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permaculture - Re: Responses to yield is important

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Subject: permaculture

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  • From: <permed@nor.com.au>
  • To: "permaculture" <permaculture@franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Re: Responses to yield is important
  • Date: Sat, 12 Jan 02 09:49:00 -0000


>When I spoke of the
>need to quantify yield I was speaking of International Development Work. I
>was speaking of working with farmers in the global south. I was speaking
>of working with people who have little to no land, or with people who can
>literally loose their livelyhoods and face death or malnitrition if a
>project does not work out.

Dr Venkat (did the first PDC in India taught by Bill Mollison & myself)
working a very poor semi-arid zone with around 40 villages set up a
demonstration farm at Pastapur which over the years inspired many local
farmers - he encouraged farmers to convert 10% of their farm a year to
permaculture and discussed with them which strategies would maximise
benefits with minimal input. For many it was simply starting with
planting legumes in non-productive areas for fuel and fodder, and/or
planting coppice legumes, bananas, taro, ginger and other water-loving
plants along the edges of their little open earth irrigation ditches
which are otherwise loosing vaste amounts of water through seepage and
evaporation.
His main work however was with the women through the Sangams (village
women's councils). One of the first things was getting kitchen gardens
going - no vegetables were being grown in the villages and many health
problems came from poor nutrition (no fruit or vegetables in the diet).
The sangams also set up micro-banking systems and food co-ops on the
village level. Venkat's assistant, Narsanna, was funded to come to
Australia for IPC in 1996 and told me that they had over 2000 barefoot
permaculture teachers - all village women - engaged in establishing
kitchen gardens and reclaiming wastelands that had formerly been common
forest areas cleared by the government 70 years ago - these women were
hand building kilometers of swales and planting mixed species forests on
the barren slopes for food, fuel, fodder, medicine and craft materials.
The women also set up a building collective and built the houses with
local materials.
It is an incredibly empowering story and unfortunately the demonstration
farm and training centre at Pastapur is now closed - not due to any
failures of permaculture but from internal corruption in the umbrella
NGO. The work of the NGO was mainly focused on the farmers growing export
crops, mainly sugar cane, with massive well contruction programmes
(resulting in dramatic depletion of ground water levels), high inputs for
fertilisers etc. The extra income earned by the men tended to support
their gambling and drinking pursuits and didn't trickle down to family
health, education and housing. The NGO received prestigious awards for
their impressive number crunching of hectares put into cane production,
tons of fertilisers imported etc. The work with the women which really
had a huge beneficial impact on village health, education and economic
independence of the women has been largely ignored by award-giving
agencies.
By-the-way, the women kept records of the value of vegies harvested from
their little kitchen garden plots - some were harvesting over 200 rupees
worth of vegies a month (they would brag about who grew the most) - this
represented incredible wealth as their wages as labourers was only a few
rupees an hour.
Robyn




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