Smaller Markets in Rajasthan

Posted on by in General, India Food Waste, Photography, Research, Travel

Note: This blog post was originally published on the MIT Public Service Center website. It’s the eighth post in a blog series sharing findings from a research project I’m working on throughout the month of January. January 23, 2012 Paul Artiuch and Sam Kornstein are graduate students at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Throughout the month of January they are in India researching market-oriented approaches to reducing agricultural food waste. They will be sharing their project scope and some of their findings in this blog series. Earlier this month, we visited Azadpur Mandi, the largest wholesale produce market in Asia. We found that while the marketplace is extraordinarily chaotic, it’s actually quite efficient, and little food goes to waste

Continue reading

Why Aren’t iPhones Made In America?

Posted on by in Current Events

Via Marginal Revolution, the answer has less to do with wages than you might think: This is an excellent article, and perhaps it will win one of David Brooks’s Sidney Awards, excerpt: Another critical advantage for Apple was that China provided engineers at a scale the United States could not match. Apple’s executives had estimated that about 8,700 industrial engineers were needed to oversee and guide the 200,000 assembly-line workers eventually involved in manufacturing iPhones. The company’s analysts had forecast it would take as long as nine months to find that many qualified engineers in the United States. In China, it took 15 days. …Foxconn employs nearly 300 guards to direct foot traffic so workers are not crushed in doorway bottlenecks.

Continue reading

India’s Lack of Food Processing

Posted on by in India Food Waste, Research, Travel

Note: This blog post was originally published on the MIT Public Service Center website. It’s the seventh post in a blog series sharing findings from a research project I’m working on throughout the month of January. January 21, 2012 Paul Artiuch and Sam Kornstein are graduate students at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Throughout the month of January they are in India researching market-oriented approaches to reducing agricultural food waste. They will be sharing their project scope and some of their findings in this blog series. Fresh produce, such as fruits and vegetables, generally spoils quickly. As we’ve previously discussed, cold storage is an effective method of extending shelf life. In most cases, however, the cost of such storage is

Continue reading

India’s Grain Storage Problem

Posted on by in India Food Waste, Research, Travel

Note: This blog post was originally published on the MIT Public Service Center website. It’s the sixth post in a blog series sharing findings from a research project I’m working on throughout the month of January. January 18, 2012 Paul Artiuch and Sam Kornstein are graduate students at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Throughout the month of January they are researching market-oriented approaches to reducing agricultural food waste in India. They will be sharing their project scope and some of their findings in this blog series. India is one of the largest wheat producers in the world, with the most recent harvest bringing in over 80 million tons of grain. As we’ve mentioned in previous posts, the government buys

Continue reading

The Punjab Potato Party

Posted on by in India Food Waste, Research, Travel

Note: This blog post was originally published on the MIT Public Service Center website. It’s the fifth post in a blog series sharing findings from a research project I’m working on throughout the month of January. January 16, 2012 Paul Artiuch and Sam Kornstein are graduate students at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Throughout the month of January they are researching market-oriented approaches to reducing agricultural food waste in India. They will be sharing their project scope and some of their findings in this blog series. As we mentioned in our post on cold storage, this year there’s an excess supply of potatoes in India, and prices have plummeted. After spending a day speaking with professors at the Punjab Agricultural University, we

Continue reading

A Look at India’s Agricultural Supply Chains

Posted on by in India Food Waste, Research, Travel

Note: This blog post was originally published on the MIT Public Service Center website. It’s the fourth post in a blog series sharing findings from a research project I’m working on throughout the month of January. January 15, 2012 Paul Artiuch and Sam Kornstein are graduate students at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Throughout the month of January they are researching market-oriented approaches to reducing agricultural food waste in India. They will be sharing their project scope and some of their findings in this blog series. Over the past week, we’ve learned quite a bit about how food gets from farmers’ fields all over India to the plates of the country’s 1.2 billion people. What struck us most is

Continue reading

Police Corruption in Delhi

Posted on by in Travel

There’s quite a bit of security in Delhi. I can’t comment on its effectiveness, but it’s definitely all over the place. When you drive around the city, every couple kilometers or so you’ll come across a police checkpoint where a few officers stand and spot check vehicles for, presumably, anything suspicious. The checks can range from a look in the window to a more thorough search in the trunk or through any bags that are in the car. Once the sun goes down, though, the checkpoints seem to serve a different purpose. I’d always heard that India’s a pretty corrupt place, and got to see it first-hand last night. I was in a car with four other people, and we

Continue reading