[HN Gopher] In Mongolia, a killer winter is ravaging herds and a...
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In Mongolia, a killer winter is ravaging herds and a way of life
Author : Brajeshwar
Score : 114 points
Date : 2024-03-07 01:54 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (e360.yale.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (e360.yale.edu)
| Venkatesh10 wrote:
| With all the money free flowing in the world and with experience
| to games like city builder, Builderment.. we can easily share
| them food, resources from tropical regions.
| netsharc wrote:
| Easy is debatable, unless you have a huge fleet of helicopters
| (or maybe drones, because hey, it's the 21st century for some
| parts of the world). I've been to Mongolia, the vast emptiness
| is amazing, the article talks about roads but most of it is
| unpaved dirt track in the steppe. Now imagine a thick layer of
| snow covering that...
| COGlory wrote:
| Yeah it's tough for folks to understand the sheer vastness of
| a place like Mongolia. Combined with a lack of
| infrastructure, it's still a really unforgiving area.
| xenospn wrote:
| When I was in Mongolia, I met a group of American peacecorps
| who helped nomads with planning for winter, and taught them how
| to better manage their resources to avoid this exact scenario.
| As soon as they left, the locals reverted back to their old way
| of doing things.
| heisenzombie wrote:
| Perhaps there was more to it, but as told -- that's a story
| of incredible hubris! Truly amazing to fly across the world
| to tell Mongolians how to live on the steppe.
| marssaxman wrote:
| It sounds like the Mongolian hosts showed remarkable
| courtesy by accommodating their guests' odd preferences
| during the visit.
| xenospn wrote:
| I would imagine this was a joint venture between the
| Mongolian and American governments, but you're right.
| RealityVoid wrote:
| While I get where you're coming from, it's not unheard of
| cultures finding a local maxima that they are unwilling to
| leave. I guess it's hard to judge from the outside?
| sct202 wrote:
| Peace Corps is especially notorious for sending
| inexperienced agriculture volunteers who's expertise is
| volunteering 2 months at a WWOOF organic farm, so I would
| not be surprised if they were just clueless new grads
| thinking they were saving the world.
| paulcole wrote:
| Isn't it hubris to think that someone who flew across the
| world to try to help you isn't worth listening to?
|
| And afterall it's the Mongolians who might starve. Any port
| in a storm.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Depends on when they showed up. The helpful Americans,
| that is, in relation to the killer winter.
|
| Judging from a lot of HN discussions so, Americans should
| really understand the rwluctance of anyone to listen to
| people from other countries explaining how things should
| be done. Exihibit A through Z: every single discussion
| about health care or city planning. Or gun control.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| But we're exceptional - they would never work _here_
| because there 's no way we could manage those things
| without screwing it up.
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| The Mongolians have been thriving in the steppes for
| thousands of years.
| paulcole wrote:
| Isn't it hubris to think that someone who flew across the
| world to try to help you isn't worth listening to?
| triceratops wrote:
| Anyone with the money can fly across the world to try to
| help. That doesn't make the help automatically useful.
| randomopining wrote:
| Yeah sharing knowledge for free is definitely hubris. For
| sure.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Sure it is, if you have no idea if your knowledge is
| actully usefull and you push it anyway.
|
| Just imagine how you feel if someone, say a consultant or
| a agile master, shows up at your work and tells how to do
| your job without having any experience with it, or the
| environment you are doing it for. There are even multiple
| threads on HN every week accusing those consultants of
| hubris in various ways.
| SR2Z wrote:
| Presumably they didn't just fly in and wing it, and it's
| kind of a given that any solutions to this problem will
| be different to the status quo.
|
| The only thing that shows more hubris than telling
| foreigners how to live is foreigners dying en masse
| because they refuse to change their way of life - see,
| America on cars or gun control.
| dahart wrote:
| Correct, it definitely can be if it's unsolicited advice
| and/or if the "knowledge" is low quality, incomplete,
| difficult to apply, or just ignorant of Chesterton's
| Fence.
| antisthenes wrote:
| Yep, snooty early 20-somethings flying halfway across the
| world to teach people with hundreds years of experience.
|
| For sure that's not just virtue signaling and youthful
| delusion. For sure.
| triceratops wrote:
| Let me drop by your workplace and tell you how to do your
| job. And call you ungrateful when you don't listen to me.
| I mean, I have no idea what you do for a living and you
| have no reason to believe I have some special expertise
| you lack. But hey, free knowledge right?
| blacklion wrote:
| There was TED Talk from person who tried to teach some
| African people to grow tomatoes. When tomatoes were almost-
| reap there were a large herd of hippos and eat all
| tomatoes, completely, fruits and foliage.
|
| At least, this person (sorry, I can not recall name)
| acknowledge, that it was naive and hubris!
|
| UPDATE: I was not first:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39640882 need to read
| whole thread before answering!
| hef19898 wrote:
| As others pointed out already, Mongols are very polite and
| friendly to visitors. Even people who want to tell them how
| to live in their own steppes.
| sgift wrote:
| "Want to tell how to live" - what a bullshit way to read
| the GP comment. People starved, others tried to help them
| not to starve. They didn't "tell them how to live". If
| Mongols want to live like before and starve, sure, that's
| their privilege, but then I'd say everyone else has done
| their part. It's not the job of the world to help someone
| who wants to suffer.
| hef19898 wrote:
| No idea when OPs story happened, but from his use of
| "help prepare for winter", I concluded it was _before_
| the current disaster. Pretty hard to prepare for
| something when you are right in the middle of it.
|
| And yes, that is hubris.
|
| Also, your comment shows are very deep and troubling lack
| of empathy. On top of quite a large amount of ignorance.
| godshatter wrote:
| All this depends on whether the advice was actually
| objectively good advice or not. Is it hubris to give
| someone information you think may help them? This all
| hinges on whether or not they decided not to take the
| advice because it was crap advice or because they were
| set in their ways too much to make use of it.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Before you give advice, you ask questions and build the
| necessary basis that allows you to adopt your knowledge
| to the particular use case. If you do not do that, you
| fail. You even fail with good ideas, because you do not
| get buy in from the people.
|
| So yes, hubris is a rather good word for that kind of
| behaviour.
| godshatter wrote:
| Sure, asking questions and building rapport helps... and
| we have no idea if they did that or not. We don't know
| how they came about giving their advice to those
| particular people, we don't know what that advice was,
| and we don't know why they refused to heed it.
|
| Even if I had the urge to judge them on whether or not
| they were showing hubris in that situation, I would have
| to conclude I don't have enough information to do so.
| mmsimanga wrote:
| I think change is gradual not sudden. It tends to be
| incremental and also tends to be specific to one area. Often
| if you are involved in the change you don't notice it as
| much. My grandmother passed over 20 years ago. As a result of
| her passing away I didn't go to her village for close on 15
| years. When I did go the changes I noticed were astonishing
| to me. 15 years back most of the houses were mud huts. Now
| most are brick building with mud huts being the exception. It
| took a while.
|
| Anyone who spends time spreading new and improved ways of
| doing things I urge you to firstly continue to do so and to
| also realise change is gradual. Humans
| willismichael wrote:
| That makes me think of this excellent TED talk:
| https://youtu.be/chXsLtHqfdM?si=kTaxu3KCBEYYadGA
|
| (Spoiler) The TL;DW The presenter participated in a
| humanitarian group to establish an agricultural project in an
| African community. The effort was a disaster - hippos emerge
| from a river and devoured all of the produce. The presenter
| shares his insights about how to actually help locals by
| asking questions instead of telling them what to do.
| tiler2915072 wrote:
| I also met some nz government workers teaching ppl how to
| farm. They said most Mongolians weren't interested in working
| with the dirt. Understandable given their long long history
| as nomads.
| dahart wrote:
| > They said most Mongolians weren't interested in working
| with the dirt.
|
| What a strange statement. Most people in most countries
| aren't interested in "working with the dirt" as their full
| time occupation. Are they supposed to be interested in
| working with dirt more than other countries for some
| reason, and not aim for science, tech, education, finance,
| arts, etc? I just looked it up, and Mongolia's economy is
| around 35% mining and agriculture, with 10% of their total
| GDP from agriculture, which is quite a bit higher than New
| Zealand, so their statement seems especially ironic. The US
| and European economies have an even lower fraction of
| mining and agriculture, and aspire to get away from manual
| labor, especially involving dirt.
|
| Also don't forget it's much easier to grow things in NZ
| than Mongolia: "the high altitude, extreme fluctuation in
| temperature, long winters, and low precipitation provides
| limited potential for agricultural development. The growing
| season is only 95 - 110 days. Because of Mongolia's harsh
| climate, it is unsuited to most cultivation."
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolia#Agriculture
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| "Agriculture" as a category includes livestock and
| herding, which make up something like 80% of the
| Mongolian agricultural industry.
| dahart wrote:
| Yeah, correct, because it makes more economic sense to
| herd than farm, for reasons you and I have both given. It
| doesn't make sense nor help anything for foreigners to
| waltz in and proclaim Mongolians aren't interested,
| right?
| robocat wrote:
| > 10% of their total GDP from agriculture, which is quite
| a bit higher than New Zealand
|
| Meat was 11% of NZ export income: a huge amount more than
| the 1.5% for Mongolia[1]. GDP is weird, and comparing
| sectors or countries is hard. Comparing meat since that's
| closer to the topic.
|
| > long winters, and low precipitation provides limited
| potential for agricultural development. it is unsuited to
| most cultivation
|
| A better comparison is between the South Island of New
| Zealand and Mongolia. South Island latitude 41S to 47S.
| Mongolia latitude 41N to 50N. The South Island has "high-
| country farms" but yes New Zealand farming is far
| different from Mongolia where the country's altitude is
| mostly between say 800m and 1600m (along with continental
| weather). Our agriculture is very different from
| Mongolia's (and ours is variable: floods in some areas
| and bad droughts in other areas).
|
| [1] Data: Mongolia Exports of meat and edible meat offal
| was US$19.73 Million during 2021, Mongolia of total
| Exports 1324.80. New Zealand had NZD77.2 billion exports,
| with NZD8.6 billion exports for meat and offal.
|
| > They said most Mongolians weren't interested in working
| with the dirt.
|
| (Edit: removed inane opinion). Dissecting a second-hand
| sentence is pointless. Without more context, we can't
| know what they meant or what they were trying to
| communicate or the value of their opinion.
| dahart wrote:
| That's all fair, I'd delete my comment if I could.
|
| > Dissecting a second-hand sentence is pointless. Without
| more context, we can't know what they meant or what they
| were trying to communicate or the value of their opinion.
|
| Totally agree. Sharing the second-hand sentence out of
| context also makes little sense, no? That was the only
| point I intended to make, and I should have left out the
| sloppy economic comparison.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Mongolia is an incredibly shitty place to farm outside a
| couple of valleys with nice microclimates. There's very
| little infrastructure for the equipment and resources, and
| any farmers would be competing with Chinese farmers that
| don't have these constraints and can hit vastly lower price
| points. Farming is a difficult life in the best of
| situations, but not doing it in Mongolia is simply common
| sense.
| pradn wrote:
| The baseline international volunteers need to demonstrate is
| that they provided benefit higher than just giving away the
| cost of their flights to get there.
|
| IE: American volunteer groups going to poor countries to
| build them schools.
| eunos wrote:
| They can easily ask China and Russia (and realistically only
| those two can help massively). Likely they are too prideful tho
| rjzzleep wrote:
| Can you elaborate? Because as it stands the US throws away
| 30-40 percent of its own food supply[1].
|
| When Russia supplied free grain to Africa, because they
| couldn't sell it due to sanctions the West complained that
| accepting free grain would be "too dangerous a price to
| pay"[2]
|
| [1] https://www.rts.com/resources/guides/food-waste-america/
|
| [2]
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-02-23/russia-
| in...
| blue_pants wrote:
| How generous of them
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2022-russian-stolen-
| grain...
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220627050935/https://www.bbc.
| c...
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| Shipping free grain to places with food security problems
| actually does make the problem worse, because it bankrupts
| local farmers. It's fine in an emergency, but in general
| it's better to subsidize local farmers than to send food.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Yeah, of course. All famines and food shortages happen
| because the people faced with a shortage are to proud to ask
| for help... Rihjt...
|
| Any other deep thoughts you want to share?
| DinaCoder99 wrote:
| Sure, but they can also easily ask anyone. I don't know why
| it makes sense to shrug off that responsibility onto some
| nationalist bullshit.
| thriftwy wrote:
| The problem here is not simply food security, but the fact is
| that herds represented the capital those rural mongolian held,
| and now it's gone.
| philomath_mn wrote:
| Life is not a video game
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| Source?
| mikhailfranco wrote:
| The Mongols deliberately invaded Russia in winter, for two
| reasons:
|
| - the wide rivers were frozen, so they could just ride across
|
| - Moscow is 15degC warmer than Ulaan Bataar in winter (on
| average)
|
| Didn't work out so well for Napoleon or Hitler.
| whobre wrote:
| Not that you are wrong, but Moscow was irrelevant at the time
| of the Mongol invasion.
| cduzz wrote:
| I think the point was more "they could do it in their
| underwear because those parts of russia were a tropical
| paradise compared to where they came from."
| Wytwwww wrote:
| The climate in Kyiv is relatively mild to what people would
| generally associate with the "Russian winter".
| mikhailfranco wrote:
| Yale article linked to climate change.
|
| Not _caused_ by climate change, but it didn 't write itself, so
| definitely linked to it.
| sjducb wrote:
| How would you demonstrate whether something is linked to
| climate change or caused by climate change?
| klyrs wrote:
| I'm having some trouble with the delivery, but OC seems to be
| making a joke that climate change didn't directly cause the
| paper to be written?
| ronzensci wrote:
| This yale article seems to be heavily 'inspired' by the WHO
| article:
| https://www.who.int/mongolia/news/detail/28-02-2024-severe-d...
| tokai wrote:
| What is your point? It's not plagiarized, and the WHO 'article'
| is a _press release_. Which is literally published for other
| journalists to use as primary sources and statements on events.
| WHO made their statement to explain their involvement in this
| event _and_ provide information about said event, so it can be
| disseminated to a wider audience.
|
| Don't throw such accusations around when they so unfounded.
| brabel wrote:
| > herds are struggling through both a "white" dzud, in which very
| deep snow hinders their access to grass, and an "iron" dzud, in
| which a brief thaw is followed by a rapid, hard freeze, locking
| pastures in ice.
|
| That's the worst... where I live, the temperature tends to get
| just above zero after snowstorms, just enough to make the snow
| wet and more compact, and then when it freezes over again it's
| basically a piece of ice which takes ages to melt later. I
| suppose that with the weather previously being more stable, it
| wouldn't do that often in Mongolia? But now that it both snows
| more and the temperature varies more widely, this is a recipe for
| disaster. Hope they find ways to adapt with the help of modern
| tools, but of course it's easier said than done, specially when
| they probably don't have any money to invest in things that could
| help and even if they could, the infrastructure just doesn't
| exist.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| > Hope they find ways to adapt with the help of modern tools,
| but of course it's easier said than done, specially when they
| probably don't have any money to invest in things that could
| help and even if they could, the infrastructure just doesn't
| exist.
|
| Only way so far apparently in Mongolia has been to migrate to
| cities.
| SR2Z wrote:
| The overwhelming majority (90%+, IIRC) of Mongolia already
| lives in Ulanbataar.
|
| They have different winter-related problems there (severe
| coal smog) but at least they're not at the mercy of ice on
| the pastures.
| prlambert wrote:
| Not sure why you think that? The nomadic population is
| between 25%-30%, two sources: 1) World bank gives 25%
| "around one quarter of households live nomadic life in
| Mongolia" https://blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/counting-
| uncounted-how-... 1) Wikipedia gives 30%, "Approximately
| 30% of the population is nomadic or semi-nomadic"
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolia.
|
| Population of of Ulaanbataar is 1.6M, Mongolia as a country
| is 3.3M. So just under 50% live in the capital city.
| redbar0n wrote:
| Feedback from a friend who lives in the very West Mongolia who
| read this article:
|
| " This concerns mostly East Mongolia, and it can be a good thing
| for the nature, even though it is disastrous for many
| shepherds/herders. It's now more than 3x as many livestock
| animals in the country compared to when communism fell in 1990.
| Over-grassing kills the steppes and makes the desert spread in
| record speed. So if half of the livestock animal population would
| die, it would be, as said, good for the nature, but crap for the
| shepherds/herders.
|
| If you want to see the official animal statistics check out
| http://1212.mn/en "
| asimpleusecase wrote:
| I lived in Mongolia in 2000-2001 and the winter then was similar
| . https://reliefweb.int/report/mongolia/mongolia-snowfalls-upd...
|
| It was a disaster for herders. Then in the spring we had a huge
| outbreak of hoof and mouth.
|
| What is happening right now is tragic- but I suspect that herders
| will find a way to endure. They are incredibly resilient people.
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