Food's Growing Pain By Jean Friedman-Rudovsky Summary

Too much of something is always bad and the people of Bolivia are now living this motto. Jean Friedman-Rudovsky explains in the Article “A Gourmet Food’s Growing Pain” how the Quinoa became one of the most valuable exports for Bolivia. The Quinoa “was always comida para los indios” but “Today it’s food for the world’s richest”(Rudovsky, p.1) according to two locals.
The Quinoa received a lot of fame after NASA recommended it as part of a potential diet and after that the market for Quinoa sky rocked. This made a lot of the farmers in Bolivia happy. What they once aet because they did not want to spend money on rice is making them so much more than what they expected. A farmer states that “Now we’ve got tractor for our fields and parabolic
The Globalization of Quino also caused some violence between farmers trying to obtain more land. We saw something similar in articles about the Lacandona Rain Forest written by Lourdes Arizpe, where farmers started to bring cattle without knowing the damage they could do to the soil. The farmers in Mexico had to cut parts of the rainforest so that they could grow more crops so that they could sell and provide for their families. The farmers in Mexico did not know how to take care of the land and this might be an issue for the farmers in Bolivia too. Although, instead of bringing more animals, the farmers were getting rid of llamas so that they could have more land to grow Quinoa which caused “erosion and a scarcity of llama-fertilized soil.”(Rudovsky, p.1) the effects were the same. In the article “Reforestation in Haiti” written by R.E. Lenkeit, we learned how Gerald Murray taught the citizens of Haiti how to protect the rainforest and different ways to increase crop production so they can reduce as much collateral damage as possible. The people in Bolivia need to learn how to take care of the land just like the people in Haiti