permaculture

[Lawrence London <lfljvenaura@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Mar 5, 2014 at 11:32 AM, Lawrence London <lfljvenaura@gmail.com>wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 4, 2014 at 4:30 PM, Mark Feineigle <mfeineigle@gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> First off, this is not meant as aggression toward anyone, but I feel
>> someone has to say it.
>>
>>  What is the point of this thread? It isn't a call for solidarity (which I
>> would stand in). It isn't a deconstruction of the drug war. It is crying
>> into the abyss because someone got dealt a raw hand. It doesn't even say
>> WHAT is happening. Are you being threatened? Can you not pay your
>> (essential) bills? Is your region being evacuated/eminent domain? Are you
>> choosing to leave because you are (rightfully) scared? We can't offer any
>> advice if we don't know what the exact problem is.
>>
>
> Some background, a news source for Michoacan:
>
> The Narco News Bulletin
> Reporting On the Drug War and Democracy From All America
> http://narconews.com/otroperiodismo/michoacan/en.html
>
> My opinion, conspiracy speculations notwithstanding. Whoever can put this
> in their pipe and smoke it:
> "A kneejerk reaction from me would be to say that "The Cabal" sends in
> their team to disrupt local traditional agriculture in Mexico (and
> elsewhere) anywhere in the hinterland where local folks use their
> traditional food production and lifestyle systems to sustain themselves,
> survive and stay independent of foreign influences and their surrogates in
> Mexico; thus empowering themselves and reinforcing their ability to resist
> intrusions into their lands (often common lands [& btw, <an unnamed person>
> was using lawyers in Mexico to circumvent common land covenants on farmland
> land they were interested in purchasing, read: investment property, (prime
> farmland with water and housing and farm structures), thus taking yet more
> rural farmable land out of the reach of indigenous Mexicans who have
> traditionally used this land through a common ownership system for
> centuries. - 'cause they are rich foreigners who want to own more stuff no
> matter the costs to anyone else who might be affected adversely by their
> greed and lack of compassion]. This "team" I refer to consists consists of
> drug cartels and their activities and those who try to convince the public
> that they are fighting said drug cartels, i.e. Mex and US law enforcement
> (remember Fast and Furious?) and CIA or other related agencies (as they did
> in Chile - why not Mexico too, a ripe plum for the picking). Why does The
> Cabal do this? Assist multinational agribusiness corporations take over
> more food production, processing, distribution and sales within the
> vertically integrated agribusiness system they utilize, in Mexico and the
> US. More and more food comes from Mexico; with the drought in California
> large scale farming could increasingly happen in Mexico to meet needs of
> the US market.
>
> Holger and his permaculture community have been directly affected by this,
> as I see it. Mere speculation I admit but it may be true to some degree.
>
> The corruption boggles the mind. It exists in most of E/W Europe, Russia
> and the USA. Prime example in the US is the activities of Monsanto and
> similar associated agribusiness corporations.
> In corporate agriculture its increasingly about biotech, high tech digital
> farming, new and old types of all categories of pesticides and other
> synthesized materials used in chemical-dependant farming and large heavy
> automated-digitized-wireless complicated machinery and draining non
> renewable resources of the world to support this non sustainable form of
> food production, never local food production systems, natural and
> sustainable performed by local farmers and gardeners working within a vast
> detailed network of local and regional farms.
>
>
More about this from a friend sent to me in email:

"First, the net effect of NAFTA's relaxation of grain import/exports was to
throw peasants off the land. And in fact there have been similar programs
all around the world to do just that, either intentionally or as a
byproduct of their drive to join the 'world economy'-- that is, give their
countries over to capital-led expansion schemes.

In India, peasants are displaced by hydroelectric dam projects. On every
continent, farmers get evicted by the creation of gigantic superfarms,
growing crops like oil palm, soy or sugar on a massive scale. The host
governments in these poor countries give away their citizens' land to court
foreign capital. So they sell the land and transfer it 'broom clean'-- that
is, with no bothersome tenants living on it. (This phrase is from real
estate, where contracts for rental properties will stipulate 'vacant and
broom clean' as a condition of sale.)

And everywhere, simple farmers can't compete selling their crops against
the products of well-capitalized participants in the global economy. Why is
it that a billionaire hedge fund manager in Manhattan can sell his
subsidised cotton grown by subcontractors in Alabama cheaper on the world
market than a dirt farmer in Mali can grow and sell his cotton? It's the
miracle of capitalism.

Combine this trend with the worldwide population explosion we've seen since
the late 1940s, and you see the growth in third world cities-- that is,
displaced people with no access to land and few job openings. What has
contributed to this trend as much as anything is, oddly, institutions like
the World Health organization. After they began their vaccination
campaigns, all the babies who would normally die in their first year became
viable adults. And the world just had no room for them.

So... fewer family farms, more mouths to feed and now the early
consequences of Global Warming, disrupting crop production around the
planet. The prognosis isn't pretty.

But to return to your point, traditional tribal forms of ownership like the
ejido system in Mexico are the target of a special campaign on the part of
capitalists to impose western forms of land ownership. They must weaken
these ancient systems, because they can't buy a whole ejido-- but they can
make peasants break up their cooperatives and then buy them out one by one.

Then they have to move to the city-- there isn't much left on the land for
them. "


-- 
Lawrence F. London
lfljvenaura@gmail.com
http://www.avantgeared.com
https://plus.google.com/+Avantgeared
Skype: lawrence.f.london