.
But Pentagon officials say the military deserves the same access to students that schools give to colleges and employers.
“In the past, it was all-too-common for a school district to make student directory information readily available to vendors, prospective employers and post-secondary institutions while intentionally excluding the services,” Air Force Lt. Col. Ellen Krenke, a Pentagon spokeswoman, said in an e-mail.
“Having access to 17- to 24-year-olds is very key to us,” said Maj. Gen. Michael Rochelle, commander of the Army Recruiting Command, said at a news conference Friday at Fort Meade, Md. “We would hope that every high school administrator would provide those lists to us. They’re terribly important for what we’re trying to do.”
Asked about aggressive recruiters targeting young people, he said:
“I would certainly hope that we are harassing no one. A recruiter today has to contact roughly 100 people before they can generally get one of them to sit down and listen to the Army story. … I’m not asking my recruiters to be any less aggressive. I would not wish for them to be overbearing or annoying.”
As military conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan drag on, the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines are having trouble attracting recruits to their reserve forces, though only the Army is falling short in attracting people for its active-duty ranks.
Andrew Rinaldi, a senior at Edison High School in Edison, N.J., filed an opt-out letter but said he was contacted by a recruiter anyway. He said the recruiter mocked his pacifist views. “They’re becoming more aggressive,” he said.
None of the nation’s approximately 22,600 high schools has failed to comply with the military provision of No Child Left Behind, and just one is “finalizing its compliance,” Krenke said. None has lost funding.
Before No Child Left Behind was signed into law in 2002, about 12 percent of the nation’s schools refused to turn over student records to military recruiters, Pentagon officials said. Sen. David Vitter, R-La., who sponsored the recruitment provision, called the actions of those schools “offensive.”
Now, activists are holding rallies and awareness campaigns to make sure students know they can opt out.
In Montclair, N.J., more than 80 percent of Montclair High School students have opted out since a student-led effort began last year.
“It’s a place where military recruiters are not likely to have a ton of success, anyway, partly because … a lot of parents can assist their kids with going to college,” school district spokeswoman Laura Federico said.
In the urban blight of North Philadelphia, Joshua Gordy said the lure of college money led him to join the Army reserves at age 17. He said recruiters at his high school told him he could earn $35,000 for college.
That hasn’t happened. Gordy, a 20-year-old reservist, said he apparently failed to send in the right paperwork in time. He hopes to enroll in community college this fall.
Rep. McDermott faults the military for enticing students with talk of patriotism, adventure and college funds, instead of giving them a realistic view of combat.
McDermott is among those in Congress trying to change the law so that students instead “opt-in” for recruitment.
“There’s nothing dishonorable with serving in the military,” said McDermott, a psychiatrist who served stateside during Vietnam. “But it ought to be done with your eyes open.”
___
On the Net:
http://www.LeaveMyChildAlone.org
http://www.militaryfreezone.org
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Associated Press writer Foster Klug contributed to this story from Fort Meade, Md.
© 2005 The Associated Press
washingtonpost.com
Brazil’s Biofuel Strategy Pays Off as Gas Prices Soar
By Dan Morgan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, June 18, 2005; D01
PRADOPOLIS, Brazil — Outside the cavernous Sao Martinho refinery, the air smells of molasses as a quarter-mile-long caravan of trucks piled high with sugar cane waits to unload cargo, signs that the world’s largest sugar harvest is moving into high gear.
Such bumper sugar crops have often meant worldwide gluts, low prices and headaches for politicians in the more than 100 countries where sugar cane is grown, but not this year in Brazil. About half the cane brought here will be made into ethanol as part of a 30-year gamble to substitute fuels made from crops for imported oil.
As international oil prices soar, that bet has put Brazil at the forefront of a “biofuels” movement in which many countries view sugar cane, corn, soybeans, beets, cornstalks and native grasses as cleaner, money-saving substitutes for oil produced in politically unstable countries. Ethanol is higher in power-producing octane than most gasoline and can reduce tailpipe emissions of carbon monoxide and harmful particulates.
The trend in Brazil has far-reaching implications for environmental policy, trade and economic development in poor countries that may have a bright future producing crops that can be easily turned into fuels. Biofuels also could be alternatives to U.S. farmers facing cuts in large federal farm subsidies on traditional crops, according to some agricultural economists.
Congress, the Bush administration and U.S. industry are aware of ethanol’s potential. During Senate floor debate Thursday on major energy legislation, Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) said Brazil’s example showed that biofuels were one way to break the “addiction” to imported oil.
Efforts to gain wide acceptance in the United States have faced political, economic, and technical obstacles not present in Brazil.
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has vowed that his country will become the world’s leader in renewable energy. It is already the largest producer and exporter of ethanol, sending half a billion gallons a year to a dozen countries, including the United States.
“We don’t want to sell liters of ethanol, we want to sell rivers,” Agriculture Minister Roberto Rodrigues told Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi last year.
About a third of the fuel Brazilians use in their vehicles is ethanol, known in Brazil as “alcohol.” That compares with 3 percent in the United States. All gasoline sold in Brazil contains at least 26 percent ethanol, but motorists driving flexible-fuel cars have the option of filling up with pure ethanol, or E100, which currently is selling for about half the price of the blend.
Use of pure ethanol will rise sharply as carmakers in Brazil such as General Motors and Volkswagen make more flexible-fuel cars. Half the new vehicles sold this year will be able to use either pure ethanol or the blend, according to the Sao Paulo Sugar Cane Industry Union.
In the United States, the sugar-cane industry has had little incentive to diversify into ethanol production because import quotas support U.S. sugar prices far above world levels. Expansion of sugar cane acreage beyond Hawaii, Florida and the Gulf Coast is limited by the need for a long, frost-free growing season. The House-passed energy bill would authorize a three-year demonstration program for producing ethanol from sugar cane.
Most U.S.-produced ethanol is now made from ground corn in a process that has been faulted as inefficient. Corn yields less sugar per acre than sugar cane and the refining uses substantial amounts of energy. To keep ethanol competitive with gasoline, major refiners such as Archer Daniels Midland Co. have relied since the 1970s on a tax subsidy, now 51 cents a gallon.
U.S. refiners sell a gasoline blend composed of 10 percent ethanol in many parts of the Midwest, but they have been in no hurry to use more. Only a few hundred gasoline stations, mostly in the Midwest, offer a near-pure blend known as E85. Adapting cars to pure ethanol can be done relatively inexpensively by adding a fuel sensor and corrosion-resistant hoses, but there are only about 4 million flexible-fuel cars on U.S. roads out of more than 200 million.
Now the spike in gasoline prices has given ethanol a sudden edge.
Ethanol was selling for 30 cents less a gallon than gasoline this month in the Chicago wholesale market, even before refiners deducted the federal tax subsidy. Drivers in parts of Minnesota were paying $1.59 for a gallon of E85, compared with $1.99 for regular gasoline.
“If this doesn’t scream that we need something more to make the oil companies buy this product, I don’t know what does,” said Monte Shaw, spokesman for the Renewable Fuels Association.
A provision in the Senate energy bill requires U.S. refiners and importers to double use of ethanol and other agriculture-derived fuels by 2012. It is supported by farm-state senators, consumer groups, several labor unions and environmental organizations. But the American Petroleum Institute, representing major oil companies, is fighting to keep it out of the final bill.
The United States imposes a stiff tariff on imported ethanol. But over the past 12 months, 160 million gallons of the Brazilian product still entered the country. The U.S. agribusiness giant Cargill Inc., the third-largest U.S. ethanol refiner, announced plans last year to refine Brazilian ethanol in El Salvador and export it to the United States duty-free under provisions of the Caribbean Basin Initiative.
The tariff is a sore point with Rodrigues, Brazil’s agriculture minister. In 1948, his father acquired a bankrupt coffee plantation not far from the Sao Martinho sugar refinery, about a three-hour drive from Sao Paulo. Now he grows sugar cane on 7 square miles of rolling countryside.
“If the U.S. and Brazil would open their markets, they will contribute to democracy and peace,” he told a group of visitors to his farm last month.
Brazil launched a “pro-alcohol” program in the 1970s with incentives for distilleries and auto companies that made ethanol-only cars. But motorists turned away from those cars in 1989 when they were squeezed by high prices and shortages.
In the 1990s, some distillers went bankrupt and many refiners and sugar-cane farmers fell on hard times. But the government stuck by its commitment to alternative fuels, purchasing unsold stocks of ethanol and showering tax breaks on cabdrivers who used ethanol.
Brazil has added 2.4 million acres of sugar cane since 1996, according to a report from the officer of the U.S. agricultural attaché in Brazil. This trend could be accelerated by a recent World Trade Organization decision that could end the dumping of sugar on world markets by the European Union.
About 70,000 farmers produced 385 million tons of sugar cane last year, and refiners made 4 billion gallons of alcohol fuel — enough to replace 460 million barrels of oil.
Mills such as Sao Martinho are highly efficient. The pressed sugar-cane juice can either go to huge fermentation vats to make alcohol or be spun in centrifuges to produce sugar and molasses, depending on which product is priced more favorably on any given day. The plant supplies its own electrical power by burning the crushed outer stalk of the cane, known as bagasse .
Exact comparisons are hard to come by, but mill manager Mario Ortiz Gandini said the mill can produce sugar for less than half the price of U.S. ethanol from corn. “No country can beat us,” he said.
Sugar’s role in producing a “green” fuel is part of a broader rehabilitation of the crop’s reputation. Colonial-era sugar planters, mainly Portuguese and Spanish, used slaves to hack and burn their way into northeast Brazil’s wild interior, opening up the country but giving the crop a lasting reputation for appalling working conditions and environmental desecration.
“Sugar comes from a disreputable past, and there are still labor issues, but from what I have seen in Brazil the energy balance and its environmental impacts make it an extremely promising source of energy,” said Kenneth A. Cook, president of the Washington-based Environmental Working Group.
Paulo Rodrigues, who manages the family sugar plantation for his father, acknowledges that “sugar has had a bad reputation.” But, he said, sugar cane requires fewer chemicals than any crop except pasture. His farm uses wasps to fight insects, reducing the need for chemical pesticides. The crop’s dense leaves absorb large amounts of carbon dioxide, making it a good recycler of the greenhouse gas implicated in global warming.
Traditionally, some of the carbon is released back into the atmosphere when the leaves are burned off before the cane is cut. But according to William L. Burnquist of the Sugar Cane Technology Center, Brazilian environmental laws require the practice to be phased out.
Burning is being replaced by “green cane harvesting,” in which machines cut unburned cane and separate the leaves mechanically. Mechanical harvesting eliminates the need for some temporary field jobs, but Burnquist noted: “These aren’t jobs that you would wish for anybody.”
© 2005 The Washington Post Company