I discovered this two weeks ago when travelling through Nederland, a town of about 1,500 people approximately 27 km from Boulder in the western state of Colorado in the US. The centerpiece of downtown Nederland is Kathmandu Plaza, complete with a Nepali restaurant, a Nepali handicraft store, boarding rooms for vacationers, a liquor shop, a convenience store and an ATM cash machine.
The intrepid Momo is a key offering in the Nepali restaurant at Kathmandu Plaza, along with other staple fares like dal-bhat, saag, kukhurakomasu and so on.
Nederland is no common town. Every March it hosts the Frozen Dead Guy Festival, which as the namely very aptly describes, celebrates a dead guy who has been kept frozen and remains there under the ground, frozen. Nederland is also the second town in Colorado, after Breckenridge, to legalize the business of marijuana, which it did in 2010.
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The combination of a frozen dead guy and legal pot must invariably produce moments of enlightenment. Sure enough, my ‘ahhh’ moment was to come shortly in the middle of our meal at Kathmandu Plaza.
At lunch with our very gracious and hospitable hosts, conversation quite naturally centered on food. Perhaps inspired by the long journey of the Momo to Nederland, I recounted a tale that had been told to me in Kathmandu by a storyteller over lunch about how much food is forced to travel across Nepal.
A lot of that food doesn’t survive the journey. Much of it rots along the way for lack of adequate transport infrastructure. Some never even leaves the area where it is produced because it is unable to find markets quickly enough.
At the same time, almost a quarter of Nepal’s population, particularly in far-flung hilly communities, suffers from significant food insecurity. They are unable to supplement their local production, especially when there is weather or disaster disruption. Urban centers are equally at risk, though food shortages in these areas manifest through prices and poor quality.
“We lack the infrastructure to transport our food. We need a chain of cold storages and other infrastructure to package, store and transport our food. Lack of energy is one critical constraint, though there are many other challenges that explain the poor state of our food transport and handling system,” I said recounting the storyteller’s point as best as I had understood it.
About a quarter of Nepal’s food production is wasted. As a country, we are simply unable to transport the food from where it is produced to where it is needed.
My hosts sympathized with our plight, though it must have privately struck all of us as ironic that we should be speaking of wasted food while heartily biting into freshly steamed Momos.
I continued to expound on the possibility that Nepal could potentially eradicate its hunger or food insecurity by improving transport of food produce, until a member of our lunch party quipped in with a simple observation.
“Here [in Nederland and surrounding areas] we are trying to make sure we consume as much as we can as close to the source of production as possible,” he said.
Simple moments of truth always produce a funny picture. At that instant I’m sure I was transfixed, perhaps with half a Momo sticking out of my mouth. I can’t be certain at this stage but that simple observation about trying to consume as much locally as possible could go on to change our lives.
Almost all of our food is produced in rural areas. It is increasingly consumed in urban and rapidly urbanizing markets. A large part of our challenge is moving the produce from rural production areas to urban centers. This does not address the issue of food security in vulnerable, remote communities but the rural-urban connect is an important, and possibly now, the larger dimension of Nepal’s food crisis.
So, here’s a thought. Maybe we have the approach to creating food transport infrastructure backwards. Instead of moving produce from rural areas where it is produced to urban areas where it will be consumed, why not reverse that chain. Instead of moving food, why not move consumers closer to the sources of food? Why not incentivize people to remain in rural areas close to where the food is produced instead of having them migrate to urban centers?
Such a contrarian view, inspired over a meal in a town which celebrates a frozen dead guy and has legal marijuana, could be rubbished as high-minded idealism. After all, food must move to where people are located and will consume them. Increasingly, people in Nepal are in urban centers or are rapidly moving there.
A new book by the World Bank, Urban Growth and Spatial Transition: An Initial Assessment, due for full public release later this month, will argue that Nepal is the fastest urbanizing country in South Asia. Urban population has grown by 5 percent on average over the last four decades. Though urban population still remains small (only a fifth), it accounts for two-third of the country’s income.
Urban areas are already under stress with creaky infrastructure that has long outgrown what they were initially designed to serve. Access to drinking water, electricity, cooking fuel and housing has declined rapidly. Food is another key area where urban populations are increasingly at risk.
While consumer products are readily available, access to health, education, and other social services remain absent.
The response to such urban challenges almost always calls for the redoubling of efforts to improve infrastructure in cities—better housing, roads, electricity, water, waste management and of course, more food supplies. These responses temporarily make cities more livable but reinforce the incentives for migrating to cities. In due course more people arrive and the expanded infrastructure is soon overwhelmed. The vicious cycle continues for us to start all over again at exactly the same place.
Traditional urbanization patterns of developed countries simply cannot work for us. We must look creatively at more diffuse patterns of development that seek to reverse urbanization and incentivize people to remain closer to their habitats, families, livelihood and food.
Reversing urbanization for broader development requires—more than the creation of livelihood opportunities, perhaps—the availability of services. Over the last three decades, several companies and researchers have focused on marketing to rural communities and the poor. Bottom of the pyramid and other such concepts have spawned a new genre of entrepreneurs, business models and products.
A Re. 1 toothpaste sachet is now readily available in every village store, and so is a Re. 1 shampoo sachet. While a large number of consumer products are accessible in these teardrop sizes, access to education, health or other social services remain absent.
People may be tempted to stick around in the villages for the prospect of cleaner teeth or shinier hair. But the real revolution to broad based development will come only if education, health, agricultural services can also be packaged and sold in Re. 1 sachets.
The author is a consultant on energy and environment
bishal_thapa@hotmail.com
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