You can reduce the chance of arsenic contaminated rice (and citrus), by avoiding crops grown in former cotton growing regions. An arsenic based pesticide was widely used on cotton crops, contaminating the soil. Texas rice and citrus are much more likely to contain high levels of arsenic than California grown crops.
I'm just making a joke. It may be less toxic that other states' but in California we have to label it because the Prop 65 threshold is 1/1000th of the “no observable effect level."
That is likely to mess up the taste really hard. Rice cookers are designed to cook the rice to just the right favor. But if you use something that is pre-cooked… It's definitely going to overcook it.
Rice cookers are designed to reach a certain humidity level, you can choose how much under/over cooked you can make the rice by putting less/more water
You are probably referring the old style rice cooker. Modern rice cooker does much more than that, with controlled temperature and duration, and probably have multi preset for each thing you want to cook. And it probably don't expect people to put pre-cooked rice into it at first place.
People use both of them. The old style one for heating dishes or making soups, because it is simple to control manually. The new style one for cooking rice, because it taste better and much unlikely to mess up like old style one.
Source: I am a Taiwanese, and you literally see both of them in every home here.
I’m a bit annoyed the article doesn’t even bother to touch on whether this is a concern domestically. Are we exporting the bad stuff? Or are we eating it too?
Rice is going to have higher concentrations of arsenic no matter what. Indian rice has the lowest. It’s very high in Bangladesh so I would never buy rice from there. Chinese rice is also very high in arsenic. The US, Italy and Spain are particularly bad as well. If you buy rice make sure it’s Indian or Pakistani. Japanese rice also has lower levels of arsenic, comparable to India and Pakistan.
What about the second largest rice exporter, Thailand? This is what I found:
> In comparison, the American rice accumulated the highest arsenic concentration (mean 0.257 mg kg−1) followed by the Thai rice (mean 0.200 mg kg−1), the Pakistani rice (mean 0.147 mg kg−1), the Indian rice (mean 0.103 mg kg−1), and finally the Egyptian rice (mean 0.097 mg kg−1).
Egypt doesn’t really export a significant amount of rice (77th rice exporter in the world, <0.02% of Indian output) so its inclusion is irrelevant here since you will never find it in stores. Its arsenic level is basically the same as Indian rice.
> White basmati rice from California, India, and Pakistan, and sushi rice from the U.S. on average has half of the inorganic-arsenic amount of most other types of rice.
My understanding is that rice you buy in China, which is presumably Chinese, is generally good for arsenic since the authorities are really hot on it, given the amount they eat. I can't remember where I read this but it seems plausible.
"Yes, but". It's possible for large nations like USA and China to grow rice in heterogenous regions and meet domestic demand with rice grown in low-arsenic regions (California), and export rice grown in high-arsenic regions (Texas).
That said, few people trust China to provide good numbers/testing/pro-active enforcement for consumer safety. They are good about applying very tough penalties (including personal executions/death penalty for corporate officers) after quality issues reach a certain level of public outcry. But most issues involve slow poisoning, don't directly kill/maim anyone, and don't reach any level of public outcry, so they go unenforced.
Their acceptable safe amount is 200mg/kg which is considered very high in the rest of the world. It’s a 100% higher than the average amount of arsenic in Indian rice.
What are the safe trace levels, assuming zero is impossible to achieve? I'm guessing our rice exports to Haiti are almost 100% white since brown rice is more of a domestic specialty crop (is it eaten much outside of the western developed world?).
It is in fact a problem domestically as well, rice is a well-known bio-accumulator of arsenic. This is the reason for guidelines on how much rice pregnant women and children should eat.
The other common arsenic bio-accumulator in our food is brassica oleracea i.e. broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, and other cultivars of that plant.
That's why just to stay safe, I exclusively eat french fries and ham. Sure my doctor keeps talking about cholesterol and something about the pressure of my blood, but they're just in the pocket of big brassica!
Kidding aside, I really think that a more... "European" for lack of a better word... attitude would do us a lot of good in the US when it comes to food. Our bottled water is full of plastic, our rice and brassica are loaded with heavy metals, and a lot of our food just sucks. Our dairy is sub-par unless you buy the very high end, our meat varies wildly, and you never quite know what you're getting.
Ugh, as someone with celiac disease, I don't have many starch choices. Don't take rice from me!
The recent lead contamination in apple sauce made me glad we have the FDA, but also wonder if the FDA is doing enough. I've ran across some political conspiracy theories about doing away with the FDA and similar organizations, and I think I should appreciate the FDA while I can.
But also, why did it take a bunch of kids getting lead poisoning for the FDA to find that apple sauce had a lead problem? Systematically testing products from the stores seems like a low hanging fruit, one of the simplest and most effective means of regulating the food supply. Is this not happening? What is the FDA doing that is more important than performing regular checks of the food in stores for contaminants?
Maybe I'm a pessimist, but if rice commonly does have unsafe levels of arsenic, I'm not confident that anyone will say or do anything until it becomes a tragedy.
Certain political stances think that companies are the best people to curtail their own behavior. That inspections should never be done by the government.
That no sane company would ever chase short term profit and stock price, over going bankrupt in 5 years, because they killed 1/2 their customers.
So the FDA hasn't the budget to do random pulls I suspect.
Of course, if you think of how many products are on grocery store shelves, pulling and testing 100k? 200k? products a week would be a budget indeed.
You're dramatically underestimating the amount of work that testing all foods would entail. It would be, at the minimum: every_single_type_of_food * every_production_point_of_said_food * every_manufacturing_point_of_said_food(e.g. restaurants) * every_test_to_run * frequency_to_test_at. That's a wildly exponential function.
So the way the FDA (and most regulatory agencies in the US) works is by researching what they believe to be safe and then requiring companies agree to only use those methods/components. If a company does something else, they are required to provide evidence that they believe it is safe. The FDA then evaluates the provided evidence, rather than e.g. running labs/experiments/etc themselves.
This drives numerous issues. For instance one is a 'generally recognized as safe' exception that allows companies to add entirely new components to their foods without even notifying the FDA. [1] Genetically engineered foods are another big one. A genetically engineered e.g. potato is, from the FDA's definitions, just a potato. And so it there's no further regulatory oversight or safety testing done whatsoever. The only thing they offer is a voluntary 'plant biotechnology consultation program.' [2]
I think removing "every_manufacturing_point_of_said_food(e.g. restaurants)" would suffice, and be would perfectly appropriate. We literally already do this for all exported and imported food. So it's not absurd at all.
Also I think your variable naming is a bit off. Restaurants aren't generally considered manufacturers.
No, they don't. What people think the FDA does and what it really does in general are extremely different. There's a very readable paper here [1] precisely on FDA handling of food imports - that is, if for some reason, you don't choose to believe random internet guy insisting everything most people think they know about a topic is wrong. I don't think it's very purposeful for me to just rephrase the paper when you can read it yourself and get all the details. But, if nothing else, I'll at least quote the lead sentence of the background section:
---
"The FDA’s overall foods program is distinct in several respects from the agency’s other public health regulatory program areas. First—with the exception of food and color additive approvals and premarket notification for certain foods—foods under FDA jurisdiction, whether produced within or outside the United States, do not require premarket approval. Thus, the foods program overall is generally a postmarket program."
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The FDA does spot testing of high risk foods but otherwise relies primarily on corporations to simply promise that they're following the regulations that the FDA publishes. That's how you get things like lead in apple sauce - it's not something the FDA is going to be checking for. By contrast, they would likely test something like chicken, coming from a region that had a recent bird flu outbreak, for contamination.
The bigger problem is we have a ton of regulatory overhead. The FDA and the USDA are both responsible for checking the safety of different parts of the food supply, and this causes issues. Instead of it being a clear priority for one agency it gets muddled in which agency should be looking at what. Then couple that with the fact that the FDA historically spends more time on drug safety than food safety and the USDA has conflicting priorities in many ways, combined together you end up with some real issues with catching things early and/or before they hit the market
It could be solved by creating a single agency dedicated to food safety and removing the burden from two the agencies that have many other priorities on top of food safety.
That in a tl;dr nutshell is the problem. There is a good overview of these dynamics done by Last Week Tonight that’s on YouTube I recommend for an overview: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Za45bT41sXg
This sounds a lot like the justification for creating the DHS to encompass the historically-disjoint agencies. I don't disagree with you, but I worry that the result would end up providing food safety theatre, à la TSA.
I don’t think the theater resulted from the joining of the agencies but rather the change in mindset post 9/11 that led to the merger. Common root cause.
I can’t recall where but I read something about southern US rice (especially Texas) having high levels of arsenic. California rice was reported as safer
On cotton fields lead arsenate was used as a pesticide to kill boll weevils. Some of that land now is rice fields. USA rice is marked Product of USA to differentiate from foreign crop. California grown is marked California to differentiate it from US south grown rice.
Or in other countries. It makes total sense for the study to focus on analyzing samples in one market, but turning it into a news story without outside context is misleading - it seems like the story is about Haiti when it’s really about the US.
It mostly isn't a concern domestically. Americans don't eat nearly as much rice as Haitians, apparently.
What constitutes a dangerous level of arsenic in the diet is controversial. First, arsenic is an essential micronutrient similar to selenium, and with a similar toxicity profile. There isn't much science to support the notion that the trace levels commonly found in food and water represent a health risk. Second, the recommended arsenic thresholds set by the government were the product of efforts by environmentalists to make opening new mines impractical by setting the standard below background environmental levels for many types of mining. This was sold under the theory that "arsenic is toxic at any dose" but per the first point, it clearly isn't.
tl;dr: There was a lot of motivated reasoning and not much science behind the food and water arsenic recommended safe levels, and several regions of the planet are subject to significantly higher background levels with no ill effects. You definitely don't want to go out of your way to consume arsenic -- it is toxic at some dose -- but much of the discussion around the level of risk is misleading.
As far as I understand there is no actual evidence that arsenic is an essential trace element for humans. There is some data in animals, but not in humans.
Of course it is a gross generalization, talking about the diet of any country usually is.
While everyone is focused on rice, the other major bio-accumulator is brassica vegetables such as cabbage, broccoli, and cauliflower. Many parts of Asia consume large quantities of both plants daily as staples, which suggests that the risk is low in practice.
Your Asia observation is relevant only if Asian levels of arsenic in the soil is comprable US levels, but I always thought levels in the soil in the southern US are an order of magnitude or 2 higher.
Don’t buy rice from Texas or Mississippi. The Consumer Reports analysis other people are linking showed the former big cotton states had contaminated many of their rice fields with arsenic from cotton growing.
I think the whole point is that an American who eats a lot of rice is not served by the answer “it’s not a problem, Americans don’t eat a lot of rice”.
I think the people are trying to figure out if arsenic levels in rice will be a problem for them specifically, not our population as a whole. When they say “is that a problem here?” they mean “is the rice I am buying here of concern if I eat a lot of it?”
There empirically is a standard American diet. Of course diversity also exists but it’s insignificant statistically. When this changes you’ll see different food at rest stops on interstate highways. It’ll happen but not very fast.
I'd be curious to see a study that weighs the health costs of too much arsenic, with the health costs of too few calories. It's not intrinsically obvious what the cost/benefit analysis is.
Obviously, this assumes that if Haiti doesn't import bad rice from the US, their calories per capita would decrease or cost per calorie increase, which isn't necessarily the case. Also obviously, we should do everything we can to decrease arsenic content for healthier food.
It's akin to the problem of our housing standards and regulations that are so high, that we struggle to build low cost housing that satisfies code, so instead tons of people end up living on the street.
One way we “split the eye of the needle’s onion” or whatever is differentiate on things you “do for others” and those you “do to yourself”. For example, relax building codes for work done by the homeowner - the problem comes when people sell.
Arsenic used to be added to chicken feed, to change the color of the meat. The chickens’ arsenic droppings were used to fertilize rice fields. Rice concentrates arsenic out of the soil. I think the rice from Arkansas and other southern states are the most contaminated with arsenic. Whoops.
There are cooking methods to remove arsenic from rice. Simplest method is to use a coffee percolator to run fresh hot water through the rice. The other way is to boil the rice in lots of water for five minutes, discard the water, then add fresh water and cook until completed.
Not trying to minimize the gravity of this situation, however I want to point out that soaking rice in water overnight prior to cooking, as well as cooking it in a larger quantity of water (excess water is drained off, rather than cooking with less water until rice is dry) has been tested to reduce arsenic levels by around 80%. I've been doing this for years, and once you make a habit out of it, it's really not a big deal. Makes me feel better about eating rice 2-3x per week.
Most Hatians are critically short of both drinkable water and cooking fuel (not to mention food), so any advice to take extra steps that require extra fuel or water are likely to be ignored for the sake of short-term survival.
> The study also pointed to comparatively loose U.S. limits on concentrations arsenic and cadmium, which can leach from both human and naturally occurring sources to contaminate food and water. Rice is especially prone to absorb these metals.
So Haiti has nothing whatever to do with the root problem.
And the headline forgot to mention the added bonus of toxic cadmium in U.S. rice.
“According to the study, average arsenic and cadmium concentrations were nearly twice as high in imported rice compared to Haitian-grown product, with some imported samples exceeding international limits.”
I’m a biologist. I worry about these differences. Many things we measure in our bodies are reported in “fold change”, we plot things on logarithmic scales, things go 10x, 100x before we call them “active”.
The same happened in my house, I had the lead contenting of the drinking water measured. It was 1.5 (something) - in the green. A fried does it: 2.7, orange. He is recommended to flush his pipes at the start of each day.
I just can’t help but feel very weird about these very small differences between “safe” and “alarming”.
Well your a trained scientist (as am I) so you actually have an understanding of biological systems that other people don't.
I agree that the EPA or FDA cutoffs give a false sense of risk. If an acceptable limit is set at 50 ppm, then 49 ppm will pass and 51 ppm will fail. The actual biological impact between the two? Impossible to measure. Hell, the instruments and sampling technique used in testing likely have an accuracy of +/- several ppm.
I can look it up (ug/L or something). But my whole point is about the factors. Super low concentrations and then a factor 2 is from safe to alarming? I almost don’t buy it.
Just consider restricted media. Below a threshold, different things happen due to rates of metabolism, preferential uptake, etc.
And this isn't to convince you that your water is "safe", but lead is excreted up to a threshold, and beyond that, it can begin to accumulate in bones and teeth, which is a rate. If yours is below the amount you're likely to consume over the given period that accumulation is likely to occur, then guidance says you should try to reduce it somehow to minimize the probability of long term health effects.
I don't think either of you are at risk for acute toxicity from your water levels, so you could think of it like calories; you're fine with your current caloric intake, but should you double it? Diet lead, that classic taste.
Whenever I read sad stories about poor countries like Haiti[a], I like to ponder a hypothetical scenario:
If one were a god who could, with the snap of a finger, replace the country's entire population with an equal number of people, randomly sampled from a rich, diverse country (say, Canada, but any other rich, diverse country would do), how would the poor country's fortune change, if at all, over the course of a generation?
That's like an instant infusion of billions of dollars, since gainting that experience and education was paid for by the donor society. So they would almost certainly do better.
You can easily argue it would change significantly and not because of the reasons you think. Its because “rich” people will help “rich” people become rich again and not “poor” people. Value goes where its likely to increase in worth
Saw a documentary yesterday called Poverty, Inc[1] and it dives into the rice imports to Haiti. While it's agreed that international aid was a good thing in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, they argued that continued aid to the country has largely destroyed native rice farming by the simple fact that it's hard to compete with something that's free.
Highly recommend a watch if you haven't seen it already. Saw it yesterday and really gave a new perspective to international aid.
> heavy metals that can increase risks of cancer and heart disease
I’d say this is the least of Haiti’s problems right now, as virtually nobody there is expected to live long enough to develop any cancer or long-term heart disease.
That’s life expectancy at birth (which is still 30th worst in the world), and it doesn’t incorporate getting shot in a random act of gang violence at the old age of 17.
> The report called for an ethical investigation into U.S. rice exporters,
It is common to grow rice, test it, and if it fails a test, then you sell it into another market where the test thresholds are different.
However, this is unethical because safety thresholds are set imagining that different samples of a product will have different levels of contaminants. It is assumed that buyers will eat from different sources randomly.
However, if some sellers are picking which country they sell to based on test results, then a market with a slightly higher safety threshold will in fact be flooded with much more contaminated products, on average. And the people will suffer as a result.
I have also heard that Indian rice has the lowest level of arsenic. Indian farmers are increasingly using rice varieties that are resistant to arsenic uptake and also the climate (hot and humid, which helps to reduce arsenic)
The US has thresholds at the federal and state levels for domestic food contamination. The federal limits tend to be lower to allow states to decide what they consider safe, not because they're goals, which also implies they're regularly sampled.
FDA and USDA are occasionally the testers (like for PFAS) and always the arbiters, but it's the individual members of the self-regulated farming and import organizations who are responsible for getting the testing, and only the high level aggregate reports are published, I believe. Look up lab testing services - it's a big business, and they're required.
You're also asking a question that you probably aren't aware of the scale of. US ag is huge and time sensitive. It's a miracle it works, and its systems run on the labor of millions. By the time that processed seasonal Starbucks muffin gets sold, the various parts of it have travelled farther than most Americans will in their entire lives.
The comment section here is a clue. It's truly horrifying.
Deflection, projection, denial, minimizing concerns, semantic debate with near-zero, statistically insignificant levels of reading comprehension, blatant racism, ignoring the fact we've known this since 2007, etc, etc.
And this is a 'well-educated' crowd, with full access to the information needed to come to a better conclusion literally a click or two away.
I really wouldn’t be shocked if exported agricultural commodities were held to a different standard than if they were sold domestically or imported. Likely they’re only held to the standard of the exporting nation and to me it is likely that if the industry senses any form of lax enforcement many players will simply press their luck on how often they get caught by overseas regulators.
This is pure FUD because it's not a racist conspiracy. Rice grown in America contains unhealthy levels of arsenic because of America's soils and the nature of rice.
> "The flooding of U.S. rice into Haiti is not only economically violent for Haitian peyizan who struggle to sell their local product, but also violent toward the long-term health of Haitian consumers," the report said.
This seems like a very strange way for a research paper to talk about chemical analyses. The Reuters article doesn’t cite the paper directly, but it’s here [0].
I note from their paper that rice from all non-Haitian origins, not just the US, contained what they describe as worrying levels of arsenic. I’m also confused by their (mislabeled) graphs attempting to suggest that the levels are routinely harmful. Those graphs all seem to reflect people whose bodies weigh between 8 and 20kg each eating 1.5 cups dry = 300g dry = 1kg cooked rice daily.
That seems like a lot of rice for a baby to eat, but I don’t know what’s normal. What’s more, their graphs seem like they’re saying both local and imported rice would largely fall below the “cancer risk” threshold they show on one set of graphs, and both largely exceed the “non-cancer health outcome” thresholds they’re interested in.
To top it off, in their conclusion, they mention that they know they’ve been measuring the wrong thing all along: they’re measuring total arsenic levels, while the standards they use refer to concentrations of inorganic arsenic. The EPA says that organic arsenic is nontoxic and harmless. [2]
> By measuring only total arsenic levels, our measurements do not exactly correspond to thresholds set by Codex and the U.S. FDA, which are based on inorganic arsenic concentrations.
A quick look at other widely-cited experimental research suggests that around 40% of the total arsenic in US rice is the harmful, inorganic kind [3]. And the remainder of the total arsenic count is the nontoxic organic kind.
Which suggests that if the researchers at hand had measured the thing that was actually harmful, instead of including harmless things with a similar name, they’d find that all the rice in question was below the worrisome thresholds, even for the small humans they’re worried about.
I wonder if the same policy agenda informs the rest of the editorial decisions at the “Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development.” A causal glance suggests an activist kind of flavor [1], but I don’t have much of a baseline on norms in the “food justice” discipline.
> "The flooding of U.S. rice into Haiti is not only economically violent for Haitian peyizan who struggle to sell their local product, but also violent toward the long-term health of Haitian consumers," the report said.
I was really hoping that the academic writing trend where you call everything “violent” had died around 2021, but apparently it’s still with us!
That's not it. You just can't help a freezing person by setting fire to them.
Giving people money for food raises the prices of food. Giving people free food ruins the people selling food.
A starving population is an economics problem, rarely is it a commodity shortage.
If you want to distort an economy you have to do it intentionally and with great care with an eye for helping it grow.
For example, look at what they already import from your country, buy it from your own producers and then sell it at a deep discount, but watch out for who else sells it and if you'll distort any other exporters markets.
Look at their needs for capital equipment, especially where efficiency is involved and sell it to them cheaply, again paying attention to not trample existing markets.
Many more examples but in essence pay attention to the consequences of your actions, don't just focus on one and ignore the rest.
This is not wrong in any way. If you undermine someone's ability to help themselves and then withdraw your help, that's two bad actions. There are other ways to go about helping.
This train of thought has very “just build more housing to solve homelessness” character. While it’s a true statement, there are people in need in the interim that would eventually be helped by more housing, but will be irrevocably harmed without short and mid term interventions.
In your case, yeah, eradicating corruption might solve the issue, but that’s something that has eluded the entire human race since time immemorial. So in the meantime while we work to solve the human equivalent of an NP Hard problem, let’s help people out.
"Quality education" has to come together, unfortunately (contrary to conservative thinking) with free money and food too, as hungry people do not learn.
Haiti used to have a thriving rice production and could feed itself. In the 90s, the then government made some bad decisions when dealing with the IMF and reduced import taxes to almost nothing. At which point, farmers where not able to compete anymore, and the dark spiral began.
The poster was only saying there was no real way for the U.S. to do anything without being condemned in this situation. Ironically, you jumped on them for even saying that. So, it's damned if you do, damned if you don't, and damned if you observe that you're in a no-win situation. No wonder people get defensive.
The Dominican Republic is on the same damn island, also had a colonial history, had the same GDP per capita as Haiti until 1970, but now has 10x the GDP per capita as Haiti.
The USA are still meddling in Haiti[0], so don't discount their role into Haiti's current situation.
> The Dominican Republic is on the same damn island, also had a colonial history
Not just any colonial history: the USA invaded the Dominican Republic as well. Crazy how they can't refrain themselves from doing it over and over.
Now, comparing Haiti and Dominican Republic solely on the basis that both are on the same island and had a colonial history is too much of a simplification to mean anything, and to be fair verges on racist conclusions. Almost like you're implying that Haitians are inherently worse than Dominicans.
You blamed a person for something they did not do. I'm really not sure what you meant here. It seems to me like you are purposely trying to poison the conversation.
I mean, its not far off. The country has been in immense debt over freeing themselves from slavery. Economic violence is real, you undermine local markets then make them dependent on your exports, hurting the local economy and resiliency.
But the broader point is that whenever you have a strong and weak entity interacting, you can always find a way to frame anything the stronger entity does as "violence".
Not sharing your wealth and power? Violence by indirectly causing suffering with your hoarding.
Sharing your wealth and power? Violence by harming the weaker entity's ability to take care of themselves and be independent.
At the end of the day, some armchair critic is always going to accuse the stronger/wealthier party of violence, so accusations of such lose their meaning and people increasingly ignore the boy who cried wolf.
> whenever you have a strong and weak entity interacting, you can always find a way to frame anything the stronger entity does as "violence".
Correct. While it's a bit crude term than the historical "inquitable", it accurately describes trade surpluses being lost to the weaker party compared to a more equal exchange. This is why BATNA is an important principle.
2. Injury done to that which is entitled to respect,
reverence, or observance; profanation; infringement;
unjust force; outrage; assault.
[1913 Webster]
Um it’s violence and privilege to use famous examples of “Western” literature to make your point and it doesn’t consider the diverse heritage of learners.
Could you please cease doing violence and not think those thoughts?
(/s This is sarcasm - the second line obviously references Doublethink. The example is meant to point out how ridiculous it is that thought is being shut down by accusing people with an expanded/changed definition of violence)
'"There's a long history in Haiti of groups like USAID flooding the market with rice and other imports," said Victor. "This is not what we need. We need real help and that means completely changing the agricultural system."'
'Paul O'Brien of Oxfam America says the lessons of the harm of flooding a country like Haiti with subsidized rice should have been learned a long time ago.
'"The days are gone when we can throw up our hands in terms of unintended consequences; we know now what these injections can do to markets," he said. "The question we want asked is what is being done to guarantee long-term food security for Haitians."'
'[...] there is plenty of malnutrition.
'Some 2.4 million Haitians — out of a population of nearly 10 million — cannot afford the minimum daily calories recommended by the World Health Organization.'
'But donors often sink more money into emergency aid than such long-term projects.'
'Before the 1970s, Haitians only ate rice once or twice a week, getting starch from other local staples like sorghum and manioc, Woolley said.
'Today, rice is a staple but often U.S.-subsidized rice costs less than locally grown crops. On Friday, a 55-pound bag of US rice cost about $36, compared with $60 for the same size sack of Haitian rice.'
'In the 1970s, fearing indigenous pigs could spread swine fever, the United States — in conjunction with USAID — moved to replace all of Haiti's hearty Creole pigs with pigs from Iowa. The end result was the fragile U.S. pigs often became sick, preferred expensive feed and had fewer litters.'
'[Haitians need] cheap credit, cheaper fertilizer and more government aid, he said.'
Probably not but they’ll have a harder time finding capital the next time they need to borrow. It is generally unwise to default on debt if you think you may need to borrow again.
There aren't many instances in history where people are actually systematically exterminated on the grounds of their race, so Haiti is of historical significance.
It is indeed quite unusual for a chattel slave uprising to actually succeed. It's more the norm for them to be crushed and for their oppressors to continue to brutalize them with no consequences for decades and centuries to come.
Nobody bats an eye at the reprisals that follow when the slavers win.
In the case of Haiti, the country was isolated internationally for decades as a result of the revolt. The US refused to recognize Haiti for nearly 60 years, ironically despite the fact that the US was itself founded on a revolt on grounds that were less serious. This naturally stunted Haiti's development economically.
If you read the Wikipedia page rather than being inflammatory they extended full citizenship to Polish and German people there who turned against the remands of the slave state, so your assertion that this massacre was based on skin color rather than affiliation is false.
Your race baiting and lying is what should be removed.
“ The massacre excluded surviving Polish Legionnaires, who had defected from the French legion to become allied with the enslaved Africans, as well as the Germans who did not take part of the slave trade. They were instead granted full citizenship under the constitution and classified them as Noir, the new ruling ethnicity.”
If you're going to heap moral outrage on events 220 years ago, apply it to the whole situation, not just the part that makes you uncomfortable. Chattel slavery is utterly unconscionable and irredeemable, as is every society that participates in it.
(It's also weird how you're excluding the part where the Polish and the Germans were enfranchised by the Haitian government.)
Some people might say that "exterminated on the basis of race" isn't inaccurate if French is the race, not "everyone without lots of melanin." If someone killed all African blacks but spared some dark-skinned Indians, that would also still be a genocide.
While we're being complete, let's remember the part that the genocide extended to poor whites (not slaveholders) as well as women and children. The fact that they gave a pass to those who allied with them shows that the perpetrators were strategic, but does not detract from their bloodthirstiness.
As someone who believes in Karma, I am not surprised that a country founded on revenge at the race level has never managed to become a good place in any sense of the word.
It is overused, for sure, and stylistically obtuse, but nitpicking when the meaning is clear ("destructive"). And it is true: NGOs and "aid" that indiscriminately flood a market with cheap products under the lazy and foolish belief that giving away free stuff is a Good Thing does incredible damage to economies. It's one thing to distribute aid during a crisis. It's another to keep shipping free stuff indefinitely.
In this case, free rice is having the effect of price dumping. You can't compete with free, so local agriculture and cuisine is being wrecked, and diets are changing for the worse.
Another example is the distribution of so-called mitumba, where, say, ragpickers from New Jersey ship tons of used and second hand clothing to Africa, destroying the local textile industry. This, and intentional Chinese tactics (and probably American, among others), is how, for example, Nigerian cotton and textiles were destroyed.
If you want a country to flourish, often it's a matter of fucking off and letting it develop. Investment is good, of course, as long as it's done on the basis of a partnership between labor and capital, not taking over and pumping and dumping competition so you can effectively colonize the country economically. Unregulated free trade is always promoted by the powerful, as they can easily swoop into developing economies and entrench themselves before the local industrial base even has a chance to establish itself.
Then you are not familiar with the historical range of uses of the term, because it can certainly be synonymous. To "do violence to" does not imply physical force, but damage. I already said the particular manner in which the term is used is obtuse, but it is most definitely nitpicking, especially when all the original comment has to offer is a comment on how he doesn't like this particular usage of the word (as I said, I am also not a fan), paying no attention to the much more important substance of the article.
Indeed. Just look at phrases like "violent contrasts" [1]. That phrase has lasted throughout the entirety of its history back to 2004, too! [2]
Tenebrism, from Italian tenebroso ("dark, gloomy, mysterious"), also occasionally called dramatic illumination, is a style of painting using especially pronounced chiaroscuro, where there are *violent contrasts of light and dark*, and where darkness becomes a dominating feature of the image.
Don’t confuse “pumping and dumping” with “offering a cheaper product”.
Nearly any time a country that has figured out how to produce something in a scalable fashion for cheaper (including shipping), it will wipe out local alternatives.
It doesn’t matter to the local competitor if it’s being subsidized by a foreign government, it’s just as “violent”.
It’s stupid to replace “cant compete” with “violent” when there are a lot of actual examples of competition where real violence is involved (mafia).
Why don’t we ratchet the Overton Window a bit further and introduce the term “economic rape” when you force product into an economy. That’s bound to produce some useful discussions.
It’s not bike shedding. It makes the writer look like an emotional moron when they use terms like “economic violence” for an export program that disrupts one small industry.
Do you consider cheese exports from France to be economic violence against Wisconsin?
Not going to get involved in this any further because I still think you're bike shedding. Just -- there's some intense irony in saying someone looks like "emotional moron" to win an argument. Stones, glass houses, etc.
But if France was knowingly shipping arsenic-laden cheese to the US in a way that displaced the local economy to the degree that the only available cheese is poison? That'd, at least, cause some violent diarrhea.
The intent of the words is wrong, not the literal meaning. There is no violence to someone offering a cheaper product.
You either don’t understand the meaning of “bike shedding” or you think one small portion of the economy struggling to compete on the price is “violent”. Either way, I think you’re confused about the definition of something pretty fundamentally.
If it was really the choice between, “you’ll get poisoned and have violent diarrhea if you eat this cheaper option” or “keep buying the previous local option”, both options would stay available.
So the point you tried to make really missed the mark. The way that arsenic rice could crush the local market is only if it had essentially no near to mid term side effects. If it was obvious people wouldn’t buy it.
Lol, friend. The "mark" I was trying to hit wasn't any point about arsenic or sickness. The entire point of that post was to use "violent" as a flavor word in an attempt to be clever to show that words are wibbly wobbly. Calm down and take a breath.
It’s not exceptionalism, it’s perspective. Anyone who has been exposed to actual economic violence (severe embargoes, depression collapses, hyper inflation, etc) sees writing like this and discredits the author for being an out of touch desk warrior.
>Stunned that people are defending this tbh.
It’s frankly shocking that you think deriding the author for calling food programs “economic violence” is defending this scenario. Take a step back and realize that multiple things can be wrong at once.
> And selling rice with internationally illegal levels of arsenic and other toxins is violent too.
You’d have to prove intent to call it violence. Seems more like negligence. Its also puzzling why someone would assume an intent to harm in this scenario .
Are we supposed to believe no one involved in selling this massive amount of rice knows what we learned in 2007 [0] ?!
> At one point during the reign of King Cotton, farmers in the south central United States controlled boll weevils with arsenic-based pesticides, and residual arsenic still contaminates the soil. Today, rice paddies cover fields where cotton once grew, and a large market basket survey published in the 1 April 2007 issue of Environmental Science & Technology now shows that rice grown in this area contains, on average, 1.76 times more arsenic than rice grown in California.
'Negligence' is not the word for this. It's violence, and it's inexcusable.
Your own sources show its not violence. Again, you would need to show intent to harm. But instead the intent was to increase yields by eliminating pests.
Most of Haiti doesn't eat mud cookies, what in the hell are you talking about? Most Haitians' diet consist of rice and beans. Clueless American remains clueless
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004896972...
Summary of bes method (PBA): pre-boil for 5', remove water, add fresh water, then cook rice normally.
https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S00489697203687...