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money-laundering · 5 years

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In Guatemala, a foul Year For Corn — And For U.S. Aid

In a suitable year, Jesús García Ramos can feed his family all year on the corn that he grows in small fields around his home in the Guatemalan village of Quilinco. But this was now not the right year.

On a go-to in August, I met García Ramos in the area behind his house, the place I found him hacking down dried-out yellow corn stalks with a machete. He had planted the corn in March. But then it didn’t rain in June or July, the quintessential months when kernels structure on the cob. He predicted his yields would be about half what he’d anticipate in a precise year, or possibly less.

“We don’t sense horrific though, because we’re used to it,” he says.

Quilinco sits deep in Guatemala’s western highlands, in an overwhelmingly agrarian place the place poverty is high and child malnutrition costs hover around 70%. The vicinity also boasts some of Guatemala’s best possible migration rates to the United States. Local farmers say climate exchange is making it increasingly hard to get through and is one of the elements pushing human beings to head north. But Quilinco has also benefited from a U.S.-funded program to help farmers adapt and enhance their meals security. It’s a vicinity where one agricultural resource project’s effect — and the stakes of reducing such aid, as the Trump administration did this past spring — can be viewed firsthand.

To get there, I rode a bus for five hours from Guatemala City and then acquired a trip in a pickup truck for every other hour. The truck bounced up a dusty grime road that wound up the mountains, via pine bushes and a patchwork of little fields of corn and broccoli.

Virtually all and sundry in the town make a residing as a farmer, planting corn in the summertime for subsistence. In winter, many additionally plant veggies such as snow peas and potatoes for export to the United States.

Farmers and scientists say climate exchange has been making agriculture extra difficult. This year, the trouble has been drought. Rain patterns have been more unpredictable, and storms have been stronger. Two years ago, an uncommon spring hailstorm shredded García Ramos’ corn plants, and he lost the whole crop. In different years, hurricanes have left him with nothing.

But García Ramos has a security net. In years that he has lost his crops, he has been able to plant once more the subsequent season thanks to a bucket of seeds he shops in Quilinco’s neighborhood seed reserve. The reserve is a phase of an about $7.5 million undertaking funded by using the U.S. Agency for International Development. Called Buena Milpa, the challenge has labored considering that 2015 with subsistence farmers at some point in the western highlands to improve their corn yields and assist them to adapt to climate change.

The project, whose name means “good cornfield,” supported seed reserves in 15 communities. It additionally helped farmers diversify the plants they plant to feed their families and taught them soil and water conservation techniques.

The seed reserve in Quilinco is a small one-room building, painted white, that sits in the center of a cluster of cornfields. A signal outside the constructing says in Spanish that it’s “a measure to adapt to local weather change.”

“It’s a structure of relief from local weather change due to the fact it permits us to shield each farmer’s most necessary seeds,” says Esvin López, who oversees the reserve. Inside, red and green buckets of seeds are stacked on shelves.

Since 2015, López has been a nearby task coordinator for Buena Milpa, incomes about $500 every month. Then, this previous March, President Trump introduced he planned to freeze about $450 million in foreign useful resource to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras for failing to stop their residents from migrating to the United States. In June, Buena Milpa’s coordinators realized that the project’s funding would cease about six months previously than expected. Latin America professionals have warned that halting aid would possibly without a doubt spur more Central Americans to depart for the United States. Food insecurity has been one of the most important drivers of migration from Guatemala, and climate change has been making it more challenging for small-scale farmers to feed their families.

López estimates that almost half of Quilinco’s 600 residents have spent time in the United States. He isn’t always one of them, even though as a youngster he idea seriously about heading north. Then a crop scientist working for every other international aid task came to Quilinco and invited López to take part in an agronomy course, the place he specialized in lookup on neighborhood corn seeds.

“I cherished it, and I thought, ‘This will be my opportunity,’ ” says López. “And I liked being a leader.”

López helped set up seed reserves like the one in Quilinco at some stage in the western highlands. Then, he and the scientists he works with began crossing the seeds they accumulated to create new types that would be more productive and resistant to storms, pests, drought and different issues exacerbated with the aid of climate change.

Inside the Quilinco reserve, López pulls out a small paper bag filled with one of these varieties, labeled “Population One.” The translucent white seeds were created through crossing corn from Quilinco with a native variety from every other region, where corn vegetation is shorter. The result is a plant it truly is tailored to Quilinco’s climate but does not topple over as effortlessly at some stage in storms. José María García Funes, every other nearby farmer, has been developing a drought-resistant variety this year. He lives at the bottom of a steep hill it truly is thick with trees.

Behind the trees, his corn flora are green and healthy, with fat, nearly ripe ears of corn.

García Funes received involved with Buena Milpa 4 years ago. He’d simply returned from residing in Chicago, the place he labored in a factory that made spice mixes for fast-food chains.

“I noticed that the neighbors’ corn wasn’t developing as tall as mine, and the wind didn’t knock it over as easily,” he said. “So I decided to get involved.”

The program also educated García Funes in the modern developing techniques, like how to pick out the best seeds to plant from yr to 12 months and how to store seeds by using preserving them dry after the harvest. Now he has been harvesting almost twice as great deal corn as he used to. Several farmers in Quilinco informed me that working with Buena Milpa had expanded their yields and helped them feed their families. One of them says he has been growing six times more than before.

Still, the expanded corn yields have not saved García Funes’ youngsters from migrating. If now not for his migration, he would not have been in a position to develop great deal corn at all. He used some of the money he earned in the U.S. to buy the land where he grows this corn. And his sons are following in his footsteps. One of them later came domestic after a few years in Oregon and bought fields where he’s now growing broccoli. Another left for Washington state closing spring.

They’re no longer the only household of farmers to matter on money earned in the U.S. to get by. García Ramos, the farmer who misplaced his crops to a hailstorm, can purchase meals in horrific years with cash his son sends from California.

Even López says his work with farmers in all likelihood hasn’t made migration much less appealing in Quilinco.

“Yes, we’ve got elevated our yields,” he says. “But it isn’t enough.”

When it comes to migration, he says, cash is the key. He says it is almost impossible to buy land to farm on in Quilinco without doing a stint in the United States. So some distance he has survived on his U.S.-funded salary, however it has by no means been sufficient to buy land of his own.

This summer, after mastering of the funding cuts, López began questioning about heading north himself. Over the summertime, he went to his 7-year-old daughter and requested her, “What do you think? Do you prefer to go with me to the United States?”

She stated no — she desired to remain in school here.

López hopes to continue to be in Guatemala with his spouse and daughter — and to find a new job researching local corn.

Beyond López himself, the reduce in USAID funding might also no longer affect migration from Quilinco. But the corn venture wasn’t designed to end migration. It used to be intended to decrease poverty and malnutrition.

With the funding gone, Quilinco’s seed reserve will remain, though barring any staffing. López’s lookup on new sorts has ground to a halt. And farmers won’t acquire any more training. They’ll be left with fewer tools to climate change.

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murasaki-murasame · 7 years

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Thoughts on Rakugo v2

I think I’ve had this for a week or two but I only got around to reading it last night, so here we go.

Considering that I’ve never found the time to write up my thoughts on the anime, I think I may as well also do a bit of that here. Which means I might also just freely spoil parts of the entire story in these posts. So I’d probably suggest people avoid these posts entirely if they haven’t finished the whole series in either manga or anime form. I’ll probably mostly stick to discussing each volume at a time, but I might casually reference later events and entire character arcs every once in a while, so I’m just giving a fair warning.

It’s still difficult to figure out how to even word these posts, because it’s effectively a reread in that I know the entire story already, but this is my first time experiencing the manga version of it. It’s weird.

I’m kinda surprised that basically everything in this volume made it into the anime, after how half of v1 got skipped over [though I think that the director’s cut version properly adapts all of the first arc]. In fact, I’m pretty sure that the first two chapters of the Yakumo and Sukeroku arc were adapted into three anime episodes, so that’s . . . interesting. I definitely got the vibe that the anime gave itself way more time to breathe for this part of the story in particular.

Which gets into the whole topic of the general difference in tone and atmosphere between the two versions. I think I touched upon it in my first post, but I feel like the anime handled things in a slightly more dramatic way, and toned down on the more comedic aspects. And it does feel like, as said, this part of the story in particular had more time to breathe in the anime. I wish I remembered exactly what happened in this part of the anime, but it feels like there’s a few entire scenes/moments that apparently didn’t exist in the manga. Unless they were lifted from the next volume or so. I at least remember that the scene with Yakumo reciting rakugo to himself as a calming technique was way more fleshed out in the anime, and involved a moment of him talking to Matsuda, and a scene with Sukeroku about to walk down the hallway but stopping and sitting on the stairs when he sees Yakumo staring out the window. Stuff like that.

I also noticed that the part with Yakumo getting his first girlfriend was like two pages long in the manga but felt at least slightly longer in the anime. And the part where he worked at the factory was literally a single page long, with the scene of him leaving on the train being entirely anime-original.

I feel like these posts are mostly going to sound pretty negative, but I don’t really dislike the manga. It’s just different to the anime. I totally get why the manga must have been popular and beloved in it’s time. I mean, the story itself is obviously captivating and original no matter what. I just really like the things the anime did to take the manga and make it even better.

The art is really wonderful all round, though it’s still hard to get used to Kumota’s preference for drawing silly cartoon-y faces. It just comes across so differently to the entire tone of the anime. In general the difference in tone is my main issue with the manga version, with pacing being in second place. The more light-hearted style of the manga is fine, but I just personally prefer the more serious, atmospheric, contemplative tone the anime had. But it only really feels like an actual problem in a select few scenes that felt actively diminished due to being more fast-paced and light-hearted. Like the part where Sukeroku and Yakumo VII return from the war. It wasn’t necessarily bad in the manga version, but I think the anime handled it far better.

I appreciate that this volume felt like it had more actual rakugo performances than the first one did. Those were very well done. I might be forgetting a few performances that were anime-original, though. Seeing Nozarashi still tugs at my heart so goddamn much. It’s one of my favourite performances in the story, purely because of the emotional weight it gains through context and repetition. I was also happy to see the Yumekin story done in seemingly the same way as the anime.

The fact that Kodansha is translating the rakugo performance names is still throwing me off big-time though. It’s not a bad choice at all, but I’m just used to their Japanese names. I think I mentioned it in my first post, but I feel like Kodansha is translating everything that the anime subs didn’t translate, and not translating anything they DID translate, and it’s just odd to read.

I’m very curious to see how Miyokichi is going to be portrayed, since I’ve heard people say that the manga treats her more unsympathetically. I think it’s probably too early to tell how her portrayal differs between this and the anime, since she only really got one chapter of screen-time in this volume, but I can kinda already see it. It still makes me sad to know that the author wrote her with less depth and sympathy than the anime did. Miyokichi is still one of my favourite characters in the show, so it just kinda sucks to hear. It makes me wonder how the manga will handle the climactic moment of the flashback arc. The most I’ve heard is that when you get to see what really happened there, the manga handles the big reveal way worse than the anime did, but I don’t know how, and I probably won’t know for a fair while.

One thing I’ve noticed while reading this is that I can really vividly remember how the anime did things. I can basically always imagine the characters’ VAs in my head as I read their lines, I can imagine the scenery and the backgrounds from the anime, I can imagine the soundtrack, etc etc. I think it really lends to the experience, especially during the rakugo parts. I still think it was kinda inevitable that this sort of story would feel more natural in any format that has music and voice-acting. It’s all about an artform all about voice-work, so it feels slightly awkward in a silent, purely visual format.

As we get into the later volumes, it’ll be interesting to keep track of what parts made it into the anime and what didn’t. I’m curious to see if there’s entire scenes/chapters in this story arc that didn’t get adapted, like what happened with the first arc. But I think that v3-5 [which I think makes up the rest of this arc] would have been adapted into about three episodes each, so I have a feeling that there wouldn’t be much cut content in this arc. It’d probably mostly be noticeable for the second half of the story.

Fake Edit: OK I just checked wikipedia which has a convenient rundown of each volume and it’s contents. So apparently the Yakumo and Sukeroku arc is nine chapters long, and ends a third of the way into v5. Ep1 of the first season adapts the entire five chapters of the first story arc, which makes up all of v1 and the first third of v2. Ep2-4 of the first season adapts the first two chapters of the second story arc, and thus the rest of v2. So the other nine episodes of season one adapt the seven chapters that make up the rest of the story arc. Assuming that the first season ends with the last Yakumo and Sukeroku chapter. But from what I remember of how it ends, it might have gone a bit into the Sukeroku Futatabi arc. Maybe. So either way the rest of the anime seems like it’d be a nearly 1:1 chapter to episode adaptation, so I guess there probably wouldn’t be much cut content at all. I’m not sure, though. The third arc definitely seems to be where more cut content might be, since it adapts a 17-chapter arc into a 12-episode anime. But, again, if the first season did adapt a chapter or two of that arc, maybe that number’s slightly more even. Either way, I’ve heard from manga readers that the last three episodes of season two adapt the last volume of the manga, which is three chapters long, so that part’s a direct one chapter per episode adaptation, at least. Which makes sense because the last three episodes definitely felt like three distinct segments of one overall ending arc. So if we take that into account, then the first 12 to 14 chapters of the last arc would have been adapted into 9 episodes of anime, so yeah I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some skipped material there. Which would make sense, since I could tell while watching it that most of season two felt a bit more rushed than the rest of the show.

OK that was a long tangent but these things interest me so I wanted to get it my thoughts on it down.

I hope the manga can help flesh out certain things from season two that felt kinda lacking to me. That’d be nice.

Even if I have some vague issues with the manga version of this, I’m still enjoying it, and I’m going to keep buying it as it comes out. I already have v3 in the mail, at least. I really hope that more of Kumota’s manga gets licensed into English, but since most of it’s BL I don’t think most publishers would touch it, sadly. Maybe someone will eventually license her manga adaptation of Fune wo Amu.

#murasaki rambles #showa genroku rakugo shinju #I keep having to remind myself what exact spelling variation of the title I use as my main tag for it lol

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