of mobiles and Ethiopia
(UPDATE! The continuing discussion in NYT has made me edit my post a bit. Please note that I have specially erased references to the comment that I referred to as I know now a bit more about who wrote it)
As it has now been profiled by the New York Times, I guess it is not that clandestine anymore so will add here a few words about my recent work. Basically, I have been doing media strategy for an environmental project in Ethiopia that aims to use mobile phones to connect carbon trading funds to small-scale farmers in rural Ethiopia. Nothing that flashy technically: just using text messages as the interface to the Internet for calculating how much carbon is tied to the biomass of trees and how much money this accounts for on the current carbon exchange, that is, in a way downsourcing the climate debates away from top-down centralized projects to most people in the world – ie small-scale farmers etc. Perhaps develop a more general mobile application based on this with funding in the upcoming months and so on and so on …
Check the article out below to get quite a decent overview of what has been going on – link HERE:
Selling Offsets By Mobile Phone in Ethiopia
By Jeffrey Marlow
One of the most daunting hurdles for the trade in carbon offsets is the logistical challenge of connecting customers — typically carbon dioxide emitting companies based in America or Europe — with offset producers in places like South America, Asia, and Africa.With the help of an innovative new program developed by Veli Pohjonen and the Finnish Ministry for Foreign Affairs, however, this global interaction may soon become as easy as sending a text message.
Many carbon trading efforts have struggled because of their cumbersome administration and multiple middle men, Mr. Pohjonen said — adding that they have “not led to anything remarkable in the combat against climate change.”
Under Mr. Pohjonen’s system, small Ethiopian farmers, for example, would measure the diameters of trees on their land twice a year and put the information into a text message, which, along with each farmer’s unique identification code, is then sent to the regional Watershed Users’ Association office.
Software computes the amount of carbon stored on each farm as well as the change from the previous measurement; any increase in stored carbon dioxide is converted into cash using the going rate of CO2 on international markets, and farmers are paid by their local association.
Major challenges remain, of course. Not least: keeping farmers honest and verifying the data they report, a hurdle that would almost certainly demand at least some of the administrative overhead that Mr. Pohjonen aims to avoid.
And the computer modeling used to calculate the amount of CO2 absorbed by stands of trees — a blunt tool at the moment — would need to be calibrated to account for the idiosyncrasies of Ethiopian ecology, and later, to those of other regions that might use the tool.
But finding more efficient ways to connect remote carbon offset projects to a faraway industrial world increasingly hungry for them is, to Mr. Pohjonen, the first hurdle. “Transaction costs can be minimized in another manner,” he said, “rather than just making projects bigger.”
Mr. Pohjonen’s son Matti, a Fellow in Digital Culture at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, has been overseeing the technology end of the project.
“The standard function of a mobile phone is talking and texting,” the younger Mr. Pohjonen said. But it can also be used, he added, to access the Internet and run queries regarding carbon prices or exchange rates.
The Pohjonens have been testing the system on eight farms in the country’s central highlands, where the average farmer is earning approximately 1000 Birr, or $80, every six months from their carbon offsets.
“In the Ethiopian context it is considerable money,” says Mr. Pohjonen. “It would give an added value of 10 to 20 percent compared to what he would get selling the trees as poles.”
While this article itself is not that much about media, I found there was two interesting things dealing with more general themes that we have been touching upon:
The first is how Ethiopia seems to be still being talked about and/or represented. As we know, Ethiopia is known in the collective Western imagination as a symbol for starvation and poverty in the world (ever since especially the famine of 1984). Probably we all still remember these images that have been burned into our collective imagination:
With this in mind, I found this comment following the NYT the article especially enlightening.
I often see a certain arrogance of people who talk about the developing world claiming to know what, in fact, is in the better interests of the people who live there – speaking in their name. This person even claims to know the specific farmers in question (I wonder if he has actually even been to these farms we measured and talked to and have their names like we do?) It seems to me that the rhetoric mediation here goes somewhat as follows:
1) He claims to know what the farmers want because he has been in Ethiopia more than the journalist;
2) Because of the signification of Ethiopia as a country of famine and food shortages, he therefore claims to know what all the farmers needs are (ie not some fancy mobile project dealing with complex local politics around agroforestry that would provide meager additional funding for planting of trees).
3) What the farmers therefore need is food aid (probably provided from the outside) rather than supporting their own bottom-up activities and the work they have started without outside mediation.
I quote:
I know this area of Ethiopia and the farmers the article is talking about. It is simply amazing to note how much disconnect exists between our Western journalists and their subjects. Which Ethiopian farmer will agree to text you the diameter of hundreds of trees twice a year? Do you know that the most basic question of the moment is the looming food shortage disaster. These farmers are worried about getting their next meal even in 2009!!! I think our friends in Finland are just being out of touch and simply addressing the wrong urgent problem.
I always wonder where this ‘discourse’ comes from? While there are no doubts food security is an issue in Ethiopia and there is, once again, a looming famine in the country, this, actually, does not affect the particular part of Ethiopia around Debre Tabor and Bahir Dar. But I think the more interesting question here is to notice the way how agency is represented when a country like Ethiopia is talked about, often accompanied by a certain kind of self-righteous moral indignation about the ills of the world by people claiming to represent other people because of some assumed superior knowledge of what their needs are. I recall Deleuze once said of Foucault: “he taught us the indignity of speaking for others …” Perhaps as close to an ethical guideline we can ever get.
Anyways, for some reason this comment reminded me of some of the themes we will be touching about the representation of the Other </End of rant.>
Secondly, it was again interesting to observe how quickly this article was RT:d (retweeted) as it came out. I did a quick search and found tens and tens of retweets of this almost immediately surfacing after it came out. I suppose this again demonstrated that Twitter has come the de facto way of spreading information today about things that have been published elsewhere and a good tool to find how news is being disseminated today.
So see Twitter search feed below:
Popularity: 4% [?]
Related posts:
our country received food aids from EU nations and it is a good thing to have those food aid programs`.:
we can always give food aid to the african countries if we just save some pennies and donate it to them “`;