AT CU.com please find my attempt to celebrate my greatest personal privilege: to visit women empowered Bangladesh 15 times from 2007 during last 13 years of life of Fazle Abed. From 2012 we discussed AbedMOOC and 2015 onwards at his 80th birthday AbedAI. Back in 2001, Abed 65th birthday hosted by Steve Jobs in Silicon Valley changed both of these human genii's life work. Even today I dont spend time exploring America AI with any engineers or practitioners of health or education, food or safety or finance, who dont know what they (we humans all) owe to Steve J.
2015 DCAI--AI & Childhood Cancer .Before AI lifted off in late 2000s 3 underacknowlefgen Happenings: 1 steve jobs hosted Fazle Abed's 65 th birthday party silicon valley 2001; .jensen hunag and steve jobs went from coding binary to cosinf pixels; Fazle abed clarified that paulo freire culture celebrated poorest asian womens ebd poverty networking miracle -- largest NGO, providing education, health services, microcredit and livelihood creation programmes for a significant part of the population of Bangladesh. What lies behind this huge success, Caroline Hartnell asked Fazle Abed, founder of BRAC and still very much at the helm. Questioning everything they do and being prepared to tackle whatever is needed to make their programmes successful are certainly part of the secret behind the success of this extraordinarily entrepreneurial organization. The secret of success? Asked what lies behind BRAC’s phenomenal success, the first thing Fazle Abed mentions is determination: ‘We were determined to bring about changes in the lives of poor people.’ The second thing is thinking in national terms: ‘We always had a national goal; we never thought in terms of working in a small area. We thought, all right, if we work with the poorest people in this community, who’s going to work with the poorest people in that other community? So we felt that whatever we do, we should try and replicate it throughout the nation if we can.’ The third thing he mentions is inspiration. ‘We always thought nationally, worked locally, and looked for inspiration globally. We were inspired by Paolo Freire’s work on the pedagogy of the oppressed, which he came out with in 1972. It was wonderful to have a thinker who was thinking about poor people and how they can become actors in history and not just passive recipients of other people’s aid. He made us realize that poor people are human beings and can do things for themselves, and it’s our duty to empower them so they can analyse their own situation, see how exploitation works in society, and see what they need to do to escape these exploitative processes.’ Finally, he says, ‘one needs to have not only ambition but also the ability to do the work. The organization must be competent to take on national tasks. That confidence we got from the campaign for oral rehydration, to cut down diarrhoeal mortality, in the 1980s. That involved going to every household in rural Bangladesh, 13 million households, and it took ten years to do it. Then we became a little more ambitious. We thought that if we can go to every household, then we can cover the whole country with everything we do.
..
NB any errors below are mine alone chris.macrae@yahoo.co.uk but mathematically we are in a time when order of magnitude ignorance can sink any nation however big. Pretrain to question everything as earth's data is reality's judge
Its time to stop blaming 2/3 of humans who are Asian for their consciously open minds and love of education. Do Atlantic people's old populations still trust and celebrate capability of generating healthy innovative brains? What's clear to anyove visting Washington DC or Brussels is a dismal mismatch exists between the gamechanging future opportunities listed below and how freedom of next generation learning has got muddled by how old male-dominated generations waste money on adevrtising and bossing. Consider the clarity of Stanford's Drew Endy's Strange Competition 1 2:
Up to “60% of the physical inputs to the global economy”7 could be made via biotechnology by mid-century, generating ~$30 trillion annually in mostly-new economic activity. 8 Emerging product categories include consumer biologics (e.g., bioluminescent petunias,9 purple tomatoes,10 and hangover probiotics11 ), military hard power (e.g., brewing energetics12 ), mycological manufacturing (e.g., mushroom ‘leather’ 13 ), and biotechnology for technology (e.g., DNA for archival data storage14 ). Accessing future product categories will depend on unlocking biology as a general purpose technology15 (e.g., growing computers16 ), deploying pervasive and embedded biotechnologies within, on, and around us (e.g. smart blood,17 skin vaccines,18 and surveillance mucus19 ), and life-beyond lineage (e.g., biosecurity at birth,20 species de-extinction21 ).		.

notes on drew endy testimony on bio tech 2025 strange competition

Natural living systems operate and manufacture materials with atomic precision on a planetary scale, powered by ~130 terawatts of energy self-harvested via photosynthesis

Biotechnology enables people to change biology. Domestication and breeding of plants and animals for food, service, and companionship began millennia ago. Gene editing, from recombinant DNA to CRISPR, is used to make medicines and foods, and is itself half-a-century old. Synthetic biology is working to routinize composition of bioengineered systems of ever-greater complexity

 https://colossal.com/  20 https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/34914  19 https://2020.igem.org/Team:Stanford  18 https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2024/12/skin-bacteria-vaccine.html  17 https://www.darpa.mil/news/2024/rbc-factory  16 https://www.src.org/program/grc/semisynbio/semisynbio-consortium-roadmap/  15 https://www.scsp.ai/2023/04/scsps-platform-panel-releases-national-action-plan-for-u-s-leadership-in-biotechnology/  14 https://dnastoragealliance.org/  13 https://www.mycoworks.com/  12 https://serdp-estcp.mil/focusareas/3b64545d-6761-4084-a198-ad2103880194  11  https://zbiotics.com/  10 https://www.norfolkhealthyproduce.com/  9 https://light.bio/     8 https://web.archive.org/web/20250116082806/https:/www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/BUILDIN G-A-VIBRANT-DOMESTIC-BIOMANUFACTURING-ECOSYSTEM.pdf  7 https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/life-sciences/our-insights/the-bio-revolution-innovations-transforming-econo mies-societies-and-our-lives     6 https://www.nationalacademies.org/our-work/safeguarding-the-bioeconomy-finding-strategies-for-understanding-ev aluating-and-protecting-the-bioeconomy-while-sustaining-innovation-and-growth   5 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2650-9  

  4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-40199-9

 AIH- May 2025.Billion Asian womens end poverty networking 2006-1976 is most exciting case of Entrepreneurial Revolution (survey Xmas 1976 Economist by dad Norman Macrae & Romano Prodi). In 2007, dad sampled 2000 copies of Dr Yunus Social Business Book: and I started 15 trips to Bangladesh to 2018- many with apprentice journalists. This is a log of what we found - deepened after dad's death in 2010 by 2 kind remembrance parties hoist by Japan Embassy in Dhaka with those in middle of digital support of what happened next. We witnessed a lot of conflicts - i can try and answer question chris.macrae@yahoo.co.uk or see AI20s updates at http://povertymuseums.blogspot.com. I live in DC region but see myself as a Diaspoira Scot. Much of dad's libraries we transfreered with Dr Yunus to Glasgow University and enditirs og journals of social business, new economics and innovators of Grameen's virtual free nursing school.
Bangladesh offers best intelligence we have seen for sdgs 5 through 1 up to 2008, Search eg 4 1 oldest edu 4.6 newest edu ; .620th century intelligence - ending poverty of half world without electricity -although Keynes 1936 (last chapter General Theiory: Money, Interest, Employment) asked Economists to take hippocratic oath as the profession that ended extreme poverty, most economists have done the opposite. What's not understandable is how educators failed to catalogue the lessons of the handful who bottom-up empowered villages to collaboratively end poverty. There are mainly 2 inteligences to understand- Borlaug on food science -arguable the forst Biointeligence rising ar1950 on; fazle abed on everything that raised life expectancy in tropical village (zero-electricity) asia from low 40s to 60s (about 7 below norm of living with electricity and telecomes). Between 1972 and late 1990s, Abed's lessons catalogued in this mooc had largely built the nation of Bangladesh and been replicated with help of Unicef's James Grant acroo most tropical asian areas. What's exciting is the valley's mr ad mrs steve jobs invted Fazle Abed to share inteligences 2001 at his 65th birthday party. The Jobs and frineds promised to integrate abed's inteligence into neighborhod university stanfrd which in any event wanted Jobs next great leap the iphone. The Valley told abed to start a university so that women graduates from poor and rich nations could blend inteligence as Abed's bottom of the pyramid vilage began their journey of leapfrog modles now that grid infrastructures were ni longer needed for sdiar and mobile. Abed could also help redesign the millennium goals which were being greenwashed into a shared worldwide system coding frame by 2016. There at Abed's 80th birtday party , the easy bit was checking this mooc was uptodate. The hard bit - what did Abed mean by his wish to headhunt a Taiwanese American to head the university's 3rd decade starting 2020?

Monday, August 3, 2026

America's summer food crisis rooted in river mapping ignorance?

 

This summer USA in a salad crisis- where grocers over stocked in salad which public is not buying because of the alleged crisis of Taylor farms supply chain. Is there any evidence that a broader problem is us salad distribuoirs had to hastily make new choices of supplier inside mexico as a lot of california farmers contracted mainly due to labor shortages caused by immigration policy but potentially also due to climate change
GEMINI Yes, there is extensive evidence of the exact "salad crisis" you are seeing on grocery shelves. However, the actual market data reveals a striking paradox: while your local grocer is overstocked and the public is wary of buying bagged salads, California lettuce growers have actually been forced to plow under and destroy a third of their summer crops due to a complete collapse in consumer demand. [1, 2]
The structural breakdown stems from a massive public health traceback, but the underlying supply chain vulnerabilities perfectly connect to your thesis on labor, consolidation, and climate shifts.
1. The Core Crisis: The Historic Cyclospora Outbreak
The overstocked shelves and consumer fear are driven by the largest Cyclospora outbreak in U.S. history. [1]
  • The Culprit: The FDA and CDC officially traced the parasitic contamination back to a single supplier facility: Taylor Farms de Mexico in Guanajuato. The parasite sickened over 15,000 people across multiple states. [1, 2, 3, 4]
  • The Supply Chain Freeze: On July 17, 2026, Taylor Farms voluntarily recalled all iceberg lettuce sourced from central Mexico and suspended production there. Major national distributors like Sysco immediately halted all Mexican iceberg lettuce purchases. [1, 2, 3]
  • The Demand Collapse: Because Taylor Farms processes bagged salads for massive consumer private labels (like Walmart's Marketside) and major fast-food chains (like Taco Bell), the public completely stopped buying packaged greens. Consequently, wholesale lettuce prices plunged by a record 73% in July, leaving grocers with expiring inventory and domestic farmers with fields of unharvestable, profitless crops. [1, 2]
2. The Shift to Mexico: Labor Contractures & Immigration Policy
Your intuition regarding the shift to Mexican suppliers is structurally correct. Major U.S. agribusiness conglomerates have been systematically moving seasonal operations to central Mexico over the last several years due to compounding domestic pressures:
  • The Labor Choke Point: California's Central Coast and Salinas Valley—traditionally known as "the world's salad bowl"—have faced severe farmworker shortages. Tightened immigration policies, erratic visa pipelines, and a lack of local labor have made domestic harvesting incredibly expensive and unpredictable. [1]
  • The Hasty Sourcing Reality: To stabilize year-round grocery store quotas without paying unsustainable domestic overtime labor rates, massive distributors heavily consolidated their supply chains. They shifted summer sourcing blocks to centralized Mexican mega-farms. When a single water source or facility in that consolidated Mexican hub failed, it instantly corrupted the salad supply for half of the United States. [1, 2, 3]
3. The Climate Change Accelerant
Climate data heavily backs up why distributors have scrambled to diversify into different micro-climates within Mexico:
  • Water & Heat Stress: California's hyper-erratic weather patterns—swinging between intense multi-year droughts and sudden, severe winter flooding—have disrupted predictable planting schedules on the Central Coast.
  • The Parasite Breeding Ground: Cyclospora is a waterborne parasite that thrives in warm, agricultural runoff water. Agricultural scientists note that as global temperatures rise, water infrastructure in regions like central Mexico faces increased biological contamination risks. When U.S. companies rapidly expand operations into these regions without upgrading localized water-testing infrastructure, outbreaks become a mathematical certainty. []
The UYKB Action Perspective (Unless You Know Better)
In the framework of your UYKB Action Guide, this salad crisis serves as a textbook example of Layer 3 (Sovereign Infrastructure) failing Layer 5 (Community Apps/ фронтлайн supply). Top-down corporations optimized purely for Wall Street revenue and cheap consolidated labor. In doing so, they engineered a fragile system that collapsed under a single biological anomaly. [1, 2]
The action-learning takeaway here is that sustainable human wellness requires shorter, localized, and open-source supply networks rather than massive, opaque corporate choke points. [1]
  • Draft a section for the UYKB Guide analyzing "Supply Chain Fragility vs. Localized Autonomy"
  • Examine how automated agricultural robotics are being deployed in California to solve the immigration labor gap
  • Look into the FDA's updated traceback regulations set to take effect for fresh produce
AI can make mistakes, so double-check responses
Taylor Farms Keeps Being Linked to Outbreaks. Is Our Food ...
Can we layer in discussion of the crisis around river flow in us west. Some biggest reservoirs down to quarter of capacity as colorado snowpack has reduced water flows down stream. This impacts us west agriculture the further south (downstream) the colorado river. It sounds as if the challenges are not going to be less next year ; we can imagine prices will need to go up for safe salads??
Yes, your assessment of the downstream collapse is exactly correct, and it is happening right now. In August 2026, the nation’s two largest reservoirs—Lake Mead and Lake Powell—plummeted to their lowest historic capacity levels since they were originally filled in 1936 and 1963. Driven by a historic "snow drought" in the Upper Basin where winter snowpack hit a staggering 22% of normal, the Colorado River system is sitting at a critically depleted 32% of total system capacity. [1, 2, 3, 4]
Because water allocations are strictly dictated by seniority and geography, this upstream deficit hits the furthest southern, downstream agricultural points first and hardest. [1]
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