Oz wrote:

I have a relative who has spent nearly a year in rural tajikistan,
living with local farmers.

I have been given permission to quote this extract from an email they
sent recently. It's for general interest.

===================

The family we stayed with has a hectare of
rented land sown to wheat but is only yielding
about 0.6 tonnes/ha, which is just enough to
feed their family of six children for 4 months.
The rest must come from the sale of a couple of
cows. But the farmer says: "the land is tired
and each year it is producing less and less."
In living memory it has never had anything but
wheat grown on it.

[-]

The hard thing to realise is they are in a catch twenty-two
situation. They only have just enough to live on now. But
what about next year and the one after that and the one
after that - when their wheat yields fall even more, when
they have to go 15km instead of 10 every day for wood, when
the old apple trees give up the ghost and haven’t been
replaced.

Sustainable????

Clearly not.

regards
sarah


--
Waist deep, neck deep
We'll be drowning before too long
We're neck deep in the Big Muddy
And the damned fools keep yelling to push on