Foreign Policy Need Not Be "Foreign":

Every year the Foreign Policy Association identifies the areas of the world that need our attention and prepares information to help us understand and discuss these issues. The association has prepared materials on the following for 2020:

• Climate change
• India and Pakistan conflict
• Red Sea security
• Modern slavery and human trafficking 
• U.S. relations with the Northern Triangle of Central America (Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador)
• China's Road to Latin America
• U.S. relations with the Philippines
• Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data

To find out how to obtain these materials and how to start a foreign policy discussion group, go to fpa.org/great_decisions.

On the Mexican Side of the Border

The days of confining children in tent cities on the dusty Texas side of the Rio Grande are over. Guards need no longer bar the concerned visitors who set red balloons afloat over the camps to show those inside someone cared about them.

     But migrants still cross into Mexico from Guatemala, Honduras, and
El Salvador. In the five-year span from 2010 to 2015, the UN estimates over 300,000 left Central America. The Economist magazine (March 16, 2019) mentioned 8,000 left in January and February this year.

     Mexico understands the plight of Central Americans who seek asylum from government repression of the poor, gang violence, and soldiers, like those who murdered San Salvador's Archbishop Oscar Romero and four nuns in 1980 and the environmental activist, Berta Caceres, in Honduras in 2016. Besides fleeing violence, migrants also risk the long, hot and dangerous journey north when they are displaced by mining activities and when coffee and other crop prices drop or when a lack of rainfall, heat, and a plague of insects reduce crop yields. (Also see the earlier post, "How Can Bananas Be 29 Cents A Pound?")

     Since Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador became Mexico's President in December, 2018, his humanitarian welcome has cut into the estimated $2.5 billion organized crime was used to pocketing for trafficking migrants through Mexico to the U.S. border. As requested by Washington, D.C. migrants seeking asylum in the U.S. now remain in Mexico until close to their court dates.
   

How Can Bananas Be 29 Cents a Pound?

You may have noticed Chiquita prints labels on bananas from Honduras over pink ribbons supporting breast cancer research. Possibly the company has seen research by Kantar Consulting in the UK. Kantar's Purpose 2020 study found "almost two-thirds of millennials and centennials...express a preference for brands that have a point of view and stand for something." Consultants went on to conclude consumers expect brands to use their social power for positive change.

      Nowadays, the world has a wide variety of models that affect positive change. Religious missionaries and JFK's Peace Corps show how to bring education and skill training to impoverished areas. Experienced nongovernmental organizations rush water, food, and medical quick-fix support when earthquakes and other natural disasters strike, while international banks grant low-cost loans to finance the projects and equipment for long-term solutions. Foundations, universities, and major stockholders pressured South Africa to end apartheid by withdrawing investments from South African companies. Supermarket shoppers lent their economic power to Cesar Chavez's campaign to better conditions for lettuce pickers.

     The mothers, children, and other relatives walking, riding, and floating north to escape violence and poverty in Central America crave positive social change. According to ethicalconsumer.org, United Fruit, now Chiquita, and Standard Fruit, now Dole, came to Central America in the 1890s, because fertile land and government corruption provided excellent conditions for their banana businesses. In time, grocery chains habitually began to use bananas as loss leaders, offering them at low prices to attract shoppers who would buy other items, such as greeting cards that can be $3 or more, at profitable prices. These shoppers now are in a position to pressure supermarkets to buy from suppliers who treat workers fairly. Customers, who work for a living themselves, understand employees are entitled to fair compensation for their work. Those who climb trees to harvest bananas in Guatemala cannot be expected to subsidize grocers by accepting low wages, poor education and housing, and medical problems from unsafe working conditions.

     Today's greater access to worldwide information prompts both consumer concern for the exploitation of labor in foreign countries and exposure to the consequences of government corruption. The Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission in Kenya recognizes foreign companies involved in corrupt practices "ruin our country." At the same time, what company wants to risk prosecution for bribing government officials for a construction contract in Brazil or to pay off officials in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, if the same commodities are available in Australia?

     Migrant refugees don't want to walk miles to seek asylum from violence and poverty. Consumers and businesses have the power to change the conditions that can help them stay home.   

Picture This

Maybe Kim Jong Un's first glimpse of a promising future based on something other than purging all his military and political competitors, starving dissidents in re-education camps, and destroying Seattle with a nuclear missile was the video President Trump showed him when they met in Singapore.

      Unlike President Obama, who grew up inspired by the vision of multicultural ethnic and religious groups living side-by-side in Indonesia and Hawaii, Trump's New Jersey-New York line of sight was much different. How would things be different if his eye had been schooled to see something other than sites for beach-front condominiums, golf courses, and ice skating rinks?

     Bob Baffert, who grew up around horses in Arizona, looked at Triple Crown Winner, "Justify," and said he loved watching him run with his long strides. Abby Lee Miller's Broadway bound eye spots young girls with both dancing and expressive talents.

     In Vogue (June, 2018), Alexis Okeowo wrote how she grew up in the late 1990s watching Jackie Joyner-Kersee and Surya Bonaly on TV. Her conclusion: strong, beautiful, successful black athletes also could have style. Young women watching Serena Williams these days might have drawn the same conclusion, when they saw her attending the wedding of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry.

     Bethenny Frankel saw suffering from a hurricane in Puerto Rico and an earthquake in Guatemala and hired private planes to bring relief. Sometimes pictures of suffering are too painful to watch, especially if we don't have a place for an abandoned puppy or extra funds for a charity. In the Tony-winning musical, "A Band's Visit," Jewish settlers and a few Palestinian band members spend a chance meeting wistfully thinking about what could be. In contrast, Amnesty International's founders launched a creative campaign to write letters protesting human rights abuses. Pope John Paul II and Lech Walesa founded the Solidarity labor union movement to overthrow Communism in Poland.

     On "The Golden Girls" TV series, master storyteller, Sophia, used to begin her tales by saying, "Picture this." Right away, she engaged more senses. A science teacher showed students a video of a firecracker to attract immediate attention. But the video also inspired students to question why the sparks were different colors and much more, all the questions she was going to ask. 

       

Characters with Diverse Nationalities Populate A Summer Reading List

Children who read for fun under a shady tree or beach umbrella this summer will be in good company. Microsoft's co-founder, Bill Gates, considers "the chance to sit outside reading a great book" summer's gift for "gutting out" the rest of the year inside.

     No doubt young people will find the reading list selections made by Elizabeth Perez, a children's librarian at the San Francisco Public Library, more to their liking than the books Bill Gates put on his list:
     The Vital Question by Nick Lane, who explores the role energy plays in all living things, and
     How Not to be Wrong, Jordan Ellenberg's take on the role of math in all things, and
     Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, in which Noah Yuval Harari speculates on the way things           like artificial intelligence and genetic engineering will change future humans.

     Perez chose books featuring characters with diverse nationalities, including children from Mexico, the Caribbean, Guatemala, Ghana, Somalia, and Korea. Her choices also include children who have dual nationalities, American and Vietnamese, for example. She has age-appropriate selections for students from age 4 to age 14.

For ages 4-8
Emmanuel's Dream: the True Story of Emmanuel Ofosu Yeboah by Laurie Ann Thompson.
     A Ghanaian boy, born with one less developed leg, becomes a professional athlete.

For ages 5-8
I'm New Here by Anne Sebley O'Brien
     Children from Guatemala, Somalia, and Korea begin to adjust to a new school with the help of new classmates.
Mango, Abuela, and Me by Meg Medina
     A parrot becomes a go-between for a little girl who doesn't speak Spanish and her grandmother who does.
Mama's Nightingale: A Story of Immigration and Separation by Edwidge Danticat
     Librarian Perez advises adults to read this book first before deciding if children should find out letters are the only way some children have contact with their parents in detention camps.

For ages 5-9
Juna's Jar by Jane Bank
     Juna uses a Korean kinchi jar to store her dreams.

For ages 6-10
Funny Bones: Posada and His Day of the Dead Calaveras by Duncan Tonatiuh
     A non-fiction book about an illustrator famous for drawing Mexican Day of the Dead skeletons.

For ages 8-12
Listen, Slowly by Thanhha Lai
     Unwillingly an American girl visits Vietnam with her Vietnamese father and grandmother to learn what happened to her grandfather during the Vietnam War and to discover the Vietnamese part of her identity.
Full Cicada Moon by Marilyn Hilton
     This book uses a half Japanese girl's interest in space to describe her feeling of being an alien in a town where almost everyone is white.

For ages 9-12
The Jumbies by Tracey Baptiste
     An heroic young girl is determined to save her Caribbean island from the ghostly Jumbies that appear in folk tales.

For ages 10-14
Echo by Pam Munoz Ryan
     During World War II a harmonica weaves together stories about a family living in Nazi Germany and a Mexican-American family and Japanese-American family living in the United States.