Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>]

I'm not posting the whole article because it's long and gets into the
economics of world agriculture and trade. How we grow and eat is, in the
end, a profoundly political act.  Those interested should check the link.

paul tradingpost@lobo.net
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Free Trade vs. Small Farmer By Walden Bello
http://www.countercurrents.org/bello300407.htm
April 27, 2007

More and more people are beginning to realize that local production
and culinary traditions are intimately related, and that this
relationship is threatened by corporate control of food production,
processing, marketing, and consumption. This is why Jose Bove's
justification for dismantling a MacDonald's resonated widely in Asia:
“When we said we would protest by dismantling the half-built
McDonald's in our town, everybody understood why -- the symbolism was
so strong. It was for proper food against malbouffe [awful
standardized food], agricultural workers against multinationals. The
extreme right and other nationalists tried to make out it was anti-
Americanism, but the vast majority knew it was no such thing. It was
a protest against a form of production that wants to dominate the
world.”

Many economists, technocrats, policymakers, and urban intellectuals
have long viewed small farmers as a doomed class. Once regarded as
passive objects to be manipulated by elites, they are now resisting
the capitalist, socialist, and developmentalist paradigms that would
consign them to ruin. They have become what Karl Marx described as a
politically conscious “class-for-itself.” And even as peasants refuse
to “go gently into that good night,” to borrow a line from Dylan
Thomas, developments in the 21st century are revealing traditional
pro-development visions to be deeply flawed. The escalating protests
of peasant groups such as Via Campesina, are not a return to the
past. As environmental crises multiply and the social dysfunctions of
urban-industrial life pile up, the farmers' movement has relevance
not only to peasants but to everyone who is threatened by the
catastrophic consequences of obsolete modernist paradigms for
organizing production, community, and life.

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Walden Bello is Executive Director of Focus on the Global South, a
Bangkok-based research and advocacy institute, and a Professor of
Sociology at the University of the Philippines at Diliman. A longer
version of this piece comes out in the April 2007 issue of Global
Asia. It is republished with permission.