Halfway down the Danube

Dates are interesting

Well, they are.

I spent much of June running around the West Bank looking at the regulatory environment for agricultural exports.  (Yeah, it's taken me a month to get around to blogging about it.)  This involved visiting farms, greenhouses, packing houses, and even a date processing plant.  Up until then, I didn't even know that dates needed processing.  I thought -- insofar as I thought about it at all, which I guess I didn't -- it's a fruit, it comes off a tree, you eat it.  Turns out, no.  Lot of stuff has to happen first. 

Anyway, dates.  The things that look like giant raisins, yah?  They grow on date palms, which are medium sized palm trees that like a hot arid climate.  Popular across the Middle East, growing in popularity in the West as a healthy snack food.  Nice little hit of tasty calories, lot of fiber, some vitamins.  In Muslim countries they're a traditional food for Ramadan, of which more shortly.

Date palms are desert plants, but dates are a thirsty crop: if you want to grow dates commercially the palms will soak up astonishing amounts of water.  That's because the date palm adjusts its output of fruit to match the availability of water.  Palms can survive perfectly well on very little water, but then they won't produce a lot of dates.  So whenever you see a date palm plantation -- and they're a very common sight in Israel and Palestine, especially along the Jordan valley -- you're looking at a lot of water. 

Israel and Palestinian agriculture

This is a big topic, but here's a first sketch.

Israel controls much of the good land on the West Bank.  Not all, but much of it.  Very broadly speaking, if you see a piece of the West Bank that's particularly fertile soil, with good access to water, there's a pretty good chance that an Israeli farm is sitting on it.  (And if you see a piece of the West Bank that has spectacular views, good chance there's an Israeli settlement sitting on it.  But that's a topic for another post.)

That said, there's still plenty of good land left for farming by the Palestinians.  For such a tiny area -- it's just about the size of Delaware -- the West Bank is astonishingly diverse.  It's all pretty dry but "dry" covers a wide range from true desert (down south towards the Negev) to half a dozen different Mediterranean microclimates.  You can grow a lot of different stuff here, from "desert" crops like dates and olives to "Mediterranean" herbs and vegetables like tomatoes, peppers and basil. 

But if you're talking about commercial agriculture, as opposed to subsistence farming? Well, that gets complicated.  Commercial agriculture, growing large amounts of crops for processing and/or export, requires a lot of stuff that's hard to get in Palestine.  For instance, commercial farms want fertilizer.  But Israel won't allow the importation of nitrate- or ammonium-based fertilizers into the West Bank, because those could be used to make explosives.  (Timothy McVeigh blew up a chunk of Oklahoma City using a truckload of fertilizer.)  There are substitutes -- stuff like potassium chloride -- but they're generally either more expensive or not as good.

Then there's water.  Oh my, water.  This is a huge and complicated topic, but here's the short version: the Israelis have taken a very disproportionate share of the available water in the West Bank.  For instance, in Area C, the large region under direct Israeli control?  There hasn't been a single permit issued for a new Palestinian well to be drilled.  Like, ever.  Every Palestinian well in Area C predates 1967. 

Now, commercial farmers need irrigation.  A little subsistence farm may be able to survive on rainfall plus a catchment system, but that's just not going to cut it for a serious commercial farm -- you need high productivity, and you need to be able to deliver a crop at a fairly fixed time with a fairly predictable quality.  Otherwise, nobody's going to want to buy your stuff, and you go out of business.  So, you absolutely must have water.  But because Palestinians have a lot less water per capita than Israelis, water is more expensive.

Palestinian water also tends to be worse in quality than Israeli water.  Because you have a lot of people drinking from a tiny water table, there's more mineralization and higher salinity.  More saline water causes dramatic drops in agricultural productivity, to the point where you might as well not bother trying to grow stuff.  You can treat the water to improve its quality, but this is a significant capital expense, and there are environmental issues too.  Short version: if you treat 100 cubic meters of saline water, you end up with 80 cubic meters of sweet water -- and 20 cubic meters of really salty water.  Which you can't just dump somewhere, because it's going to poison the soil, and you can't just pump back into the water table, because then you're salting everyone else's drinking water.  Anyway, it's probably moot, because you need money for water treatment, and you don't have a lot of money. And even if you do find it somehow, it's just bringing you up to the point that your Israeli counterparts are starting from.

You can also try dealing with it by grafting, which is what a lot of Palestinian farmers do: you plant seedlings that are grafted onto salt-tolerant roots.  This is a workaround that can be fairly effective, as long as the water is not too terribly salty.  But, again, added expense. 

Oh, and if you farm with salty water for too long?  Over a period of years, the salt is going to build up in your soil, and kill it.  If you're doing open-field agriculture, then you can alleviate this problem with crop rotation to non-irrigated plants; over time, natural rainfall will wash the salt out, allowing you to start over.  But if you're doing greenhouse agriculture -- which is where the money is -- then saline water means that every few years, you have to throw away your ruined soil and start over from scratch.  In addition to being a rather dubious practice environmentally speaking, this is yet another added expense.

Here's an additional fact in the mix: Palestine and Israel are in a customs union.  Israel can control the flow of goods across the border, and prohibit certain things from crossing, but there are no actual tariffs.  Palestinian goods can flow into Israel (subject to health and security checks), and vice versa, without paying anything at the border.  So if you're a Palestinian commercial grower, you're competing directly with Israeli commercial growers.  And the Israelis are sitting on the best land, have better fertilizer, and much cheaper and more reliable access to better quality water.  That's before we start getting into other Israeli advantages like better technology, much more access to credit, much better developed market linkages, government assistance and subsidies, etc. etc.  Just right off the bat, with those three basic things -- land,fertilizer, water -- the Israelis are already well ahead of the game.  You could set everything else equal and Israeli agricultural products would still be noticeably cheaper.

So, consequences.  One is that every grocery store in Palestine is full of Israeli agricultural products.  Oh, there are some Palestinian crops -- watermelons, apricots, cherries, all sorts of stuff -- but it's mostly small scale and local, and it's mostly fresh fruit and produce.  If you're talking stuff that's processed and/or mass produced --  fruit juice, tomato sauce, canned beans, frozen peas, corn oil, marmalade -- it's mostly Israeli, with hardly a Palestinian product to be seen. (The Israeli advantages mentioned above are amplified by the fact that it's a lot easier to move an Israeli product into Palestine than vice versa.  Israel subjects Palestinian imports to fairly rigorous health and security checks -- every container gets examined, every pallet gets scanned -- while Israeli imports to the West Bank go through with relative ease.)

Second consequence: it's really hard for Palestinian commercial farmers to compete in international markets.  Not impossible, but hard.  Which is why commercial farming in Palestine is still pretty dinky.

That said, there are some interesting wrinkles to this story.  More in a bit.

 

 

 

The Meat Pie Fear Index

While I was up in Copperbelt, I had to wait for an hour while a colleague finished a meeting.

The meeting was at a District Commissioner's Office -- sort of a combined courthouse and town hall, a low rambling building with various offices.  I wandered around a bit looking at things -- there was a trial in session, very well attended, interesting -- looked at the jacaranda trees for a bit (jacarandas are very cool, I love their seed pods) then wandered across the street to a cafe. 

Hot, flies, one big old fan trying to keep the air moving -- but, hell, there was a fan.  And water to wash your hands with before eating.  (The staple starch of Zambia's diet is corn mush, and you always eat it with your hands, so you wash your hands first.)  I ordered a vegetable sambosa and a tonic water (not for the quinine, I just think it's very quenching in hot weather).  Whoops, no vegetable sambosas left.  Meat pie?  Oh... all right.

I ate the meat pie.  I ate it with some trepidation, but hell -- I was hungry.

Later it occurred to me that I would never, ever have done this in the DRC.  And so was born the Meat Pie Fear Index!

"You are in a roadside cafe in a rural area.  You are hungry.  The only food available is a fried meat pie."

0 -- purchase and eat the meat pie without an instant's hesitation [Germany, Sweden]

1 -- purchase the meat pie, pause for a moment, shrug and eat it [Britain, France]

2 -- stare at the meat pie, think "God knows what's in that" and then "well, I'm pretty hungry", purchase the meat pie, give it a cursory examination, eat it.  [Serbia]

3 -- stare at the meat pie, think "it's probably crawling with parasites", dither for a minute until you realize you're blocking the line, sigh inwardly, purchase meat pie.  Stare at it on plate for a moment, turn it over and examine carefully.  Take a small bite and chew.  Take another small bite and chew.  Wash down with tonic water in the vague hope that the quinine will do something or other.  Over next half day, monitor self for signs of mysterious sudden internal disruptions.  All that said, eat the whole pie, because you were hungry.  [Zambia]

4 -- stare at meat pie, shake head, walk away.  Go hungry.  [Uganda]

5 -- do not enter cafe in the first place.   [DRC]

I'm not sure what this actually measures, but no doubt it will come to me.

 

For the husband

  Husband, look what I found at the REWE today:

And also, Cherry Garcia. I took them both, and then discovered they have a whole section with a (admittedly limited) selection of flavors.  My initial reaction was to stock up (old reflex from living in second and other world countries).  But it seems we don't need to worry.  Don't ask me what I paid for them, though!  Hideously expensive is one word for it.

The Cherry Garcia will wait for you to come back home.  The Cookie Dough... I'm not so sure.

It seems I might be able to send you out after B&J's after all!

(This is an old joke.  The first month or two of my first pregnancy we spent in DC -- and I sent Doug out for B&J almost every night.  That stopped once we moved abroad into countries sorely lacking in B&J's. It has always been a major complaint during pregnancies.  But not anymore!  Yay!)

Brandy blogging: Korbel versus Ararat

Doug will be leaving Armenia shortly, so I thought it would be appropriate to toast his stay with an Armenian brandy taste test. In the near corner, we have Wisconsin's favorite brandy, Korbel:

And in the far corner, straight from Admiral Isakov Avenue, we have Armenia's Ararat:

How do they compare?

Comiendo los alimentos en la madre patria

Somebody ... probably my mother ... once described Spanish food as “letting the ingredients speak for themselves.”

“Hearty peasant food,” Amma says.  “Solid presentations of uncommon meats.  Satisfying to the stomach, but not so much to the tongue.” 

I wouldn’t call it bland, exactly.  But comida andaluza does, I think, explain the Philippines.  The Philippines got the full force of a cuisine that liked to “let the ingredients speak for themselves,” only without the ingredients.  Philippine food is, perhaps, Andalucian food before the conquest of Mexico brought the ingredients to the peninsula.   

Or not.  It’s a hypothesis, anyway. 

Anyway, Spanish cuisine is just plain food — alimentos — more than a “cuisine.”  Maybe I’m just too used to it, having grown up on a faintly Americanized version of the stuff.  Meat-heavy fried food with very light seasoning. 

Overcooked venison is actually pretty good once you get used to it, and I’ve already mentioned croquetas.   

Plus, tapas are fun, although much better in America (or Catalunya, for that matter) where the substance comes from Mexico and Southeast Asia but the style is español.

Day 27: The dream we all dream of.

A gift from La Loca:

Pomegranate Tuesday

  Ever eat a pomegranate?

They're tasty, and good for you, and sort of fun to eat.  But at the same time they're kind of a pain in the ass.  You eat it by plucking out the seeds, a few at a time, and eating the sweet drops of flesh around them.  (The "arils", to be technical.)  Since an average pomegranate contains several hundred seeds, this takes a while.  If you try to speed things up, you'll crush the arils and get juice all over your hands and probably your clothing too. 

In which case you'll be sorry, because pomegranate juice is a bitch: it stains fast, deep, and for good.  It's rich in tannins, right?  That's what gives the fruit its interesting, astringent flavor.  So, imagine spilling a mixture of grape juice and strong tea on your new  Brooks Brothers shirt.  That's right -- it's never, ever coming out.

So you can eat a pomegranate quickly, or safely, but never both.  Basically it's a fruit for people with lots of time on their hands.  Or nudists.