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Ways of Ancient Mexico Reviving Barren Lands
Elisabeth Malkin, New York Times
Jesús León Santos is a Mixtec Indian farmer who will soon plant corn on a small plot next to his house in time for the summer rains. He plows with oxen and harvests by hand.
Under conventional economic logic, Mr. León is uncompetitive. His yields are just a fraction of what mechanized agriculture churns out from the vast expanses of the Great Plains.
But to him, that is beside the point.
The Mixteca highlands here in the state of Oaxaca are burdened with some of the most barren earth in Mexico, the work of more than five centuries of erosion that began even before the arrival of the Spanish colonizers, their goats and their cattle. The scuffed hillsides look as though some ancient giant had hacked at them, opening gashes in the white and yellow rock.
Over the past two decades, Mr. León and other farmers have worked to reforest and reclaim this parched land, hoping to find a way for people to stay and work their farms instead of leaving for jobs in cities and in the United States.
“We migrate because we don’t think there are options,” Mr. León said. “The important thing is to give options for a better life.”
Viewed against the backdrop of rising food prices in a global marketplace, Mr. León’s fight to keep farmers from abandoning their land is much more than a refusal to give up a millennial way of life.
As Mexico imports more corn from the United States, the country’s reliance on outside supplies is drawing protests among nationalists, farmers’ groups and leftist critics of Mexico’s free trade economy. Earlier this year, as the last tariffs to corn imports were lifted under the North American Free Trade Agreement, farmers’ groups marched against the accord in Mexico, asking for more aid.
(13 May 2008)
Afghans swap poppies for wheat as food costs soar
Pia Heikkila, Guardian
Afghan farmers hope to capitalise on soaring food costs by growing wheat instead of poppy crops, with the fall in heroin prices further fuelling the switch.
The price of a tonne of wheat in Afghanistan has almost trebled this year, causing acute food shortages. A changeover of crops has begun in key agricultural regions, said Tekeste Tekie, country representative for the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation.
He said a significant increase in wheat crops is expected from next year’s harvest. “The high price of commodities has encouraged farmers to switch from poppy cultivation to wheat. In fact, we are already seeing evidence of this happening, for instance in the Bamian region, where some farmers have planted half wheat and half poppy crops,” Tekie said.
(13 May 2008)
Farmers unable to cash in on soaring food prices
Jerry Hirsch, Los Angeles Times
All over the world, prices for basic foods — barley for beer, milk for cheese, corn for tortillas, and the rice that serves as a staple for more than half the world’s population — are soaring. But farmers aren’t rushing to cash in on the boom by planting more of the crops.
The amount of corn planted in the U.S. is expected to dip this year. Rice acreage in California, which sells as much as half its crop overseas, is predicted to increase by only a small amount. Instead, farmers are planting cheaper-to-grow wheat and soy.
They say the reason is simple. The cost of planting some crops is rising as fast as their prices, and sometimes faster, leaving little incentive to increase production of some foods that remain in high demand around the world.
Farmers typically plant their crops once a year and not all of them cost the same to produce. Both corn and rice, for example, require more fertilizer to grow and fuel for farmers to tend than other crops. As the prices of those supplies rise faster than the prices of some commodities, farmers are shying away from some expensive crops.
(13 May 2008)
Firms Seek Patents on ‘Climate Ready’ Altered Crops
Rick Weiss, Washington Post
A handful of the world’s largest agricultural biotechnology companies are seeking hundreds of patents on gene-altered crops designed to withstand drought and other environmental stresses, part of a race for dominance in the potentially lucrative market for crops that can handle global warming, according to a report being released today.
Three companies — BASF of Germany, Syngenta of Switzerland and Monsanto of St. Louis — have filed applications to control nearly two-thirds of the climate-related gene families submitted to patent offices worldwide, according to the report by the Ottawa-based ETC Group, an activist organization that advocates for subsistence farmers.
The applications say that the new “climate ready” genes will help crops survive drought, flooding, saltwater incursions, high temperatures and increased ultraviolet radiation — all of which are predicted to undermine food security in coming decades.
Company officials dismissed the report’s contention that the applications amount to an intellectual-property “grab,” countering that gene-altered plants will be crucial to solving world hunger but will never be developed without patent protections.
(13 May 2008)
Foreigners will no longer pick our fruit and veg
Marcel Berlins, The Guardian
Foreigners will no longer pick our fruit and veg for a pittance. Is this the end of seasonal, local produce?
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… many thousands of young people from eastern Europe were suddenly infused with the desire to come to Britain to pick strawberries, earn very little and live in terrible accommodation. The farmers were pleased because the strawberries got picked. But the good times have ended and I cannot see how they can return. Primarily, the reason is that the foreigners relied on to do the picking will no longer be available in the required numbers.
As in other fields of employment, large numbers of Poles and other eastern Europeans are returning home to burgeoning economies and improving work prospects; many, anyway, were finding Britain an impossibly expensive place to live. …
There is little chance of wooing British workers back to the picking fields, and anyway, it wouldn’t help much. When, recently, Germany decided to combat unemployment by giving local labour a slice of the asparagus-picking work usually done by Poles, the result was disastrous. German workers, unused to the task, were far slower, tired more quickly and were significantly less productive.
The future is bleak. I see rows of rotting fruit and veg, unharvested because there are not enough humans to do the work and new technology cannot entirely take their place. In such circumstances, all the chatter about relying on seasonal local produce and cutting down on imports from far-off places is just nonsense.
(14 May 2008)
The phrase “learned helplessness” comes to mind. -BA
