Brazil part 2 – Living the dream

After the reality check of part 1, now it’s time to indulge in the wondrous sights that a recent trip to Brazil offered up. Let’s go straight to some of the Biggies…

And how about some birds?

And other intriguing creatures…

Despite these treasures on offer, international (and even domestic) tourism won’t be on the radar of government officials looking at what makes the economy buzz. Whereas tourism contributes close to 20% of GDP in Greece, in Brazil, it’s closer to 3%. And there’s a relatively low number of international tourists coming in – 6.4m in 2019 – compare that to the 90m who visited France. But perhaps that’s for the better as more tourists would require more infrastructure, in particular proper roads to reach the beauty spots, and that would make it easier for the bad (see part 1) as well as the good.

But though roads might not be smooth, there was definitely no shortage of food options on offer. Buffets seem to be the norm and no worries if you’ve got a dietary requirement. A feast for all the senses.

Brazil part 1 – Driving through deforestation

This post represents the first of a two part piece exploring experiences of a recent trip to Brazil. I’m going to cover the negative first before indulging in the beauty and the wonder in part 2.

The photos above should hopefully make the negative very obvious. En route to a stay in the Amazonian rainforest in the Mato Grosso region, we drove through areas that our guide could recall as having been covered in dense vegetation on only a couple of decades ago, but were now literally burning before our eyes. Burning is a quick and easy way to clear the land so that it can be used for cattle grazing or agriculture. Ugly and horrible, and also really annoying from a selfish perspective as it created smoky air that meant birds and other creatures remained hidden away. The previous day, we had spent many hours being amazed at an extensive parade of birds doing a fly past from a canopy tower – the bottom photo which shows this unsullied view.

And these photos above show what sort of landscape deforestation created. We drove along tarmac and red dust roads, with scrubby vegetation dotted with cows or tired looking crops (it was winter and therefore the dry season, so not moist and lush as you might expect).

Given that the country I live in has a long history of deforestation, to such an extent that it’s hard to imagine what the landscape would have been like in its ‘original’ stage, I’m not in a position to suggest that people should not be allowed to improve their lives by using the resources at their disposal. Instead, the only final observation I’d like to make is that we also saw a different approach to using the land, which appeared to be about working with it, rather than destroying it. In the first part of our trip, we visited the Pantanal, which is the world’s largest wetland and further south. Here, there is a culture of Pantaneiros cattle ranchers, who move herds around different areas depending on where there is available grassland through the dry and wet seasons. While it’s not ideal, it seems more sustainable and has allowed man and wildfire to co exist for several centuries, though this balance seems under threat with climate change and increases in land use. We felt very lucky to see what we did.

Parktastics

This is just a reflection on how cramped and crowded the UK is compared to the US. It’s based on having made my first visit to one of the US National Parks – Yosemite – and being surprised at its unexpectedness emptiness.

Now I have to quickly give a caveat to my impressions – when we first got to Yosemite, a small part of the park was closed due forest fires, with some potential visitors no doubt deciding not to go given the risk that all of the park might subsequently be shut/visitors need to leave, or more realistically, going there when there have been fires would compromise on the experience as the air might be less clea. As a first time visitors, it was hard for me to tell what different any smoke residue was having. As you can hopefully admire in the below photos, it was still rather beautiful.

The year we went was the first time visitors to Yosemite were required to buy a permit to enter. And our expectations for huge crowds were set by the fact that we were advised to reserve our permission to buy a permit as soon as the booking window (similar to booking for festivals) came out. It turned out we were only asked to show our permit once, and even then, it wasn’t clear that we needed to have made the advance reservation. Instead, the roads were in the main pretty empty and there didn’t seem to competition for car parks (except for one point at the weekend at the main commercial centre for the park). And in general, it was striking that there few signs of commerciality (even the shops I did see were pretty basic).

This is all very different to what goes on in UK national parks. For a start, there is just simply a much larger volume of people going into the them. The Lake District gets around 19m visitors a year , compared to Yosemite’s 3.3m . And then there is the fact that the US parks are genuine wilderness in that no one lives (or farms) in them. This is unlike the Lake District, which has 45, 000 who live in the area and supporting these ‘vibrant communities’ is very much part of the area’s long term vision.

Not sure I have strong view as to which is better but I have to say, you couldn’t really get a good of tea (or coffee really) in Yosemite. Maybe it’s about natural refreshment.

The Uninhabitable Earth

No, that’s not the title of a sci-fi disaster movie; it’s the title of a book which sets out all the (terrifying) facts about climate change, past, present and all too soon in the future.

Not surprisingly, it wasn’t an enjoyable book, but not just for all the obvious reasons (totally scary and awful and all round just grim), but because I couldn’t see the point of the book. I was already scared about climate change and I didn’t feel my attitudes had changed. And what I wanted was a clear call to action – something to do as a result – but The Uninhabitable Earth was, for me, just depressing facts and descriptions of one super sad event one after another.

Maybe I am sounding too harsh and I should think more clearly about what I got from the book.

I did learn that one of the less obvious consequences of climate change, in particular more CO2 in the atmosphere, is the likely decrease in the nutritional quality of our food. That’s aside from the extreme weather events which could have burnt, flooded or blown away the crops.

I got confirmation that I’m incredibly lucky. I live in a part of the world which is apparently at the optimal average annual temperature for productivity (13C) and not likely to be severely affected climate change (I live on a hill and the UK isn’t likely to have lots of extreme heat, drought, cyclones or other such events). And please note, I don’t take this fortunate position for granted.

The optimal Earth right here in my front garden?

In fact, the relentless drum roll of statistics setting out the horrifying future doesn’t make the future challenge seem more real or believable. Big numbers just wash over you after too many of them. Stories are much more powerful; they bring it home what it feels like to be in the midst of those figures.

And I wanted something which sets out how complex it all is; the interconnection of systems which mean that it can be like wading in treacle to change things for the better. No, not treacle, but like walking on ice where moving to one plac or focusing on one issue causes cracks that others might fall through.

Bangladesh gets mentioned as much of the land is at severe risk of flooding but that’s not the whole picture of what’s going on in this country. There is more than just climate change to factor in. For young women stuck in conservative families in rural parts of the country, escaping to the city to work in garment factories is a major draw. They might not get paid that much but they have an income, much more independence than back in a village and more social interaction. But we don’t like the idea of sweatshop garment factories. So perhaps the factory needs to be shut down. So where do the girls go? Should they go back to their villages and little plots of land which get submerged in all the rains. Ok, it’s not quite that simplistic, but no decision or choice is all good.

So should we just give up? That’s why I wanted a call to action. What’s your response?

Writing with emotion

Never before has the announcement of a Secretary of State for Education been so eagerly anticipated and when it came, the lives of so many young people were turned upside-down. At a stroke, all of the certainties about progression through A Levels to university and beyond have been undermined…

I was struck by how the intense first period of the Covid crisis brought to the fore the need for effective communication. We were and still are living in a situation which seems to be creating an endless series of ‘unprecedenteds’ and we need guidance knowing how to make sense of it all, at the most basic level, and at another, what we should be doing as a result. What ‘authorities’ tell us has become incredibly important and valuable.

I don’t intend to put the spotlight on political messaging but focus on arenas closer to home – namely schools – who perhaps face more demands on their communication. Schools need to tell parents what has been decided by the government, what they as a school are going to do in response, inspire confidence that this will be achieved, and that all this will not compromise some of the most important things to a parent: their child’s safety and their child’s education. And all this needs to be delivered within a context of actually very little coming from government – no forewarning, no time to prepare for huge decisions such as ‘schools will shut from tomorrow’ or ‘schools will open in a week’. Little or no guidance to help either.

This is why newsletters from schools have taken on a different role. Normally school newsletters are an important if dull source of practical details: reminders about non-school uniform days, reminders about submission of forms, advance notice of calendar events, often rounded off with some pleasant blandly warm commentary from the head.

Now these letters have become emotionally charged communiques, brimming with fine rhetoric (see opening quote) or heated, unfiltered emotion, in which the personal glaringly overshadows the professional. For the latter, see below for some choice quotes.

I have had the privilege of working in the education sector for 36 years (yes, I am that old). I have learnt many things, one of which is to be truthful and the second is that as far as children are concerned you have to plan around the worst case scenario to avoid a disaster.

The suggestion that students in Year 10 come back in preparation for their exams to receive specialist teaching is also a nonsense.  Boris, as we know was taught at Eton, where the teacher to student ratio is 1:8.  Nice.  At our we have class sizes of between 25 and 30 in the main.

I would not send my child back to school under the current threat of death, and as such I will not play Russian Roulette with the life of your child, or the lives of my staff. For those of you that are not in agreement with my decision, please recognise that it is my decision and, therefore, any venom that you feel, needs to be directed to me rather than members of our staff, or teachers in general.’

I do not wish to cast judgement – any evaluation would be meaninglessly subjective – but just to draw attention to yet another way in this pandemic changed the game, requiring new skills and expertise, and at the same time, surfacing new character traits and dimensions.

I’ll finish with one of my favourite lines – it was from a primary school head who sent a separate letter to their pupils and ended with the following: ‘We miss you all’.

Polishing up my perspective on Poland

Over the past year, I have had the privilege to be involved in a deeply fascinating pan-European project with the objective of thinking about the future of the postal sector in 2030. I was working as a part of the team from a German foresight agency and participated by attending three workshops in Paris, Bonn and Warsaw.

The project was so interesting across a whole variety of dimensions: experiencing cultural differences in discussion and social dialogue between countries and generations; different attitudes towards worker rights and protection; the manifold challenges of working with translators; understanding the importance of universal service obligations (all you folk living out in the sticks be thankful for this).

And though I work on what are ostensibly ‘international projects’ as I need to investigate, explore and explain the difference between attitudes and behaviours across different markets, such projects are vicarious. I do not live the differences. Here I did – to a certain extent.

It was only to a certain extent as a number of the aspects of my experience at the workshops did not vary hugely across markets. We stayed in large hotels catering to business travellers and which therefore tended to offer identikit services and products. Take, for example, the buffets of breakfast food from everywhere: some eggs things, some sausage meat things, some cold meats, some bakery and other bread bits, fruit and cereals. Likewise for the lunches, though there were some intriguing local stand-outs of varying appeal. We were in Bonn at the start of October and every single meal (bar breakfast) included the seasonal offering of pumpkin in some form or other (soup, in ravioli, in stew etc), whilst in France, there were macaroons (better) and in Poland, well, it was lots of beetroot (fine but not in excess).

But perhaps the most interesting learning was a realisation that Poland, beyond the beetroot and the rather extraordinary socio-realist architecture, is really going places. I am so used to thinking about Europe as a mature market with very slow growth and that all the whizzy GDP growth rates belong to BRICS, CIVETS and their ilk. Well, it seems that Poland is not hitting double digit growth but certainly compared to other large EU markets, it is operating in a different gear.

The trigger moment was moment was during a presentation midst workshop, when as has been customary for each of the host countries, there is a chance to show off about how brilliant their postal business is. To be honest, it’s most often about how they are managing the commonly felt challenge of mail volumes falling off a cliff whilst trying to snatch up as much as they can of the growing but much more competitive parcels business. However, in Poland, there were pronouncements about doubling revenues and huge growth in activity. To make clear how extraordinary this is, a recent annual report from Royal Mail can only talk about small incremental gains of revenue rarely in double digits.

Yes, it seems that, now I have opened my eyes to it, that Poland is the tiger of Europe. Output growth reached 4.6 percent last year, compared with 2.5 percent for the European Union as a whole, unemployment has dropped to a record low of 4.4 percent. Many other EU states would envy this performance. Poland has reaped the fruits of opening up and liberalising its economy, as well as benefiting from its particular attributes of a large educated population (admittedly somewhat depleted by all those who disappeared off to the UK – probably on their way back now) and its location as being the first EU country Asia encounters as it moves West, and more.

However, some have concerns that this has come at a hidden cost and does not represent sustainable growth or wealth creation. In an interview in October last year, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki commented, ‘We have sold pretty much all of our economy. Money is being sucked out of the country, “transferred every year in the form of dividends or interest on capital, interest on loans, deposits and current accounts.”

From now on, I shall make sure that I stay up to date with the next stage in Poland’s development.

PS Did I forget to mention the dumplings?!

Making it big

How do you view the world and which criteria do you use to determine who is ‘top dog’? If you focus on landmass, then Russia does pretty well; if you look at GDP, it’s the US that comes out as number one; taking population brings China to the fore; and so on.

And then if we think about how these countries got there, it changes the picture yet again. I like thinking in terms of systems and stories, but having just read Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall, I have understood there is another way to frame country narratives. And thinking about things in this way has made some current dynamics clearer/easier to comprehend.

This is best exemplified by focussing on Africa. Over the years, this continent is subject to great paeans about its future potential (as yet unrealised) but which are now ‘almost there’. Why is this?

Well, it’s worth remembering that Africa actually has a head start – it’s where Home Sapiens originated 200,000 years ago. Though Africa is a great place overall and in terms of the specific regions within it (which contain a huge amount of diversity across many different dimensions), what they have in common is isolation: isolation from each other as well as from the outside world. This is significant as this stops the all-important flow of ideas that drive progress.

Let’s come in a little closer. There is the Sahel which cuts across the top third of the country, and whilst the north, in particular those places with access to the Mediterranean and technologies, agriculture innovation and trade from Europe, managed to develop and change , below the Sahel, it’s quite different. Here, there are few plants willing to be domesticated, and animals even less so. Much of the land is jungle, swamp, desert or steep-sided plateau, none of which is good for growing crops or grazing for easy livestock, such as sheep. There is a good quote from Jared Diamond which reinforces this point: “History might have turned out differently if African armies, fed by barnyard-giraffe meat and backed by waves of cavalry mounted on huge rhinos, had swept into Europe to overrun its mutton-fed soldiers mounted on puny horses.”

And then there is challenge of getting goods in and out. Africa has lots of rivers, but they aren’t much use in this regard as they begin in high land and descent in abrupt drops which thwarts navigation. Going to the sea doesn’t improve the situation much: there are few natural harbours – the coast line across much of Africa is too smooth (where can ships aggregate safely together if that is the case?) and around the beaches the water is too shallow.

However, perhaps some of the ‘challenges’ can now come into their own as the means by which we rely on sharing ideas and goods have changed. For example, those same rivers that hampered trade are now being harnessed for hydro-electric power. That’s one bright spot in the prison of geography. Let’s see how long it takes for more to make a real difference.

 

Older and none the wiser

If I mentioned ‘pensions’, it’s likely that your mind will go blank, or you might start thinking about what you will have for lunch/dinner/snack on instead. But even if you try to think about pensions, it’s not clear that you will be able to make much progress. Pensions, over the past decade or so, have really become much more complicated and this means it is hard to keep track of what the situation is. There is complexity across many different dimensions and the overall result is that there are many choices to make and lots of uncertainty implicit within those choices.

Crudely, pensions were about paying money in and then getting a regular set sum back again once you had retired at some point in your early sixties. But this is no longer the case. For a start, you won’t be able to get your State Pension until you are 67 (well, I won’t!). And, as we have all been told many times, you really shouldn’t think that you can rely on the State Pension to survive in old age, unless you are very keen on leading a minimalist lifestyle.

So you need to set something up additional. This is where the questions and uncertainty kick in. You go for some private pension provision and most this is probably done through work – but how do you know what is best? And what if you have changed jobs and have an existing pension with another employer in another scheme? Can you remember who that is with? And should you consolidate them? How do you work out which offers best value? Do you know the charges? What about returns? What about other costs that are hidden away?

And, thinking about this additional pension provision, you won’t get a set amount (a proportion of your final salary) at the end. The times of Defined Benefit pensions are over. I am not going to go into all the background of why (perhaps for another time), but now the majority of schemes set up are Defined Contribution (where you put a set amount in but what you get at the end is far less certain).

And now for more decisions and choices. When you retire, you don’t simply get some money, you need to work out what you will do with the big lump of money you have carefully saved up. Before most people would buy an annuity, which gives someone a guaranteed sum paid out each month. Now you can take a substantial cash sum out in one go, but then again, you need to be careful as you might start paying a lot of tax on that if you take out too much as this is taxable income.

But if you took some out, you don’t want to put it in a bank as it will effectively lose money with interest rates so low. So instead you might decide to do something more sophisticated, such as keep some money invested so that it carries on making better returns, but will your current provider let you do this? And then perhaps you could take a regular small sum from that for current expenses. But do you know how to split up the amount saved – how much to invest and how much to take out?

And then another element to consider is how to get financial security for your final years, for example some kind of annuity. But the challenge here is to second guess when would be the right moment for this, and then what sort of amount would you need to live on? Most people tend to overestimate how much they will need at this stage and die with unspent funds.

I’m just hope that by the time it comes for me to grapple with all this, that the perfect product has been launched and I can live happily after thanks to it.

Ecuador – on the Equator but a land of extremes

In one sense, Ecuador is in the middle – the Equator runs all the way through its centre. However, in terms of what you can find there, it is more likely to be wild and wacky, rather than middle of the road. Let me illustrate with some photos from a recent trip.

Firstly, in terms of altitude and temperature, well, Ecuador includes both chilly snow-capped volcanoes and mountains that form part of the Andes over 6000m to long sandy beaches baking under a bright blue sky.

Next, what about plants? Well, it is possible to find fungi that is not dark and shapeless but white and lace-like.

Or flowers and berries that defy the imagination in terms of textures and colours they put forward.

We came across insects which could have come from a ‘Lost World’: giant earthworms a metre long, odd clunky stick insects and vast but beautiful moths.

And I haven’t even got started on the birds. We managed to see over 400 different species whose plumage covered all the colours of the rainbow and astounded us with their minute or momentous scale.

Finally, a spotlight on the food, which ranged from the traditional and ‘homely’ to concoctions perhaps inspired by nouvelle cuisine.

Home from home

Where do you think the above snap was taken? Don’t look too hard as otherwise you will spoil the fun!

I’m hoping that you zoned in on the all-too recognisable Heinz tomato ketchup and thought the photo was perhaps taken in my local supermarket. Well, not quite. I took this picture in my Xmas holidays spent in the coastal area close to Malaga on the Costa del Sol. It is the heartland for ex-pat Brits and it was all too easy to find those little creature comforts of familiar foods readily available in the Mercadona next to the villa we were renting.

With all the chaos created by Brexit (at the time of writing, it is all very much up in the air), the number of Brits living in Spain has actually dropped. According to Spain’s National Statistics Institute (INE), in the last five years, the number of British residents in Spain has dropped from 397,892 to 240,785 – a fall of 157,107. However, for someone who has no point of comparison, it felt like British presence was still a feature of the landscape in Cala de Mijas where we stayed.

I had a lot of fun ambling around the supermarkets, trying to spot the items catering to the Brits. Here are some of the treasures I found.

Brussels sprouts – of course! Well, it was Christmas.

And fancy a curry – albeit with salmon – but I guess fish is pretty hard to avoid in coastal Spain.

Can you spot the bacon in the centre of the bottom shelf?

Spot the wannabe After Eights on the top shelf?But there were also some delicacies clearly aimed at the local residents. The below is not my cup of tea.

And out in the streets, there other similar indicators of Brit presence.

But I want to use my final photo to highlight a new dynamic reverberating in the area. Having chatted with a local (Irish!) estate agent, it seems that Scandis are the new big kids on the block since an airline started added direct flights between Norway and Malaga. So in the Mercadona, amongst the bacon and baked beans, I also found the dark rye grainy bread so beloved of Scandinavians.

I can’t say that I saw any pickled fish, but that’s probably coming!