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.
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 was 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."
First in a series of interviews with farmers affiliated with La Via Campesina, an alliance of international peasant farmer organizations.
Prabina Pradhan works in Kathmandu, Nepal's capital, as an advocacy organizer for the All Nepal Peasants Federation. She talked with me about the economic and climate situations in her country, and how people's lives are being affected.
Pradhan explained that most people in Nepal have small kitchen gardens to provide much of their food, and may earn some money selling any extra harvest at market. Agriculture there is mostly rainfed and highly dependent on a changing climate cycle.
"The crop cycle is getting shorter now", said Pradhan. Also, the growth range for tropical crops is moving into higher latitudes of the Nepalese mountains that formerly were good for temperate crops. Add in food imports mandated by WTO agreements, often sold below production costs, and it becomes hard for the typical Nepalese to thrive.
What did she think of the climate agreements, like the Clean Development Mechanism or the REDD forest funding program, would they help? "Earning money is not the solution if the land and water and environment [are] polluted," said Pradhan, "we can't have clean air by money."
While Pradhan thought there should be compensation to poorer nations for the environmental damage they're seeing alreeady, that they shouldn't have to trade with their environments for the sake of developed nations who refused to cut their emissions. She said she thought the rich nations didn't want to spend a lot money to reduce their own emissions, but instead wanted to give only a little money to reduce emissions in other countries.
I told Pradhan that I've heard people in the US say that it's better for subsistence agriculture, like that in Nepal, to go away anyhow. That it would be better for people to get other jobs and not worry about agricultural problems caused by climate, like the ones she's seeing.
"But we don't have other jobs!" she exclaimed, saying further that 67 percent of Nepalese depend on agriculture and most of the people are illiterate. She said they couldn't just push all that away. "In the United States," she said, "... people can do anything they like, but we can't."
"The crucial factor in all of this is net energy. - Richard Heinberg
Before a certain critical mass of human population, and barring natural disasters, the world's ecosystems in had generally been trending towards increasing the amount of soil and living species. Fueled by sunlight, what was once a poisonous, lifeless ball of rock became ever more welcoming as net surpluses of that energy were cumulatively stored in the form of chemical bonds.
Fueled by fossil sunlight, humanity is currently engaged in the process of returning the planet to its bare, poisoned, inhospitable state.
Nice to know that when it's people, instead of banks, whose health is at risk, the federal government becomes inordinately worried about how much things cost. I've positively run out of sarcasm on the subject.
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.
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:
Barbie and I don't have a lot in common. For one thing, I'm biodegradable and she's not. But we do agree on one thing; math is hard. For example, how is it that Lisa Simpson's been a vegetarian for thirteen years when she's only 8 years old? Is it possible that an anti-oxidant-rich plant-based diet has the power not only to delay the aging process but actually reverse it?
But while eternal tweener Lisa's the token treehugger in the Simpson household, it's Bart who's got the perfect prescription for how to cool Mother Nature's fevered brow: don't have a cow. Literally. The less meat you grill, the more you help the planet chill.
Now, before you dismiss me as some kinda free-range Chicken Little, clucking about the catastrophic consequences of our fossil-fueled food chain, you should know that I'm not the only one warning that burgers do more harm than hummers.
Activist/author Anna Lappé's been looking up at the sky, too, but while I've been running around squawking that it's falling, her brand new campaign Take A Bite Out Of Climate Change looks up and sees a sunny solution--a plant-based food chain founded on the ultimate renewable energy source, solar power.
On average, rural supermarkets are 4% more expensive than suburban supermarkets. You might expect that our massive transportation system would allow for decentralization of our nation's food production; prices would increase as you move away from the farm. Instead, our system is marked by massive centralization. Big farms, big processing plants, and big supermarkets. Food travels great distances from farm to supermarket, with a number of bottlenecks in the system as they pass through centralized processing plants. Two plants in the United States process 75% of all precut salads; one of them processes 26 million servings of salad each week. Michael Pollan highlights several of the problems caused by food centralization. Much more below.
The survival of the honeybee, perhaps the world's largest matriarchy, has been a matter of real concern since the announcement of Colony Collapse Disorder earlier this year.
As we discussed in an April story (On Bees, Or, An Apple A Day May Be A Thing Of The Past), the pathogenic loading seen in the few recovered bees was so dramatic and of such a great variety that it was assumed there was more than one cause for the troubles.
Recent news reports from Spain have suggested the answer may be at hand...but apparently nothing in life is that easy. We'll talk more about the bad news-and the good-as we go on.
Bill McKibben, who's run the Step It Up! efforts to draw attention to the climate crisis has urged people to support carbon emission reductions of 80% by 2050. That people are paying attention, that Congress is starting to pay attention and take early steps, is encouraging. Before an Inconvenient Truth came out and a great many committed activist organizations laid the groundwork for awareness, not even that much would be possible.
But it isn't enough. For one thing, it's not quite enough to get the job done. For another, I'm concerned that it won't even sustain people's interest long enough to mobilize for better legislation and industrial solutions once they see that 'something' has been passed.
2050 is a long ways away. In terms of my own timescale, I'll be 75 then. I'll be shaking my cane at the young whippersnappers who won't get off my lawn. (Not that I'd have a lawn. Very ecologically unsound. Can I suggest a nice, friendly, native plant landscaping, instead?) The teens and 20 year olds involved in these campaigns will be around retirement age, and when you're their age, 40 years old seems incomprehensibly distant. The people who are passing these laws today will be long dead by 2050. (Unless we have incredible leaps in cryonic storage, which is exactly the sort of wild and crazy thing that comes to mind as being possible over long time periods.)
Considering the amount of technological change that's happened just in my lifetime, I think encouraging people to deal with it on a scale like that creates a favorable climate for those who say we should do nothing, because surely we'll figure it out by then.
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. - "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.
Needlenose: It can be hard to remember in an abundant modern city, far from the extraction or production of the resources consumed in it, that supplies are finite. It might strike home a bit more to know that we're even using up the supplies that make our electronic things work, let alone our agricultural resources. I have a whole new level of belief in the need to recycle old computers:
... For example, if we continue to consume the following minerals at current rates, we'll exhaust:
* iridium (LCDs) - 13 years
* hafnium (computer chips) - 20 years
* silver (catalytic converters) - 29 years
* tin (cans, solder) - 40 years
* uranium (power) - 59 years ...
The Farm Bill contains Enron levels of corruption and rural Americans know it. It'd be a huge political coup for the candidate willing to try and get it into the conversation. Subsidies, as the diarist notes, are a symptom of the problems and not the cause.
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.
Take the debate about international food aid and the Farm Bill, for example.
Late Friday night, Rep. Collin Peterson (D-MN), chair of the House Agriculture Committee, released a revised version of the 2007 Farm Bill. It will go to the full committee for mark up (further revision) and voting July 17th-19th. Below, some highlights from five programs included in the Farm Bill's Conservation Title.
Conservation Reserve Program: The USDA currently lists 36.8 million acres of farmland as enrolled in CRP contracts and currently being held in wildlife habitat, wetlands, or tree cover. The new mark would expand the program to allow another 2.4 million acres to be enrolled, for a total of 39.2 million acres. Retiring farmers with land enrolled in CRP are encouraged to transfer their land to beginning or socially disadvantaged farmers or ranchers, or to a low-income farmer or rancher intending to practice sustainable grazing or cropping practices. That's really among the best news.
Conservation Security Program: A notable Farm Bill program getting the cold shoulder is the Conservation Security Program, which rewards conservation practices on working farm lands. The Committee fact sheet on the program lists the oft-repeated and valid complaint about this very popular (among its limited recipients) program that the "USDA has not implemented the program nationwide, as the original law required and has restricted CSP participation by limiting program enrollment each year to producers in specified, priority watersheds. This has been controversial and has prevented many eligible farmers from accessing the program."
Peterson's new version addresses this flaw by allocating no new funding for the program until 2012, when Congress is expected to pass a new Farm Bill. Existing contracts could be funded, though the appropriations process has not always fully funded the honoring of these contracts, but no new signups would be allowed until that time.
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