Adam Menter’s Blog

Today’s Fresh Air program on NPR featured James Balog, a nature photographer and the founder of the Extreme Ice Survey, a project to document the changes occurring on some of the planet’s most remote glaciers. Basically, they are melting right before our eyes. As Mr. Balog said in the program, this isn’t about climate models and projections - this is about putting us face-to-face with the change that is going on right now.

The program was excellent - and Mr. Balog just seemed like a really cool, genuine guy. I recommend you give it a listen. Also, this work is going to be featured on PBS’s NOVA program on March 24th. I’m sure it will be breathtaking (and scary).

…little self-indulgent rant coming up…

I was sickened by an article in this morning’s NYTimes about how Frito Lay is trying to target their products to women: Frito-Lay tries to Enter the Minds (and Lunch Bags) of Women. It is basically about a big new campaign that Frito Lay is launching to get more women to buy their junk food:

Women are snacking more than men, but are not eating as many Frito-Lay snacks…“So if it’s, you’re snacking two times as much, but you’re not snacking with us, why, and what can we do for you?” …men’s growth in salty snacks is far outpacing women’s.

They’re pretty worried about the women they studied feeling guilty (as expressed in a logbook study):

According to their logs, the women felt guilty about quite a lot, whether it was snacking, not seeing their children enough, or not spending enough time with their husbands…”So the question for us was, how do we not trip her guilt?”

And their answer to this is:

Toning down the packaging and showing off healthy ingredients in the snacks…Baked Lay’s will no longer be in a shiny yellow bag, but in a matte beige bag that displays pictures of the ingredients like spices or ranch dressing.

Pretty much NO thought given to the products themselves. When are we going to step up, stop putting up with this crap, and get better than this? Imagine how many millions of dollars were spent on this campaign. Imagine how many (wo?)man hours were wasted on this…and imagine how sad it is that the people who were working on this probably genuinely wanted to be helping people.

The problem is that Frito Lay has millions to spend to pay people to do this less-than-meaningful work. While some of the only people trying to address the root of these womens’ guilt (by encouraging and emboldening them to actually spend time with their children and families, for example) - are working for some non-profit for peanuts.

…and one more thing…

They’re also back-handing women with the good ‘ole “hate your body” routine:

In one of the webisodes, two of the women stand with a swimsuit saleswoman, who is reviewing a chart of what bikini works on women with different body types — a trope familiar to readers of women’s magazine summer issues.

“Where’s the one that takes a middle-aged mom with some unwanted bulges and a chest that’s seen perkier days and makes her look like Cindy Crawford?” a character asks.

(check out http://www.awomansworld.com/ and watch the video on the NYTimes site if you can stomach it)

I thought we were heading in the right direction with campaigns like Dove’s Beauty campaign. I guess not.

…okay, I’m done now…

Last week’s Economist has a provocative article about the food system (Good Food?..Voting With Your Trolley). It basically says that Organic, Fair Trade, and Local food may be bad for society and the environment. Having a sister who is deeply passionate about these issues and living in San Francisco where the Organic/Fair Trade/Local mantra is religion to a lot of people – this came as a shock to me. Basically, the article says that Organic food could be bad because it is far more resource intensive (much more land for the same food output). Fair Trade food isn’t great because it encourages farmers to continue producing cash crops that there is already an abundance of (instead of diversifying) and makes them reliant on this “fair” trade. Local food isn’t great because the local food supply chain isn’t as efficient (think tightly packed tractor trailors on the highway vs. individual pick ups puttering to market) and that most of the “carbon footprint” of the food we eat comes from us individuals driving to and from the store to buy it. The bottom line of the article is that if the food system is ever really going to change, it is going to take much more than consumer’s individual purchases – it is going to take a sea change in global trade and government policies/subsidies.

My personal take on this so far is that organic food is still good. Local is good. Fair trade – mostly good. The reason that organic food might be bad is due to the world’s huge population (in fact, overpopulation is the root of A LOT of society’s problems in my opinion). The reason local food might not be great is because of the way people decide to move themselves and where they decide to live. The bottom line is that I think organic and local food is good for society and the environment. Where it runs into problems is when it intersects with other less-savory aspects of our human society (what we do right doesn’t look right because of what we do wrong). For now the Economist’s argument does not have me convinced to change my personal food convictions. But it does give me more incentive to be mindful of global food politics.

I would love to hear more discussion about this topic. I submitted the article to Grist (one of my favorite environmental news sites). I haven’t seen them pick it up yet.

The article is here (but you need to subscribe to the Economist).

UPDATE (01-11-07): Grist responded to the article.  Check out their response here.

After writing my previous post, ‘Microfinance Needs More Than Scale,’ I was happy to read a story in Forbes that paints the other side of the microfinance picture. “Easy Money: Microcredit is booming in India, but the loans don’t often pull people out of poverty” (11/13/06) talks about some of the ‘failure stories’ and potential drawbacks of microfinance that it is so important for us to hear, especially in the Western World where we are so far removed from the on-the-ground reality. If the only things you every read about microfinance are success stories that appeal to your emotions, then there is a publication bias. (In fact, I just read about a new academic journal called “The Journal of Spurious Correlations” that is devoted to publishing negative results in social sciences. Sometimes knowing what doesn’t work and why is just as important as knowing what does. It is a great idea.)

Before you jump on me for raining on Microfinance’s parade, I want to make clear that I think Microfinance is a great tool. However, the realities that I saw working in the field for several months in India don’t always jive with what I have been reading in the Western media. I certainly saw some wonderful success stories – but I also saw failures, mistakes, and miscalculations. The Forbes article talks about some of this, saying that for many recipients, “the loans haven’t turned into new income” and many “haven’t started businesses at all. Instead…the money helped them pay for urgent expenses.”

The article also talks about some of the drawbacks of large-scale microfinance institutions that I alluded to. “The rapid growth also means that lenders are less likely to keep tabs on a borrower after a loan is made (in India there is one microfinance staffer for every 439 borrowers, in Bangladesh the ratio is 1:131)… The women in India could probably use more guidance, because it’s so difficult to run a business there: The country ranks just 134th out of 175 that the World Bank studied this year for ease of doing business.”

The Forbes article does tell the typical uplifting story of a woman (Manjula, an entrepreneur with a sari shop and an alcoholic husband) who used the loan to expand her business. However, it is also careful to point out that Manjula is not a typical loan recipient and started at a high level of competence and education. Also, even a relatively advantaged woman like Manjula has not been able to completely stop borrowing from other high-interest moneylenders.

Hooray for Forbes for having the courage to be candid!

With the Nobel Prize recently going to Muhammad Yunus, microfinance is getting more attention than ever. I recently read a BusinessWeek article entitled “Taking Tiny Loans to the Next Level” (Nov. 27, 2006). It talks about how Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are starting to get involved by providing financing and technical support to microfinance organizations around the world. The fact that these Western businessmen are interested in using their brainpower to solve problems like this is fantastic. However, what I noticed in the article is a bit of naivitee about the realities of microfinance on the field. In the article Pierre Omidyar (eBay) is quoted as saying “[microfinance] is just another large-scale systems challenge.” The article then goes on to make a parallel between Bill Gates selling millions of copies of Windows to become the richest man in the world and microfinance organizations needing to grow in scale to service many millions of people to maximize their impact.

In a sense Omidyar is right about microfinance being a large scale systems challenge - in the sense that global poverty is a large scale systems challenge. This is a system that includes education, health care, family development, and global trade among other things. It is a system that involves governments and politics. Microfinance is just one tool and scale is not the only thing keeping it from alleviating global poverty. One has to remember that these loans are going to people in the developing world whose daily realities are MUCH different than most Westerners can imagine. Many have never saved money before. Many have deeply rooted problems outside of their financial lives.

As much as us Westerners would love sit here and solve global poverty by throwing money and software at it, it is going to take more than that I’m afraid. Being process-oriented is great if that process also tries to address the root cause of these people’s problems (ensuring they are receiving proper health treatments, that alcoholism is being addressed, that children are being educated, that a balanced meal is being provided, that shelter is adequate, that mothers are mindful of their baby’s early childhood development, etc). The problem is that once microfinance organizations become too big they become less adept at dealing with these underlying problems - especially when they are operating as a for-profit business. They are not as rooted in the community. Individual loan recipients become just a number with statistics attached instead of a face with a personal history attached.

In a side note: In just about every microfinance article you read, you hear a success story. It usually involves a single woman who gets a loan to start a small business and then is able to feed and educate her family (the BusinessWeek article is no exception). That is great – but that is not the fate of every loan recipient. What about the people who are applying for loans who aren’t as capable? Businesses do fail (there are only so many tailors and vegetable vendors one neighborhood needs) and often many microfinance loans aren’t even used to start businesses. We never hear the failure stories.