By Joe Arvai

8/14/2009

After a day off yesterday in the coastal village of Cahuita, we’re back in
San José .  One our way here, we stopped in for a final meeting with
colleagues at EARTH — really just to say good bye, and to offer a sincere
thanks, before continuing on our way back to MSU.

We’re treated exceptionally well by our colleagues here and I can only hope
that they enjoy our company as much as Robby and I enjoy theirs.  We’ll
return to Costa Rica in October to continue with our field work.  Between
now and then, there will be hundreds of emails, dozens of calls on Skype,
and a lot of exchanged ideas.

This is exactly the kind of work I imagined when I joined ESPP in 2005.  No
silly debates about the “true” connections between environment, science, and
policy.  Just an interdisciplinary group of researchers — economists,
agronomists, soil and weed scientists, decision researchers, and others –
pulling in the same direction on an important problem for the local people
of this breathtaking country.  Together.

As I am writing this, and before I sign off, the slogan printed on my duffel
bag catches my eye.  It says: “Never stop exploring”.  I couldn’t agree
more.

Thanks to all who followed this diary.  Maybe we’ll meet again, on this thin
slice of cyberspace, in October.

(photo courtesy Joe Arvai)

By Joe Arvai

8/12/2009

Pineapple, as far as the eye can see.

We drove east today, from the EARTH campus toward the coastal city of Puerto
Limón.

As one heads east, pineapple plantations dominate the landscape.  The size
of the plantations only underscores the magnitude of the problem facing
local communities.  Massive amounts of pesticides need to be used to keep the
plants free of insects, and to keep them growing quickly.  Monstrous storage
warehouses and packing facilitates, which consume energy like mad, dot the
sides of the main highway heading east.  Tractor trailers carrying the fruit
barrel down the narrow roads, often making the simple act of driving in a
car feel like a ride with the Blue Angels (or the Snowbirds for the
Canadians in the audience).

Often, the plantations are set back from the road (and nearby villages) and
are ‘hidden’ behind piled earth or tree-lined buffers.  The official
explanation for the buffers is to keep airborne pesticides from traveling
into populated or well-travelled areas.  This is no doubt true; moreover,
local residents have staked these buffers out as an important issue in any
policy reform regarding pineapple production.  On the other hand, could it
also be that the big producers — Dole and Del Monte — just want to hide
what are fairly unsightly and potentially dangerous monocultures from the
hundreds of tourist busses and vans that head for the Caribbean coast each
day?

This complex of issues is more than enough to fuel the scores of advocates
for what many researchers and practitioners are calling “alternative
agriculture.”  When I wander the aisles of the well-stocked but relatively
environmentally unfriendly grocery stores in the United States and Canada, I
too often find myself squarely in this camp.

But, as is always the case, environmental risks aren’t simple cases of good
guys versus the bad guys.  The plantations employ tens of thousands of often
poor, local villagers.  The producers play an important role maintaining
infrastructure — roads and bridges, and the delivery of water and
electricity — in places that look like they have been forgotten by time,
let alone the government.  And a significant share of pineapple revenue gets
plowed back into the country, supporting all kinds of national, provincial,
and local programs.  So while “organic” and “local” are hot topics these
days in North American agriculture, these agricultural systems — which do
exist in Costa Rica — would have great difficulty surviving, and in some
cases thriving,  without access to the warehouses, packing facilities, and
roads built and maintained by the corporate giants.

So for us, it’s the complex decisions — and importantly, the tradeoffs –
embedded in this tangled web of costs and benefits that brought us to Costa
Rica in the first place.  I have a feeling that they’ll keep us here for
quite some time…

By Joe Arvai

8/11/2009

I was in Costa Rica in February to do some location scouting with Lanie
for the NSF proposal that would eventually end up funding our work here.  On
that trip, we had a great meal at a small patio restaurant called Las
Palmas.  The place is in Pocora, a town just a short drive down the road
from EARTH University.  The rice with shellfish, arroz con mariscos, was
particularly good back in the winter.

The research team takes a break

Having eaten there again last night with Robby and Lanie, I can tell you the
seafood is still as good as ever.  However, something was different.  “Las
Palmas” is now “Mi Amor” and has an added feature that was not present
in February: a nudist club (and maybe more if you believe the locals).  I’m
very happy to report though that the restaurant is still “clothing
mandatory.”

But I digress.  Today was a day for more work with Ramón, Lanie, and Robby
on the different attributes of environmental policy options.  After another
long day, I think we have the basic attributes down and are ready to take
the next step, which is to model the estimated costs associated with the
different policy options we’ll be looking at.

León, Kellon and Richardson hard at work (photos courtesy Joe Arvai)

We also took a stab at determining the sample size for this first phase of
the research while also thinking about the initial project timeline.  We
need to do much more work on this but we’ve pretty much achieved what we
came here to work on with Ramón.  Tomorrow will be a day to visit some local
communities where the first phase of the research will take place…

By Joe Arvai

8/10/09

We arrived yesterday in the afternoon at EARTH University after what was
quite a spectacular drive through the Costa Rican highlands.  After some
good food and better company in the evening, it was down to work this
morning.

One of the central aspects of our research involves helping local
communities to address the tradeoffs that alternative environmental policies
entail.  In a nutshell, stricter environmental regulations will, in theory,
do a better job of protecting the environment.  However, they will also cost
more.  So the basic question is, are the added environmental benefits worth
the additional costs?  To answer this question, our plan is to compare –
via a series of experiments — economic and decision-analytic methods aimed
at helping people to confront these tradeoffs.

From left: Robby Richardson, Ramón León and Delanie Kellon discuss the project. (courtesy Joe Arvai)

Because we’re working with communities located around pineapple plantations,
however, protecting the environment while also maintaining livelihoods
associated with production actually gets quite complicated.  Many attributes
of potential environmental policies — e.g., the presence or absence of
buffer zones, restrictions on pesticide use,  alternative soil conservation
techniques, etc. — all need to be considered.  More than that, the
relationships between performance across these attributes and, ultimately,
the cost to implement and monitor new policies needs to be determined.

So we spent today working with our local contact, Dr. Ramón León, to start thinking
about this. Before we can even consider going into a local community to carry out the
methodological aspects of our research, the problem context that will be the focus of
our experiments has to make sense to both experts and local stakeholders. Not an
easy task…but, an absolutely necessary one.

Note: This is the first in a series of posts from Costa Rica, where faculty members from MSU’s Department of Community, Agriculture, Recreation and Resource Studies have joined doctoral student Delanie Kellon on a project that aims to improve decision making associated with international development.  Please drop by GreenBoard in the coming days for more posts from the team, or subscribe to our RSS feed to have updates delivered to you.  Thanks for reading!

By Joe Arvai

8/9/2009

When I was in high school, there was this software thingy the guidance
counselors used to help us think about the kinds of careers we might be
interested in pursuing when we ‘grew up.’ We students would sit down in
front of a computer (a Commodore Vic 20 for those who remember) and respond
to a series of survey questions. After we keyed in our answers, the machine
would think for a few minutes and then tell us what future career — nurse,
doctor, welder, professional athlete, etc. — it thought would best suit us.

The questions it asked of us were things like: “Do you like to work with
metal?” and “Would you enjoy working under water?” Okay, so maybe I don’t
remember the questions exactly, but I do remember this one thing: I was a
huge — I mean HUGE — fan of Raiders of the Lost Ark and all I ever wanted
to be when I ‘grew up’ was Indiana Jones. I could imagine myself swinging
from a bullwhip across bottomless pits in the jungle and running from large
and menacing boulders while clutching some ancient relic.

When I caught wind of the fact the one of the career paths the computer could choose for
us was “archaeologist,” I spent much of Grade 11 gaming this extraordinarily
simple computer program so that I could convince it to conclude that this
career was the ideal one for me. It took dozens upon dozens of attempts but
I’m pleased to report that by about mid-May in 1987, I was finally able to
get a print-out from the machine that reported that I should, in fact,
become the next Indiana Jones.

Needless to say, today — some 22 years later — I’m no archaeologist.
Nevertheless, this is the childhood memory that comes to mind as I sit here
on a rooftop in San Jose, Costa Rica. I can easily imagine myself
readying for some jungle expedition to recover a long-lost idol.

The truth is that I’m in Costa Rica with my friend and colleague Robby
Richardson to take the first steps in a relatively ambitious project to
compare economic and decision-analytic methods for eliciting preferences
from stakeholders. No whips. No idols. No boulders. (We hope.) The
overarching goal of the project is to see what we can learn about improving
the quality of collaborative decision-making processes for international
development.

It all started about 18 months ago when one of our doctoral students,
Delanie Kellon, received funding from the Fulbright Program to undertake
dissertation work focused on this same research question in Costa Rica. At
about the same time, Robby, John Kerr, and I began to discuss a proposal to
expand upon Lanie’s research. In January of this year, Lanie arrived at
EARTH University, which was to be her host institution in Costa Rica. That
same month, Robby, John, and I submitted our proposal to the National
Science Foundation. We learned in late April that our proposal was
successful and have been working diligently ever since to get the project
off the ground.

The project is barely a few months old but already, it’s been a tremendous
amount of fun. It’s always amazing to me how much you can learn in such a
short time when you work with really great people. That said, as we start
the major research push of the project (while also getting ready to spend
some serious federal grant dollars) I think all of us are a little uncertain
of what the future will bring.

Don’t get me wrong: We’re very excited
about the project and are very optimistic that we’re on to something
important and interesting.   At the same time, it’s a big project with lots
of moving parts in a faraway place.  So, as we leave San Jose and head for
the heart of the Costa Rican jungle, I think I can safely say that all of us
have just a few questions about whether we’ll be able to pull this off.

Just like Indiana Jones.

ESPP published a story last spring on the introduction of robotic milkers at the Kellogg Biological Station’s Pasture-Based Dairy Operation. Also check out the complete KBS series.