Tracking Gnomes and Auditing their Books

Todd Gleason, Farm Broadcaster, University of Illinois

The European Union Center on the University of Illinois campus has taken a group of high school teachers to Brussels, Belgium. Most of them are history teachers, and learned how agriculture, in large part, underpins the common European society. Listen to the fourth and final of Todd Gleason’s journal entries from the weeklong trip, and follow along with the transcript below. Also check out Todd Gleason's blog on the experience, featuring posts, photos, and a map of the study tour.

Friday June 29, 2012

You cannot visit Belgium without a brewery tour. Ours took place in farm county a couple of hours outside of Brussels, near the French border and just an hour from Luxembourg. We went to the Brasserie d’Achoufe. The Achouffe Brewery. Achouffe is the word for sneeze, I think, and the name of the town. The brewery isn’t that old, established in the early 1980’s. They’ve a nice little story to go with their bier about the Gnomes of Ardennes forest wanting something different to drink than the crisp clean spring water. We’ve some extra time here, finally. One of our crew wants to walk to the restaurant – bar – where we will have lunch. It’s four kilometers away and I know the two-and-half-mile trek is all up hill. We’re on a blacktop, mostly Simmental or Simmental Charolaise cross cattle dotting the pastures on both side of the roadway—at least where there aren’t pine forests. The barkeeper looks like a French strong man with a red nose and a beret. Classic. I cool off not with a bier, but with water.

I’m not cool for long. Our hotel in Luxembourg is not air-conditioned. No big deal really, even the buildings with air condition have been stuffy at best over the entirety of the trip.  Bier at noon – the brewery tour - and then back into the classroom late in the day. This time we are at the University of Luxembourg. It is on our itinerary mostly because – as has been the case almost always when I’ve traveled with the University of Illinois – the two campuses are searching for common areas of interest and ways to trade students. We are there long enough to learn the University of Luxembourg is not expensive to attend either as a local, or an international student. I calculate the costs, housing and tuition, is just about the same as attending a community college here.

We spent Thursday evening in city center watching soccer on a big screen with a crowd of maybe a couple thousand - maybe just a thousand; all very young, with bier available. Strikingly, they were quiet, intent, not drunk and extraordinarily cordial. It meant very few policeman were needed. I think Americans need to work on being more European in this case. 

Friday morning we head to the European Court of Auditors. The ‘federal budget’ for the European Union is about 1.6 billion U.S. dollars. The U.S. budget is more than 3 trillion dollars by comparison. The Court of Auditors does exactly what you think it might do, but in a more small townish way. For instance our group is traveling on a grant from the European Union. The auditors we are meeting with could very well ask to see the receipts we turn in. We’re told stories of going to farms and counting cows, and national borders to count jeeps used to patrol them. The budget is small, because each country mostly takes care of its own. The auditors say that’s where the financial crisis lies.    

The teachers on our trip are excited. We’re headed to high school. The schools in Luxembourg “track” their kids a whole lot more than would ever be acceptable in the United States. Starting in about 7^th grade the children are picking out careers and following a corresponding course of work. The school, despite being one of the worst in the city we are told, is clean, up-to-date, quite – the kids are in class – and our high school teachers are envious at almost every turn – well, with the exception of the tracking part.

Tracking Gnomes and Auditing their Books

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Granddad can we go to the U.S. mission?

Todd Gleason, Farm Broadcaster, University of Illinois

The European Union Center on the University of Illinois campus has taken a group of high school teachers to Brussels, Belgium. Most of them are history teachers, and learned how agriculture, in large part, underpins the common European society. Listen to the third of Todd Gleason’s journal entries from the weeklong trip, and follow along with the transcript below. Also check out Todd Gleason's blog on the experience, featuring posts, photos, and a map of the study tour.

Wednesday June 27, 2012

When the sun sets around 10 o’clock you go to bed about 1:30 in the morning. Well, I did last night. That’s a bad deal when the alarm rings at 6:30am. Fortunately, we get to sleep-in an extra hour on hump day, but we are out and running quickly. A few of the younger folks have been burning the candle at both ends a bit harder than me. The hour-long bus ride this morning gives time to sleep…not enough to recuperate, but everyone is operational. I wonder, with a little smirk on my face, how they’ll take to the chocolate factory. It should be odiferous.

Barry Callebaut is situated in classic small town Americana. At least that’s how we are introduced to the company. Wieze Belgium is a little burg of about 2000. And, judging by the size of the chocolate factory, everyone in town probably works or is related to somebody who does work here. As it turns out, I’ve likely been eating chocolate made by this company for decades. It is the chocolate supplier to the chocolate makers. About 70 percent of Belgium chocolates start with a Barry Callebaut base; one in four chocolates on the planet. Wow! I am at the candy man’s house. It has over 2000 recipes, employs 6000 people in 27 countries, and controls 40 percent of the industrial open market. Illinois based Kraft/Cadbury soon to be spun off as Mondelez is the next biggest followed by Mars, Nestle, Hershey’s (half as much production by the way), Cargill à now we’re talking ag, Blommer, ADM and Lindt.

Barry Callebaut is ‘concerned’ about Cargill and ADM. And while it wasn’t said, it’s a pretty good guess THAT is because those two companies have direct contact with cocoa growers. So, does Barry Callebaut and it makes no beans (pun intended) about the importance of growers in Africa. Ivory Coast is the world’s biggest cocoa producer. Callebaut is putting genuine effort into what it calls Sustainable Cocoa. On the outside that sounds like doing good works, and I suppose it is in part, but I’m more production oriented and it is clear sustainable means teaching growers how to produce a better quality bean. We tour the plant. It smells yummy, and Callebaut sends on our way each with about 4 kilos of chocolate. I tap out a note to the wife… about 8 pounds of Belgium chocolate in hand, will purchase more only upon request. She and I agree on this point.

We board the bus and head back to Brussels for lunch and a visit to the United States Mission to the European Union, passports required for entry. Once again, like our visit to NATO, all of our loose belongings – phones, wallets, cameras, change in our pockets - is collected and stored. We pass through security climb a set of stairs and enter a posh conference room. I’m one of the last to arrive, and take the seat at the opposite head of the table. The journalist, that’s me, is quickly identified and later in the briefing the words “On Background” are uttered. In my world, that means you can hear it, but not attribute it. The mission is like a mini Washington, D.C. housing reps from the Departments of State, Agriculture, Commerce, Homeland Security, Treasury, Justice, Defense USAID, USTR, and NOAA. A tourist from Arizona managed to join our group for this briefing. He was traveling with his grandson. Note to self: Do that with your grandchildren. I don’t think my kids would stand for it, but when Granddad says we are going to the U.S. Mission à that is cool.

Granddad can we go to the U.S. mission?

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The European Commission Prison

Todd Gleason, Farm Broadcaster, University of Illinois

The European Union Center on the University of Illinois campus has taken a group of high school teachers to Brussels, Belgium. Most of them are history teachers, and learned how agriculture, in large part, underpins the common European society. Listen to the second of Todd Gleason’s journal entries from the weeklong trip, and follow along with the transcript below. Also check out Todd Gleason's blog on the experience, featuring posts, photos, and a map of the study tour.

Tuesday June 26, 2012

Oh my, our second full day in Belgium is starting just as early as the first. 6:30am for breakfast and then we’re off to the European Commission building. It is a foreboding structure. Almost prison like from the outside because of louvers that line its curve and then a tower – a prison tower dead center. I’m sure the commission would not approve of my description, none-the-less this is how I see it from the street. Inside we pass through security checks and eventually settle into a warm be very comfortable conference room. It’s a bit UN’ish. We are arranged in sweeping oval, the center of which is open. We each have a microphone in front of us, a set of headphones stashed in the desk from which we could listen to the interpreter if there were one. There is no need.

Our briefing, and I believe that is truly the correct word, is lead in the first hours by a Fin. Who know the Finnish people were so dry witted. The high school teachers are engaged in the geo-political discussion. The give and take is easy, and the PowerPoint presentation is dismissed altogether as it is quickly apparent the three days spend on the University of Illinois campus preparing for the trip has paid dividends. There was little need to recap the history of how the European Union came into being. We delved into the current challenges and the financial matters at hand; Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Ireland; the possible expansion of the Euro Zone; the prospects for Turkey’s entry and that of Iceland. The time passes swiftly.

Our second briefing is not nearly so entertaining nor engaging for most of the group, but I am enthralled as we pick through U.S. / E.U. trade relations and the ground work being laid this year for a future Free Trade Agreement that could harmonize regulations across the two areas. It might for instance create a common-emissions standard so that automobiles could move more easily from one side of the Atlantic to the other. Paying attention to the regulations would allow the globe’s two largest trading partners to set the bar by which all others might have to play.  Now that is good stuff. We have one more lesson before lunch on the streets of Brussels. CAP, or the Common Agricultural Policy.

NATO is next. It is a lengthy, hot and humid transit bus ride to the headquarters of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Save the razor wire, this building is not nearly so ominous as the European Commission. One of our group thinks it looks like a big high school inside and out. Maybe, but most high schools don’t require a passport for entry. All our electronic devices are stowed at the gate. We arrive on an historic day. The members of NATO are deciding what do, if anything, about the downing of a Turkish military jet by Syria. The NATO reps discuss possible actions, and then as is the case we are told for each and every decision the final question is if there is any opposition. The agreement is made in silence. If no opposition is voiced then the action is taken…classified, but taken.

Dinner is at 7:30. It last a few hours. Unlike NATO our group is not silent. We’re loud, very loud!

The European Commission Prison

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Caterpillar & a Bucket of Mussels

Todd Gleason, Farm Broadcaster, University of Illinois

The European Union Center on the University of Illinois campus has taken a group of high school teachers to Brussels, Belgium. Most of them are history teachers, and learned how agriculture, in large part, underpins the common European society. Listen to the first of Todd Gleason’s diary entries from the week long trip, and follow along with the transcript below. Also check out Todd Gleason's blog on the experience, featuring posts, photos, and a map of the study tour.

Monday June 25, 2012

We arrived three hours late in Brussels yesterday. I am hopeful our return trip to Chicago will not be delayed. Once on the ground our troop of 21 began to move quickly into the city, checking into the Thon Hotel near the European Commission buildings. Tired, but excited we began a more than two hour walking tour of what has become essentially the capitol of Europe. Our guide Sasha loves this city and took great pains to tell us its story building by building. And then, while it was on our itinerary, we spent a couple of hours eating our first evening meal in Europe at the Spicy Grill Indian restaurant - really good, but a bit more international than expected. It was the first of many global surprises. Sunday night’s sleep was restless for the group. I’m in bed before sundown. Most spent part of the wee hours awake at one point or another as the time differences is seven hours.

Breakfast must be the most important meal of the day! The Thon buffet, especially at 6:30am, is overwhelming; hard breads and cheeses, pastries, boiled, fried, and scrambled eggs, cold cuts, bacon, and link sausages, fruits, vegetables… the list goes on. I wanted coffee, but only found the espresso machine.

By 9am Monday we had traveled an hour and 15 minutes to the Caterpillar plant in Gosselies. What a beautiful site it was as we peered from the tour bus windows to see the familiar yellow and black of Peoria’s pride. I had set next to a Cat engineer on the plane ride over and knew we’d see the beginnings of a line being retooled in this plant tour. Gossilies produces excavators and wheel loaders for Europe and export. It looked and smelled a lot like what I remember seeing as an FFA’er in high school on tour in East Peoria. Those plants have long since been leveled, Where told Caterpillar managed its way through the economic downturn not because of its global footprint in Europe, but rather the plant in Asia. Those plants and a strategic plan in place before the fall are the reason the Peoria headquartered company is now turning bigger profits. It is a global market place. There are 40 Caterpillar competitors operating in Belgium.

We ate lunch in the Cat cafeteria, boarded the bus and headed back to Brussels for an afternoon meeting with AmCham EU or the American Chamber of Commerce. We spent the first of many hours sitting in a very warm room watching an interesting – but not always fully engage because of a full belly and warm temperatures – power point. AmCham lobbies the European Union on behalf of American companies. We finish up at 4:30, are a twenty-minute walk from the hotel, and the group decides to mostly eat together for the evening. We head for the fish restaurants and dine on mussels, king crab legs, and crawfish. Our meal ends about 8:30pm. The sun sets around 10:30pm. We make our way back to the hotel slowly, stopping to indulge in Belgium’s pride. I like Duvel. It’s a good bier. 

Caterpillar & a Bucket of Mussels

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