Word: cottoning
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While most australians are sleeping, Dick Estens is plotting. Between 3 a.m. and 6 a.m., when truck drivers, factory hands and bakers are in a skirmish with their circadian rhythms, the 56-year-old cotton farmer from Moree, in northern New South Wales, is in bed whirling his mind through a problem. Estens might be crafting a game plan to outwit a Canberra bureaucrat or thinking of a way to motivate a juvenile criminal offender; he might be trying to understand the power structure in a small town or finessing a schmooze assault on a CEO target. This social entrepreneur...
...Protestant Huguenots and the father of English empiricism, John Locke. Estens' Dreaming is the Enlightenment and the rich earth of the Moree plains - liberty and equality, with a dash of Aussie bush can-do and toil. He started the AES with the idea of providing skilled labor for the cotton industry; that modest venture seemed to lift the town and as the institutions surrounding job placement changed under the Howard government, the innovator started to work the system. As supportive elders held off the "radical and ratbag elements," Estens turned the AES into a crusade. Perhaps a non-indigenous person...
...silos at Moree's southern end. The barley will need to be cleared quickly, says Andrew Dahlstrom, 31, an AES worker who has spent most of his life in the town. "The wheat harvest is about to start and they'll need all the storage space available." As well, cotton has been planted and in coming weeks, under a harsh sun, teams of casual workers, known as "chippers," will flock to the vast fields to remove weeds from the crop. Dahlstrom, like many other indigenous people, has relied on this work for extra pre-Christmas cash. He's traveled...
...Beyond the trade haggling are real human consequences, best seen in elementary schools like the one in the town of Marka Coungo, a few miles from Bafing Diarra's farm. Ba Dienta, head of the school, estimates that enrollment varies as much as 25%, depending on the annual cotton price and the size of the harvest. When farmers make no money from cotton, Dienta says, his students concentrate poorly and fall asleep in class because they're hungry. "Everything is done on cotton money?marriage, debt, babies," he says. "When the price is low, it's a catastrophe...
...establishment of an international rule of law for trade and a body to enforce it?the WTO itself. It has delivered some stinging blows to both the European Union and the U.S., including rulings that some of the most contentious subsidies they pay to their farmers, on cotton and sugar, are illegal. Absent a Doha agreement, says Stiglitz, "the best hope for developing countries would be for them to use that rule of law to push back at the U.S. and the E.U. Once they have shown that subsidies are illegal, they can then come back to the bargaining table...