Coffee Prices Going Up; Allowances Going Down?

Children may be looking at a cut in their allowances, if the adults who provide them are big coffee drinkers.

     A quick lesson in economics teaches disposable income is the money people bring home from work after taxes are removed. For most people, a large portion of disposable income pays for such necessities as food, housing, transportation, and clothing. After paying for these necessities, what is left over is discretionary income that can be spent on things like a mango, doll, game system, or any other things children want.

     For those who need their morning cups of coffee, the anticipated increase in the world's price of coffee beans will reduce the amount of disposable income they have left over for discretionary spending. Is an allowance a necessity that has a claim on disposable income? If it is, it won't be affected by higher coffee prices. But a child's allowance may suffer, if the adult paying it considers an allowance in the same category as discretionary spending for a new toy. Increased coffee prices that reduce the amount of disposable income left over for discretionary income can cause a reduction in a child's allowance. If that happens, older children might decide to look for jobs that give them an income and the power to decide their own disposable and discretionary spending.

     Considering a wider economic context, kids might learn to ask why coffee, banana, soda, bus fare, and other prices go up and down. When a supply increases and demand stays the same, prices go down. But, when supplies decline and consumer demand increases, prices also increase. That explains a coffee price increase.

     In Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Tanzania, because of climate change, temperatures are rising in the high altitude tropical regions that grow high-quality Arabica coffee beans. There, coffee bean output is threatened by the pests and plant disease that flourish because of long periods of drought and short periods of heavy rainfall. The International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) in Colombia suggests survival for Arabica growers will require them to move 300 to 500 meters farther above sea level, an impossibility for Brazil's highly mechanized, commercial coffee plantations that supply 70% of the world's 1.6 billion cup daily coffee demand.

     Although growing coffee under a canopy of trees, such as shown in the photo of coffee growing in Mexico, would increase the predators that feast on insects that damage coffee beans, reduce the costs of chemical pesticides and fertilizer, and curtail polluting run-off, for all but a few specialty brands, the trend in the past 20 years has been away from shade-grown coffee. High-yield Robusta coffee, like that grown in Vietnam and Indonesia, can withstand higher temperatures, but its lower quality is used mainly for instant coffee. Wet processed coffee beans from the Indonesian island of Sumatra gives them a different taste that some coffee drinkers dislike but others enjoy, especially when, for example, McDonald's mixes them with beans from other sources.

     Whatever the coffee type, the same conflicts the palm oil and timber industries face regarding deforestation, questions of land ownership, competition among food crops, and water scarcity affect all types of coffee growers.

     While the future of coffee production is uncertain, increased demand is certain. Using Arabica grown in Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Tanzania, Starbucks, in partnership with Taste Holdings, is planning to open in Johannesburg, South Africa in 2016. Positioned as part of the fashionable, upscale urban scene in Shanghai and Beijing, coffee consumption in traditional tea-drinking China is growing faster than anywhere else in the world. Although China's four-cup-per-person-per-year is very low compared to the U.S. and Europe, Starbucks and Costa are responding to the potential for growth by planning to double and triple the number of their shops in China by 2020. Sumerian, a local company, also has entered China's coffee shop scene. Although China currently imports most of its coffee beans, domestic growers have increased their production from 60,000 to 120,000 tons in five years. Unfortunately, most Chinese coffee is grown in the sun in southern Puer, Yunnan, where more fertilizer and water are required and, at the moment, all but 30% of Yunnan's coffee is exported because it is a lower quality than what Chinese shops prefer to serve.

     With coffee consumption increasing, coffee bean growers have an incentive to solve production problems and meet high quality standards. Children who receive an allowance from coffee-drinking adults have an incentive to keep an eye on coffee prices.

Global Services for Gifted and Talented Kids

Gifted and talented kids grow all over the globe. Women and men from France, Israel, Japan, and many other countries have made Nobel Prize winning contributions to the world; basketball stars from China and Africa have played in the NBA; South Korea, Cuba, and Ethiopia are just a very few of the countries that have brought home medals from the Summer and Winter Olympics.

     Based on a normal bell curve distribution, we know there are outlier gifted and talented boys and girls in every country in the world and in every socio-economic and disabled group within each country. Odense, Denmark, will host the 21st Biennial World Conference for Gifted and Talented Children from August 10 to 14, 2015. Details are available at worldgifted2015.com. Throughout the year The Global Center for Gifted and Talented Children (gcgtc.com) in Germany provides a full array of resources for parents, teachers, and young people. In honor of The International Day for Gifted Children, the Global Center is inviting gifted children to send it art, videos, poems, and blogs that can be posted at gcgtc.com.

     To help children succeed in school and in life (and, I might add, to help them contribute to the peace and progress of the world), the Global Center offers solution-oriented coaching, teacher training, consulting by Skype or phone, workshops, diagnostic testing, conferences, and lectures by staff members. A downloadable flyer is available online and additional information can be requested by sending an email to info@gcgtc.com or by filling out a contact form at the Center's website. Since the Global Center's website offers information in at least 85 languages, there is little or no excuse for failing to make use of information tailored to the needs of gifted kids.

     Online, the Center also recommends articles and informative blogs. Some of the blogs are written in Persian, Spanish, Dutch, and Norwegian, as well as English. I found Aimee Yermish's blog, written in English, to be extremely useful.

     In addition to resources provided by the Global Center, with the help of their teachers, gifted and talented students can go to ePals.com, to find projects that let them collaborate with students in Italy, Egypt, Sweden, Liberia, Malaysia, and other countries. Projects are grouped by age, up to 17 and older. If gifted kids are interested in robots, they can find young people with similar interests at the website, Wevolver.com. There is more information about projects involving robots at the earlier blog post, "Robots for Good."

     The mission of the Global Center for Gifted and Talented Children is one we all can aim to achieve: "We discover what a child is good at and then build on their own resources."

   

 

Why Do They Love Us?

We believe that human rights are universal. As embedded in the United Nations' Declaration of Human Rights, "all human beings are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood." The Declaration declares everyone has the right to life, liberty, security, privacy, freedom from torture and arbitrary arrest or detention, equal protection before the law, and many freedoms, including the freedom to travel, receive an education, marry, own property, express an opinion, and associate with others.

     Since all human beings have a conscience, they have the right to choose to be an atheist or agnostic or whatever religion their conscience selects. Like Muslims, more than a billion Christians in the West and elsewhere choose to believe there is only one God. Only conversion, not coercion, may cause those who hold no belief, or a different one, to change their minds. No fatwa dispensation can consecrate the criminal slaughter of those who are not Muslim. The West believes that God needs to be allowed to let great sinners, like Paul, Augustine, and Ignatius of Loyola, choose to become great saints.

     Whether someone lives in the West, East, North, or South, life, not suicide, is a basic human right. Despite being blind, Chen Guangcheng defended the right of women, not the Chinese government, to determine the number of children a family should have. His opposition to forced abortions led to his house arrest and beatings of his wife. Like the millions of others who are fleeing from violence and murder in Syria, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or Libya, Chen escaped. Due to the good offices of the United States, he lives here now. He tells his story in The Barefoot Lawyer: A Blind Man's Fight for Justice and Freedom in China. 

     Persecution is not the only reason refugees flee to the West. Poverty and lack of opportunity cause many to take great risks at sea and through deserts to find jobs here. In an interview by Robert Christian, published on the Millennial blog (millennialjournal.com), Chen reports that in the real China 70% of the population live in awful rural conditions not the modern skyscraper cities of Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou. In the United States, slaves, women, homosexuals, every ethnic and religious group, and people with disabilities have been able to appeal to the Declaration of Independence and Constitution in order to get their rights recognized and enforced. American blacks. women, and other groups have overcome job discrimination. They vote, attend public schools, and obtain small business loans. The social media that ISIS blithely uses to make bombs and recruit other terrorists was created by students educated in the West, not the Taliban who shot Malala in the head because she wanted to go to school. In the West, freedom of speech and opinions do not lead to murder. They lead to the formation of unions, media coverage, and legal remedies.

     Western researchers have come to the aid of the world's health. They have searched for and found cures for small pox, polio, pneumonia, and numerous other diseases that have plagued the world throughout history. Rather than shun, and even kill, homosexuals, Western researchers kept experimenting until they found a cocktail of drugs that could keep an HIV/AIDS diagnosis from being a death sentence. Because a French doctor founded Medecins sans Frontieres in 1971 and because charities and the Red Cross were willing to go to Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea, the Ebola epidemic has been stopped. And these Western organization continue to go everywhere, such as to Nepal, when natural disasters strike. Even when individuals like Kayla Mueller hear about people suffering in foreign countries, they leave their comfortable lives and go to help (See the earlier post, "The Continuing Battle of Good and Evil.).                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 Democracy is not perfect. People love the West, because we are free to laugh at ourselves and admit our faults. Britain's Winston Churchill summed it up. "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."

Why Do They Hate Us?

Let's begin by recognizing that Indonesia, a country where 86% of its estimated 252,812,245 population is Muslim, is a democracy with a traditional commitment to religious diversity. Despite opposition from extremists, Time magazine (April 27/May 4, 2015) noted that Indonesia's President Joko Widodo appointed a Christian woman as a district chief in Jakarta. In other words, hate for the West is not an emotion shared by all Muslims.

     Zak Ebrahim, whose father murdered a militant Jewish Defense League rabbi and helped plan the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, observed in his book, The Terrorist's Son, "murderous hatred has to be taught...forcibly implanted. It's not a naturally occurring phenomenon." It is, therefore, not to justify or condemn the feelings of Muslims who hate the West but to lay out the reasons Ebrahim's father, El-Sayyid Nosair, and those in Lawrence Wright's book, The Looming Tower: al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, give to explain why they hate the West.

     Wright reminds us that Muslims went in two different directions after the death of Mohammed. The vast majority of Mohammed's followers are Sunnis who believe caliphs, Islamic clerics, should be elected. In contrast Shia Muslims, such as the Iranian Muslims who are Persians rather than Arabs, expected a hereditary caliphate, rule of Islamic clerics, to begin with Mohammed's cousin and son-in-law, Ali ibn Abi Talib. Within the Sunni majority, a fundamentalist subset of Salafists believe the only valid Islamic practices are the "early Muslim" (Salaf) ways followed during the time of Mohammed (See a description in the earlier blog post, "This We Believe."). In Egypt, Hasan al-Banna founded the Muslim Brothers in 1928 in order to form an Islamic state where the government, a Sharia legal code based on 500 immutable verses from the Quran, and lives would be centered on God. The Muslim Brotherhood came to be seen as a social service agency that provided jobs, schools, and hospitals and as an organization willing to achieve an Islamic state through the political process and compromise. Within the Brotherhood, a "secret apparatus," or army, also was formed to achieve this aim by violent means. The Ayatollah Ruhollan Khomeini, who formed a rigid theocratic state in the wealthy, modern country of Iran in 1979, sanctions this kind of terror and the use of the sword by warriors in a jihad, holy war, against infidels. Iran became a model for those who would impose religious dictatorships by force.

     To devout Muslims, infidels are those who practice a full array of godless, immoral behavior: homosexuality, adultery, divorce, the sexual freedom of women who flirt and wear enticing colors, close male and female dancing, jazz that arouses primitive instincts, drinking liquor and drunkenness, racism, violent sports, individualism, and materialism. Muslims believe Islam will triumph over both capitalists and communists, because modernity in the West, rather than focusing all aspects of life on God, has separated the secular and sacred, mind and spirit, state and religion, and science and theology.

     However, Muslim aspirations for forming an Islamic theocracy in Egypt were crushed by the secular regime of Gamal Abdul Nasser; Israel's swift victory in the 1967 Six Day War; and Anwar al-Sadat's secular democratic state, his ban on religious student organizations and traditional Islamic garb worn by university women, and Egypt's peace agreement with Israel. When a military plot to kill Sadat was successful in 1981, thousands were imprisoned in a 12th century dungeon where they were severely tortured. Among the prisoners was Ayman al-Zawahiri, a member of an underground cell that kept alive the idea of a jihad movement that would establish an Islamic state. When Zawahiri, who was a doctor, first went to Pakistan in 1980 to care for Afghan refugees who fled across the border following the Soviet invasion, he noted the training received by the Afghan freedom fighters or holy warriors, the "mujahideen," and how the area could serve as a base for recruiting an army of jihadists to take over Egypt and ultimately the West, considered to be the enabling force behind the Egyptian regime and state of Israel. Zawahiri's organization, which was strapped for money, would join forces with Osama bin Laden in the well financed al-Qaeda organization.

     The divide between supporters of secular governments and Islamic theocracies shows itself in a variety of countries. In Bangladesh, the secular Shahbag movement squares off against Ansar al-Islam Bangladesh, a group with ties to al-Qaeda in India. Al-Qaeda is taking credit for the May 12, 2015 murder of Ananta Bijoy Dash, who wrote for the Free Mind website that promotes secularism in Bangladesh.. Earlier, other Bangladesh bloggers, Avijit Roy, Oyasiqur Rhaman, and Ahmed Rajib Haider also had been killed by young Islamic activists. Dash had told friends that he did not expect anyone to kill him in his home in Sylhet.

     It should be noted that religion is not the only cause for the rise of what has become known as Islamic fundamentalism. Racism, and in some cases colonialism, has had an impact on non-whites.
In Egypt, for example, the poverty, disease, and illiteracy of the local population stood in stark contrast to the sporting clubs, hotels, bars, casinos, movie theatres, restaurants, and department stores that catered to the English upper classes and troops who began coming to Egypt when it became a British Protectorate in 1882. In fact, British troops continued to maintain a base in the Suez Canal Zone throughout half of the 20th century.

Recess Differs Around the World

As seen by photographer, James Mollison, in his new book, Playground, how students play, learn, and live is very different around the world.

     In Tokyo, Japan, children in clean shirts and shorts play in a gym with plenty of space under a roof that opens and closes. At school in Hull, UK, young men in uniforms of white shirts with navy sweaters and pants fool around in a brick courtyard. Recess in Africa is quite different. Hundreds of students in drab uniforms stand around in the dirt in front of their ramshackle school in Nairobi, Kenya. In Freetown, Sierra Leone, students in blue shirts and dark shorts share their recess with pigs in a stream.

     Sitting at outdoor ping pong and chess tables, students in Tel Aviv, Israel, wear military uniforms, while the dress code on the students standing around outdoors in a cement lot in Bethlehem, West Bank, is blue shirts and dark pants.

     Outdoors in Karvag, Averoy, Norway, active students in sweaters spend their recesses climbing trees in a wooded lot. Some African children also like to climb trees in their free time.