[Laney Siegner, ERG graduate student]

Food on the Galapagos: Local ingredients and local volcanic soil

A quick summary of my recent trip to the Galapagos could read like a line from Snoop Dogg’s “Sensual Seduction”: coffee liqueur, rich dark chocolate, and passion fruit pie—showering under waterfalls in the jungle, perfumed tropical flowers in my hair. These phrases conjure up idyllic imagery but obscure much more than they reveal. My journey “behind the scenes” of Galapagos' agricultural activities led to revelations about the difficult realities facing many small island farmers.

Galapagos Islands (red box), off the coast of continental Ecuador

Fresh fruit rotting on the ground, excess vegetables lying uneaten on farms or fed to animals, costs of transport outweighing profits to be gained in local markets—these are a few of the challenges facing a declining agricultural sector on the Galapagos. Despite efforts by local organizations such as Conservation International, the Charles Darwin Foundation, and the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, Aquaculture and Fisheries (MAGAP) to increase and revitalize local food production, many galapagüeños are leaving the agricultural fields of the highlands in favor of better-paying jobs in the tourism industry of coastal port towns.

Saturday Market, 6:30 am

Agricultural activity has been increasing in recent years, but certainly is no longer at the levels seen before the boats started providing regular food production from the mainland. Boats arrive in the islands weekly (for the most part), bearing produce from continental Ecuador 1000 km away, supplying about 80% of local food consumption, and lowering prices due to higher production levels on mainland farms. With the prohibitively high cost of transport to the markets ($15 for the 20 km drive), local farmers are often forced to let their produce go to waste as it won’t produce sufficient returns to justify this up-front cost. Better communication and union, called for by Jose Angel Ortiz, might help solve this problem if neighboring farmers pool resources to buy an old truck for transporting produce to market. However, in a region where many neighboring farms are recently abandoned, this is not always possible.

​​Checking out Angel Ortiz's tomato plants

Besides being dependent on food imports from the mainland, the Galapagos are also dependent on petroleum imports for energy production. The Interpretation Center on San Cristobal Island declares a goal of 100% fossil-free energy production by 2017. The islands, however, are far from reaching this goal, having missed their 50% renewables goal by 2010. There is little evidence of renewable energy generation on the islands; other than three windmills at the top of a hill on San Cristobal and solar panels at the Giant Tortoise Birthing Center and Charles Darwin Foundation on Santa Cruz. Twenty-four hour electricity service, powered by petroleum products, is a relatively recent occurrence on the four inhabited islands, and service doesn’t fully extend to all of the farms in the highlands.

There are, however, signs of hope for scaling up island food and energy self-sufficiency. On March 19th, there was a cheering promotion of local food consumption at the Galapagos Earth Hour celebration; part of an international network of such events held in over 150 countries. Earth Hour, which lasts from 8:30pm to 9:30pm, is a call to action for communities to turn off the lights and look inwards for solutions to addressing climate change. The Galapagos chose to highlight local food production as their “local solution,” bringing producers and consumers together for a night of cooking competitions, taste tests, and trivia celebrating the 80+ local food products on the islands. From seafood to tropical fruits, from the mundane yucca root to the exalted cacao, it was a night of food diversity and appreciation.

Entries in the local cooking competition at Earth Hour Galapagos (3/19/16)

David Ibarra’s Waterfront Inn restaurant is another sign of hope on Santa Cruz. After noticing the local produce highlighted on a restaurant menu in Puerto Ayora, my sister, Katie, and I asked some employees about the chef. We were directed to David at his new restaurant across the bay. We hopped in a water taxi and found that David was in an “important meeting” when we arrived, but he invited us back for dinner the following night. We showed up Friday night for an amazing locally sourced meal that would put any San Francisco farm to table restaurant to shame.

When he finished cooking, David came out to talk to us about the extensive contacts he’s made among island farmers and fishermen since arriving a little over a year ago. Inviting us to continue the conversation at a popular local bar, he went on at length about his views on the value of sourcing food from local farmers. He has big plans to increase local consumption through his “Cocinas de Evolución” project, a cooking class that infuses local ingredients into fancy French and European cooking methods popular worldwide.

Katie and Laney at Milton's farm, Finca de Guadalupe​

Milton Aguas’ eco-farm on San Cristobal, La Finca de Guadalupe, is a final example of inspiration from our island-hopping food tour. We traveled with Milton and his wife Norma to their farm. It was a bumpy ride down unpaved and washed-out roads.We braved the bugs of the jungle to hike to their waterfall-shower and sweated through the process of pressing sugar canes into juice by hand. We made dinner of freshly harvested coconut milk and herbs over fish with rice and fried plantains. Afterwards, we processed coffee beans and made passion fruit juice until past midnight. "Fresh fruit doesn’t wait," Norma reminded us.

Coffee project demonstration

Milton shared stories of volunteer groups and university students that have come to the farm to help out and learn from his sustainable agriculture practices. Milton would like to make the farm completely “clean” and self-sufficient by generating his own electricity and processing sugar cane into biofuels. (A future ERGie project or group community service trip, perhaps?! Sugar cane biofuel production on Milton’s farm – Spring Break 2017!) Those who love coffee as much as I do are almost obligated to come: the volcanic, earthy flavor of his coffee is truly “único en el mundo,” like drinking from a river of gold, in Milton’s poetic Spanish phrasing.

My journey to the Galapagos was an eye-opening encounter with interesting plants and people. It was not always comfortable or "Edenic," but rather showed signs of struggle for local sovereignty and sustainability. Investigating local food production on small islands may often be this way, and now I know a little more about where the "farm" in "farm to table" is coming from.

Katie and Laney pressing sugar cane into juice on the Galapagos

by Diego Ponce de Leon Barido, ERG PhD Candidate
with team members Javier Rosa (TIER, UC Berkeley), Stephen Suffian (Villanova University), and Odaly (Nicaragua local team)

I feared the worst: The bags had been thrown around at customs damaging our gadgets, the humidity and heat had fried our circuits, mice had eaten away at the cables, and our equipment was now being sold in Managua’s electronics black market.

Our ultimate objective for the trip in Nicaragua was to deploy a wireless sensor network in thirty micro-enterprises and households to monitor and inform the design of a micro-level demand response implementation for renewable energy integration.

One of the most stressful moments of our two and a half-month implementation was the ride back from customs to our home-stay, after recovering all our equipment. On my ride back, I shared a tiny Nissan car with two strangers with some of our equipment being tied to the car’s roof with the rest of the equipment overflowing the Nissan’s tiny trunk. The bags also weighed much less than when we initially handed them off at customs, but stopping to check the bags’ contents in the street could have meant losing even more equipment to petty theft.

We planned to be in Nicaragua for two and a half months. We allowed for failure in our mind, knowing well that we could only plan for the few things that we could control, and left extra mental space and time for the natural uncertainty of bureaucratic processes, as well as all the unforeseen mistakes that our team would surely make along the way.

Basically, we planned for what we could control, and assumed that good luck and hard work would take care of randomness. First, we would forget nothing back in Berkeley. Then, our technology would spend exactly two weeks at customs, and Nicaragua’s National Engineering University (UNI) would help us release it without paying taxes. Because we had tested our hardware and software ad nauseam in Berkeley, our deployment would be a simple "plug and play," and we would "figure out" communications for a demand response implementation "in country."

Customs was a nightmare that required 15 full days of absolute patience, cultural navigation, and polite pestering

Again, our objective was to deploy a wireless sensor network in thirty micro-enterprises and households. We call these "sensors nodes" a FlexBox. In the end, we implemented 29 (out of 30) partially working FlexBoxes in Managua, and kept one for future testing in Berkeley.

Customs was a nightmare that required 15 full days of absolute patience, cultural navigation, and polite pestering (and thousands of dollars paid in taxes). Our hardware passed most tests, but some sensors failed in the field after being exposed to being thrown around, drowning in freezing water, and sharp metal doors searing connections away. We got carried away in what we thought would be useful (but not necessary) software developments instead of focusing on a bulletproof version of our minimum viable product (MVP), and were not even close to "figuring out" a cost-effective communications protocol in Managua.

However, despite our "natural" missteps (things that can go wrong, will go wrong), we have begun developing a unique regional dataset which will allow us to correlate micro-level demand and behavior, to grid level measurements such as system frequency, generation from fossil and renewable resources, and weather data.

Our project also considers increasingly important equity implications of smart grid deployments: How are data exchanges mutually beneficial? How can urbanites be more engaged in a low carbon transitions? How can renewable energy based grids provide higher quality service and useful information to their clients?

To our knowledge, our project is the first of its kind in the region and will greatly contribute to shedding light on how existing grid infrastructure can be used to further increase the equitable penetration of uncertain and variable renewable energy.


SURVIVING IMPLEMENTATION
Throughout this process, our team learned a lot about what it takes to go from plans to implementation. Below are ten takeaways for future implementation that other researchers introducing new technology into foreign countries may find useful as well.

1. Customs
Depending on where you are traveling and what technology you’re deploying, your experience will vary drastically. If you are in a country where rules, guidelines and regulations are carefully detailed and followed your job is easy – read the rules and play by the book and most likely you won’t have a problem. However, if you are in country where everything is routinely improvised, you’ll most likely be at the mercy of a local customs agent at the beginning of your first "in country" adventure.

Make sure a handy person in your team is fluent in the local language and culture, you have "extra" money in case you need to hire a customs agency, and that your patience "hat" and best manners are at their best all the time. Two to three weeks is normal operating procedure, if you do everything right. If you make mistakes, don’t have the right permits or forms, or are being regularly scammed because you don’t understand the language well enough, this process could take months.

Our technology traveled from San Francisco...

... to El Salvador...

... to the customs of Manauga...

... and finally to 29 homes

2. Parts
Bring an extra set of cheap "parts" that you may not be able to find in country. Doing your due diligence is very important. Make a list of the things you can find in country and a list of things you can’t find in country. Bringing extra things that you can’t find in country will cause problems at customs, so make sure you have lists of parts. Bring an extra two or three "final products" (whatever those may be). Regardless of how good you think your product is, you’ll have to keep iterating in the field – having a working final product as a test bed while you deploy is very important.

3. Money
If you are working on a tight budget, you’ll have to be very creative about how you spend your money. Besides your technology, and if you have a team, you will all have to stay in the same place (and that place must have a good working space). You’ll also need a car, money for food, extra parts, and many other things that will show up as you begin your project. You’ll also need to hire a local team, both for the deployment as well as for your project’s follow up.

Although "strong collaboration" with institutions is important, and "community ownership" and "partnerships" are essential (these buzzwords are all the rage in development circles), nothing gets people working – at the pace that you want them to work like money. Be wise in how you spend your money, and prepare a detailed budget months ahead of time.

4. Contacts

You’ll soon find out that your Berkeley education and prior experiences mean very little once your project "breaks ground"

Things will inevitably go wrong. Make sure that you have friends and connections in the right places. Our team had signed collaboration agreements with the National Engineering University, the Ministry of Energy and Mines, and a local renewable energy startup. None of these signed agreements meant much until we needed to show that we knew people in high places, and that they were keeping a close eye on our project. Keep those signed agreements handy, you never know when you might need them.

5. Local Team
Nothing – NOTHING - happens without a local team. You might think your clever engineering skills have taken you far in life, or that your Peace Corps experience has turned you into a community relations expert, but you’ll soon find out that your Berkeley education and prior experiences mean very little once your project "breaks ground."

We hired a community liaison (Odaly), an electrician (Roberto), and an electronics engineer (Jorli) to work with us throughout the implementation and to stay with us through follow up. While we handled the implementation logistics and directed everything, they were heavily involved in troubleshooting, surveying, and follow up. They have all learned a wide variety of skills along the way, such as fixing broken sensors, accessing PostGRES databases, and setting up a local WiFi network.

Once you leave, you need to make sure that there is a team of people that will be able to solve problems as they arise. Without a good local team, your project will last only about two to three weeks post-implementation.

6. Build/Deploy Team
A small team needs to be composed of people with interchangeable skills that complement each other well. (Three people sounds about right). One person can be responsible for a lot but not for everything. If your project is technical, then everyone in your team must be able to help, or everyone must be willing to learn (fast). There will be plenty of times for PANIC to sneak in.

If you’re leading, you can never panic. If you’re someone who panics, control yourself. When things get hot, you’re stressed, or you’re panicking, control yourself. Drink water. Take a break. Be respectful. Try not to complain (too much). Nothing sucks more than having to deal with a difficult situation, and with someone who is complaining about it.

Javier and Stephen did A LOT of hacking to get an excellent MVP

7. Respect your MVP
You arrived to your site with a minimum viable product (MVP). You have something that works. Your goal should be to make that product work on site with as little change as possible. Don’t add components (hardware or software) to your MVP "in country." You need time to test new additions, and more time to make them work like you want them to. Additional things can be done once your MVP is fully functional on the field. Until that point, eschew any ideas to make the product better, faster, or easier to use. Any improvements should have happened during the testing phase and can happen when you’re done with your deployment. If you have a short deployment time, respect your MVP.

8. Time
You should leave, at minimum, three weeks of follow up after you have finished your deployment.  Things will fail and break, and you need time to fix them. You also need time to train your local team on troubleshooting. Leaving a country right after deployment is symptomatic of the "parachute" approach that most "development engineers" work with (drop in, have your adventure, drop some technology, fly off to another adventure). After your deployment, do your due diligence and stay in country to finish the training with your local team, make and solve problems, troubleshoot, and prepare your project for the next few months before the next iteration.

9. Release
Deployments are high-stress situations. Make sure that you’re doing something fun the entire time. Bond. Keep things fun. Remember that no one is forcing you to do this, so make sure that you’re enjoying life while doing it. If not, what’s the point?

10. Humility, Respect
Respect the people you’re working with. Respect your local team. Respect each other. Be humble about what you can accomplish. Accept and apologize when you make mistakes. Accept others' apologies. Don’t dwell. Ignore the little things that don’t matter, but REALLY pay attention to detail. Appreciate your team, you’re part of it. You are all learning from each other.

Our project looks to use thermostatically controlled loads at the micro-level to develop cost-effective strategies for renewable energy integration.

Note: The views expressed here belong solely to the author of each entry and are not representative of the position of the Energy and Resources Group, UC Berkeley.

[by Tanya Dimitrova, crosspost from Mongabay.com] 

Benigno Hernandez and Odair Canales from Hondupalma cooperative look out for a troop of monkeys in a former palm oil plantation, now set aside to regrow as a secondary forest. “This forest keeps our stream running, ” says Canales when asked why they stopped growing palms there. (Photo by Tanya Dimitrova.)   

David Reyes plunges his hand into a black smelly liquid at the bottom of a cut-off plastic jug tied around a palm tree and pulls out a dead horned beetle. “We used to put insecticide on the bottom of these traps,” says Reyes, the agricultural manager of Hondupalma – a cooperative of small landowners in Honduras that produces palm oil. “Now we simply use alcohol with sugar cane molasses to kill off the bugs.” According to Reyes, these new measures saved the co-op $175,000 in pesticide costs over the past two years.

Hondupalma recently achieved a Rainforest Alliance certification for sustainable growth of African palms – the first cooperative in the world to feature the famous green frog seal on the cooking oil they sell. Palm oil (generically labeled as vegetable oil) is used in almost all consumer products on the market: from ice cream and ramen noodle soup to toothpaste and candles. Expanding oil palm plantations are among the top reasons for deforestation globally, along with cattle ranching, timber, and soy.

The improvements achieved by the cooperative extend beyond reduced chemical use.

Continue reading on Mongabay.com

Note: The views expressed here belong solely to the author of each entry and are not representative of the position of the Energy and Resources Group, UC Berkeley.

By Diego Ponce de Leon Barido

A first lesson, taken strictly from ecological economics and its use of thermodynamic laws, is very telling about the history of resource exploitation in Latin America and the Caribbean. Energy quality and energy surpluses often determine the development of social and cultural patterns, and the unidirectional character of energy can dictate the economic and social arrangements through which wealth accumulation occurs in society.^1,2

Consider the unidirectional flow of water (and energy) downstream. Historically, bulky raw materials such as grains, ores, and timber were ‘produced in the hinterland and sent downstream to river mouth cities where those raw materials were combined to produce more valuable goods’.^1,2 For this process of ‘upgrading’ matter into highly ordered thermodynamic structures, economic production is established, adding productive value to the economic cycle at each stage of thermodynamic progress.^3-5 Great accumulations of wealth occurred in downstream cities, but very rarely did this wealth find its way back upstream. Silver from Potosi (Peru) and Guanajuato (Mexico), gold from Ouro Preto and Minas Gerais (Brazil), sugar cane from Cuba, coffee from Colombia, precious woods (and later sugar) from the Caribbean, and bananas and fruit from the entire Western Hemisphere were sent to the United States and Europe. Resource wealth flowed in one direction, fostered industrial growth in the north, and created a Latin American and Caribbean dependence for technology and goods produced in the industrial north.^6-8

More recently it is rare earth metals, oil, and drugs that flow downstream.

The City of Potosi and Cerro Rico, Bolivia. Image Source: Andrea Marston.

Nothing has changed since the 1800’s, 1900’s, or the last two decades. Today, Chinese businessmen and Mexican drug cartels trade cash for iron ore in Michoacan, Mexico’s most violent state, to fuel industrial growth and quench demand for steel in China and elsewhere.^9,10 Mexican politicians undergo ‘reforms’, and change the constitution, to re-introduce American oil companies into the energy sector where the energy return on investment is increasingly lower, but the prices – higher.

A recent article in the journal Science, highlighted that beyond the obvious impacts of drug related violence and crime, deforestation rates in the Central American Isthmus exploded at the beginning of 2006-07 – as Mexico began waging a violent, yet largely unsuccessful, war against the drug cartels.¹¹  It is true that throughout the Isthmus, forest loss has historically been a product of weak governance, conflicting property regimes, poverty, climate change, illegal logging, and infrastructure megaprojects and agribusiness expansion. Recent evidence, however, shows that the high growth rates of new ‘deforestation patches’ can be attributed to cocaine growth (> 5 hectares), as they overlap in both space and time with drug trafficking nodes. As cartels cut roads and landing strips for their operations, they intensify preexisting pressures on forests by weakening governance structures and narco-capitalizing other trafficking agents to pillage, often at the expense of indigenous small-land holders.

Amazing places and reserves such as the ‘Rio Platano Biosphere Reserve’ (Honduras), el Petén (Mexico), and Laguna del Tigre (Guatemala) have recently been recording annual forest losses as high as 5%.

A Drug Landing Strip in Honduras. Is it be possible that scientists at Oklahoma State University can analyze drug related deforestation using Moderate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data, yet, governments cannot locate and capture drug king pins, their money, and operations?
Image Source: Science.¹¹ Text: Author.

This way of doing businesses has been forced upon us. A few people have decided, mainly the financial, political, and academic elites, that all wealth can be expressed using money; and that endless growth is indeed, not only desirable, but possible. Is exponential, infinite wealth creation really possible? Nobel Prize-winning Chemist Frederick Soddy (1921) would suggest otherwise – compound interest does not create wealth, but endless debt.^12,13 We live in a world dominated by the economics of debt, which is nothing but a mathematical construct, and like the U.S economy would suggest, debts need nothing but higher ceilings. Wealth, on the other hand, has an irreducible physical dimension, it grows and rots. It has limits.

For businessmen, politicians, and drug cartels, the dollar cost of extracting an energy carrier, a mineral, or a drug from the crust and face of the earth can be useful. However, many would argue that the real cost can be given only in matter of energy units – and this exercise is hardly ever done.^14,15 The energy embedded in the extraction, purification, removal, transportation, construction, decommissioning, and operations of an energy carrier (plus many other matter types) minus the total useful energy delivered is the energy value of the carrier. ^14,15 Consider the polluted water of a shale gas site (for example, Oklahoma), the radioactive pollution left from uranium mines (for example, Navajo lands), transportation and energy generation related emissions in cities (for example, China), and deforestation in a ravaged forest (for example, Honduras). The only thing accruing here is physical debt – not wealth. This debt is being paid by many of us through pollution, crime, and inequality, while the creditors are syphoning the wealth away.

Protests abound in the world today.

Will it, how will it, and when will it end?

Obama, Peña Nieto, and Stephen Harper in Mexico at a recent NAFTA ‘Free Trade’ talk in Toluca.

Nothing useful came out of the meeting. Earlier, when in California, Obama golfed for hours with Big Tech Company CEOs while the state endured the most serious drought it has ever seen (golf courses can consume up to 3.8 Million liters of water/day). ¹⁶
Image Source: washingtonpost.com, Text: Author.

On a recent trip to Indonesia, U.S Secretary of State John Kerry announced to the world that Climate Change was the modern day equivalent of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs). At home, however, he has yet to forbid the construction of the contentious Keystone XL project. American Style consumption levels, not Climate Change, are the WMDs. Climate Change is simply the mushroom cloud.
Images: Adbusters.org, Text and Image Composition: Author.

Sources

1. Cottrell, W.F. Energy and Society. McGraw-Hill. New York. 1955.

2. Cottrell, W.F. Technology, Man, and Progress. Merrill, Columbus, OH 1955.
3. Cleveland, Cutler J., Costanza, Robert, Hall, A.S, Charles et al. Energy and the U.S Economy: A Biophyscal Perspective. Science. 225 (4665); 1984.
4. Georgescu-Roegen, Nicholas. Energy and Economic Myths. Southern Economic Journal. 41 (3); 1975.

5. C Roberts. Energy and value. Energy Policy. 10 (3); 1982.
6. Galeano, Eduardo. Las Venas Abiertas de America Latina. Siglo XX1. Mexico City. First 1971.
7. Gunder Frank, Andre. Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America, New York, 1967.
8. Furtado, Celso. La economia latinoamericana desde la Conquista iberica hasta la Revolucion Cubana, Santiago de Chile, 1969; Mexico, 1969.
9. CNN Report
10. Reuters Report: Chineseiron trade fuels port clash with Mexican drug cartel.
11. McSweeney, Kendra, Nielsen A. Erik, Taylor J. Matthew et al. Drug Policy as Conservation Policy: Narco-Deforestation. Science. Vol. 343 no. 6170 pp. 489-490.
12. Soddy, Frederick. Wealth, VirtualWealth and Debt The Solution of the Economic Paradox.
13. NY Times: Mr.Soddy’s Ecological Economy.
14. Manfred, Max-Neef, B. Smith, Philip. Economics Unmasked. Gree Books. Cambridge. 2011.
15. Lasn, Kalle (Editor). MEME Wars: The creative destruction of Neoclassical Economics. Adubsters. 2013.
16. Time: Obama Plays Water-Guzzling Desert Golf CoursesAmid California Drought.

Crosspost from dleonb.com.

The views expressed here belong solely to the author of this entry and are not representative of the position of the Energy and Resources Group, UC Berkeley.