Field Notes: February 2025

In Defense of Foreign Aid, aguaje fruit, and new restaurants from Andoni Luis Aduriz in Mexico and Thiago Castanho in Brazil.

A regular round-up of culinary news and notes from around the Americas, and beyond. If you have any tips, drop me a line thenewworlder@gmail.com.

A hive of native melipona bees in the Brazilian Amazon. Photo: Nicholas Gill.

In Defense of Foreign Aid

I’ve been traveling in the Amazon for research for my next book over the past few weeks, just as the topic of foreign aid has become a major topic of conversation in the United States. I thought my input might be useful as much of the rhetoric I have been seeing online make about as much sense as the mobile hamburger cart I saw the other day in Puerto Maldonado with a grill that was built on the back of a motorcycle, was called Texica Burgers and had a giant poster of Lionel Messi behind the driver seat. For the past 20 years, I have spent a considerable amount of time with rural and indigenous communities that have received funding for various development projects, directly and indirectly, from aid organizations all over the world, not just USAID. Why is foreign aid important? This money is often the difference between resilient economies that benefits many for the long term and ones built purely on short term extraction that benefit very few and threatens the very air all of us breath, the water we drink and the food we eat.

According to Pew Research, the US spent $71.0 billion dollars in foreign aid in 2024, though a good percentage of that was humanitarian spending for the war in Ukraine. Much of the rest of the money went towards disaster relief and other humanitarian aid, as well as ridding the world of AIDS and other diseases. For the last 20 years foreign aid has generally hovered between $50-60 billion annually. It ranges between 0.7% and 1.4% of the total federal budget in the United States. While not an insignificant number, it is well short of a survey of Americans who believed foreign aid represents 35 percent of the national budget.

Here in the Amazon, not all of the foreign aid is coming from USAID. It’s one of a number of governmental organizations around the world that recognize the importance of protecting the rainforest for a myriad of reasons, including similar programs in Norway, Japan and Germany. Countless private organizations also contribute. Still, the administration’s decision to immediately cut all funding will impact projects like these in the Amazon:

Fundo Amazônia: An extremely important initiative that is one of the primary reasons that deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon fell by more than 30 percent in 2024. It supports forest conservation projects, monitors deforestation and promotes economic projects in countless Indigenous communities.

Pachamama Alliance: A wide ranging project that covers a vast network of vulnerable landscapes and communities across the Amazon region. This includes The Sacha Project, which supports over 276,000 Indigenous people from seven different nationalities, sustains 50 bioenterprises, while also enhancing the livelihoods of 6,000 individuals—70% of whom are Indigenous and 45% are women.

Restaura Amazônia: Aka Restore the Amazon. This initiative aims to recover 46,000 square miles of native vegetation in the Brazilian Amazon by 2030.

Special Project for the Control and Reduction of Coca Cultivation in Upper Huallaga (CORAH): It supports the eradication of coca in Peru that’s involved in the drug trade in favor of alternative, sustainable agricultural products.

Roraima Indigenous Council: Covering Roraima, an area larger than Greece, mostly in extremely vulnerable Yanomami territory in northern Brazil, funding various grassroots organizations.

There are many more projects like these and the benefits of each far outweigh the costs. This is a region that is being upended by narco-trafficking, illegal gold mining, polluted waterways, a changing climate and disease. All of these organizations and many others help mitigate the damage they cause. This money helps the earth’s richest biodiversity stay in the ground rather than be carved out but miners, loggers, oil companies and cattle ranchers. It’s not just support for some far away place, however. When vulnerable communities become destabilized, especially in Latin America, this leads to an increase in illegal migration to the United States, more corruption that makes further progress more difficult, to health crises like Covid-19 being more difficult to control and countless other issues that have high costs and make us less safe.

This doesn’t mean some projects aren’t misguided or don’t deserve scrutiny. They absolutely do. Some community organizations become so dependent on aid that they move from one small project to the next without building longtime viability. Some NGOs even spend more on executive accommodations than real investments in the communities they are supposed to support. However, they are drop in the bucket.

If we truly wanted to look at government waste, USAID is hardly the place. The military, healthcare and tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy are obvious areas where there is significant room to improve efficiency. Elon Musk, Donald Trump and anyone else in the current administration is not doing this for a vision of a better America, but for their own personal greed. We cannot lose sight of that. When the world’s richest people are arguing about benefits for the world’s poorest it is very clear that something isn’t right.

• “How the Capybara Won My Heart—and Almost Everyone Else’s” by Gary Shteyngart – The New Yorker

• “Standing in the Shade of My Abuelito’s Lemon Tree” by Chanel Vargas – Eater

• “Italy’s Natural Wine Energy Is Coming From The Places You’d Least Expect” by Jason Wilson –

  EVERYDAY DRINKING

M – Mexico City, Mexico: Inside the garden and community center Huerto Roma Verde, the M in this small restaurant stands for mariscos, mezcal and maridajes. Focused on sustainable seafood, the restaurant opened in late January.