I happened to catch the documentary, Peanuts, last night on Link TV. If you get the channel you can watch it later today, Saturday or Sunday. If you don’t, you can view a short here. It’s the story of the how and why Jock Brandis invented, then with input from African villagers in southern Mali, West Africa, fine-tuned the Peanut Shelling Machine, a ground-breaking idea that has become the centrepiece of Brandis’ Full Belly Project. [ full belly blog ]
Brandis is an extraordinary fellow. His volunteering began in his early twenties when he worked as an elementary school teacher in West Kingston, Jamaica, as a member of “CUSO, a Canadian version of the Peace Corps“. During the late 1960’s, as the besieged Igbo attempted secession in eastern Nigeria, he worked with Oxfam as a pilot flying food into and starving children out of the blockaded Biafra, on relief missions so dangerous mercernaries couldn’t be paid by priests to take them on. The Ship’s Cat is Brandis’ part factual, part fictional account of the horrors suffered by Biafrans and how a determined few organised to help them when Western governments calculatingly failed to do so or aided and abetted the crimes.
On a return trip to Mali a few years ago Brandis was deeply disturbed by the wasting of land devasted by cotton crops. He encouraged the villagers to rotate the cotton with peanuts, as George Washington Carver discovered, restores the nutrients that cotton depletes. But harvesting peanuts means hours of husking that is painfull due the softness of the shell so when he returned home he searched for a suitable sheller. When he couldn’t find one, he invented it, and it is now an open source design that can be built for ten dollars and easily maintained.
MFC Energy Environment has a like-minded mission to develop grassroots solutions, by directly involving locals and using renewable technology and other innovations that promote the vast beauty of the land and culture, instead of rushing to be an abused, dispensible cog in the multinational haste and waste machine.
Mali, 2003:
More than three million Malians – a third of the population – depend on cotton not just to live but to survive.
The British charity Oxfam says the rock-bottom cotton price can be blamed directly on enormous subsidies paid to US cotton farmers, while African farmers have lost $300m.
“For the 25,000 cotton farmers in America, each of them has benefited $230 per acre,” said Mohamed Ould Mahmoud director for Oxfam in Mali.
“In Mali, in 2001 they got from USAID $37.7m, and they lost $43m because of American subsidies on cotton. So you ask yourself sometimes, who is helping whom?”
Pollution problem
In Koutiala, southern Mali, cotton fibres that escape from the packing plant choke the air, causing breathing problems.
The reek of pesticides used to grow cotton is everywhere and the bubbling brook that once ran through the town, is now a stinking bed of black and green sludge – the residue from the cotton oil extraction plant.
The people of Koutiala pay a high price for the cotton they grow and export.
Until now, it was a price Malians were willing to pay. But now the people in the village cannot afford to pay for their children’s healthcare or send them to school.