Fifth in a series of interviews with farmers affiliated with La Via Campesina, an alliance of international peasant farmer organizations. This interview was conducted with the assistance of an LVC translator. Also, even if farming isn't your usual interest, I encourage you to read this, on account of how we in the US might soon need to learn a thing or two from the world's peasant farmer and landless peasant movements.
Renaldo Chingore João works a 5-7 acre farm with his family. There, they grow maize, beans and vegetables, keeping 15 cows for meat and milk, as well as draft labor. Though it's a small farm, João and his family don't face the world alone.
They're part of a community that's organized itself for advocacy and mutual support, both within Mozambique and the larger global community of peasant farmers.
Fourth in a series of interviews with farmers affiliated with La Via Campesina, an alliance of international peasant farmer organizations. This interview was conducted with the assistance of an LVC translator.
Baramee Chaiyarat is responsible for organizing the seven networks that make up Thailand's Assembly of the Poor and his background as the son of a subsistence farmer and a teacher made him well-suited to this work.
The Assembly of the Poor represents villagers affected by either dam construction or forestry policy, the landless, alternative agriculturalists, small scale fisher folk, slum dwellers and injured workers. They're a non-partisan organization that's deeply suspicious of all the country's political parties. At one point, they were all separate, and Chaiyarat said they all "felt tired and out of energy" after many years of unsuccessful work. He doesn't even know who first thought of bringing them all together, and that it took several years of face to face forums before everyone trusted each other enough to establish the AoP, which organizes mass mobilizations in the capital and community-backed lending circles.
Chaiyarat said he and his colleagues "came to let the world know that the solutions being proposed at Bella Center are false solutions. We feel the real way to solve the problem is through the principle of food security," he said, and supporting small scale farmers who work in harmony with nature.
One proposal that particularly concerns Chaiyarat is the REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation)standard, which is said to be close to a final deal. He said that without adequate protections for indigenous peoples, "it will be one of the most vicious sorts of programs around," allowing the government an additional pretext to drive villagers out of their ancestral lands.
Third in a series of interviews with farmers affiliated with La Via Campesina, an alliance of international peasant farmer organizations.
Michel David's father was a farm worker, and in 1991, he gave up his own job as a social worker to start farming himself. He now runs a 40 hectare (around 100 acres) organic farm on woody, hillside land where he raises 20 cows among his apples and chestnuts, and came to Copenhagen representing the Confederation Paysanne.
Every year, David says competition from abroad and EU policies that reward large farms close about one farm a day in France, or about 300-400 farms per year. He said the land goes either to bigger farms or to tourist venues and "it's hard for small farms to resist."
David added that international competition could be very unequal, pitting small farms like his against Brazilian ranches with 20,000-100,000 cows, or small sheep farms against 20,000 animal operations in New Zealand.
Of course, David said, there was industrial agriculture in France, as well. He said animals there were often fed genetically modified soy from Brazil or the US, importing 4.5 million tons per year from large industrial farms that hurt small farms in their regions and take protein away from the global South.
I asked David if it wouldn't be better for industrial agriculture to replace all these small farms, if it would be more efficient. He said industrial agriculture "is not efficient at all," that it takes up too much petrol and outside resources. A small farm like his, he said, used up very few resources, ensured the animals were treated well and was "better for the health of the people and the food." He said organically managed soils also captured more carbon and this is better for the climate.
Farming ecologically and encouraging farmers to first feed the people of their own country should be normal, David said. "We have enough to feed the people of each country," he said, and that it wasn't necessary to pit farmers in different countries against each other.
For all that it seems unusual for someone to leave the office for the farm, David enjoys his work very much, responding when I asked about it with an enthusiastic, "Yes, of course!" He said that sometimes he'd like more money, but added, "I like to know the people I feed and I like to feed them properly."
Second in a series of interviews with farmers affiliated with La Via Campesina, an alliance of international peasant farmer organizations.
Elvira Baladad, a mango orchardist visiting Copenhagen to represent La Via Campesina affiliate Paragos Phillipinas in the COP15 civil society discussions, told me that she didn't want to talk about mangos. She was far more concerned about the wild weather the Phillipines have been having, with such an extended rainy season that she said it seems like they don't have summer anymore, and the destruction of what she estimated was 70-80 percent of the country's rice crop by typhoons Katsana and Parma.
Baladad said that rice varieties that were resistant to flooding and could survive long periods in standing water were no use to them, how could they dry it? She gave the example of how the Phillipines had a hard time buying rice from Cambodia anymore because the harvested grain was too wet for the kind of facilities they had, so they had to sell theirs to Vietnam where it could be processed for market.
"We're a rice eating people, ..." Baladad said, "If [this weather] is to continue, what is to happen to us?"
Baladad worried that if the country has to import rice from Vietnam or Thailand and they won't sell, as happened in 2008, that there might be uprisings or a return of dictatorship. She seemed certain that such a turn of events would hurt rural people the most, particularly economically marginal women who are responsible for feeding their families.
Through Baladad's membership in the National Coalition of Rural Women, Baladad is also aware of issues among other rural populations in the region. She explained how the REDD initiative to reduce deforestation emissions from developing nations meant that, for example, Australia could lease Indonesian forest land for emission credits, but that meant no one else could live there. She said they had to first evict all the indigenous peoples who lived in the forest before there could be a deal.
I asked Baladad if that was a problem in the Phillipines and she said no, Phillipine law forbade it. "We acknowledge their rights over their ancestral land. They have prior rights over this land." She said that, in countries without such laws, implementing REDD without acknowledging indigenous rights would mean many of them will be kicked out of their homes.
The land use problems that concerned Baladad in the Phillipines were the 100,000 hectares (about 250,000 acres) of farm land leased to the Chinese to grow food for export to China so they could continue converting agricultural land to industrial use. While naming China and Saudi Arabia, she said many countries were leasing land from the governments of developing nations for farming or biofuel projects, often displacing local peoples and over their objections.
When local people in the developing nations are hungry because their crops fail in unpredictable weather, Baladad said she expected these foreign-leased farms would be raided by the desperate.
Baladad was urgent about the need for action to stabilize the climate, and for the US to be involved. "If the US doesn't sign on like they didn't with Kyoto, this will be a total failure and nobody will want to reduce emissions. ... They can't stop China from emitting so much right now if they can't agree to an amount everyone has to reduce," said Baladad.
Baladad seemed to think it might also be a question of experience. "We're saying maybe if these floods happened in the US," she said, "the US would sign up."
Factory food sickens humans, livestock and the environment
What we eat has changed more in the last 50 years than in the last 10,000. So asserts Robert Kenner's new film, FOOD, Inc., which opens nationwide June 19th. The vast bulk of food production is now controlled by just a few mega-corporations with one value: profit. Relying on genetic engineering, pesticides and antibiotics, factory food is cheap, requiring little land. But the external costs to our health, the environment and the natural food industry are enormous.
Director: Robert Kenner
Producers: Robert Kenner and Elise Pearlstein
Co-Producer: Eric Schlosser
Released by Magnolia Pictures, with Participant Media and River Road Entertainment
93 minutes
FOOD, Inc. is the single most important film of the decade. Transcending hype and industry muzzling, the film exposes some of the cruel and unnatural aspects of industrial farms and food processing. It links epidemic rates of US obesity and diabetes with our intake of genetically engineered food.
NPR called it this summer's "suspense thriller."
The film condemns how workers and animals are abused. Illegal immigrants, who cannot complain about working conditions, comprise most of the workers at industrial food plants. They are vulnerable to raids and deportation. No corporate executives are arrested.
Well researched and well scored, the film debunks the pastoral fantasy spin. Industrial food is not grown, raised or processed on a farm. The animals see no sunshine, are kept immobile in cages, and are genetically or chemically modified. Those that are somewhat mobile are bioengineered to plump their bodies faster than their bones and muscles can support. They flop helplessly to the floor when trying to move.
Though our current system also has a significant cost, it's just that the public pays it, as Chris wrote last month. And when they're not paying it in dollars, it's coming out of their health, their time and their independence.
"I gathered a group of young farmers and farm workers together a few months ago and guess what the number one issue was: HEALTHCARE. One mishap on the farm and you are in debt for LIFE. Not to mention pre-existing conditions ... forget finding any insurance company to cover you then.
"Why do so many farmers work two jobs? Answer: health care. Why can't we get more people to farm? Answer: who wants to work two jobs their whole life!"
The rural employment situation poses other problems.
Eating Liberally Food For Thought
by Kerry Trueman Originally published on AlterNet; Painting by James Howard Kunstler
I grew up in Woodland Hills, Calif., a nominally pastoral, petrocentric Los Angeles suburb, so peak oil prognosticator James Howard Kunstler's dim view of our car-crazed culture really resonates with me.
Kunstler's relentless skewering of suburbia, and his penchant for apocalyptic predictions have landed him a reputation as a cranky Cassandra. But as Ben McGrath observed while strolling around Saratoga Springs with Kunstler for a recent New Yorker piece, "Far from the image of the stereotypical Chicken Little, he was more like an amiable town crier whom the citizenry regarded fondly, if a bit skeptically."
So, when a friend and I found ourselves headed to Kunstler's neck of the woods for a conference recently, we arranged to have dinner with Saratoga Springs' resident soothsayer. Contrary to his contrarian reputation, Kunstler proved to be an affable, upbeat guy.
Isn't it kind of odd for a culture that trumpets its 'family values' to treat its children like cattle, fattening them up on corn and soy by-products? We love our kids so much we've let Big Food turn them into cash cows for Big Pharma. A new study estimates that "about 1.2 million American children now are taking pills for Type 2 diabetes, sleeping troubles and gastrointestinal problems such as heartburn."
Of course, they're just aping their elders; as the study shows, we're the most medicated people on the planet. Apparently, our blessed way of life is a risk factor for depression, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure, erectile dysfunction, and any other malady for which Madison Avenue can find a market. Are parents counting on pills to compensate for their children's lousy diet and lack of exercise? As Dr. Daniel W. Jones, president of the American Heart Association, told the AP:
"Unless we do things to change the way we're managing health in this country...things will get worse instead of getting better." Jones noted that "body weights are so much higher in children in general, and so we're going to have larger numbers of adults who develop high blood pressure or abnormal cholesterol or diabetes at an earlier age."
Conservatives and liberals can't agree on how to tackle this impending catastrophe. Remember Hillary Clinton's book It Takes A Village? Its premise-that we have a collective stake in the well-being of every child-raised the hackles of the Let 'Em Eat TastyKakes contingent and inspired a rebuttal from Republican Senator Rick Santorum entitled It Takes A Family.
What it really takes, though, is a family farmer to provide us with fresh, healthy produce. The more fresh fruits and vegetables we pile on our plates, the less pills we need from the medicine cabinet, as the New York Times noted last Tuesday in an article entitled Eating Your Way To A Sturdy Heart. And a study released last month by the California Center for Public Health Advocacy confirmed that people who lack access to fresh produce face "a significantly higher prevalence of obesity and diabetes regardless of individual or community income."
... Last month, 45 U.S. food-processing groups, representing firms whose raw material costs have gone through the roof, demanded that the U.S. agriculture secretary release farmers from their contractual obligation to maintain a portion of their land for wildlife preservation. The U.S. baking industry's trade association, representing firms such as Kellogg Co., Sara Lee Corp. and Interstate Bakeries Corp., plans a march on Washington by the firms' employees later this month to press for a reduction in U.S. wheat exports. ...
Brilliant. Let's further degrade our declining natural resources to compensate for a crop growth pattern that degrades our natural resources. And by 'natural resources', I mean the human species' life support system.
What's plain to any reasonable observer is that conservation programs, which already tend to enroll marginal and previously degraded land, aren't the problem with declining wheat availability. In addition to the export concern (an issue because a lot of other countries are closing off exports after a bad world harvest generated a bumper crop of buyers,) this is:
... The milling industry has been resistant to using such genetically modified wheats, so wheat plants have to be improved the old-fashioned way, by laboriously selecting those with the desired qualities in test plots. That is an expensive and time-consuming process.
Even then, there is no assurance that farmers will buy the seed year after year. That is because of the nature of the wheat plant, an unusually complex organism originating in the Middle East thousands of years ago. Unlike hybrid corn, which loses its productivity after the first year, seeds from improved wheat varieties can be saved and replanted for several years without significant loss of yield.
Syngenta, a large seed company, is still working to develop improved wheat, but Rob Bruns, who heads the North American cereal seed operation, acknowledged that it's difficult to create "enough critical mass to pay for the higher tech investments."
The upshot is that most wheat research is now consigned to public colleges with limited amounts of federal and state funds. ...
Human beings have been adapting plants and animals to our needs for millenia. We're really good at it by now, when we put our minds to it. But the environment is not a blank slate onto which we add crop organisms; competition from pests, weeds and disease never stops.
Farmers used to save their own seed and do the kind of breed tinkering that now gets done mostly in corporate or university research plots. Though as you read above, that activity is mostly centralized in the hands of a few companies who may not bother with it for all grains, and often adapt varieties more to brands of chemicals than to local growing conditions.
Even the editors of The Economist, who've clearly all got certificates from the Condoleezza Rice School of How Could We Ever Have Known, were compelled to let the following truth slip onto the 34th page of their April 19th-25th, 2008, issue, in an article entitled, "The new face of hunger." Emphasis mine:
There was an interesting piece in the Fashion section of the NYTimes this Sunday that is a little weird but it gets into some pretty fun stuff.
The piece follows a kid from Brooklyn who is hell bent on becoming an organic farmer. Trucker hats, Carhartts, and Pabst were the fashion but now some are putting the heart behind the fashion and finding the funk in farming.
"The Billyburg scene has changed, said Annaliese Griffin, who contributes to a blog called Grocery Guy. "Having a cool cheese in your fridge has taken the place of knowing what the cool band is, or even of playing in that band," she said. "Our rock stars are ricotta makers."
The same is true for Sarah Love, an Oklahoma University political science graduate and sometimes young Clay Pope a former DC staffer turn conservation lobbyist who have formed an organization that helps farmers become more environmentally friendly and companies to offset their carbon emissions.
So, if you didn't know, I sold my car before moving to DC. The last time I drove was to the U-Haul place to drop off the truck. Parking is a nightmare here and it's expensive, too. I figured, hey, my new place is three blocks from a Metro station and most of the places I need to go are right on the Metro, it'll be great. That's mostly the case. Mostly.
Here's where it falls down: groceries. The full implications of that part sort of slipped my mind, it's been years and years since I needed groceries and had no car. And I was way less picky about what I ate then; lots of fast food, lots of Top Ramen. It must be granted that there is a sizable grocery store only two blocks from here, and it was a selling point, so it isn't like I didn't take this into consideration at all. But it isn't a co-op, or a Whole Foods, and their selection of organic foods on top of all my allergies leaves me with slim pickings. For fruit, sometimes there are non-skeezy grapes or maybe strawberries, never very good.
Not that I'm complaining, no, really, just musing. Sometimes I do that here. It's either that, or they'd have to search me for pens before letting me use the bathroom at the local sushi bar. And I don't approve of vandalism at all, at all.
Washington, D.C. - The House Agriculture Committee voted a little after 4pm ET to repeal a provision added to the 2007 Farm Bill by Rep. Leonard Boswell (D-IA), chair of the Subcommittee on Livestock, Dairy, and Poultry, that would have forbidden livestock contracts from including mandatory arbitration provisions, as the majority of them now do.
During the debate on amendment number 87, proposed by Rep. Mike Rogers (R-AL), Rogers repeatedly referred to his experience in family law. He said that mandatory arbitration clauses were like a couple agreeing to a prenuptual agreement, entered into when both parties were still calm and reasonable. He cited the possible expense of going to court as a reason to support his amendment, which included language that would force arbitration hearings to be held near where the farmer lived and that would allow small disputes to be taken to small claims court.
Rep. Stephanie Herseth-Sandlin (D-SD) disagreed with drawing parallels to prenuptual agreements. She said that because of geographic concentration in the livestock industry, many producers had "no options" and "only one partner" available if they wanted to sell their livestock.
Washington, D.C. - "A sound compromise that no one is satisfied with, but nevertheless represents real reform." - From Rep. Collin Peterson's (D-MN) opening statement today on the 2007 Farm Bill.
The first House Agriculture Committee markup session on the 2007 Farm Bill began with Rep. Collin Peterson's opening statement, followed by everyone else's. Peterson said that Americans were fortunate to enjoy low, stable food prices, and food that meets the highest standards of quality and safety.
No markup, or voting on specific amendments, actually took place during today's session. The last changes to the legislation weren't made until late last night, and today was the first chance most members got to see the final versions, though Rep. Peterson said that the changes were minor in comparison to the version released a little over a week ago.
Note to would-be Farm Bill reformers everywhere: There are no U.S. Congresscritters whose constituencies include West African cotton farmers. There are no U.S. Congresscritters whose constituencies include clothing manufacturers (actually, you could almost put a period right there, they've mostly gone to China by now), garment distributors, or clothing retailers who've got even a passing desire for the price of cotton to go up. There are no U.S. Congresscritters whose constituencies could be characterized as having a broad, favorable public consensus towards furthering the goals of the World Trade Organization. This doesn't mean you can't argue against subsidies, it just means that the foregoing are always going to be weak arguments when your audience is the U.S. Congress.
