I always knew agriculture was not en vogue, not at home (within the US) or abroad in development but I was floored by a figure I saw in the Christian Science Monitor "Relatively quick and substantial progress can be made if nations rededicate themselves to international aid for agriculture, which has dropped from 13 percent of all development aid in the early 1980s to only 3 percent now."... 3% of all development aid is for agriculture; folks, bottom line if people don't grow stuff then they don't eat. I knew that agriculture was not popular but 3% just boggles my mind for something so basic and critical as agriculture. In the US and Europe I see people quibbling over details of agriculture and the most environmentally appropriate (important no doubt) ways and most healthy foods but then I think about the farmers toiling away to grow enough wheat/rice for their families, producing not even 1/5th of what an American/European farmer can produce in the same area... and wheat/rice is about all these subsistence farmer families eat.
My knee jerk assumption is that since much of the developed world lives far away from agriculture so has little concept of it and given supermarkets has little appreciation for agriculture that coupled with political interests that are injected into all forms of development aid I guess its not hard to see how agriculture is marginalized but still...
Friday, January 30, 2009
Monday, January 12, 2009
A Mortgage Broker In Amish Country... lessons to be learned
I was reading an an article on NPR about the Amish and loans and came away not sure what to think...
A line from the article that really got my attention was "O'Brien says the Amish are less risky debtors than people with access to all the tools of modern banking. The Amish live well within their means — no splurging on iPods or HDTVs, no dinners out that they really can't afford. The Amish think that missing a payment brings shame — not just on them, but on their whole family, their whole community."
Its a strange phenomenon in a day and age where people routinely spend beyond their means. I am currently working through a budgeting debacle that I inherited from the previous management where it seems that they spent over 40+% of a three year budget... in 8 months; times like this remind me that even one who is "fiscally disciplined" can be subject to the fiscal faux pas of others.
I am still quite proud of my family and the way i have been brought up in terms of living in a fiscally realistic manner. Again and again i find the world looks at me like i am some sort of scrooge (though i have never been accused of being a mooch) because i live what i believe to be, responsibly. Its odd to me because it is not only the spending-money-like-water (sometimes via credit, though usually by just spending all month-to-month) westerners but also the poor as dirt developing countries, they think i have "tons of money" and can live like a king (rarely saving properly for the future) but i find that in many of these countries life gets rough when they get older and they become heavily dependent on their children, children who sometimes don't look out for their parents later in life.
ah well...
A line from the article that really got my attention was "O'Brien says the Amish are less risky debtors than people with access to all the tools of modern banking. The Amish live well within their means — no splurging on iPods or HDTVs, no dinners out that they really can't afford. The Amish think that missing a payment brings shame — not just on them, but on their whole family, their whole community."
Its a strange phenomenon in a day and age where people routinely spend beyond their means. I am currently working through a budgeting debacle that I inherited from the previous management where it seems that they spent over 40+% of a three year budget... in 8 months; times like this remind me that even one who is "fiscally disciplined" can be subject to the fiscal faux pas of others.
I am still quite proud of my family and the way i have been brought up in terms of living in a fiscally realistic manner. Again and again i find the world looks at me like i am some sort of scrooge (though i have never been accused of being a mooch) because i live what i believe to be, responsibly. Its odd to me because it is not only the spending-money-like-water (sometimes via credit, though usually by just spending all month-to-month) westerners but also the poor as dirt developing countries, they think i have "tons of money" and can live like a king (rarely saving properly for the future) but i find that in many of these countries life gets rough when they get older and they become heavily dependent on their children, children who sometimes don't look out for their parents later in life.
ah well...
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