Extinction Level Event (5 page)

After going to the bathroom and taking several empty
file folders from his desk Mike heads out to the van at exactly
8:43am. Laurie is already by the van waiting. “You have
everything?” “Yeah, all set to go. Where’s Mark?” Just then Mark
emerges from the left side rear door of the office and walks over.
“Hey guys, I’ve got everything I need. Are we all set?”. “Course.
Been for a while now! Lets get in”, replies Mike. Mike gets in the
driver’s seat, while Laurie and Mark enter through the passenger
side. Laurie takes the middle seat, while Mark takes the right
passenger seat. Mike starts the van while everyone puts on their
seat belts.

Well aware that it is going to be a four hour drive,
Mike realizes that they will have to stop every hour to stretch
legs and get food and use the bathrooms.
A relatively long road
trip
. Fortunately Interstate 5 usually runs quickly and has
over five parallel lanes on some stretches.
We won’t get there
before 1:30 or even 2pm. But we should get there around that time.
We may need to lodge in Bakersfield for more than one night as
well, especially if this investigation goes on longer than
expected.
Mike pushes on the accelerator and they drive off
onto Lakeview Road. After about twenty minutes of driving through
late-stage morning rush hour traffic through the downtown city
streets of Stockton, the APHIS team makes it to Interstate 5 and
begins the journey southwards.

FAO Headquarters, Rome, Italy

The Viale Delle Terme di Caracalla in Rome, Italy may
be translated to “Road of Caracalla’s Spas”. Visitors, however, may
take less note of the ruins of Caracalla’s Roman Baths than of the
massive concrete office building opposite the old Roman ruins. The
huge rectangular nine-story building of the “international power
style” of architecture clearly dwarfs the ruins built two thousand
years ago by the Roman Emperor Caracalla. This is only fitting; for
as the baths were for meant for the betterment of the people of the
Roman Empire, the Headquarters of the United Nations Food and
Agriculture Organization were designed for the needs of the entire
world.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United
Nations primary mandate is raise global levels of nutrition and
standards of living, improve and modernize agricultural
productivity, and better the conditions of rural populations. What
the US Department of Agriculture is mandated to do within the
boundaries of the United States, FAO is mandated to do across the
world. The wide range of activities that FAO is involved in are
crucial for continually improving world agriculture and feeding the
world’s people.

FAO assists developing countries by providing
improved seeds and fertilizers, soil conservation and
water-resource management techniques, advise on government policy
and planning. It aids international crop protection activities,
works to reduce reliance on pesticides, and aims to improve
household food security and rural family nutrition. FAO also has
programs to conserve and sustain crucial plant and animal genetic
resources. Finally, the Food and Agriculture Organization acts as a
neutral forum for the discussion of all worldwide food and
agricultural issues.

Every year FAO must be prepared to deal with more and
more problems to global agriculture and the global food supply than
the previous year. With world population increasing at a phenomenal
rate, many projections by FAO, the World Bank, World Health
Organization, and World Resources Institute estimate that the world
would grow by over 34% from 2009, to reach a staggering population
of 8-10.5 billion people by 2050. The FAO is entrusted with the
burdensome duty to of making sure that all the people on Earth have
a good standard and safe and healthy food to eat. For this very
reason, the FAO is the largest United Nations agency and is
allotted a budget of over $1 billion US dollars annually.

So naturally when mistakes are made the blame will
generally act opposite of gravity and consequently levitate
upwards. This “rule of bureaucracies” may make the position of
Deputy Director-General unenviable for many. However, for Trevor
“Trip” Manjak, it is simply his job. Having served the United
Nations in this capacity for the past six years, Trip Manjak has
gotten accustomed to not only Rome and its people and customs, but
to an increasingly demanding work schedule that would routinely
take up both day and some nights. Of course, ultimately
responsibility for FAO rests with the Director- General and not the
Deputy, but for Trip this is a trivial distinction. He performs his
job as if he were the Director-General and not the Deputy, for if
he were to make mistakes surely the outcome would be as harmful to
him as to the organization itself. That is why mistakes are to be
avoided.

Every six years the Director-General is elected by
the Conference of Member States, the governing body of the FAO. The
Conference is composed of 169 member states, one associate member,
and one member organization (the European Union). Every two years
the Conference meets to review the work done by FAO within the
intervening period and to approve a Program of Work and Budget for
the next biennium. This year is one such year. Within three months
the next Conference meeting will be held, first to review the work
FAO has accomplished over the last two years and then to elect the
Director-General for the next six years. Trip had little doubt that
the incumbent, the Frenchman Maurice, would be selected again, and
in any case, he had little interest in putting the burden on
himself. No reason to promote yourself just yet.
Too much work,
too little family time, and too much heckling. I am content with
what I am already tasked to do. And besides, within another 10
years I’ll find myself a quiet little desk job with few
responsibilities before finally retiring.
Reading over another
report, Manjak ponders in the quiet solitude of his office.

Born in Scranton, Pennsylvania to a Serbian immigrant
father and an American mother of Italian descent, Manjak had always
had a purpose in life:
To improve people’s lives
.
I’ve
always wanted to help others.
In high school he was senior
class vice president, part of a community service organization, and
played in the school band. In college, he decided to pursue a most
fundamental drive in human beings.
Food
. Before shelter,
mating, and certainly before fire comes the need for food. Humans
need energy to live and food provides those crucial calories that
allow us to move around, thrive, breed, enjoy life and evolve. Trip
was curious about where all the food came from, how it was
produced, how it was transported, how production could be
maximized, and many other questions related to food. He was also
always hungry back in those days. Trip subsequently decided to
pursue a degree in agricultural science. Graduating
Magna cum
Laude
, he transferred to New Mexico State University to receive
his Ph.D. After that achievement he started working for the US
Department of Agriculture as a field operative for Food Safety and
Inspection Service. Soon afterwards he transferred to the Farm
Service Agency, before being promoted to National Agriculture
Statistics Service and then the Agricultural Research Service.
After that job he started working for the United Nations FAO. It
was always hard getting an American to high level positions in the
UN, due to a perceived notion that the US already has excess power
and advantage in the organization, mostly from providing a
significant portion of its funding. Nonetheless, he managed; and
now having spent over fifteen years with FAO now, he slowly rose to
the position of deputy Director-General by being known not as an
orator, or a visionary, but simply as a man who could get the job
done. If there was any task that needed attention, any job that
needed completion, or any project that needed oversight, Trip
Manjak made and maintained a reputation to get it done and within a
timely schedule.

What a timely schedule really meant is- if a project
was estimated to be completed in two months, it would actually take
eight months to complete without proper supervision. Once Trip
arrived on the scene, it would take a mere four months to get the
work done. That was the nature of the job, and one had to accept
inevitability’s silent yet powerful hand in the work. No matter
what scenario the FAO got into, no matter how bright the outcome,
during his tenure Manjak noted that Murphy’s Law would always creep
in and deploy some twisted derivative that would determine the
nature and course of the project.

Life isn’t always as cynical as Edward Murphy may
have been when he invented “his” law. Manjak also met his wife
during his tenure at the USDA, during a personnel exchange program
with Colombia. Even though Sofia was a Colombian from Medellin,
Manjak secretly loved that she didn’t insist on Spanish food too
often and that her Colombian accent wasn’t very noticeable when she
spoke English. However, ever since the couple had moved to Italy
such trivial matters and “Americanisms”, didn’t actually matter.
They also brought their two twins Isabel and Max over. The twins
are both currently enrolled in the American Overseas School of
Rome. Both are 17, in their final high school year. Sofia retired
for a while, as she did not want to continue to be in a similar
agency as Trip, and take care of the kids in the meantime. The
circumstances would sometimes lend themselves as funny, other times
they would be only tenuously comical. All the better, for then she
had all the time in the world to walk and shop in Rome, take care
of the kids, and try to have a break. With the kids reaching adult
age soon, she had recently rededicated herself to international
work.

Trip looked at the report again. The report was from
Jean-Marie Dupont, Emergency Coordinator of relief efforts in
Zimbabwe. In 2009 FAO started a major operation in Zimbabwe to
provide vulnerable Zimbabwean farmers with seeds and fertilizers.
The program ensures that each farmer will receive enough maize or
sorghum seed and fertilizer to plant a 0.5 hectare crop. The plan
also aimed to provide extensive services and training to the
farmers. After the first year of the project, Dupont reported that
results were as good as anticipated and that farmer’s production
rose 96%, almost double the output of the previous year. The second
year of the project the output increased by 54%, but by the third
year output increased only 3%. Manjak believed that they were
hitting a glass ceiling, and that the project had sufficiently
increased the original output for the time being.
The increase
from three years ago has been nearly 200%!! You cannot go on
increasing output indefinitely without some sort of backlash
eventually.
The Zimbabwean situation is complicated by the fact
that the President of Zimbabwe, Bobby Ebagum, has been reluctant to
have UN operations in the country within the first place. For the
past several years there have been tensions in the country as the
UN increased operations to help out the poor, and some suspected,
neglected population of the country. While the country has had
elections every four years, Ebagum has been the victor in every
single election for over 5 terms now, leading some to speculate
that elections are fraud. The Ebagum administration first struck
down the two-term rule after his first term in office and has
expanded their direct control over every aspect of the country
since then. Now, airports, cargo ports, foreign business, and city
streets are under tighter restrictions and surveillance than ever
before, as well as under heavier guard.

However, at the moment there was nothing that could
be done. The United Nations has much more pressing concerns than
the tirades and irrational maneuvers of yet another third-world
leader. Although once again, the country’s administration is
getting in the way of United Nations aid programs to the people of
his country. This particular program is funded by the European
Union, under a multi-billion euro plan to respond to rising hunger
around the world. The so-called EU Food Facility aims to bridge the
gap between emergency aid and long-term developmental aid. It is
done on a year-by-year basis, as opposed to either quick aid to
relieve emergency problems or a long-term strategic plan.

Manjak signed. There was so much work to be done. The
FAO would be getting more overwhelmed with work with each passing
year, as resources on the planet grow scarcer and the population
increases. Funding for such a massive undertaking, despite being
generous, is nowhere nearly adequate to deal with the large
stresses that the FAO and UN will have to be facing by 2020, let
alone 2030. Unless significant and powerful leaders were made aware
of this, and soon, the United Nations would be facing major crises
sooner than expected. That is why he suggested that FAO host a
second World Food Security Summit this year. The last Food Security
Summit had been in November of 2009. While many ideas and proposals
had been floated about by the various politicians, experts,
scientists, and heads of state, at the end no real consensus had
been reached. Very few new programs came out of the Summit, and
Manjak had to note that it had been a diplomatic success but a
pragmatic failure. The Director-General approved the idea, agreeing
with Manjak that the time was overdue for another in-depth
discussion on world food security.

Beep Beep! Trip picks up the phone. It's his head
secretary, Maria Pereira. Her English, mastered at a Brazilian
university, would still never lose her Brazilian,
Carioca
accent. “Hello?” “Your visitor from the Bangladesh mission is here,
sir”. “Excellent, send him in please”, Trip puts down the phone.
At least I got my own secretary.
A short, dark and swarthy
man walked into the room. Zahir Mohammed of Dhaka, Bangladesh used
to be in charge of operations in Bangladesh. A small, monsoon-riden
country in southeast Asia, Bangladesh had as severe food shortages
as any country in the third world. Trip had known Zahir for several
years, although they hadn’t had many assigments where they worked
together and subsequently Trip didn’t know Zahir as well as he
would have liked.