We’re sitting at a table in Rice Paper [2], the little Asian-fusion restaurant in Linden Hills.

When I asked Jim Harkness [3], president of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy [4], if he would talk to me over dinner he said sure, I should pick the place. His house is in this neighborhood, I reasoned, and he lived in China for more than a decade. He heads up an agency that advocates for family-owned businesses. Rice Paper should be perfect.

The server hands me a menu and I study it for a second. “What looks good to you?” I ask.

“Well, nothing, actually,” Harkness says. He is staring at his menu, eyebrows beetling fiercely. Then he looks up. “Oh, I probably should have told you, I’m kind of an anti-fusion snob. I mean, generations went into creating authentic, regional Asian cuisines. Can’t we just stick to one? Why do we have to mess them up by mixing them all together?”

I have no idea what to say.

Harkness shrugs. “You never know, maybe I’ll be won over,” he says. “But I doubt it.”

He’s a young-looking 45, with a handsome, unlined face and dark hair. I attribute this to the way he’s lived: single, unburdened by so much as a cat, following a career path based entirely upon his whims and interests rather than mundane exigencies such as car payments, children, a 401(k). But no matter how solipsistic his approach, there’s no denying Harkness is doing great work.

He’s just returned, for instance, from a summit in Beijing where he was asked to speak about the trade relationship between China and Africa. I ask him for his position. He begins with a sketch of the history: “China’s leaders came up in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, during the Cold War, at a time when the country’s ties to third-world countries were based largely on the movement toward non-alliance. And a big part of their foreign policy has always been this notion of non-interference.” After several minutes, he shifts to the modern day: “In today’s world, a world of global economies, that’s a sort of naïve view and it ends up dovetailing very conveniently with a trade policy that’s focused on getting resources, like oil.” He launches into descriptions of the various groups opposing China and concludes with: “Frankly, I’m not terribly sympathetic to the U.S. or European countries saying that China’s motives in Africa aren’t pure because of our own 400-year history of plunder and colonialism, stretching right up to the present.”

He takes a breath. The server — who seems to have every table in this busy little restaurant — stops back to ask if we’re ready to order.

“Not yet,” Harkness tells her. “I’m formulating a theory about Chinese foreign policy here. It takes time.”

Finally, we choose two dishes, Plantation chicken and a Curry Plate with tofu, and agree to share. He orders a domestic beer (Rice Paper has obtained a beer and wine license since its “dry” opening in 2003), warning me to avoid imported Asian beers because most of them are awful.

“How did you end up in China in the first place?” I ask.

He looks perplexed again, then begins at the beginning.

Harkness grew up just a few miles away, in Minneapolis near 50th and Girard. His parents both were the children of missionaries — his father born in Mozambique, his mother in Korea — so their lifestyle, even with children, was peripatetic. Harkness attended Minneapolis Central High School when he wasn’t traveling with his family, and took classes in Chinese. In 1976, the year he was 14, he was selected along with a group of other high schools students from the United States to visit China as part of a “friendship delegation.”

“That was the era of ping-pong diplomacy,” he explains. “I think they ran out of other 'welcoming' things to do, so they invited this group of high school kids over, wined and dined us, took us to the Great Wall. I thought it was great. Had a mad crush on one of the female Red guards — unrequited, by the way.”

He returned, finished high school, and took up the Chinese again at the University of Wisconsin. In 1981, he traveled to Tianjin as part of an exchange program. But it wasn’t global politics that Harkness was interested in, it was ornithology. He was — and still is — riveted by birds.

While earning his master’s degree in sociology at Cornell University, he signed on as a consultant to the International Crane Foundation, based in Baraboo, Wisconsin. The tiny nonprofit happened to be launching a project in China and they were in need of someone who spoke the language.

Harkness glowers and announces, “In the mountain where there is no tiger, the monkey is king.”

There is a pause. “Which means?” I prompt.

“Since none of these salt-of-the-earth Wisconsin bird nuts knew Chinese, they thought I was some worldly sophisticate. I became their king. They’d find some Chinese scientist who didn’t speak English, and I’d be sent to translate and help him artificially inseminate black-necked cranes.”

Our food arrives, and I quite enjoy it. For the price, about $15 per person, I think it’s savory and interesting. The curried tofu is a bit overpowering with noodles, but eaten with the cabbage salad, it’s perfect: wild, yellow, coriander, sesame-studded tofu, Chinese basil, and sweet, shredded carrot. The chicken dish suffers due to the meat itself — which has the stale flavor of a mid- to low grade — but the mild jasmine sauce is creamy and pleasant.

Harkness disagrees. He doesn’t care for the way the tofu is prepared and calls the curry one-dimensional. The rice under the chicken is too mushy, he says, but he concedes that the sauce is nice.

We talk a bit about Linden Hills, which he likes, though he wishes it were more diverse and says it could use a decent bookstore [for adults — Wild Rumpus, down the street, is an excellent children’s bookshop], as well. In fact, he’s back because after living in Washington, D.C., and then overseas for many years, he’s learned to appreciate Minnesota.

Harkness switched from birds to bears when he was offered a job by the National Zoo’s Giant Panda [9] Plan. It was a time of panda-mania. The American public had fallen in love with the endangered Chinese animals, and there were companies “renting” pandas out to various venues: auto shows, petting zoos, Hollywood parties. The role of the Giant Panda Plan was to educate and save pandas.

“I didn’t really enjoy this job,” Harkness admits. “I learned a tremendous amount and met a lot of interesting people, but ultimately, I didn’t have a lot of faith in the plan. Instead of being in China doing something about the problem, I was in an office in Bethesda, answering questions from schoolchildren.”

But the job was a springboard. In 1993, he was hired by the Ford Foundation [10] to run their office in Beijing.

“Now this was an excellent thing to do for a living,” Harkness says. “Basically, I was being paid to give away money to incredibly smart, innovative Chinese people who were fighting the good fight.”

He worked for the Ford Foundation for five years, then signed on as director of the World Wildlife Fund [11] (WWF) in China for the next six.

“The WWF is a huge, international conservation organization, and they were concerned about environmental issues in China,” he says. “And pandas, of course. Which is why I got the job. That work with the Panda Plan finally paid off.”

But after more than ten years in China, working in the nonprofit sector, Harkness had simply had enough. He quit the WWF in 2004 and decided to take some time off. He had enough money saved; he had no responsibilities other than to take care of himself. For more than a year, he slept, he read, he visited friends.

One of the only professional appearances he made was at a meeting in the United States about Wal-Mart moving into China. After he spoke — saying the Chinese government might be the only entity in the world capable of taming Wal-Mart’s unfair labor practices — someone told him there was a job open with the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) in Minneapolis and suggested he apply.

The IATP was born out of the family farm movement in the 1980’s.

“During the previous ten years, the number of family farms in America had gone from six million to two million,” Harkness says. “One of the activists who was trying to find solutions was a guy named Mark Ritchie [12] — an Iowa farm boy who’d also worked on the Nestle boycott [13] — and he and some other people started the IATP to draw attention to the importance of global agricultural trade and how it influences the well-being of farmers in rural communities.”

The IATP has fought against the North American Free Trade Movement and the World Trade Organization, on the premise that both promote non-sustainable, commercial farming, causing environmental damage, negatively affecting public health, and wiping out family farms.

Today, one of the major issues facing the IATP is the way federal payments to farmers favor commodity over diverse, food-based farming. As a result, some 85 percent of land in the Midwest’s “Farm Belt” is devoted to growing soybeans and corn. This, in turn, leads to an economy where whole foods must be shipped in from around the country and overseas — making them both ecologically damaging and expensive — while processed products, made with soy byproducts and/or corn syrup, are plentiful and cheap.

“Over a 15-year period, from about 1985 to 2000, the cost of fresh produce went up 35 percent, whereas the price of ground beef and Coca-Cola, in real terms went down about an equivalent amount.” Harkness speaks softly, seriously. “That’s because feedlots and the soft drink industry suddenly had all this very cheap raw material at their disposal, which they would not have had without massive government intervention. And if you look at the onset of America’s obesity crisis, it coincides almost exactly with these changes in policies.”

In other words, Harkness is not only concerned about the family farmers — who, he says, make less than a living wage even if they capitulate and grow government-subsidy crops — he’s worried about consumers as well.

According to the IATP’s 2006 report Food Without Thought, during the period from 1970 to 2000, childhood obesity skyrocketed. Processed food climbed to represent 40 percent of the average American’s grocery bill, while produce claimed less than nine percent. The consumption of high-fructose corn syrup — a cheap, moist sweetener found in soft drinks and most processed foods, which provides no nutrients and very little usable energy, but must be processed entirely by the liver, like a toxin — rose 1,000 percent. There was a concurrent surge in cases of type 2 diabetes. And during the same time period the U.S. consumption of added fats went up 35 percent.

The IATP’s role — one that Harkness has adopted as his own — is to push for policies and originate practices that will correct all of these ills, ranging from the deterioration of America’s farm culture to the spread of inexpensive, unhealthy, commodity-based processed foods.

They’re doing this by lobbying for changes in the Federal price support system of payments to farmers; encouraging regional food buying in urban communities (e.g. setting up farmer’s markets in urban neighborhoods); opposing the messages of Fortune 500 agribusiness, such as Cargill and General Mills (which is one reason the IATP is based in Minnesota); developing language around a “common farmer-public health policy platform” for the next farm bill; and promoting fair trade practices — even going so far as to operate a for-profit company of its own: Peace Coffee [16].

The agency operates on whatever level is appropriate to the issue at hand, Harkness explains. Locally, they’re working with low-income residents of North Minneapolis, encouraging them to shop at local markets and buy fresh food. Regionally, their top concern right now is the growing enthusiasm for farms that will exclusively produce corn for ethanol. At the national level, most of their energy is devoted to rewriting the farm bill and swaying lawmakers. And internationally, they’re focused on the World Trade Organization and how its policies shape our communities and our lives.

“Look, I took this job because I feel like for most of my life, I’ve been concerned about social justice and, for lack of a better, less overused, word, the sustainability of our planet.” Harkness looks perplexed again. But I understand, finally, that this isn’t disapproval. He’s only pondering.

“I’ve tried to work toward those goals using all sorts of different means, whether it’s talking about conserving pandas or giving people decent, affordable food to eat. When I was first told about the IATP, I’ll admit, it sounded removed from my lofty ideas about human rights. But when I got into it and saw what this organization does — looking at issues that affect just about everyone in this world — I realized that food is a very powerful force.”