permaculture

[<permed@nor.com.au>]

>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