Let’s recap. First, the Quinoa Boom on the Bolivian Altiplano was A Good Thing. A backlash was, in retrospect, inevitable. Soon enough, it was A Bad Thing. Then, slowly, sense prevailed, and we were all, like, We Need More Data. Most recently, we’ve had It’s Complicated.
So it’s interesting, don’t you think, that Alternet, which sort of started the backlash in the first place, has just published a piece which includes this summary:
…American accounts of the story “either fall on the side of ‘the quinoa boom is amazing and it’s lifting people out of poverty’ or ‘the quinoa boom is terrible and is destroying people’s lives,’ and in both of those narratives the indigenous people are given no agency…”
And is it just a coincidence that FAO has also just published online an infographic on The impact of the Quinoa boom on Bolivian family farmers? It not only identifies the challenges, but suggests some solutions as well. But you’ll have to click on it here on the left to see all that.
Meanwhile, though…
The most recent Farm Bill was an excellent opportunity for quinoa to gain both broader recognition and government payments. After all, temperate japonica rice, used in sushi, made the list of government supported commodities. Perhaps quinoa is next.
That would be in the US. Agency indeed.