permaculture

["keller" <ak.and.ak@on-line.de>]

----- Original Message -----
From: <permed@nor.com.au>
To: permaculture <permaculture@franklin.oit.unc.edu>
Sent: Saturday, January 12, 2002 10:49 AM
Subject: Re: Responses to yield is important

(snip)

> 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.

This is an excellent example. I would like to know more about it. Generally,
it seems that there is a lot of valuable work that is just unpublished. A
lot of important experience has probably been gained in such projects. This
needs to be documented or the existing documentation should be collected and
made available.

Please everybody, if you know of any interesting work or come across some,
keep posting it here (including addresses, so they could be contacted and
asked for their experience and lessons learned).

I will start now collecting such information.

> 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
Wow!
> 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

The hint to corruption is also important. It would be interesting to get the
details of what happened.

We must also understand that the incomes and carreers of people in the
development aid organisations are tied to certain paradigms of aid. If we
come and show them that what they are doing does not work and that our
approach is better, they will not embrace us. They will start fighting us
because we are threatening their position, money, prestige and power. They
will try to suppress us. They will also try to suppress information that
shows their work's shortcommings. So if permaculture has a hard stand
getting established in development aid, this might be partially not a
consequence of its lack of success, but a consequence of its successes as
opposed to the lack of success of the established aid industry.

It is obviously necessary to develop our own independent funding and
fundraising organisations and income generating activities (although I like
the approach of funneling some of the money or green revolution NGOs into pc
work, as Dr. Venkat seems to have done here :-).

> 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,

According to http://www.permaculturedesign.com.au/aboutus/faq.html,
"there is approximately 53 tonnes of topsoil lost to each tonne of sugar
produced."

I'll ask them where they got that number from. It is also important to
collect information about the failures of the established paradigms.

> 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

Excellent.

I think it is necessary to evaluate what one is doing. What we want are
improvements (not necessarily yield improvements). So before any pc approach
is let loose on some farmer's land, I think it is important first to
describe the status quo (in terms of sustainability, yield, or whatever),
then to plean measueres to improve the situation. It should be clear
beforehand what one wants to achieve with these, and the success or failure
as well as any unforseen benefits or problems should be well documented. If
it works, a clear understanding should be developed of why it works and if
it fails, we must understand why, so the lessons learnt have to be
extracted.

I guess that a lot of such information and experience has actually been
collected already locally. Let us try to make this knowlege available. Any
hints on books, journals, articles, projects, funding organisation etc. are
appreciated.

Andreas
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