Tag Archives: grassroots social movements

Argentina’s Recuperated Factories: now a feature film

6 May

There have already been some interesting documentaries made about the dramatic process of workers on the edge of poverty taking over the factories, schools and other workplaces that employed them before hitting the financial skids. And then running them just fine.

Now there is a feature film as well – albeit one with a name that could well be a documentary — Industria Argentina: Las Fabricas para Quien Trabajan.

It is the first feature film of a young man named Ricardo Diaz Iacaponi, who worked as sound man on a 2004 doc on the same subject (I’m guessing it was ‘The Take.’) In this case, however, Diaz wrote a script based on numerous conversations with people now successfully running their own workplaces, including the Hospital Israelita, the Viyetes icecream factory and the Navales Unidos ship yard, to name just a few. And he hired well-known actors like Carlos Portaluppi and Soledad Silveyra to play the roles of workers, their family, plant managers and lawyers.

I’m not surprised that a feature film has now come out of the factory recuperation movement. As I myself found when I was interviewing people from the MNFRT for the final chapters of Broke But Unbroken, the personal circumstances and challenges and emotional turmoil they all went through were indeed epic.

Every  single one of them was at some point brought to edge of a Spielberg-like abyss, where it was a question of either be captured by the villains – i.e. accept defeat and  the bleak prospects of permanent unemployment — or leap across, and running the factory.

The real story, moreover, comes with a happy ending worthy of any movie: whatever the ups and downs of the Argentine economy and the particular workplace, the rewards have been huge — and life-changing —  for all those workers whose collective history has now inspired a movie.

Wiki-Solutions for a Hungry World

7 Apr

Sculpture: Natalia Porter

This month AlertNet, the Thomson Reuters Foundation’s news site for humanitarian issues, is posting submissions from the general public for its multi-media special report on  solutions to global hunger. This is my “silver bullet” idea:

A tragic paradox envelops the lives of small holding farmers throughout the Global South. They want to make a living from the land, but the economics of small scale farming force them to migrate to constantly expanding urban slums. Food prices rise as millions of peasant farmers lack the means — from enough land to sound eco-agricultural advice — to produce enough of a surplus to sell to the hungry. The world needs farmers while at the same time they make up the majority of its poor.

Yet the answer to the dilemma rests with peasant farmers themselves, and in ever increasing numbers, they know this. They are organizing themselves in democratic grassroots movements throughout the developing world, not only demanding but also working for change. From Indonesia to Senegal, and from Haiti to Brazil, the landless and the land poor are finding solutions to the contradictions of today’s macro-economic imperatives.

Here are just a few examples: The Serikat Petani Indonesia is not only working with their 700,000 members to reclaim land stolen during the Suharto dictatorship, but encouraging increased yields using organic techniques that cost nothing. In Senegal, regional farmers organizations, like the Union of Peasant Groups of Mehknes, ask all members to surround their plots with trees and to grow the drought-resistant crops their forefathers planted. Participation in Brazil’s Landless Rural Workers Movement, or MST, has permitted more than 350,000 families to own land and to run cooperatives, schools and small enterprises. Even in Haiti, where land is at a premium and instability a seeming fact of life, peasant organizations working with La Via Campesina and Partenaires de Developement Locale are taking the initiative and breaking free from both top-down solutions to improve and manage better production methods. The government of Brazil, for example, is basing all of its agricultural foreign aid to Haiti on advice from the La Via Campesina and the MST.

These are just a few of the many organizations flowering throughout regions we typically associate with poverty and helplessness. Other developing world nations with national peasant organizations include the Philippines, Thailand and Mozambique.  While their members don’t lack ideas, a sense of initiative or  a determination to succeed, finding the funding to expand their outreach is always a challenge.

Meanwhile, little of the billions of dollars affluent nations spend on foreign aid is going to support farmers and their families.  Rather, too many First-World development policies comprise a vision of letting giant agri-business conglomerates take care food production and leaving farming families no choice but to join an already vast labour force that will struggle to survive on cut-rate wages in modern factories and sweatshops. No wonder donors are asking themselves why so much poverty still exists in the countries to which they have been sending their money for decades.

At the same time the effectiveness and purpose of so many aid projects are being questioned, simple solutions are at hand — and have been for quite some time.

Just imagine if those of us in the rich countries could help the millions of small farmers in the developing world achieve land justice and plentiful crops.

Try and picture the results in farming villages when agriculturalists embrace their knowledge and abilities to produce healthy crops to sustain themselves and their urban counterparts.

Ask the average person who donates money to charity, and they are likely to react with enthusiasm at the idea, at the image of productive land, life-giving clusters of woods, decent schools and clinics, and vibrant markets filled with the fruits of the peasant farmer’s labour rather than wasted aid dollars, pounds and euros.

It is time to change the picture of rural poverty to one of rural power. Along with our donations to those NGOs that concentrate on empowering farmers, we can also pressure our governments to switch from foreign aid conditionalities that impoverish Third World economies to ones that insist on meaningful re-distribution of fertile land. In the United States, Canada and Britain, average people can tell their governments that we no longer want our tax money to spent on food dumping but on buying locally produced food for feeding programs and on practical help for farmers. How? Using a number of methods, from social media and the Internet to Amnesty International-style letter-writing campaigns, average people can influence government policies.

Aside from alleviating rural poverty, two immeasurably valuable consequences will come with this. First of all, we will find peasant farmers themselves taking on the task of conserving and protecting local forests and other fragile habitats. Environmental protection is already a hallmark of most if not all peasant movements.

Secondly, as their livelihoods improve, rural populations will feel empowered to demand accountability from their governments, insisting on honest and wise use of their nation’s financial resources.

The rural poor don’t want handouts and they don’t want banishment to dysfunctional lives in a slum. They want to land to till, fair markets in which to sell the fruits of their labour, and respect.  We can and must make it clear to our leaders and policy-makers that we want the same.

What do you think can be done to alleviate global hunger? I would love to hear your comments and your own ideas.

Three Cups of Obfuscation

21 Apr

By now, many will have heard about the precipitous collapse of the reputation of Greg Mortenson and his Central Asia Institute. Mortenson, the author of the mega-bestseller Three Cups of Tea, faces accusations on two fronts – that, among other stories, the seminal tale he tells of stumbling into a poor Pakistani village after an unsuccessful attempt to climb K2 and promising to repay their kindness by building them a school – is fiction, and that some of the money he and CAI have received in donations goes to help him market his already lucrative book-and-speaker venture rather than construct schools.

For me, conflating and confusing the two is an error, and diminishes the most serious aspect of Mortenson’s deceit. It is one thing to learn that so much of Mortenson’s “inspiring” memoir, including being kidnapped by Taliban, is baloney — an unfortunately necessary device, I would say, considering the publishing world’s thirst for memoirs (and one I have never been able to understand or sympathize with). I have only just begun to read Jon Krakauer’s thought provoking debunking of the Mortenson myth – Three Cups of Deceit, available on Byliner.com and, a certain sense of schadenfreude aside, a very interesting read.

But it is the latter issue, I think, that is most egregious. Part of the problem is our affluent-nation tendency to think that anyone who decides to help the poor is some kind of hero or saint. Mortenson has, of course, spent years and efforts feeding that particular beast. At the speaking engagements for which he charges anywhere from $25,000 to $30,000, he plays on the heartstrings of his audience with his epic of personal virtue.

Yet various media have now pointed out that Mortenson actually used money donated to his Institute to pay for traveling his moneymaking lecture circuit. CAI considers this “outreach,” according to a study by charity watchdog American Institute for Philanthropy, which is odd considering that the wide acceptance of the book and attending publicity would already seem to accomplish this. And as the AIP itself points out, money from the speaking tours should then also be funneled back into CAI, but is not.

Nonetheless, for many donors, it is entirely natural that a privileged and wealthy person should manage the development efforts of the severely underprivileged. We see them as incapable of making decisions and managing money and improving their environments and their lives. We are convinced that they need someone like Mortenson – buoyed by our cheques – to set them on the right path to bettering themselves.

So there is actually no one from those communities of the poor in Pakistan and Afghanistan who play any decision-making role in the CAI and its budget. Rather, their role is to be passive and grateful for ‘our’ largesse, and to see a school established for them or not. This, of course, reminds me of the recent debacle of pop singer Madonna’s similarly protagonistic attempts to improve education in Malawi, one that saw an appalling $3.8 million go down the drain and not a single structure built. Here, rather than local Malawians—whose average annual per capita income is $200 — it was the boyfriend of her personal trainer given the keys to the giant cashbox. Rather than build a hundred small schools that might be more useful to local communities (although who knows because they are never consulted) Madonna’s foundation decided to build one expensive elite girls school.

Once again, “helping” the poor is just a hobby for the wealthy, and easy to do. No kind of dialogue, relationship or partnership is required with those they supposedly want to empower through education. Giving them control over either the process or the resources would be absurd, but giving it to the friend of a millionaire is entirely normal.

Indeed what strikes me most about Mortenson’s project is this: according to Krakauer, Mortenson originally received $12,000 back in the mid-90s from a donor and with that, believed he could build one simple five-room school. The CBS 60 Minutes report said that by fiscal year 2009, CAI claimed to have built 54 schools (some of which were in fact donated by someone else.)

Putting that detail aside, however, let’s say a school costs $15,000 to build. Would this not allow CAI – which has apparently received donations of at least $60 million by now – to construct not 54, but 4000 schools?

That shortfall underlines the truly egregious nature of Mortenson’s fraud, not the fanciful embroidering of his experiences, but the terrible and real cost of his control of the purse strings: the more than 3500 schools that simply don’t exist.

And for some odd reason, that issue doesn’t seem to be garnering much attention.

An interview with Dr. Ian Burton

11 Apr

Burning Rainforest in the Amazon

Dr. Ian Burton is a scientist emeritus with the Adaptation and Research Group of the Meteorological Service of Canada and adjunct professor with the University of Toronto’s Institute for Environmental Studies.  He also works with the Red Cross-Red Crescent Climate Centre in The Hague. He recently attended the conference on Community-Based Adaptation to Climate Change in Bangladesh.

What kind of organizations attended the Conference?

I’m not sure what the proportion was, but perhaps the larger proportion was made up of development and to some extent research NGOs, but mostly development NGO, with an international network (like) Care, Greenpeace and Oxfam. They were mostly organizational people who have been working at the community level.

It started off focused on climate change but many, many people came there with a community development view that was not necessarily focused on climate change and was in fact using the climate change vehicle for getting support for the things they wanted to do anyway. More holistic, more integrated, but this is an area that has been relatively neglected in development.

So what are poor communities doing to adapt to climate change?

Just a tremendous range and variety of things, so it’s hard to generalize about people and the problems they face in mountain regions or on the Bangladesh coast, in semi-arid regions and in tropical rainforests.

Can you give me some examples?

Rainwater collection, people who are short of water or seasonally short of water can and do benefit themselves by roof collection systems. It’s just one example, (but) it’s a simple technology; it doesn’t cost a lot; it’s been in use for a long time in a lot of different places. So a lot of this movement that is going on is about trying to expand that to other communities that haven’t been doing that. And in respect to climate change, there are situation where either you know now or can anticipate in the future where water availability will decrease. Doing that is a cheaper and more self-reliant alternative than asking somebody to come and put down a tube well.

Also preserving forests, not holus-bolus chopping down forests, trying to reduce that, replanting forest, planting different varieties, different species.

What about agriculture?

That was quite a pervasive theme. One thing that I saw that was actually quite interesting was down on this southwest coast of Bangladesh, (where) they are suffering from slow incremental sea-level rise but the more acute problem at the moment is salinity. These were mostly small subsistence farmers producing rice for their own consumption. And now there is quite an interesting growth in shrimp cultivation. I saw some rice paddies full of water with a dyke around it and it would have a net diagonally strung across it. And on one side they would be growing rice, and on the side there would be shrimp.

What I see going on is very encouraging. It’s additive to what’s been going on anyway. The existence of the climate change threat and the general acknowledgement that it’s going to hurt the poor countries and poor people most, so NGOs are picking that up and saying we need to factor climate change into all the things that we’re doing on community development.

So while the focus was on community-based adaptation to climate change, it’s also community-based adaptation to everything else.

Readers can find out a lot more about the conference by checking out the videos posted at www.oneworld.org

 

The Referendum in South Sudan

9 Jan

Juba: a new capital city?

(Many thanks to photographer Jason Brooks for this fantastic photo of Juba.)

Today, the people of south Sudan vote in a popular referendum on whether or not to form a new independent nation or remain part of the “original” country (one essentially invented by the British in the 19th century).

The results are already  thought to be pretty obvious: remain part of a country whose government has sent in murderers and thugs to destroy your communities all the while living large off the oil on your land? Or try going it alone as a sovereign nation.

Some analysts are now suggesting that if every ‘tribal’ or ethnic group in Africa should think about seceding from the manufactured nations Europe concocted during the long period of colonization, then we’ll have hundreds of new little nations all inimical to each other.

But the issue is not ‘tribalism’ so much as egregious governance. African governments have repeatedly treated the people of their nations like , well, shit. They enrich themselves at their expense, plead poverty when it comes to providing any kind of basic educational or health or transport services, and worse, sate the dissatisfaction of some by encouraging the rape and pillage of others.  What’s more, rich-nation governments reap the benefits of these utterly discredited and dysfunctional regimes by dealing with them – buying their resources and giving them loans they know won’t be paid back because they’ve been stashed in private foreign bank accounts.

It is interesting to look therefore at another breakaway nation, Somaliland, the product of a brutal civil war like that of Sudan. According to Pierre Englebert, author of Africa: Unity, Sovereignty and Sorrow, this new country, unrecognized – and unfunded — by international powers, has actually done a better job of governance than many resource-rich African nations. “Somaliland,” he wrote in a NYT op ed piece last year, “provides its citizens with relative peace and democracy, offering a striking counterpoint to the violence and misery of neighboring sovereign Somalia. It was in part the absence of recognition that forced the leaders of the Somali National Movement in the early ’90s to strike a bargain with local clan elders and create legitimate participatory institutions in Somaliland.”

In my upcoming book, I take a brief look at a small, local social movement in Somaliland called GAVO – the General Assistance and Volunteer Organization. Wanting to deal with the most glaring social needs, GAVO’s initial focus was on psychiatric patients suffering from war-induced trauma living at the local hospital. They began by simply taking care of some of their personal needs, then went on to seek donations from city merchants and to use popular theatre to educate people about, and remove the stigma from, mental illness. When UN-HABITAT approached it with a plan to rebuild the port’s central market,  GAVO set up a consultation process whereby religious leaders, vendors and purchasers were able to have a say in the project through a series of open discussions and dialogue. The organization has since taken on the entire management of the local hospital, and launched a program for street children. More importantly, it has spread to other parts of the country, promoting participatory governance and helping to broaden the impoverished nation’s democratization process.

Will a new nation of South Sudan offer its citizens peace and democracy as well? Certainly that is what we in the wealthy nations need not only to encourage but invest in.

Indeed  Englebert suggests that donor governments only recognize African states “that provide their citizens with a minimum of safety and basic rights.” I would advise them to go one step further: start working with groups like GAVO instead of those recipient governments. It may be harder and slower and require more staff, but it makes far more sense than decrying poverty on the one hand and facilitating it though the support of wicked governors on the other.

 

So it’s the year of forests …

8 Jan

Forest

The UN has declared this year the “International Year of Forests” and so I am going to devote my first blog of 2011 to not only forests but people who live in and from the forests.

They add up to about a billion and are among the poorest people on earth in terms of what they earn. Yet their main problem isn’t so much poverty as  invisibility. It isn’t easy to make a billion people disappear but logging and palm-oil companies, plantations and governments all do a pretty good job of it.

Older blog posts in The Global Kiosk tell some stories of forest dwellers who have been forced out of their forest homes, from areas where they have lived sustainably for eons. Some collect and sell forest products, others farm beneath the trees, using one patch for a few years before leaving it to go fallow for decades and return to their natural state.

So hopefully this year not only the forests but the many organized communities who struggle for tenure rights and the protection of their forest habitats will get some much-deserved attention. In Indonesia, the SPI campaigns for the rights of forest dwellers, while in Nepal, an organization called FECOFUN does the same. In Brazil, the National Union of Rubber Tappers have long used a class interpretation to assert the value of keeping loggers, ranchers and dam-builders out of the Amazon, while in Thailand, the Assembly of the Poor take on the issue of forest dwellers who have been evicted from wooded areas, so that pulp-and-paper companies can have free rein in destroying trees and replacing them with so-called green deserts: expanses of eucalyptus that kill anything around or underneath them.

And unfortunately, conservationists in rich countries have also added to the problem, standing by while forest tribes – especially in Africa – are kicked out of their homelands in a mistaken attempt to protect bio-diversity.

A few far-thinking NGOs, like the London-based International Institute for Environment and Development are coming out with studies showing the crucial importance (and simple common sense) of letting forest dwellers protect and manage their forests themselves. Let’s hope that international bodies like the UN take notice of them – as well as the cause they have decided to champion this year.

On Balance – Organic is better

20 Jul

While I was travelling in Brazil and Indonesia meeting members and visiting the farms of the Landless Rural Workers Movement and the Peasant Union of Indonesia, I heard a lot about better crops from organic methods.

In west Sumatra for example, the SPI’s Rustam Efendi told me they were getting rice yields of 7 tonnes per hectare compared with 4 or 5 using chemical fertilizers and pesticides.

Now their personal experiences have found some academic backing – from Washington. State University A recent study, published in Nature, found that organic techniques actually offer better pest control and larger plants that the agric-chemical competition.

Study author David Crowder and his team surveyed potato farms in Washington state. Their focus wasn’t so much on yields as on another important aspect of both agriculture and environment – the concept of evenness. That’s the relative abundance of different species, including predators and pests, in a farm’s ecosystem. In other words, rather than the number of species present on a farm, it is this “relative abundance,” they noted, that may determine the success of one technique over another. This idea also helps explain why certain commercial pesticides lose their effectiveness.

The WSU researchers found that “although organic and conventional farms did not differ markedly in the richness of (potato) beetle eaters, the evenness of predators differed drastically. Organic fields … had far greater evenness than those where pesticides were applied regularly.”
What happens when evenness increases what Crowder called a “powerful trophic cascade,” resulting in fewer potato-munching beetles and larger potato plants. in layman’s terms, that means 18% lower pest densities and 35% larger plants. And bigger plants generally mean greater potato yields.
Evenness is really another word for balance, even though the struggle to stymie the power of agribusiness and unfair land distribution remains a grossly uneven one. But as Crowder pointed out in nature, “What our study suggests is that organic agriculture is promoting these more balanced natural enemy communities and they may have better, organic pest control.”

Peru Attacks its own People — and its Forest

4 Jul
 


JungleExplorer_039

Originally uploaded by thekjkev

Even as the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico rivets the attention of people all over the world, people in many other places continue to suffer the catastrophe of petroleum production completely unheeded. I’ve already posted something about the vicious toll oil companies have imposed on the poor of Nigeria. Now in Peru, oil companies have set their sights on that country’s Amazon basin. According to the website of the Red Ambiental Loretana (the Loreto Environmental Network) “there are hundreds of kilometers of rivers and streams that have never received any treatment after the oil spills.”

It’s really no wonder. The Peruvian government is firmly on the side of the oil companies. Avid for petro-dollars, it has refused to listen to the complaints and proposals of the indigenous people who actually live along those river, in places like Loreto, Bartra, and the Rio Tigre. Just a few weeks ago, it resorted to the kind of unhinged violence to smash through a road blockade that left at least one hundred dead. It has used the police to beat and torture protesters and the navy to break through flotillas of canoes arranged across the affected rivers — essentially funding the repression of Peruvians in favour of multi-nationals from the public purse. 

Lately the Interior Ministry has gone so far as to expel a Catholic missionary, Brother Paul McAuley, and forbid him to ever return. Government bureaucrats are calling him a terrorist. McAuley’s crime? Encouraging the inhabitants of the rainforest region to stand up for their rights.  Yet many student, civil and grassroots movements support the work of Brother McAuley, and the right of the people of the Peruvian Amazon to decide what is in their best interest.

No doubt the Peruvian government is saying it will use all the money it can earn from petroleum and gas production to better the lives of the poor. The governments of countries with these kinds of resources always do. But it never seems to happen. (Check out Paul Collier’s ‘The Bottom Billion’ for statistics on the economic performance of African nations ‘blessed’ with natural resources.)

Could oil and gas be extracted and produced without harming a rainforest environment and benefiting local people? Well, it’s a good question, but one on which no oil company I can think of wants to waste profits on trying to answer.

Organic Farming, Indonesia

28 Dec

 The SPI, as I mentioned below, has succeeded through struggle and unity in taking 1 million hectares of land from companies and government entities, much of it in fact reclaimed after it was stolen from peasant farmers during the years of the Suharto regime.

Now, like the Movimento dos Sem Terra in Brazil, they are working to convince peasant farmers to go organic. In July, I went from Jakarta to the coastal city of Padang, on the island of Sumatra, and from there to  Nagari, where the SPI have an organic farming school. I did not have my trusty interpreter Adi with me on this trip, relying instead on Rustam, an SPI leader from nearby West Pasamant. A tall rangy fellow, with a square jaw and jokey manner, Rustam had participated in a lengthy and violent struggle there to reclaim land taken by a palm-oil company, one that resulted in the death of one Union member and the imprisonment of many others. His command of  English, while eccentric and rather endearingly — if confusingly, at times – informal, was my path to communication with his Mingabau-speaking comrades.

Before talking about the school, however, I must say something about the amazing architecture of this part of Indonesia, immense wooden houses with curving roofs like the horns of a buffalo, or the prow of an old-fashioned ship, called rumah gadang, which translates simply as big house. What’s more, this island, or what I saw of it, is particularly lush with jungle vegetation, riven with streams and waterfalls, much of my bus trip from Padang to Payan Kumbuh along the route of a now-abandoned train track built by the Dutch.

The organic school in Nagari was run by a taciturn man named Adek, who had taken a six-month course in Medan, North Sumatra, back in 2002. Adek was chosen to take the course, said Rustam, “because he is interested, and clever – more clever than most.” Beyond the small house where Adek lived with his family, dozens of different species of vegetables grew in furrowed strips, often surrounded by flowering plants useful for fertilizing or pest control. At the bottom of a slope, a stilted pen had been built for the school’s collection of five goats, whose manure was added to the piles of biologically rich compost, which contained everything from leaves to burnt rice husks. They were also making a liquid organic pesticide, said Rustam, “but we don’t use it much. We focus on how to manage different species of insects in this area. Some are bad, some are friends. You always have to figure out the needs of the plant.”

Since its inauguration in 2006, about 100 people had come there for courses, staying in simple constructions made of wood and bilik,  also used for classrooms. Most of them were SPI cadre, coming one day a week for a year, but local peasant farmers had also begun turning up to ask for advice. “When we built the school, everyone laughed,’ said Rustam, “but then they started coming, one by one.” Even the government was sending a group of 60 students for an intensive six-day course in August. Meanwhile, its broad choice of organic vegetables and fruit were being packaged at the school and distributed for sale in various towns and villages nearby.

At some distance away were the rice paddies, set in a much larger area of terraced green fields, and offering a stunning view of mountain ranges, purple and misty, extending toward the horizon. Water veined the entire landscape, running through swards of rice in various stages of development, from the brilliant, almost luminescent green of bunched young plants to waving fields of ripe, pale-gold grain. The yield from using organic was almost vertiginous: people were harvesting seven tons of rice per hectare, compared to just four or five using traditional fertilizers and pesticides.  If, as Rustam said, the SPI began discussing organic farming “to see about how to lose our dependence on commercial fertilizers and the  big companies that sell them,” their endeavours had been enormously successful.

The next day in Sibaladuang, I went to a meeting of organic farmers, who had transformed a 66-hectare piece of land that had been theirs since ancestral times, taken over by a cattle ranch, then won back by them trough occupation and pressure in 1998. I asked them why they had decided to adopt organic practices and, in spite of the higher yields they were getting, no-one mentioned that as motivation. “I do it first of all so as not to be dependent on fertilizers and pesticides from factories,” said a man named Jastil, “because the factory gives the peasant very little information about what it really contains and what the effects are.” Another simply expressed confidence in this latest SPI campaign. “As an organization, it has the power to kick out the ranchers, and bring us many solutions and alternatives,” said Beni, secretary of the Sibaladuang base, “to improve agriculture and our livelihoods.”

But the most faithful adherent, perhaps, of organic techniques was Sukardi Bendang, 39, from nearby Tanjuang Pati, where he farmed one hectare of his grandmother’s land and raised a few cattle. “I first got information about organic farming from reading about it in newspapers and seeing things on television,” he said. “Shortly after, in 2002, I joined SPI. I discussed this with them and decided to take a one-week intensive course in Medan from the same teacher Adek had. After growing the first plot of organic rice, I felt really good. I got a very good crop, about 200 kilos more than by doing conventional farming.”

Sukardi had moved back to where he had grown up from the similarly named village of Tanjuang Pauh, where his wife’s clan had farmed. But “in 1996,” he said, “the government moved us because they were building a dam there and gave us two hectares for planting and another half hectare for a house in another place. But this land was very steep and no good for farming.” An NGO had initially organized the peasants against the dam-building project, he said, but once their funds dried up, they left. This NGO, said Sukardi, “only took on one project, the dam, but the SPI struggles for long-term issues that can last a whole lifetime.”

In Tanjuang Pati, Sukardi began to organize the peasants there “step by step. I have invited members to start growing organic. And I still campaign,” he said, “so that the landless can get land and for agrarian reform. Government politicians campaign and say that ‘yes, organic is very good for the peasant,’ but these are just empty words. They give no support for it. They only support the peasants who are in favour of them; they’re the one who get loans, for example. If we want these loans, we have to really pressure for them.”

Sukardi had been so successful with his organic production, that not only had he recently been invited to work with the local Farming Board – a sign of official backing he took with caution – but allowed him to purchase two more hectares of land. Nevertheless his primary reason, he said, for promoting organic farming so strenuously was because “it is healthy for families who eat our products.”

So far about a fifth of SPI members are farming organically, but that number is growing. In Batang, Central Java, the local SPI had also set up an organic showpiece, hoping to convince members and non-members alike to go organic by giving them visible evidence of its success. As in Brazil, the switch from traditional methods isn’t an easy one, but at least it is beginning.

On a final note, I was told back in Jakarta that Padang is famous for its cuisine, with many restaurants all over the country attracting diners by announcing that their cooks are from there. I’m ashamed to say that (except for the excellent slap-up meal we ate sitting on the ground in Sibaladuang) I never had time to eat a good Padang meal while here. The only place where I stopped to eat on my final day – and this is really embarrassing, I admit – was Kentucky Fried Chicken. 

But I can’t close without mentioning the amazing little hotel where I stayed: a lovely large old house, huge, beautifully furnished room and the friendliest staff imaginable, all for about $27 a night. It’s called the Hotel Mayang, and is located just off of Jalan Veteran Dalam.

 pagaruyung

This wonderful photo of a rumah gadang was taken by Michael J.  Lowe and downloaded from Creative Commons.

 

Serikat Petani Indonesi

27 Jul

It means Peasant Union of Indonesia, has 700,000 members, and I will soon be posting a few essays about this interesting grassroots movement. Stay tuned.

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.