Below is an excerpt from the Washington Post. Some of you may recognize
the author's name.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...9/28/AR2007092
801324.html
THE GOOD EARTH
The Blessings of Dirty Work
By Barbara Kingsolver
Washington Post
Sunday, September 30, 2007
Vandana Shiva, director of the Research Foundation for Science,
Technology and Natural Resource Policy, is an elegant scientist in her
silk sari, with a red bindi on her forehead like an accent mark over her
broad smile. She was trained as a physicist but is best known for her
work for farmers' rights. The soil of her country, India, is home to
one-quarter of all the world's farmers. Increasingly they grow
commodities for export rather than traditional, locally adapted foods
for their own communities. This strategy was laid out by the
technological Green Revolution, as it was called in the 1970s (when
"green" was not the word it is today), which promised that one farmer
with the right tools and chemicals could feed hundreds, freeing the rest
of us for cleaner work.
It sounds good unless you're that one guy on a tractor in Nebraska, and
the price of soybeans won't quite refuel your tank and pay for your
fertilizer. Elsewhere, it's worse. In India, Shiva says, 150,000 farmers
have committed suicide -- often by drinking pesticide, to underscore the
point -- after being bankrupted by costly chemicals in a cycle of debt
created by ties to corporate agriculture. Centralized food production
requires constant inputs -- fertilizers, pesticides and irrigation --
that in some settings are impossible to sustain, and chemical-based
farming virtually always damages the soil over time, whether in India or
Nebraska.
Traditional farming retains soil structure, but intensive modern
agriculture does not: Since the 1970s, while global grain production has
tripled, an estimated 30 percent of the world's farmland has become too
damaged to use. Also shrinking are the fossil fuel reserves for a system
that requires petroleum to run the farm machines, serve as the chemical
base of fertilizers, fuel the milling and processing plants and drive
the food to widely dispersed consumers. Shiva puts it this way: "The new
modified crops brought to us by the Green Revolution were described as
'green oil of the future.' Ironically, that has turned out to be correct
in a way, as the Green Revolution makes a renewable resource -- food --
into a nonrenewable one, just like petroleum."
Farmers come to Shiva's farm-based institute in Derha Dun to learn how
to free themselves from chemicals, indebtedness and landlessness.
Shiva's research has shown that returning to more traditional multi-crop
food farms can offer them higher, more consistent incomes than modern
single-crop fields of export commodities. She identifies the extinction
of traditional seed varieties as the principal threat to food security
here; to name an important example, South Asian farmers once grew about
50,000 varieties of rice, a number that has dropped to around 5,000 as a
globalized seeds-and-chemicals industry displaces tradition, sometimes
with coercion from the Indian government.
The institute, called Navdanya, is a small, green Eden framed against
the startling blue backdrop of the Himalayas. On the morning of my visit
last December, birds sang from the fruit trees as we ate our breakfast
of millet porridge with fruit and nuts, lemon pickle and tea, all grown
on the farm's intensively planted organic acres. Sixteen years earlier,
with no funds beyond her small savings, Shiva and her acolytes had
bought this piece of ruined land, which neighboring farmers advised her
would never grow anything at all.
Her devoted team has built the soil with compost and careful crop
rotation to its present lushness. After a tour through the fields, we
took off our shoes to enter the seed bank room, a precious library of
germ plasm collected in labeled jars and baskets: oilseeds, mustard
greens, wheats and barleys, 380 varieties of rice. Other farmers
throughout the country are building different seed banks of locally
appropriate varieties, all replanted in the fields each year as a living
catalogue. "This is the basis of Indian farmers' sovereignty," Shiva
said. "Our traditional crops."
Navdanya now hosts what Shiva calls the Grandmothers' University, a
series of cooking festivals to help connect the conservation of
traditional crops with the practical skills of cooking and eating them.
Clearly, traditional farming and time-honored food customs are mutually
dependent.
Less clear is whether this country could lose its powerful food culture
-- what is more important to an Indian girl's education than perfecting
the art of making her mother's daal? But Shiva warns that even here, the
consumption of packaged foods is on the rise. "The nutrition transition
is driven by economic changes that coerce people into jobs that give
them no time for food culture," she said. "Tech jobs, telephone industry
jobs here are mostly held by kids who may have very few other employment
prospects. They are making great money by local standards, but they are
sometimes working 20 hours per day! In a life like that, there is no
time for your mother's daal."
Industrial farming -- however destructive to the land and our nutrition
-- has held out as its main selling point the allure of freedom: Two
percent of the population would be able to feed everyone. The rest could
do as we pleased. Shiva sees straight through that promise. "Most of
those who have moved off of farms are still working in the industry of
creating food and bringing it to consumers: as cashiers, truck drivers,
even the oil-rig workers who generate the fuels to run the trucks. Those
jobs are all necessary to a travel-dependent, highly mechanized food
system. And many of those jobs are menial, life-taking work, instead of
the life-giving work of farming on the land. The analyses we have done
show that no matter what, whether the system is highly technological or
much more simple, about 50 to 60 percent of a population has to be
involved in the work of feeding that population. Industrial agriculture
did not 'save' anyone from that work, it only shifted people into other
forms of food service."
Waiting tables, for instance, or driving a truck full of lettuce, or
spending 70 hours a week in an office overseeing a magazine full of
glossy ads selling food products. Surprise: There is no free lunch. No
animal can really escape the work of feeding itself. We're just the only
one with fancy clothes and big enough brains to make up a story like
that: Hooray, we are far from the soil, and that has set us free.
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FB - FFF
Billy
http://angryarab.blogspot.com/