Organic, natural conveyor belts

In every opening segment on Rwanda TV – y’know, those bits in between shows where they play music and show some animation to remind you what channel you are watching – there is a bunch of clips showing things that Rwanda produces. The fermented milk in closed cartons that I buy in Kigali comes up on the screen, and then more cartons, one after another, on a conveyer belt. I couldn’t help but think, “Who actually buys that carton of milk other than a very narrow segment in Kigali and other cities?” The carton, which is around 500 ml., costs around 500 francs. I pay around 150-200 francs for the same amount of milk in Rubona, which comes from someone’s cow in the backyard. The milk in rural areas is left in a plastic jug until it turns into creamy deliciousness after a few days. Maybe the milk comes from a co-op, which are very common today. But, all in all, it is nothing at all like the conveyer-belt large-scale production I see on the television news station available.

Yesterday, I met an American who is working on a project for large-scale dairy production. The milk – even the fermented kind – will need to be pasteurized, undergo quality control, be efficiently distributed, be fortified, and have a central company name that would be accountable to anyone who gets sick from the milk. He told me that the government’s goal was to eventually make it so that milk needed to be pasteurized, put in cartons, and, if possible, distributed to school-aged kids to assure that they received the proteins and vitamins necessary without the adverse effects of potentially bad bacteria. This official government policy fit with the conveyer-belt milk I saw on television. As of now, there was only one large dairy farm which was not large enough – only sixty cows.

I asked the American if fermented milk was not already safe because the fermentation, I vaguely thought, significantly adds to the shelf-life of milk. Maybe pasteurized non-fermented refrigerated milk is better than fermented refrigerated milk, but if there is any glitch in the system and non-fermented milk is left around for too long, surely the consequences can be worse? There are, apparently, some problematic bacteria even in fermented milk, I was told.

I have heard mixed opinions about the co-ops that are becoming more common in Rwanda. Some Rwandan technicians, for example, pool a part of their income every month, and the funds are given to whoever is not working in any given month. It’s not centralized on a national level, but it’s still cooperation to improve efficiency. I suppose time will tell if centralized dairy production is more efficient than co-ops.

Part of my hesitation may come from the fact that, in developing countries, we are not particularly attracted to conveyer belts. In advertisements on Rwanda television, I noticed that foods are advertised as proudly coming from warehouses with thousands of the same packaged good, one after another, on high shelves you can’t reach on your own, being placed on factory floor vehicles that bring them to trucks that take the goods somewhere for you to buy. In fact, the part with the friendly little corner store selling the good is not even in the advertisement – only the bit about the good coming from a factory is. Remember, these seem to be private advertisements, not government promotion of goods, so it may be a genuine reflection of what people want to buy, as opposed to an official policy of modernization and efficiency . In Israel, I am used to cheeses and pastrami and even fizzy soft drinks being shown as coming from anywhere other than a conveyer belt. They usually appear to come from some grassy green pasture of perfection – sort of like the rural areas in Rwanda, actually. Greenery, some cluster of trees and wild flowers here and there.

Walking to the dining hall with an Israeli, an American and a Rwandan, the Israelis and Americans (including myself) lamented about the plans to remove the wild flowers and greenery on the side of the road that looked a bit like a mini-forest. It reminds me of little forest pathways that appeared in books my father and grandmother would read to me as a child. I almost expect a little fairy to come out of the hedge. The Rwandan staff member rolled her eyes, very justifiably: “You like this because you are tourists,” she said. “For us it is a home for snakes. It is the bush.”

I guess the conveyer belt and mechanical centralized production is a lot more attractive in the types of places where you feel like you are always walking around in a developed-country organic fruit juice advertisement.