"Jim Webster" wrote in message
...


It has been interesting looking at hydroponics in the 3rd world. I
suspect
in the UK, we are deterred by the high capital cost and such things as
energy. Somewhere with adequate sun is going to short circuit a lot of
that.
I was interested at how cheaply the systems can be set up.

I suspect the nearest we see to hydroponics outdoors in the UK will be
dirty
water irrigation on sandy land :-))


Isn't that the point, we have soil, stuff grows in it. My limited
understanding of the situation in developing countries is that many folks
in urban areas get poor nutrition much as folks living in rapidly growing
cities in the UK did a couple of centuries ago. We got around this by
moving cows near (or even into town) and shipping in fodder, and by
ranching sheep for mutton on Exmoor, and no doubt many other schemes -
mostly livestock based. The world has change and now it's fresh vegetables
that are used to save lives and for that you need rather more sophisticated
technology. Though UHT milk, milk powder, etc. has a role too.

For reasons of "hygiene" some cities in Africa prohibit the keeping of
livestock, so the back yard poultry and pig keeping that would have been
common in the UK in similar situations is replaced with back yard
aubergines.

Michael Saunby

In message , David G. Bell
writes

This was the weakness of the CAP. For generally good reasons, it tried
to keep people in farming.

In so far as I have ever been able to ascertain the reason for the CAP
was to enable French peasant farmers to continue to pay exorbitant rents
to their landlords, whose families dominate the French civil service.


Regards

--
Charles Francis

"Charles Francis" wrote in message
...
In message , David G. Bell
writes

This was the weakness of the CAP. For generally good reasons, it tried
to keep people in farming.

In so far as I have ever been able to ascertain the reason for the CAP
was to enable French peasant farmers to continue to pay exorbitant rents
to their landlords, whose families dominate the French civil service.


Actually it goes back to an attempt to ensure that French and Italian
Peasants stopped voting communist.
After the 39/45 war, a lot of rural people had become heavily involved in
the communist party because this was the party that (after the invasion of
the soviet union) had pretty well co-ordinated much of the resistance
activity. It looked as if the party leadership hoped to work on its wartime
record and use these as a platform for further expansion. The CAP was an
attempt to ensure that the peasantry was prosperous enough to have a vested
interest in the stability of society.
French rents are based by law on agricultural profitability. Because of the
nature of the Code Napoleon, on death a mans holding is split between his
offspring, and the one wishing to farm will normally rent it back of his
siblings. Eventually this gets more and more complex in that you are the
tenant of a collection of aunts, uncles, cousins to the nth degree and
similar. Obviously occasionally some is purchased back.
Because the French do have a large civil service a lot of the aforementioned
aunts, uncles, and cousins work in it. Because rents are linked by law to
agricultural profitability, the workings of the code Napoleon ensure that
these people, although civil servants, have a vested interest in the
profitability of agriculture. I saw figures that said that a third of the
urban population of France had a vested interest in continued agricultural
profitability.
Hence the Gendarme watching a farmers demonstration knows that if the
farmers succeed, his nephew in the Paris Basin will get a better wheat
price, rents will go up, and the Gendarme and his wife can afford to holiday
in Martinique rather than Brittany.

Jim Webster

""David G. Bell"" wrote in message
.. .
On Saturday, in article
"Jim Webster" wrote:

I know for a fact that Cumbria Trading Standards collared one of these
bogus
consultants who would get you EU grants if you paid them £300. They
invited
them to the Trading Standards office, and by throwing a sack over the
sign
became "Cumbria Trading" rather than "Cumbria Trading Standards."
The idiot went in and gave them his spiel, which was recorded as
evidence. I
felt CTS had excelled themselves

How many doors does their local Church have now?



:-))

Jim Webster
--
David G. Bell -- SF Fan, Filker, and Punslinger.

"History shows that the Singularity started when Tim Berners-Lee
was bitten by a radioactive spider."

Oz wrote:

sw writes
Yes. Ideally an aid agency would arrive with information and funding for
local schemes promoting alternative cropping strategies, low-tech water
retention, primary health care and education. Then at least the people
have a chance of producing sufficient food to feed themselves and their
children, and start to reduce the birth rate, which eventually means
they all have a better chance of finding the time and energy to invent
other projects earning money from outside the area. If someone flies in
and dumps a factory on them it might provide an opportunity to earn
cash, but it'll almost certainly be a starvation wage with no hope of
anything better.

I often wonder if the pharoes didn't have the right idea.

When there is a famine, move in with large quantities of food and then
pay people in food to do major works.

A drought is an excellent time to do terracing, make reservoirs, dam
rivers (well, weir them anyway), build roads, schools, medical centres
and suchlike.

That way a drought could be used for good rather than harm.

Absolutely. Funny you should mention that, there's a piece in the paper
about a local charity operating in Rajasthan. Started when a local
doctor travelled out with a school group and saw just how bad things can
be in a poor agricultural area. They raised UKP40,000 the first year to
fund education, health care and women's programmes, and are now close to
UKP100,000 per year. When there was a major drought, resulting in both
food shortage and unemployment -- there's no work for ag workers if
there are no crops -- the charity mobilised money to build concrete
watertanks and construct contour bunding to catch surface water on the
fields, paying the ag workers to do the work. End result, they had money
to buy food and the improvements improved their lives and crops in the
long term. *That's* how aid should work.

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

Oz wrote:

Oz writes
That's what they are trying. They have borrowed to buy beads to make
necklaces. The whole thing sounds like a classical pyramid sell and if
it is they will have big debts, a pile of unsaleable necklaces, and
borrowings to boot.

====I notice I also got permission for this bit====

The Local Scam

How’s this for a business proposal for you: You give the company a $200
deposit. You get a jar of beads which you string onto fishing wire â€"
and in 20 days they pick up the 100, 20 cm strings you’ve made and they
give you your deposit back plus $94.

[-]

The sad thing is not just that it is completely denigrating of women â€"
they sit there for hours stringing tiny beads onto fishing line and just
about go crazy, and then they will just loose their money- but that it
has consequences for whole families and communities. People here only
take loans from within their family or maybe from neighbours. What
happens when the money goes missing and people can’t pay their family
members back? What happens when people start to blame their friends and
neighbours who told them how wonderful the scheme was? This scheme is
not just thievery but a community destroyer creating anger and
destroying trust.

Bloody hell. I hope there *Is* a hell, with a special corner for people
who do that to the poor and desperate.

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

Oz wrote:

Oz writes
That's what they are trying. They have borrowed to buy beads to make
necklaces. The whole thing sounds like a classical pyramid sell and if
it is they will have big debts, a pile of unsaleable necklaces, and
borrowings to boot.

====I notice I also got permission for this bit====

The Local Scam

How’s this for a business proposal for you: You give the company a $200
deposit. You get a jar of beads which you string onto fishing wire â€"
and in 20 days they pick up the 100, 20 cm strings you’ve made and they
give you your deposit back plus $94.

[-]

The sad thing is not just that it is completely denigrating of women â€"
they sit there for hours stringing tiny beads onto fishing line and just
about go crazy, and then they will just loose their money- but that it
has consequences for whole families and communities. People here only
take loans from within their family or maybe from neighbours. What
happens when the money goes missing and people can’t pay their family
members back? What happens when people start to blame their friends and
neighbours who told them how wonderful the scheme was? This scheme is
not just thievery but a community destroyer creating anger and
destroying trust.

Bloody hell. I hope there *Is* a hell, with a special corner for people
who do that to the poor and desperate.

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

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

Oz writes
That's what they are trying. They have borrowed to buy beads to make
necklaces. The whole thing sounds like a classical pyramid sell and if
it is they will have big debts, a pile of unsaleable necklaces, and
borrowings to boot.

====I notice I also got permission for this bit====

The Local Scam

How’s this for a business proposal for you: You give the company a $200
deposit. You get a jar of beads which you string onto fishing wire –
and in 20 days they pick up the 100, 20 cm strings you’ve made and they
give you your deposit back plus $94.

The majority of people here are out of work and desperate for money.
This sounds like a good deal or if a dodgy one at least worth the risk.
And they even take out large loans to do it. The wife of our family got
involved, her niece has taken out a $1200 debt to do it. We were
completely unaware of it until one day they started stringing beads and
we started poking our noses in. Immediately we started doing the
calculations: nearly $1 a string – that is crazy – in Australia you
could buy a string for less than 20 cents. And why on earth would you
have to give such a huge deposit for a jar of beads that are worth
almost nothing?

Then we started asking questions. And the more we heard the answers the
more unsettled we became. They have no idea who is running this
business or where this company works and have no document or contract or
anything. Some anonymous courier comes to deliver and pick up money and
beads from their house. The turn around period between deposit and
payment used to be 6 days but is now 40 days because there are so many
women involved.

Why do they give their money to a complete stranger? Because they’ve
seen people they trust: their neighbour or aunt make a packet and the
word has spread, - like wild fire. And more and more women have got
involved. And people rather than pulling out of the scheme, reinvest
their money, and the turnaround period gets longer and longer and the
scammer is only paying out a small proportion of what they get in.
Eventually, when the scammer realises he is about to get caught he does
a runner with the deposits: millions of dollars worth– hey if you make
that kind of money you can afford protection and you can afford to
emigrate.

The sad thing is not just that it is completely denigrating of women –
they sit there for hours stringing tiny beads onto fishing line and just
about go crazy, and then they will just loose their money- but that it
has consequences for whole families and communities. People here only
take loans from within their family or maybe from neighbours. What
happens when the money goes missing and people can’t pay their family
members back? What happens when people start to blame their friends and
neighbours who told them how wonderful the scheme was? This scheme is
not just thievery but a community destroyer creating anger and
destroying trust.


--
Oz
This post is worth absolutely nothing and is probably fallacious.
Note: soon (maybe already) only posts via despammed.com will be accepted.