Rastafari roots of plant-based eating

An Ital meal of rice, ackee, callaloo, and veggie chunks.

Source: Wikimedia Commons (2009)

In considering a vegan diet, I imagine a young, progressive urban consumer motivated by environmental or animal welfare concerns. In other words, someone who likely shops at a Whole Foods. In the West, veganism is packaged as something performed through individual consumer choices. That framing obscures the structural conditions shaping diets, and reinforces the mistaken belief that veganism is a modern invention. The “Ital” tradition complicates the popular narrative of modern veganism. Long before plant-based eating carried a price premium in Los Angeles, it was ordinary in the hills of rural Jamaica. 

The Rastafari movement began in the 1930s in Jamaica among the working poor who had been devastated by the global financial crash of 1929 and prolonged colonial mismanagement. These forces created mass unemployment and rural-to-urban migration into the slums of west Kingston. Rastas fled to the rural mountains where they could access land and practice self-governance without persecution.  

Leonard P. Howell, an early Rastafari leader, drew on the practices of Hindu indentured laborers in Jamaica to promote what became known as Ital living. The word “Ital” comes from “vital,” dropping the first letter to emphasize the pronoun “I”. This linguistic practice signals unity with the speaker, the listener, and Jah (God). Ital eating is an expression of “livity,” a Rastafari concept that the individual can embody and express spirituality through the practices of daily life.  For Rastafarians, Jah exists in all of creation, including plants, animals, and people. As such there is a divine force or energy in everything. 

What one puts in one’s body either enhances or degrades this life force. Food that has been processed or chemically altered is considered corrupted and further from Jah’s creation. Life force does not begin at the moment of consumption. Powell’s research participants described farming, cultivation, and conservation as the literal pouring of one’s energy and emotion into the earth. The sincerity of this effort determines how the earth responds and reciprocates that energy. 

Rural Rastafari food is shaped by what the land yields. Coconuts are naturally abundant across Jamaica. They are cracked, drained, grated, and squeezed into milk that forms the base of most dishes. Vegetables and aromatics are sautéed in coconut oil. The food typically contains beans, spices, chili peppers, and the coconut milk, stewed for hours over low heat and eaten communally. A strict Ital diet rejects salt as “a needless adulteration” of what Jah placed on the earth, so herbs and dry seasonings are key. Scotch bonnet peppers, thyme, lemongrass, allspice, and nutmeg build complex flavor without salt. 

The one-pot stew is a practical response to the rural conditions of Rastafari life. Land access is limited, so the range of available produce is narrow. A single pot stretches what is on hand to feed the community. Cooking takes place outside in clay pots often balanced over a wood fire by three stones. Metal cookware is avoided on the belief that it harms the body. 

In Saint Lucia, a young Rasta farmer described conversing with plants throughout their life cycle to transfer positive energy to them. He explained that during planting one must ensure a positive heart is present because this very energy will be transmitted to the earth. The same is true of cooking. Ital food involves preparing food with a clean heart to transfer life force into the food. Food must be cooked slowly, with intention and gratitude. This preserves and transmits the life energy that began in the soil. Food is not just physically nourishing; it is also spiritually nourishing.

Food that is rushed or processed severs the energy force and transmits a lower form. It follows too that food grown under corporate conditions is spiritually degraded. Jahson Peat, who runs a vegan restaurant in London called Zionly Manna, presents Ital as a process of relearning that strips away the method of eating brought about by colonialism. This is inseparable from a rejection of capitalism itself. Commitment to Ital eating is tightly linked to a broader turn away from the imported industrial and materialist ways of life, which are all combined under the Rastafari concept of “Babylon.” 

By contrast, mainstream veganism operates according to market logic. It converts diet choices into an ethical identity. For some, it is an exercise in personal branding, where what you eat signals who you are. This channels genuine ethical concerns for animals and the environment into demand for plant-based products. In this sense, the market-based vegan movement can be seen not as a challenge to the current food system, but a force that risks expanding it further, as seen through the IPO of Beyond Meat. The growth of this plant-based segment does not depend on replacing meat consumption, only on expanding overall consumer demand. The Ital diet is not a consumer identity. It seeks to reject the economic system and the very notion of consumerism upon which it relies. 

However, Ital does not operate entirely independent of market forces. Jaffe’s concept of “Ital chic” describes the convergence of middle-class consumerism and the Ital diet. In Kingston, Rasta symbols have been used to market artisanal soap lines and premium vegetable products. When a brand sells coconut-milk products with Rasta packaging, it co-opts a tradition built on self-sufficiency and places it inside the very market that tradition was designed to reject. This dynamic is similar to that explored in a blog post from this semester about rural tourism. It noted that rural culture is often packaged to meet consumer expectations, with authenticity operating as a selling point. 

Plant-based eating did not begin with a farmer’s market or with a marketing campaign. It owes some of its roots to rural Jamaica, where people grew what the earth offered based on a theological conviction. That story deserves to be remembered before it is repackaged.

The ronda and the rope: Parallel justice systems and the dangers of legal abandonment in rural Latin America

Peruvian President Ollanta Humala delivers a speech in rural Puno.
© Presidency of Peru, 2015 

Much has been written about the lack of access to legal services and the reduced capacity of state and legal actors in rural areas of the United States of America. Savvy writers usually stay clear of making worst-case-scenario predictions. This is understandable, as nobody wants to be the person who says the sky will fall. I shall not make such calamitous predictions either. What this article contains is instead a view into a place in which legal systems have failed and given way to other forms of "justice."

This article is a small survey of parallel systems of justice in rural and remote areas of Peru, a country with which I am intimately familiar. Over the course of this post I will go through the circumstances that led to the formation of such systems, their current status, and some of their worst excesses. Peru is not the United States. Its geography, history, and demographics are radically different. The underlying conditions that produced these parallel systems are not, however, unique to Peru. It is worth asking what fills a vacuum when the courts do not play a role. Some particular responses have emerged in Peru. Whether such responses might ever emerge in rural America is for the reader to imagine.

The geographical roots of legal absence

A lone truck challenges the curves of the Pasamayo Serpentine.
© Santiago Stucchi, 2008.

Peru's geography represents a major obstacle to the nation's political integration and by extension, to its legal system. Peru is vertically split in half by the Andes Mountain. The Andes are flanked on the east by the Amazon rainforest and on the west by the Pacific Ocean. Peru's capital, Lima, is home to one-third of the nation's population. This results in an extremely centralized nation, dominated by its political and economic coastal elites. Its mountainous terrain makes transportation quite difficult as well, with some highways like the infamous Serpentine of Pasamayo--an extremely narrow 14-mile stretch of highway which has mountain on one side and abyss on the other--being the only way between different regions of the country.

In many remote areas, especially in the Andes, there is very little formal policing. Courts are a distant, nonoperative institution. Language barriers do not help either, as about 15% of Peru's population speaks Quechua as their main language. But many Peruvians--especially those working in government--do not speak Quechua at all. Historically, communities in such areas have governed themselves with little involvement from the central or even regional government. They often handled disputes through informal assemblies or through respected community leaders. The first rondas campesinas (meaning "peasant patrols") were established in the northern Andean region of Cajamarca in the late 1970s. These early rondas were primarily created to deal with property crimes, the main one being cattle theft.

Sendero Luminoso and the militarization of the rondas

A painting displayed on the First Military School of Sendero Luminoso.
On the left, the students. On the right, Sendero's leader, Abimael Guzman. Above him the figures of Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin and Mao Zedong.

In May 1980, the Maoist terrorist group Sendero Luminoso (literally "Shining Path"), a primarily rural Andean movement, declared war on the Peruvian government. It was led by Abimael Guzman, a professor of philosophy at a university in Ayacucho (a region in the southern Andes). Part of Sendero's strategy was what they called "batir el campo" (meaning "scouring the countryside," destroying all non-Sendero authority in such regions). Initially, many rural communities sided with Sendero, agreeing with their message of discontent against the ways in which the government had neglected the people of the Andes.

When confronted with the violent revolts happening in the Andes, President Fernando Belaunde dismissed them, assessing the threat as nothing more than small issues with cattle rustlers. Sendero held "people's trials" against those it considered "antirevolutionary elements." The subjects of these trials were often community leaders, and the price of resistance was massacre. The most notorious of these was the Lucanamarca massacre of 1983, in which over 60 people (ranging from ages of 6 months to 70 years of age) were killed with machetes and axes, in retaliation for the killing of one of Sendero's commanders. What followed were years of massacres in the Andes, with most of the human cost falling on the rural communities who lived there.

Eventually, in the early 1990s, the Peruvian government found its footing in the fight against Sendero, and the war started to turn. Under the leadership of President Alberto Fujimori, the rondas started being armed and supported by the government. This cooperation proved instrumental to defeating Sendero in rural regions and displacing them into other areas where the government had an easier time fighting them. On September 12, 1992, Sendero's leader Abimael Guzman was captured in a safehouse in an upper-class neighborhood in Lima, where he was being hosted by a wealthy classical dancer. That was game over.

Constitutional recognition

Guzman's capture was an inflection point from which Fujimori moved forward with a series of reforms. Chief among them was the Peruvian Constitution of 1993. In its Article 149, the constitution recognizes the authority of the rondas campesinas within their jurisdictions, as long as they "respect the fundamental rights of people." The same article calls for the cooperation of the "traditional" judicial power and these parallel systems of justice going forward.

How the project of cooperation and respect for the fundamental rights of people is going is difficult to assess with precision. But, where statistics are scarce, it is always good to tell a story.

A Canadian in Ucayali

The village of Nuevo Jerusalen in the Ucayali Region of Peru.
© Vratislav S, 2012

Imagine you are a young (ish) Canadian man. Like many of your peers, you seek enlightenment. You doubt Western medicine and respect indigenous cultures. So, you decide to look into the real stuff. You travel south, to Peru, perhaps farther south, to the Ucayali Region of the Amazon rainforest. You do ayahuasca. It changes your life, so you seek to go further down the rabbit hole. You seek a teacher, Olivia Arevalo Lomas, a well-known elder, healer and community leader. You dedicate ten years of your life to this. Then one day, a bang, and your teacher is dead, three gunshot wounds.

The police eventually show up (it takes them some time), and everyone is really angry. Even worse, they think it is your fault. Oh no. Facebook posts start to be circulated. "WANTED" they say, then a picture of you, then a plea for clues on your whereabouts. People in the comments express their wishes that you are brought to justice; others propose rewards for hunting you down. Things are looking really bad for you.

But actually, these latest developments are not that bad, since you are already dead. Police soon find a phone which contains a video recording of your last moments. A mob got to you, quickly, well before the police ever got there, since you are conspicuously foreign. There was no trial, no evidence, no attorneys. You have been lynched, and your manner of death was strangulation.

Your family says you were really nice, hated guns, and just loved ayahuasca. The locals will remain convinced it was you who killed Arevalo Lomas. The rest of the world will never know. This story is not a thought experiment. This happened to Sebastian Woodruffe, a Canadian tourist. His death drew international attention in 2018 before disappearing from the news cycle within days.

Gerardo's choice

If you are in any way like me, you may have heard the story and said to yourself, "only one way to avoid a similar fate, stay as far away as possible from that region if you are not a local."

This is not, however, a solution. In 2007, in the village of Patascachi (near the border with Bolivia, population around 1000), a mob descended upon the house of Gerardo Parisuana, a farmer. Nearly the entire town was there. The occasion? Gerardo's son Gary was accused of being a cattle rustler, and the mob had had enough of him. The evidence against him? A gang of cattle rustlers, upon capture, had accused Gary of being their leader. The police arrested Gary, but found insufficient evidence to hold him and soon released him. For the rondas, however, the "trial" had already happened. The verdict was in. There was no room for appeals. Gerardo now had a choice: to lynch his own son, or to have the rest of his family share his son's fate. Gerardo made his choice. According to witnesses, the crowd tortured Gary before Gerardo hanged him.

The mayor on trial

A sign near the city of Ilave, in the Puno Region.
© TeshTesh, 2015

Not even money and power are enough to protect one from such a fate. In 2004, in the city of Ilave (elevation 12,000 feet, in the Puno Region, near Lake Titicaca in the heart of the Andes), the mayor of the city, Cirilo Robles, was lynched by a mob. It all started with a protest sparked by allegations of corruption and embezzlement. Aymara-speaking peasants made camp in front of the municipality's doors, protesting that the mayor had promised to pave the Ilave-Mazocruz highway, a promise yet to be fulfilled. The mayor left the city as soon as the protests started, returning only weeks later. When he finally came back, he held a meeting with his council at his private residence, in which he resolved to resign.

The mob found out about the mayor's return, and they soon descended upon his home. They breached the house and dragged the mayor out after giving him a beating. He was tortured for hours before being hanged in the city's square. His lifeless body was found under a bridge. Later that year, Peru's Government Accountability Office investigated the allegations against him. They found no evidence of embezzlement and exonerated him. The Supreme Court of Peru sentenced two members of the mob to 30 years in prison. Mayor Robles' successor, Miguel Flores, closed this somber chapter with a comment that could be considered the most Peruvian aphorism, "Everything remains the same for us."

Conclusion

The rondas campesinas are not just a series of horror stories. They emerged from genuine necessity and fulfilled a role that nothing else could. They even have constitutional recognition. But the results they tend to generate speak for themselves. Formal policing and legal institutions are not perfect, but they tend to produce less shocking and violent results. 

Peru is not the United States. The Andes are not Appalachia. The Amazon is not the Ozarks. But legal vacuums do not know borders, and the dynamics that fill them may follow recognizable patterns. Whether those patterns may ever extend to the United States is, as said in the introduction, for the reader to imagine.

Literary Ruralism (Part LI): Attention to "rural" in Dan Wang's Breakneck, on China's rise

Breakneck:  China's Quest to Engineer the Future by technology analyst Dan Wang was published last month by W.W. Norton.  The promotional blurb touts the book, in part, thusly:  

Wang blends political, economic, and philosophical analysis with reportage to reveal a provocative new framework for understanding China—one that helps us see America more clearly, too. While China is an engineering state, relentlessly pursuing megaprojects, the United States has stalled. America has transformed into a lawyerly society, reflexively blocking everything, good and bad.

I came to the book after listening to Ross Douthat's interview with Wang on the "Interesting Times" podcast.  While Wang's book primarily contrasts the differing approaches to development and infrastructure of the United States and China, it often raises the matter of rural-urban difference and how those differences play out in the two countries.  I was intrigued, for example, by Douthat's comparison of Guizhou, a backwater Chinese province that Wang uses to illustrate an underdeveloped place, to West Virginia.  The transcript from the podcast features this from Wang: 

Guizhou... is a land where a local said, “Not three feet of land is flat, not three days go by without rain and not a family has three silver coins.”  China’s fourth-poorest province, I was surprised to see, had much better levels of infrastructure than one could find in much wealthier places in the United States, like New York State or California.

We saw very tall bridges all around us. We saw a guitar-making hub. We saw a lot of fancy new roads that were a cyclist’s dream. And it was only afterward when I realized how bizarre it was that China’s fourth-poorest province — about the level of G.D.P. per capita of Botswana, much less than Shanghai or Guangdong — was able to build all of these things.

It is a province with 11 airports, 50 of the highest bridges in the world and brand-new, spiffy highways — and that’s because China was just building a lot in its equivalent of a South Dakota or West Virginia.

That's a good introduction to the book excerpts that follow.  I have highlighted the word "rural" in context.  

Modern China has many tools of social control. Within living memory, most Chinese residents worked inside a danwei, or work unit, which governed one’s access to essentials like rice, meat, cooking oil, and a bicycle. Many people still live under the strictures of the hukou, or household registration, an aim of which is to prevent rural folks from establishing themselves in cities by restricting education and health care benefits to their hometown. Controls are far worse for ethnoreligious minorities: Tibetans are totally prohibited from worshipping the Dalai Lama, and perhaps over a million Uighurs have spent time in detention camps that attempt to inculcate Chinese values into their Muslim faith. 

The engineering state can be awfully literal minded. Sometimes, it feels like China’s leadership is made up entirely of hydraulic engineers, who view the economy and society as liquid flows, as if all human activity—from mass production to reproduction—can be directed, restricted, increased, or blocked with the same ease as turning a series of valves. (pp. 5-6)

* * * 

The Guizhou locals we chatted with were prouder of their bridges than anything else. My friends and I cycled across bridges that were set above plunging ravines. State media boasts that Guizhou has become a “museum of bridges,” a few of which are trying to develop into tourism sites: The tenth-highest bridge in Guizhou (which is twenty-third globally) hosts the world’s highest bungee jump. Each time the engineers build a bridge, they inevitably announce that travel times between two towns have been cut from many hours to perhaps a few minutes. That creates real convenience and connection for rural people. Some of these are bridges to nowhere, but after a few years, they become somewhere. 

(I am reminded of what a "bridge to nowhere" connotes in the United States; read some of my analysis of the political implications of the phenomenon here). 

Still, beneath Guizhou’s engineering marvels are counties mired in poverty. At $8,000 per capita, the province has the income of Botswana, 40 percent below China’s national average and less than a third that of rich coastal cities like Beijing and Shanghai. One day, Christian remarked on how few working-age adults we saw in Guizhou: Those who don’t have a job making guitars have mostly migrated to other provinces, leaving small children in the care of grandparents. In 2010, only half of Guizhou’s children attended high school—the lowest rate in the country. News reports often featured stories of children having to rise at the crack of dawn and hike through harrowing mountain paths, some with rope ladders, to be able to attend school. 

In spite of the challenges of deep rural isolation, China’s fourth-poorest province—where household income is one-fifteenth that of New York State—has vastly superior infrastructure: three times the length of New York’s highways, as well as a functional high-speed rail network. And Guizhou isn’t exactly an exceptional Chinese province. Across the country, the engineering state has relentlessly built public works, making Guizhou an extreme case of China’s growth strategy rather than a deviation from it. 

Modern China has been on a building spree. It began in the 1990s, after economic reopening took hold, and then received another boost in 2008, when the central government approved vast public works to respond to the global financial crisis. (pp. 27-28)

* * * 

The Fourteenth Five-Year Plan outlines interstellar research and other state-directed megaprojects. There’s something for the ordinary consumer too, but it’s nowhere near as exciting. To promote consumption, the plan suggests measures like “expanding the coverage of e-commerce in rural areas,” “improving product recalls,” and “improving in-city duty-free shops.” Fine measures, but puny relative to orbiting Mars. The economic planners have obviously poured their hearts into the scientific projects, whereas the consumption measures look like a hasty afterthought. When Chinese officials talk about promoting consumption, it often involves building new malls or replacing old industrial equipment. In other words, it’s still more about investing to build stuff rather than shifting the propensity of households to spend a greater share of their income. 

Under Mao, China practiced a more literal form of Marxism, with full state control of the means of production. Deng Xiaoping pivoted the country away from that failed experiment. As Deng was fond of remarking, the defining feature of socialism was not economic redistribution but rather “concentrating resources to accomplish great tasks.” That flexible definition allowed for greater adaptability, generated higher growth, and sustained the regime into the twenty-first century. Under Deng’s definition, the United States has also achieved plenty of socialism. The Manhattan Project, the Interstate Highway System, and the Apollo Program all concentrated resources to accomplish great tasks. Maybe even Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative could have been understood as socialism. When the engineering state works, it can produce beautiful cities like Shanghai. But Shanghai is exceptional: It has been China’s richest and most westernized city for the better part of a century. The engineering state also produces a lot of problems. To see them, we should return one more time to Guizhou. 

Under the gleaming new bridges lurk not only poverty but also a massive debt burden. The underlying hope of Guizhou’s construction is that infrastructure will invite lasting economic activity. Part of that has worked out: Guizhou incomes have risen by nearly 10 percent annually from 2011 to 2022, driven partially by urbanization and by the tourism facilitated by new infrastructure.  (pp. 37-38)

* * *  

But most of Guizhou’s infrastructure spending looks dubious. Its super-high bridges aren’t producing the revenue to recoup anywhere near their super-high costs. Of Guizhou’s eleven airports, five have less than a dozen flights each week—and there are three more airports still under construction. Guizhou has become one of China’s most indebted provinces, and it’s starting to feel real fiscal distress. In an unusual move, Guiyang’s finance bureau issued a public outcry in 2022 that it was at the end of its ability to deal with the debt. Quickly afterward, the government deleted its own admission. 

Guizhou’s debt has kindled Beijing’s wrath. In China, the only people scarier than debt collectors are political inspectors from the central government. The Communist Party has unleashed teams of officers from the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection to descend on Guizhou. They are unbound by even the modest levels of legal niceties afforded in China. Rather than investigating legal crimes, their remit is to find “violations of party discipline,” a nebulous charge that includes not only corruption but also misuse of public funds and political disloyalty to the Communist Party. That makes the commission akin to the Inquisition, enforcing doctrine and discipline on its members. (pp. 38-39) 

The worst-affected people are targeted minority groups, who have to bear Beijing’s social engineering. The state has singled out, for example, Tibetans, who are forced to relocate from high-altitude mountains, where they are able to graze their yaks and horses, to lower-altitude farms in part to monitor them more easily. What are yak herders supposed to do when they move down to apartment blocks? Rural people who know only their farming or pastoralist lives are often at loose ends when the government resettles them into rows upon rows of high-rises. Two researchers at the University of Colorado have documented China’s coercive tactics to compel locals to leave their homes. It is a process it calls “thought work,” ranging from presenting resettlement as a voluntary and happy choice to holding intensive one-on-one meetings with recalcitrant folks who do not want to leave. Officials mix inducements with threats until they wear down the farmers. Thus, the state has been able to achieve “voluntary” resettlement rates of 100 percent. 

Reckless construction has often produced rubbish quality. Builders employed cheap materials to construct even schoolhouses. The 2008 earthquake that tore through Sichuan also shattered thousands of schoolrooms, killing five thousand children (according to official figures).  (pp. 48-49)

* * * 

Though rich students in Shanghai score splendidly on international exams, education in China’s rural areas is still often abysmal. The Covid pandemic revealed that the country’s health care system is weak, with shortages of doctors and nurses and six times fewer intensive care unit beds per capita than in the United States. An official like Li Zaiyong might be more interested in building a gleaming hospital filled with sophisticated equipment. Their attention drifts, however, when it comes to installing the trained technicians capable of operating the facility, since the Communist Party is better at rewarding new construction than health outcomes. 

The engineering state is focused mostly on monumentalism. Though there are many public toilets, provision of toilet paper is only a sometimes thing. Nowhere in China is it advisable to drink tap water. Not even Shanghai. The engineering state has engaged in wild spasms of building over the past four decades. That has achieved considerable wonders and a fair degree of harm. The future would be better if China could learn to build less, while the United States learns to build more.

I’ve come to realize that there are many ways that China and the United States are inversions of each other.  (pp. 49-50) 

* * * 

China’s overbuilding has produced deep social, financial, and environmental costs. The United States has no need to emulate it uncritically. But the Chinese experience does offer political lessons for America. China has shown that financial constraints are less binding than they are cracked up to be. As John Maynard Keynes said, “Anything we can actually do we can afford.” For an infrastructure-starved place like the United States, construction can generate long-run gains from higher economic activity that eventually surpass the immediate construction costs. And the experience of building big in underserved places is a means of redistribution that makes locals happy while satisfying fiscal conservatives who are normally skeptical of welfare payments. 

Rather than worry about bond vigilantes, the engineering state has focused on delivering material improvements for the people. Rural folks in Guizhou have seen their material conditions of life improve immeasurably over the past few decades. The mixture of permitting free enterprise while building big infrastructure is part of the reason that the Communist Party has held on to consent of the governed.  (p. 54) 

I'll write a separate post later about the rural-urban divide in relation to China's one-child policy.  

iPhone factory rises in rural India. Does it provide rural development lessons for the United States?

Alex Travelli and Hari Kumar report from Devanahalli, India in yesterday's New York Times on the pending opening of an iPhone factory.  The story features many descriptors suggesting the remoteness and rurality of the place and concludes with a brief comparison to rural development efforts in the United States.  The plant, which will be fully functioning and employing 40,000 people by the end of this calendar year, responds to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's “Make in India” policy, announced in 2015.  The Modi government has committed $26 billion to subsidizing strategic manufacturing goals since 2020. 

A new iPhone factory in an out-of-the-way corner of India looks like a spaceship from another planet. Foxconn, the Taiwanese company that assembles most of the world’s iPhones for Apple, has landed amid the boulders and millet fields of Devanahalli. 

* * *

By the end of 2025, with the Devanahalli plant fully online, Foxconn is expected to be assembling between 25 and 30 percent of iPhones in India.

* * *

The effects on the region are transformative. It’s a field day for job-seekers and landowners. And the kind of crazy-quilt supply chain of smaller industries that feeds Apple’s factory towns in China is coalescing in India’s heartland. 

* * *

India’s most urgent reason for developing industry is to create jobs. Unlike the United States, it does not have enough: not in services, manufacturing or anything else. Nearly half its workers are involved in farming.

* * *

India is thick with people. A five-minute walk away, a village called Doddagollahalli looks the same as it did before Foxconn landed. Nearly all the houses clustered around a sacred grove belong to farming families growing millet, grapes and vegetables.

Some villagers are renting rooms to Foxconn workers. Many more are trying to sell their land. But Sneha, who goes by a single name, has found a job on the Foxconn factory’s day shift. She holds a master’s degree in mathematics. She can walk home for lunch every day, a corporate lanyard swinging from her neck.

It is people like Sneha, and the thousands of her new colleagues piling into her ancestral place, who make Foxconn’s ambitions for India possible. Mr. Trump wants to revive the fortunes of left-behind American factory towns, but the pipeline of qualified young graduates is not there.

Thus, while Trump wants this to happen in the United States, it probably won't, "without sustained government financial support to revive U.S. manufacturing and training to expand the pool of qualified factory workers."   

From Benin City to global stages: what Rema's journey teaches us about rural potential

When we talk about rural areas, we often associate them with limited opportunities, economic struggles, and slow-paced lifestyle. However, raw talent and unique cultural identity are hidden in these communities. When nurtured, they can thrive on global scale. A perfect example of this is the story of my favorite singer, Divine Ikubor, popularly known as Rema. The Nigerian Afrobeat sensation rose from Benin City to international fame. In my opinion, his journey reflects the reality of many rural areas worldwide: full of talent just waiting to be discovered.

 

The singer’s beginnings were undeniably humble. He was born in 2000, in Benin City, Nigeria, a region that isn't traditionally known for producing mainstream music stars. Like many people from smaller towns, Rema had to navigate economic and social challenges while chasing his dream. According to the World Bank’s “Nigeria Poverty Assessment 2022”, about 40% of Nigerians live below the national poverty line. In many regions, especially in the north, access to quality education and basic infrastructure such as clean water and electricity remains limited. To make matters harder, the Afrobeat sensation lost both his father and brother at a young age, forcing him to take on responsibility for his family. Before his breakthrough, he worked multiple jobs to support them.

 

What makes Rema stand out globally is his ability to blend Afrobeat with international influences while staying true to his Nigerian roots. Rural communities have rich cultural histories that can become assets rather than obstacles. For example, rural tourism seems to be growing worldwide, as people are increasingly interested in authentic experiences: learning traditional farming techniques, attending local festivals, and exploring indigenous arts. By embracing these traditions, rural communities can turn their heritage into a source of income and pride. 

 

Just like Rema’s talent was waiting to be recognized, rural areas worldwide are filled with people whose potential remains unseen due to lack of exposure. Technology and social media are slowly changing this narrative. The singer used to make music as a teenager and post it online. One of his freestyles went viral and caught the attention of music executives, which led him to sign with Mavin Records, the label that launched his international career. Similarly, South African singer Tyla also gained international recognition through her 2023 hit “Water”. The song amassed over 10 billion views on Tiktok.

Rema’s journey is inspiring but it’s not just about music. It is a case study about how potential can flourish with the right mix of talent, opportunity, and technology. For rural communities to thrive, they need more than just ambition —they need support. In that context, Nigeria has taken steps to support its booming creative sector. Initiatives like the Creative Industry Financing Initiative (CIFI), launched by the Central Bank of Nigeria, provide financial support to young creatives in music, fashion, and film. Similarly, the African Creative Blueprint, backed by a $3.5 million USAID investment and run by Ascend Studios, provides training and mentorship in TV production and other creative fields.

But despite these good intentions, initiatives like CIFI and the USAID-Ascend partnership are often centered in urban hubs, where exposure, and industry connections already exist. For a gifted musician in a rural area with no stable internet, no mentors, and no recording gear, these programs can feel out of reach. In her blog post, Sophie Roppé made a good point about rural festivals like Bonnaroo and Hinterland: they’re not just music events —they’re economic catalysts and cultural lifelines for smaller communities. Similarly, if countries like Nigeria could host festivals outside of urban centers, it could celebrate local talent and stimulate local economies.

If Nigeria truly wants to nurture the next generation of creatives, it must dig deeper. Funding is a start, but it must be followed by real infrastructure, decentralized mentorship, and digital access that reaches every corner of the country. Like Rema, rural talent is ready to shine. The question is: Are we ready to invest in it?

Ndala and Cyclone Freddy: the harsh reality of climate change

On March 13, 2023, Ndala, a village in northeastern Mozambique, was almost entirely submerged in water. Heavy rains caused the river running through the village to overflow. The torrent of water and rocks cleared everything in its path: houses and people inside them, roads, bridges, livestock, and vehicles. The cause of these tragic events was Cyclone Freddy, the longest tropical cyclone on record. Two years later, Ndala still faces the effects of the storm. The population endures isolation, illness, and deepening poverty. The cyclone injured many, tore families apart, and destroyed livelihoods. 

 

The people most affected by extreme weather, particularly in places like Mozambique and across Africa, are often the least responsible for the climate crisis. Those affected live in communities with the least resources to adapt to climate disasters such as Cyclone Freddy. As a result, these countries and population pay the heaviest price for climate change with their lives. 

 

This vulnerability is not unique to Mozambique. In his blog post “Rural vulnerabilities in a changing climate”, Ryan Chen highlighted how rural areas with weak infrastructure are the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change. He cites Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, where drought is worsening due to it. Similarly, Ndala also lacks infrastructure and has trouble dealing with flooding. 

 

The increased frequency of floods and droughts directly impacts agriculture, threatening crop yields and livestock, primary sources of income sustenance for many rural communities in Mozambique. The cost of adapting to these drastic changes strains already limited financial resources of rural communities.

Malawi, a neighboring country of Mozambique, was also impacted by Cyclone Freddy. Recognizing the previous challenges, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the government of Malawi launched a US$53 million agricultural development program in 2023. The initiative aims to commercialize agriculture, enhance small-scale farming resilience, and improve food security and nutrition across the country. As part of this effort, the seven-year Sustainable Agriculture Production program will equip farmers with the skills and resources needed to combat food insecurity, increase income, and improve rural livelihoods. In addition, the program allows funds to be reallocated to address immediate needs such as repairs to infrastructure that was damaged or destroyed by climate disasters. 

Nevertheless, while the IFAD has been actively involved in improving food security and resilient livelihoods for rural transformation in Mozambique, it didn't provide direct assistance to the country following Cyclone Freddy.

 

Climate disasters often lead to migration. Cyclone Freddy left thousands in Mozambique without homes, forcing them to migrate in search of safety and stability. However, under international law, these people do not qualify as refugees because their displacement is climate-related rather than a result of persecution based on race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or social group, as defined by article 1 of the Geneva Convention. 

Climate-displaced individuals are classified as internally displaced persons (IDPs) if they remain in their country or migrants if they cross borders. Under the Geneva Convention, refugees are entitled to the right to seek asylum, non-refoulement (not being sent back to danger), access to healthcare, education, and work in host countries, unlike IDPs and migrants.

 

This legal gap has sparked an ongoing debate about the legal recognition of “climate refugees”. The UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) advocates for the expanded definition of refugees to include those displaced by climate change. However, many countries that ratified the Geneva Convention oppose this change, fearing it would increase migration and legal obligations. Amnesty International argues that concerns over mass migration are overblown. Instead, the organization emphasizes the need for humanitarian assistance, as climate change continues to displace communities worldwide. 

 

The case of Cyclone Freddy and Ndala underscores the growing urgency of this debate. Moving forward, the international community can no longer afford to ignore the impact of climate change on rural communities. Without action, climate migrants will remain trapped in legal limbo, denied the protections they desperately need.

Connecting rural and small-town youth with higher education

Images are from STARS Network website

I recently learned of the STARS Network, that is the Small Town and Rural Students Network--when my own alma mater, the University of Arkansas, became one of its 32 members.  Here's how the organization describes itself: 

The STARS College Network, which partners with top colleges to ensure that students from rural and small-town America have the information and support they need to enroll and graduate from the college or university of their choice, is doubling its membership to include 32 of the nation’s most prominent institutions.

In its inaugural year, the STARS College Network opened doors to higher education for more than a quarter-million students. The expansion this summer will add flagship state schools, historically Black colleges, Ivy League universities, and other selective institutions, spreading STARS’ reach to more regions across the nation.

Support

In support of the STARS expansion, the Trott Family Philanthropies, which catalyzed the creation of STARS with an initial $20 million gift in 2023, will be investing more than $150 million over 10 years in programs that prepare, recruit and support rural students. Adding the financial aid provided directly by the STARS institutions to students, expanding support from philanthropies and non-profits and new funding from governmental agencies, an estimated $7.4 billion will be spent in support of STARS’ mission over the next decade. This extraordinary growth follows a year in which STARS outreach connected with 1.6 million people, including students, families, educators, administrators, foundations, legislators, companies and other organizations. STARS institutions directly engaged with more than 700,000 students, and more than 288,000 students joined the STARS network.

Partnerships

STARS schools directly engage with the rootEd Alliance, a public-private partnership that helps rural students define and plan their futures, whether that means a college degree, work-based learning, or military service, with the goal of putting them on a path to career success and economic stability. By placing dedicated college and career advisors in 195 schools across Missouri, Texas and Idaho, rootEd has served 42,000 students to date, and collaborates with STARS to provide specialized support and training for rootEd advisors throughout the year. rootEd Alliance, launched in 2018, is made possible by a group of philanthropists convened by Trott Family Philanthropies.

Meanwhile, this international publication on rural students' access to higher education came across my radar screen, "Access of rural youth to higher education: An international perspective," published in Journal of Infrastructure, Policy and Development 2024, 8(8), 5528.  The authors are Álvaro Andrés Rivera Sepúlveda, Omar Cabrales Salazar, and Lizeth Natalia Saboyá Acosta.  Here's the abstract: 

This is a review of empirical studies with the objective of analyzing the theoretical-practical discussions that have been raised internationally to deepen the understanding of the access of rural youth to higher education as an object of study. For this purpose, a narrative review was designed, considering scientific articles published in three different languages and concerning studies conducted in 21 different countries in all regions of the world. The results reveal three discussions: a) the strong interest that higher education has regained in the life expectations of rural young people and their families, especially as a means of social advancement; b) the inequalities that most affect the access of rural youth to higher education are the lack of academic offerings in rural areas and the discontinuities that occur around rural socio-cultural capital; c) since the inequalities experienced by rural youth are diverse, actions to promote greater democratization cannot be limited to implementing systems of grants and scholarships. It is concluded that the major project consists of creating a differentiated higher education model that, in terms of location, academic offerings, recognition of knowledge, and articulation with the environment, allows rural youth to experience their professional training not as an inevitable process of acculturation, but as a continuation of their socio-cultural capital and their territorial yearnings.

Community radio in rural India

Community radio has been gaining notable traction in India's rural regions. One reason is that rural communities in India suffer from lower literacy rates compared to urban areas. In 2018 rural areas in India had a 73.5% literacy rate compared to 87.7% in urban areas, making radio an effective way to communicate with the populace. 

Community radio is partially used to "bridge the information gap between urban and rural audiences." During large-scale flooding in 2013, three radio stations set up communication lines to allow people to call for help and reach their loved ones. In 2019, Radio Surabhi was able to alert people that a cyclone had hit Odisha, and it shared information about available shelters. 

Community radio became even more important during the first COVID-19 lockdown when it broadcast educational programs and spread community health guidelines, vaccine information, and more. Multiple community radio stations have popped up around India since 2008, many of which are products of NGOs and community service initiatives.   

One community radio station in particular has received worldwide attention. Alfaz-e-Mewat, which is loosely translated to "voice of the Mewati people" or "rural voices of Mewat." Mewat is the cultural region that spans the state of Haryana, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh. Mewat district, a rural district in the foothills of the Aravali mountains, was renamed Nuh in 2016 and is one of the 22 districts in the northern Indian state of Haryana. 

Located roughly two hours south of Delhi, India, Nuh is "home to the country’s ethnic Meo Muslims and a minority Hindu population" and in recent years “has emerged as a hub of cyber crime and sextortion rackets.” 

Alfaz-e-Mewat broadcasts for 13 hours every day in Hindi, Urdu, and Mewati, reaching 225 villages. Millions of people listen in from all over Nuh as Alfaz-e-Mewat, through the Indian airwaves, provides various programs including group therapy, education, women's empowerment, and entertainment. 

This community station started raising awareness about the COVID-19 pandemic shortly before the first outbreak in India. Alfaz-e-Mewat's program "21 din 21 baatein," meaning "21 days 21 topics," hosted experts to speak on the importance of frequent handwashing, accessing healthcare, and social and physical distancing. They also encouraged spreading positivity and encouraged their listeners to try yoga. 

One Alfaz-e-Mewat reporter spoke about the importance of radio in disseminating this information saying, "In my village of 250 families, only one house has a television. So, you can understand how important our role is as reporters in this region."

This region of India has some of the lowest female literacy rates in the country. Only 1/3 of women in Nuh are literate and 90% of Nuh women have dropped out of school before the age of 10. The norm in Nuh is reportedly that of early marriages and violence against women. In this region, where women are considered beneath their male counterparts, Alfaz-e-Mewat is becoming the voice of change. 

Alfaz-e-Mewat was started in 2012 by the S.M. Sehgal Foundation, a nonprofit the government funded with $18,000. What started as a community radio station to promote water conservation and agrarian practices now helps women get connected to resources if they are experiencing domestic violence. It also helps stop the spread of disinformation and is transforming the lives of their female listeners. 

Alfaz-e-Mewat receives around 50 calls daily, many from women experiencing health-related problems. Dr. Yadav, who occasionally answers questions on the radio station, reported that women in this region are often neglected at home, leaving many of them with severe anemia. Anemia, which is a shortage of healthy red blood cells to carry the necessary oxygen to one's organs, can lead to weakness and dizziness. Increasing one's iron and protein intake is an antidote so Dr. Yadav instructed a listener on how to make protein-rich meals out of available ingredients like chickpeas.

Bhagwan Devi, a 51-year-old listener, was inspired by Alfaz-e-Mewat to start a campaign to build toilets inside houses in her village. Noor Mohmamd, a 65-year-old from Mubarakpur Rawalki village, says he's a fan of the radio station, which has led him to change his farming practices. Women across the district have been impassioned to get educated, get jobs, and gain protection from violence. 

“Community radio gives women a platform not only as listeners to get information, but as active participants" -Anjali Makhija, chief executive of S.M. Sehgal Foundation.

Rural vulnerabilities in a changing climate

A number of world-renowned scientists regard climate change as one of, if not the, greatest modern threats to humanity (see here, here, and here). Among other dire consequences, climate change threatens global food production and water supply, access to natural resources, ecosystem health and biodiversity, and physical safety from natural disasters. All of these will surely have deleterious effects on international peace, stability, and human health.

Rural areas, especially those lacking in modern infrastructure, are the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change. This is as true as in the U.S. as it is worldwide. The National Climate Assessment attributes rural vulnerability to a number of geographic and demographic obstacles, such as physical isolation, lack of infrastructure (including emergency response, healthcare, and transportation), lack of political power, limited economic diversity, higher poverty rates, and an aging population.

Sadly, we are already seeing the effects of climate change on rural areas in the United States. In Texas's Rio Grande Valley, drought is approaching disastrous levels. Tornadoes are also getting worse and more frequent across the South and Southeast. 

Rural communities in California are similarly feeling the effects of climate change. Take, for example, the worsening wildfires in 2021 that devastated rural communities across the state but particularly in Northern California and the Sierra Nevadas. As if we needed more extreme weather, just two years after the worst wildfires in California history, an extremely wet winter brought flooding to many areas of rural California like Pajaro, a small town of 3,509 people.

One consequence of climate change that will surely become one of the most pressing issues in the next decades is mass migration driven by climate change. For the United States, this likely means that people living on the coasts, like in New Orleans and the Bay Area, will have to migrate inland to avoid sea level rise.  In fact, NASA estimates that U.S. coastlines could rise 12 inches above their current level by 2050. Climate change could also mean people living in areas prone to natural disasters (like drought in the Southwest and tornadoes in the South) will need to migrate to more hospitable climates.

However, elsewhere in the world, climate change has meant a migration of people from hot and poor rural areas into cities. For example, in the African Sahel, widespread drought and crop failure displaced millions of rural people to coastal cities. Pakistan, a country that has been notoriously hit by extreme weather conditions, has seen more than 680,000 climate refugees relocate to overflowing urban slums. This will only get worse: Pakistan is expected to have nearly 2 million climate refugees by 2050.

So what should be done to alleviate some of the effects that climate change will have on rural areas around the world? The rural communities chapter of the Fourth National Climate Assessment has some answers.

The assessment, for example, suggests a number of measures to support the adaptive capacity of rural communities. These measures primarily involve money: the assessment highly recommends investing in modern infrastructure, including rural transportation, broadband access, healthcare, and emergency response systems. More education, greater political power, diversification of local economies, and updated regulations and building codes are also key.

Overall, climate change represents a dangerous and imminent threat to rural areas, with catastrophic and irreparable consequences if nothing is done to mitigate its effects. All levels of government need to give rural areas the special consideration they require now. If not, full-scale disaster will decimate rural populations in the U.S. and around the world.

Rural women are vital to global food systems

As the United Nations Women Watch's overview on food security identifies, rural women not only act as food producers and agricultural entrepreneurs, they also informally facilitate food security and stability in their households and communities (another post on women in farming is here). Expanding on the latter point, both the UN Women's research on rural women and girls and a 2019 Root Capital article, "How Climate Change Impacts Women Farmers," suggests that rural women are well positioned to foster resilient agricultural hubs, due to demonstrated skill at community networking, mobilization, and adaption in the face of environmental threats and economic crises. 

Over the past few years, the International Day of Rural Women has consistently endeavored to draw attention to this often unappreciated reality. In 2021 the theme, "Rural Women Cultivating Good Food for All," spotlighted how investing in rural women engaged in agribusiness could help alleviate global food insecurity. Food insecurity, which has been exacerbated by recent climate crises (discussed here) and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic (discussed here), affects upwards of 800 million people worldwide, including over 33 million Americans, who are disproportionately from communities of color and in rural areas (previous posts on food insecurity in the U.S. here and here). 

The premise, as informed by National Geographic's article, "Empowering female farmers to feed the world," is that gender-specific barriers, such as discriminatory practices, limited access to resources, and misogynistic social norms, prevent rural women from maximizing their agricultural and economic potentials. Consider, despite equivalent competency, on average women-run farms tend to produce smaller crop yields and generate less profit than those run by men. If barriers were eliminated, rural women might be able to close the gap between them and their male counterparts, in ways that would also strategically amplify their existing contributions to global poverty and hunger reduction. Citing the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the National Geographic article estimates that if women farmers were provided equal access to resources, then global food production by women could increase by up to 30%, providing food to roughly 150 million additional people. 

While obstacles to rural women farmers vary depending on regional particularities, certain impediments can be identified fairly consistently across contexts. Specifically, as discussed in a 2018 World Bank story, "Breaking the 'Grass Ceiling': Empowering Women Farmers," inequitable access to both land rights and financing opportunities, influenced by historic and ongoing gender-bias, emerges as a common limiting phenomenon. Synthesizing the World Bank story and the National Geographic article, this can be seen in certain developing countries where women comprise half of the agricultural labor force, but only make up 10% of landowners. Without autonomy over the land they are farming, women cannot structure land use and farming agreements to maximize their benefit. As a related matter, smallholder women farmers in these areas can struggle to access credit in the face of insufficient collateral and sexist cultural norms. Accordingly, they must operate under a funding deficit that can place advanced tools and techniques capable of improving production out of reach.

Focusing now on rural America, one can see that parallel limitations similarly inhibit women farmers. On one hand, as noted by the American Farmland Trust's 2021 report on "Women in Agriculture," women are currently outpacing men in agricultural education programs throughout the country (at UC Davis, in 2019-2020, 75% of students who earned a bachelor's degree in agriculture-related majors were women). Despite this, women are the principle operator on only 14% of U.S. farming operations. The American Farmland Trust report contextualizes this statistic within additional research documenting women farmers' obstacles to obtaining land, including exclusion from networks, challenges accessing credit and obtaining conservation support, and patriarchal norms that prioritize male heirs.

The American Farmland Trust report further notes that disparities in access to loans and capital hit women farmers of color the hardest. This is, in part, a result of women and farmers of color tending to run relatively smaller operations with lower revenues and weaker credit histories, but also the product of implicit bias in resource and loan provision. Additionally, as theorized in a 2022 National Institute of Health study, "Decolonizing agriculture in the United States," the predominant agricultural narrative in the U.S. has been constructed around white masculinity in ways that exclude women and people of color from our cultural imaginary of who a farmer is and should be. 

Juxtaposition of two feminist projects grappling with these issues shows a range of approaches being employed to support women farmers in the United States. The first, a One Earth-backed project, "Supporting Black Women farmers working to expand regenerative agriculture in the Southeastern US," embodies concrete resource-based programmatic support that must be paramount. Specifically, this project will expand on the American Farmland Trust's existing partnership with the Black Family Land Trust in order to promote land access, enhanced viability, and increased resilience for black women farmers. The second, FarmHer, a social media campaign initiated by Marji Guyler-Alaniz in 2013, represents a supplementary resistance strategy. This internet-based photo project aims to update modern conceptions of farmers in ways that recognize, celebrate, and recruit women.

Beyond these select examples, SeedChange, an organization committed to supporting farmers and combatting hunger, poverty, and climate change, provides broader recommendations for empowering women farmers. Specifically, its publication, "Women Seed Change," advocates for the following actions:

(1) strengthen women's leadership by funding women-led farmer organizations ... (2) prioritize women's knowledge and agency in climate resilient agriculture ... (3) invest in women farmers, including youth and indigenous women ... (4) develop gender equity frameworks to guide policies ... (5) enhance women's agency, decision-making power and rights over land and productive resources [and] (6) uphold the rights of women ...    

In short, rural women in agriculture are vital to global food systems, and they need robust support from a range of domestic and international institutions.

How rural Arizona students treat a Filipina teacher who came to help

 Eli Saslow reports for the Washington Post out of Bullhead City, Arizona, under the headline, "An American education."  The subhead is, "Amid a historic U.S. teacher shortage, a ‘Most Outstanding Teacher’ from the Philippines tries to help save a struggling school in rural Arizona."  The alternative headline is, "Teachers from Philippines Help Struggling U.S. Schools."  And the essence is that an award-winning teacher in the Philippines came to help a rural school district experiencing a teacher shortage, and then had to endure awful behavior by the students.  Here are some excerpts, first about the teacher, Rose Jean Obreque, who, in order to get to the U.S., took out "$8,000 in high-interest loans to pay for the agency fees, a plane ticket, two new teaching outfits and the first month’s rent on a two-bedroom apartment she planned to share with five other foreign teachers."

Here's how the students in her home country are described: 

Her seventh-grade students there were the children of fishermen and sugar cane farmers. They arrived for school early, even if they had to walk more than a mile to get there. They called her “ma’am.” They brought her homemade lunches. They wrote thank-you notes at the end of each week. They aspired to become engineers or doctors or teachers like her, and they volunteered to stay after school for extra lessons rather than returning home to work in the sugar cane fields. Obreque started an after-school program for struggling readers. She led the school’s innovations club to a regional first-place finish. She recorded daily video lessons during the pandemic and hiked to remote villages to make home visits, until her ambition landed her at the top of the teacher rankings and she began to hear from recruitment agencies around the world.

Then there are her students in America, whose behavioral issues Eli describes in considerable detail, including: 

Another [student] had dropped his paper on the floor and was stabbing his pencil into the side of his desk.

“Is everything all right?” Obreque asked. “Why aren’t you participating?”

“’Cause my pencil’s broken,” he said, banging it harder against the desk until it snapped. He picked up the two broken pieces and held them out to her as proof. “What do you want me to do?” he asked, smiling at her, and Obreque looked at him for a moment and then decided that his behavior was her fault. Maybe she hadn’t communicated the assignment properly. Maybe, instead of beginning the class by making name tags, she should have started with the rules so they knew how to behave. She walked back to the front of the room. “Eyes up here,” she said, as several of the students continued to talk. “Five, four, three …” she said, as the students shouted over her, until finally the PE teacher blew his whistle. “Hey! Try doing that to me and see what happens,” he said. “Be quiet and listen to your teacher.”

Obreque nodded at him and then continued. “I want this class to be systematic,” she said. “We are not animals. We are not in the jungle. We should be guided by rules, or we will not be successful in our learning, right?”

“Yeah, guys. We’re not animals,” one student said, and then a few boys began to make jungle noises until the PE teacher blew his whistle again.

“If you want to be respected, show me respect,” Obreque said. “Human beings are supposed to be able to follow simple instructions. You come to school to learn, right?”

“Nah, I come because my parents make me,” one student said, turning to smile at his seatmate.

“Yeah, and because somehow you haven’t gotten expelled yet,” his seatmate responded, shoving his friend in the shoulder.

“And ’cause the girls here are fine as hell,” the student said, punching his friend back in the arm.

“Enough!” Obreque shouted, using a voice louder than she’d ever used in seven years of teaching in the Philippines. “What is an example of behaving with dignity and respect? Please, answer and raise your hand.”

Then there is the model provided by Ann Cuevas, a teacher who has been in Bullhead City for four years and survived:

She gradually moved beyond her Filipino instinct for classroom formality and began asking her students about their lives, and they introduced her to a version of America much different from what she’d first expected: abusive families, homelessness, surging drug overdose deaths, conspiratorial ideologies, loneliness, suicide, alcoholism and poverty every bit as bad as anything she’d encountered in the Philippines.

Don't miss the rest of the story.  

Coronavirus sent many urban Filipinos heading home to the hinterlands

Sammy Westfall reports for the New York Times from Leyte, the Philippines under the headline, "Rural Philippines, Long Neglected, Newly Appealing in Covid Times."  The subhead is:  "The economic disparity of the nation’s rural and urban areas is a problem of long standing. Will the lessons of the pandemic finally lead to change?" 

An excerpt follows, featuring the story of 50-year-old Marlen Zilmar:  

Since the 1970s, the era of Ferdinand E. Marcos’s dictatorship, every Philippine leader has encouraged rural development, in an attempt to alleviate overcrowding in Metro Manila, the dense patchwork of 16 cities that make up the Philippines’ urban core. His son, Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr., known as Bongbong, recently elected as the nation’s next president, echoed a similar theme in his campaign, invoking his father’s legacy.

Despite the many government efforts, the percentage of urban dwellers has generally risen as the nation has grown. Less than a third of the population was urban in 1970; 47 percent live in urban areas today. Metro Manila had less than four million residents in 1970; it has over 13 million today.

Despite the many government efforts, the percentage of urban dwellers has generally risen as the nation has grown. Less than a third of the population was urban in 1970; 47 percent live in urban areas today. Metro Manila had less than four million residents in 1970; it has over 13 million today.

* * *

Over the decades, the government had devised programs to encourage people, especially informal settlers, to move to rural areas. Ms. Zilmar nabbed a slot in a pilot phase of the latest version, introduced after Covid-19 took hold and signed into law in May 2020 by President Rodrigo Duterte.

Participants in the program, titled “Return to the Province, New Hope,” got start-up cash, livelihood training, relocation assistance and subsidies, and a one-way bus or plane ticket as part of the project’s resettlement effort. Ms. Zilmar also got some seeds; others received a pair of piglets.

A recent Wall Street Journal story on this pandemic trend of migration to rural places, with a focus on older folks/retirees, is here.