The Global System (Or How a Merrill Lynch Golf Jacket Ends Up Being Worn By a Farmer in Ghana)

A story  in the New York Times from late September continues to irk me and bring out my inner Yosemite Sam.  I finally have the fieldwork metaphor try and explain why this piece is so damaging to how we think about Africa as a place and its position in the world.  

Following the Westgate Mall attacks in Nairobi, East Africa correspondent Jeffrey Gettleman stated that Nairobi presents an excellent context for watching the expansion of Africa’s middle class.  He elaborates:

“…new office blocks are rising above the tin-shack slums, new bistros are popping up all over the place and taxi drivers are getting on Facebook. It’s essentially Africa joining the world.”

This is a very problematic way of reporting on Africa.  First of all, we should not be surprised that Kenyans performing drudgerous work know how to use the internet and are inclined to participate in social media.  As a blogger for the site Africa is a Country recently snarked in reaction to a different Times piece (one bellowing the wonders of how artists in Kenya use the internet as a means to create and share), “If a Kenyan DJ uploads a mixtape to soundcloud and the New York Times isn’t around to hear it, does it make a sound?” 

My overarching issue with this reporting is that an emerging middle class in Africa and Africa “joining the world “are two very different things.  There is something going on in Ghana with class, though I’ve yet to come across a convincing definition of a new Ghanaian middle class.  I rather suspect that more people are inching into the wealthy category and more people are falling behind, creating an average that looks middle class.  

This is the size of the new houses that are going up in wealthy neighborhoods in Accra

This is what new apartment complexes look like in wealthy neighborhoods in Accra

This is where advertisements for new up-scale apartment buildings are put up--on existing middle class apartment buildings that show no signs of expansion. 

But more importantly, Africa has always been, and every person on this continent retains active membership in the world. 

Maybe Mr. Gettleman never had a world history class that talked about the trans-Sahara trade that was the economic feature of West African societies prior to European contact. That seems pretty worldly to me. Maybe he forgot about the slave trade.  The forced movement of people from one continent to other continents also seems pretty indicative of worldly transactions.  And then there’s colonialism, and the current era of development that many label as neo-colonialism. There is a lot of external presence inside Africa, and Africa has a lot of presence outside of itself. 

This narrative is so nefarious is because it negates to acknowledge just how globally interconnected this continent has been for a long, long time before Facebook became a thing, let alone a metric for measuring a common man’s place in the wider world.  By equating economic and technological strides with integration into the world, it can be assumed that Africans who are not able to access such resources (or who have no interest in accessing such resources) are, by default, not part of the world.

The farmers who I work with don’t have Facebook accounts.  But they’re sure as hell integrated into a global system that harnesses them into positions of minimal power.  As producers and consumers, they are at the mercy of a global market system that undervalues the goods they produce.  One farmer in my site of study is always wearing an oversized warm up jacket with the Merrill Lynch bull emblem, an item of clothing he inevitably got through the prolific used clothing markets in Ghana.   The fact that this jacket has traversed from the shoulders of a wealth manager prone to golf to the shoulders of a farmer prone to plowing his own fields because he can’t afford to hire the service of a tractor.…………that, to me, pretty much explains how farmers in Northern Ghana are members of the world even though they don’t eat at bistros or log onto Facebook.  

Hoes used by farmers in the Upper West for plowing and weeding

When I asked this farmer of the Merrill Lynch warm up jacket if he thought the price he was paid for his cashew harvest was fair, his response was, essentially, that beggars can’t be choosers.  He got paid $7 for a cashew harvest that will probably go on to gather $14 from the middle man who has the means to get the nuts to the processor.  The processor will go on to charge more, the distributor will charge more and the supermarket will charge more.  And Merrill Lynch will go on to work to ensure that those at the top,  who win the most, can keep on winning the most.  Then they will kindly donate old golfing jackets that can serve as work gear for farmers in Ghana.  That’s our global system that ensures that all people are part of the world, just not equitably integrated into it. 

Baggage

As all of the Groupons for gym memberships putrify my inbox, here’s a thematic posting on weight and health.

One of the ways I gauge the power of my own cultural context is body image. I do a fairly good job of ignoring it in the States, but in Ghana it emerges with full force because Ghanaians tell it like it is.  Over the past 2 weeks I have been told by 3 different people that I am getting fat.  Well actually 2/3 of the sample said fat.  1/3 indicated that I was getting plumpy.  Even if people were not commenting upon it, my snugger jeans have told me the truth.  I arrived in Ghana at the lower end of my weight spectrum and have now crept up to the higher end.  No big deal.  But to have it pointed out in such bluntness is punching my psyche in the face. 

This is a compliment in Ghana.  While we may pass pleasantries in the US by congratulating someone on weight loss, Ghanaians suck up by telling someone they look plumpy. For here, to have some meat on your bones is to show that you are taking good care of yourself.  A friend told me that people sometimes go to the pharmacist for pills that will make them gain weight.   Personally I am finding that switching to a starch and oil heavy diet, (with further supplement provided by reliance on Coke and HobNobs to make the toils and foils of fieldwork feel less bleh), is working wonders.   Though I try wholeheartedly to embrace the Ghanaian ideology, I can’t shake the American ideology when I’m faced with interpreting comments that make my weight gain publicly acknowledged.   Maybe when Jennifer Lawrence no longer has to serve as the ambassador for female weight and body image issues I’ll be able to embrace being plumpy.

60 Ghana Cedis (about 20 US bucks) for this derriere enhancing undergarment. 

It’s not that Ghanaians are promoting obesity or are immune from health issues that stem from too much weight and too little activity.  There’s a strong public health discourse to bring awareness about the non-communicable diseases (NCDs) that are on the rise in Ghana, including hypertension and diabetes.  People are concerned about maintaining a weight that reduces their risk for disease.  For those not involved in physically demanding jobs, intentional exercise is practiced and more cautious consumption adhered to.

Words from the Ghanaian Ministry of Health at a park where inevitably people will be playing basketball and some really great volleyball (not a popular sport here)

Ad for a walkathon promoting heart health in Accra, the largest urban center in Ghana and thus an area of the country where heart disease is more of an issue to do urban lifestyles

It’s that the weight you do (or don’t carry) in Ghana does not come to define you as individually in charge or weakly willed.  Food is not something that instigates emotions such as shame or is associated with characteristics such as will-power. When I eat with women in Ghana, never do we engage in the kind of self-congratulatory or self-loathing language reifying or vilifying our food intake that pads dining conversations in the States.  Here you aren’t what you eat. It is acknowledged that being self conscious about my weight whilst I pursue research on food insecurity is incredibly tacky. I regularly deride myself for my toolishness. But it’s hard to shake your cultural baggage, and sometimes you don’t even realize your cultural baggage until it is challenged in paradoxical ways.

"More Cowpea!"

If you eat black eyed peas for good luck on New Year’s Day, you are participating in a tradition linking American foodways to West African foodways via the trans Atlantic slave trade. For the past 7 years I have lived in (and eaten my way through) New Orleans and Georgia. Now I am residing in a region of Ghana that was lucrative for looting humans to sell into the Dutch and Portuguese slave markets that fed the plantation systems in the Americas.  I’m always seeking and contemplating the connections between these two settings.  Though I’m pretty convinced that the vibe I felt at a parade in Accra is the same vibe I felt when watching a Second Line in New Orleans, vibes are a little too subjective. Food is definitely a more objective connection to make. 

As a Stateside vegetarian, I’ve a bit of an affinity for legumes. The black eyed pea that we know in the States is one of many types of peas fitting in the category of cowpea. So a black eyed pea is a cowpea but a cowpea is not necessarily a black eyed pea.

Cowpea at market in Wa

 The cowpea is indigenous to Southern Africa and spread outwards to West and East Africa as well as Asia.  The cowpea is still important to farming and culinary practice in Ghana.  As a cultivar, cowpeas are important for fixing nitrogen in the soil.  For this incredibly variable climate, it’s also a relatively resilient crop to rains that can either be lacking or too intense.  As a food, cowpeas are an important source of protein for households that can only afford to integrate small amounts of meat into their diet. Cowpeas are eaten boiled and whole with rice to produce waakeye (a dish that must be a cousin to Hoppin’ John) and with fried plantain to produce a dish known as red-red.  The dried bean is also ground into a fine flour that is used to make fried bean cakes called kosi that make for a filling breakfast alongside a millet based porridge.   Even the leaves of the cowpea plant are used, consumed both by people (as a tasty leafy green in soups) and by livestock.  

Making kosi (note the antiquated US aid oil can in the background.....perhaps it is soy oil)

So in addition to being delicious, cowpeas fit comfortably into the local agro-ecology and promote food security for small scale farmers in Ghana.  That’s why it’s a bit frustrating to see and hear incessant buzz about soy.  Soy beans are being pushed fast and furious as the crop du jour that will end poverty for all Ghanaian farmers who partake in its cultivation. Soy is already grown in Ghana, but neither prolifically nor very profitably as it does not compose a substantial part of the local diet.  

Soy is not being pushed as a food crop in Ghana (or elsewhere in the new soy colonies that are already very expansive in South America) but as a commercial crop for processing into oil as well as animal feed that can quench an increasing global desire for meat.   The idea is that there is a global demand for soybeans and if small farmers in Ghana are able to meet that demand they will walk away with cash in their pockets that can be used to buy all needs (including food).  

In theory this sounds great.  In reality, it never really works out that well for the small-scale farmer. For at least the past 40 years, anthropologists and other social scientists have shown how this idea has failed to profit the people proposed to profit.  The reasons for failure can begin at production (when farmers are not given access to the inputs they need to produce the crop) or at harvest (when the market is so un-regulated that buyers are able to grossly under-pay or when the supposed demand is no longer there and the farmer is left with a commodity crop that is not consumable).  

The US is a prime harbinger of how scaling-up does not necessarily work out that well for most parties involved. We’ve already seen what happens when agriculture becomes more about a supply chain than about food that nourishes people.  This is why we hardly have any family farms left in the US.  Small farmers don’t profit in a farming system that is all about links in a chain.   Corporations processing the crops profit.  And those who profit can buy out the “failing” farmer. In the meantime, our food becomes really cheap, but at the cost of a diverse, fresh and nutritious diet.

Salvation soy projects are already unfolding across Northern Ghana. In visiting a community selected to participate in such a new agricultural venture, a major hurdle to success was already prevailing.  Two different varieties of soy were given to farmers.  One variety was not as drought tolerant as the other and the dried out shells of the soy burst, producing an audible popping sound and a visible shooting bean. Farmers who were given this variety decided that the only way the crop was salvageable was to harvest the plants whole and put them in a pile.  In a pile, the burst pods would at least provide an accumulation of beans in one spot rather than exploding all over the field.  However, because the farmers who were harvesting in this manner did not put a tarp down to capture the popped beans, they became vulnerable to demands of the buyer (a processor) looking for a pristine product.  Soybeans captured on the ground are soybeans that are likely to be mixed with detritus such as small stones and dirt.  Such sullied beans do not make processors happy because it messes with their system of efficiency.  So while small scale farmers are smart, adaptable and open to experimentation, they are not always equipped with foresight for all of the potential problems that can undermine their foray into commodity production. 

Soy plants piled to collect exploding beans

Production of soy in Ghana may or may not be of benefit to farmers here.  No matter what the outcome,  emphasis on soy is detracting farmer knowledge from important indigenous crops like the cowpea that are capable of growing in this increasingly variable climate and are enjoyably consumed in multiple, nutritious forms. If we get to make a wish for what kind of luck we’re seeking in our black eyed pea consumption, I’m hoping that there can be more praise for agricultural bio-diversity, and not just for the context that we individually live and consume in.  In the US, we’re starting to honor our diverse agricultural heritage by refining our knowledge of and palettes for the varieties of fruits, vegetables, and livestock that fell out of fashion when our farms turned into mono-croppers and all of our produce started coming from California. Just as we start to realize that our food system really doesn’t work out that well for us, we push the same kind of models across the pond. As citizens trying to re-define our own food system, we should acknowledge that people everywhere have the right to honor their own interwoven agricultural and culinary heritages.  Just because people are poor does not mean that the best and longest lasting solution to their poverty is integration into a global commodity chain that may boom now but bust in the near future.  

If I could re-write a catchphrase, it would be “More cowbellpea!”  It’d be awesome if some celebrity would make it their cause.

Should you be inclined to read some more in-depth anthropologicalness….

Troubled Fields by Eric Ramirez Ferrero is an ethnography that explores how the 1980s farm crisis came to fruition through political and economic means and how the crisis negatively affected farming communities and farm families in Oklahoma.

Silent Violence by Michael Watts is an ethnography that shows how a shift from subsistence to commodity farming in Northern Nigeria failed to procure wealthier farmers and instead produced hungrier families.

Though I haven’t read their work, Judith Carney and Jessica Harris are scholars who have written about the linkages between crops/food in Africa and the American South.