Food Justice in the City

Intergenerational Contact: Being in Place

Pancho McFarland and Kortney Craigmiles McFarland

               
One of the more tangible benefits of community gardening in the city is the ongoing contact between the generations.  City dwellers often lament the ever-increasing generation gap, which can be seen as related to the loss of ethnic distinctiveness and lack of self-determination.  The only way to maintain tradition, ethnicity, autonomy, and resilience is for current generations to be present for the next generation; Youth will inherit responsibility for the sustenance and maintenance of our community gardens.  Working in a community garden opens the door to intergenerational interaction.

                  One of the goals of the Green Lots Project is to increase contact between children, young adults, older adults and elders. One project, The Elders Garden Club at Roseland Victory Center, provides opportunities for elders, young adults, and middle-aged people to garden together, exchanging stories and otherwise communing.  They encourage youth to plant and mind tomatoes, corn, squash, beans, onion, peppers, okra, and collard green seeds and seedlings. In this manner, culturally specific crops and general knowledge of gardening is maintained and exchanged.  Clearing and preparation of the raised beds for crops is another occasion for sharing time, effort, seeds, and wisdom.

                  A second Green Lots Project site has facilitated multigenerational contact.  The Roseland Community Peace Garden involves university students of all ages, families, teens, grammar school kids, middle-aged people, and elders.  On Saturday afternoons during spring and early summer, a dozen or so people (sometimes more than 20) cleared, till, plant, weed, build, water and otherwise maintain the communal garden.  Neighbors contribute water, someone else plays a drum that becomes an impromptu orchestra of children led by their elder, while others shovel soil into wheelbarrows and cart them off to planting beds built by still another mixed generational group.  At Roseland Community Peace garden, an intergenerational, mixed-class, mixed-race communitas grew and flourished. This is food justice in action.

                  The fruits of shared labor have included to date (June 26, 2010): Two harvests of collard greens; one of kale and radishes; several harvests of broccoli including daily pickings by the evening watering crew; and the sharing of self-edifying labor and stories within a newly developed community.  The space of the garden is communal and inviting rather than private and excluding; the work of tending soil and plants facilitates the development of a small community and strengthens the prospect of food sovereignty for the next generation.

La depredacion de las tortugas de Veracruz, Mexico

 

INDISCRIMINATE EGG HARVESTS NEWLY ENDANGER MEXICAN SEA TURTLES

 

El Rito, CO. In 1990, Mexico adopted a total and permanent ban on the capture of sea turtles as well as the trade in sea turtle products. The ban has kept the turtles from going extinct but they are still highly endangered and their populations unstable. One especially vulnerable species, common to the Gulf of Mexico, is the Golfina or green sea turtle (Lepidochelys olivaea), pictured here on nesting grounds on the shores of Tecolutala, Veracruz. Unfortunately, Mexico's ban has not survived the past two decades of neoliberal globalization marked by growing consumer demand for sea turtle meat and eggs, especially in Japan and China. Both countries have refused to abide by the global ban on wild sea turtle harvests imposed under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES).  I just received word through an email from a colleague that the biggest threat to the survival of these sea turtles is the re-emergence of massive harvests of eggs by illegal poaching. Turtle populations have previously been decimated by ocean fish trawlers whose drift nets capture and drown the sea-faring turtles; off-shore oil development is also a constant threat. Mexicans do not typically eat turtle eggs and only rarely turtle meat. This practice has become even more widespread than it was in the 1980s before the ban first went into effect. The shoreline of Tecolutala is a veritable open-access area with no formal system of commons management, and so the harvesters do not even bother to leave eggs behind for the next generation of turtles. It is way past time to stop this brutal exploitation and endangerment of los animalitos. If you have information about this activity, please contact Centro Ecologico Akumal in Quintana Roo, Mexico or the Inter-American Convention for the Protection and Conservation of Sea Turtles.
 
 

GRAPHIC EVIDENCE - Take 1

Moderator's Note: On occasion we will be posting a single photograph, quote, or graphic illustration that speaks a thousand words.  Here is our first in this occasional series: a graph showing the relationship between the fall in the price of corn and the steady decline in the number of independent corn farmers in Mexico. For anyone wishing to understand or think some more about why there are so many unemployed Mexican farmers among the undocumented immigrant population in the U.S., this provides stark, graphic evidence. The graph appears in a recent report published in Prospect: Journal of International Affairs at UCSD, entitled, "NAFTA and U.S. Corn Subsidies: Explaining the Displacement of Mexico's Corn Farmers."

ethics at the edge - 1

BIOWEAPONS, RESILIENT AGRICULTURE, & THE FETISHISM OF THE COMMODITY-FORM

 

Every major state biological warfare (BW) program we know of has included an anti-agricultural component, from the World War I German use of anthrax and glanders against animals to the Iraqi program on wheat cover smut. 

Dr. Mark Wheelist, Edmonds Institute Molecular Biologist

 

Shoreline, WA.    The Edmonds Institute is a remarkable non-profit public interest research group staffed with highly-skilled and socially-conscious scientists. For more than two and a half decades, the Institute's scientists have consistently produced important investigations in the field of science and technology assessment, and specifically in an area that I call edge-work. 

The Institute's scientists investigate science where it operates at the edge of ethical legitimacy, in those often secretive spaces where it is altogether very easy to go beyond the piecemeal logic of biosafety limits and unto the slippery slopes of the applied domains of market-driven and defense-steered science and technology development. 

From the vantage point of the record assembled by Edmonds Institute scientists, the so-called leading edge "Life Sciences Corporations" (LSCs) -- and their collaborators in the Pentagon, DARPA, and other federal research and development (R&D) agencies -- are really out-of-control technological innovators. Their blind pursuit of profit and quests to maintain dominant market or politico-military position forsake any decent, let alone adequate, investment in the public and democratic control of so-called "negative externalities." The legal, social, economic, cultural, and environmental risks and impacts of new technologies are not a priority for this military-industrial complex and the current BP catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico illustrates this fact as plainly and clearly as can be. 

Science in service to capitalist imperatives always necessarily implies the acquiescence of scientists or technologists to a regime that basically "banks" on the ability to engage in outright fraudulent discounting of the social and environmental harms that production for profit inevitably entails.

Loren Baretz warned of this dilemma in his Servants of Power (1974) in which he illustrates how the misuses of the social sciences, as part of "Project Camelot" and other similar U.S. interventions designed to control and suppress political dissent and radical social movements in Latin America, produced lasting damage to the prospects for more indigenous, home-grown democratic institutions.

A similar theme was addressed by Gerard Radnitzky in the oddly-titled book, Contemporary Schools of Metascience (1973) in which the author argues that science, and especially applied science for technology development, is a largely "market-steered" phenomenon. Scientific revolutions do not solely emerge as naturalized results of Kuhnian "paradigm shifts," as much as they emerge from socially-constructed events and practices brought about through the technical networks of scientists, corporate employees, and governmental agency staffs.

The type of edge-work research done at the Institute includes critical studies of bioweapon technologies that could have unparalleled global impacts and perhaps even alter the very processes of natural evolutionary and biological change and adaptation. In the process, The Edmonds Institute has become a virtual storehouse of knowledge that citizens can tap to develop a better-informed understanding of the politics of science in the R&D realm and beyond in the commercial marketing of dangerous applied technologies.

Wither robotic insect swarm?...avenge thyself among the corn fields!

Which brings me to DARPA, agriculture, and biodiversity. DARPA celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2008. The agency remains relatively obscure (to the public) but glamorous (to the techies). Established in 1958 as a response to the Soviet launching of Sputnik, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has played a central role in the applied science and technology fields for half a century.

DARPA helped deliver the Internet, stealth technology, and the computer mouse as well as robotic assembly lines, GPS-based telecommunications systems, and even genetically-engineered viruses and bacteria. That is quite a track record, and DARPA is just warming up, even if its "giganticism" is a by-product of the mass production mentality of Cold War industrial organizational forms. DARPA admits that fully 96-98 percent of all its projects fail; that is, they produce no recoverable results or developments that can be invested or integrated into applied technologies for military and commercial markets. 

Now, DARPA had an interesting precursor, the Chemical Warfare Service (CWS). The existence of this aptly named agency was revealed to the public in 1946. It was our nation's original department of bioweapons or biological warfare research. The language used to define "biological warfare" in the official history of the CWS is worth quoting: 

[Biological warfare is] the intentional cultivation or production of bacteria, fungi, viruses, rickettsia, and their toxic products, as well as certain chemical compounds, for the purpose of producing disease or death in men, animals, or crops. [brackets added] 

And indeed, the U.S. government continues to fund research on biological warfare, presumably only for purposes of developing defensive responses and strategies.

 

The public is not very well informed about the history and contemporary status of bio-warfare agents. Press reports tend to be sketchy, and the average consumer of news gets superficial information because the intermittent coverage by the MSM (mainstream media) is typically limited to events involving the use of such weapons; for e.g., when Saddam Hussein first used bacteriological agents against enemies foreign and domestic.
 
In a more serious vein, a recent study of the history of U.S. bioweapons research and development, the authors note that all of the agents they analyzed:

...were selected as candidate biological weapons in the old offensive biological warfare (BW) programs of the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Soviet Union. Some of these agents were brought to the stage of mass production, were field-tested, and then stockpiled in bulk and in munitions.

 

Moreover, the study also warns that: 

 

By 1960, much of the technology of selecting, producing, and disseminating disease agents as weapons could be found in the open literature. Aside from the novel and modified agents that can be imagined, all of the "select agents" (except for smallpox) designated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention remain accessible from clinics or natural foci.

The study, entitled, Biological Weapons Defense: Infectious Diseases and Counterbioterrorism, is edited by three scientists, Luther E. Lindler of the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center, Frank J. Lebeda of USAMRID  (U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases), and George W. Korch, Director of the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center, all at Ft. Detrick, MD.

What I find most disconcerting about the study is this: While it accurately grounds the science and technology of bioweaponry in developments led by our own R&D establishment and therefore part of an inherited institutional force from the Second World War and Cold War aftermath, it fails to fully recognize or acknowledge that these geopolitical circumstances no longer exist, especially when new asymmetrical considerations weigh-in.

 
The neoliberal corporate-military-industrial establishment seeks to defend the supreme status of the U.S. as sole hegemonic force in a unilateral world. The conditions under which a neoliberal (minimalist national security) state might seek to do so by means of the deployment of weaponized biological agents could have been examined by these scientists and ethicists. The bioterror threat, in other words, could be viewed as a problem sourced in domestic designs. You do not need a conspiracy theory hangover to imagine how easy and tempting it might be for someone in the corporate world to make use of "Terminator" technology to gain market control or strike at competitors. It is not hard to imagine a Project Camelot to target grain crop supplies of "enemies" by genetically-engineering sterility in their production seedstocks.
 
While we live in a different geopolitical context, what does exist is a growing incentive by all parties - allied and hostile forces alike - to exploit the relatively cheap investments required to weaponize anti-agricultural agents. There are technical barriers to effective and widespread dissemination of the agents, especially if the targets are humans or animals. However, biowarfare attacks on plants (crops) are a more serious threat since the barriers to dissemination are less formidable.
 
This brings me to the issue of biodiversity. Today, well over 90 percent of the commercial maize cultivated in the U.S. is limited to 2 or 3 principal varieties (one variety respectively for animal feed, human consumption, or industrial production of ethanol biofuels and high fructose corn syrup). Two of these varieties are genetically-engineered or transgenic organisms. It is not difficult to imagine how this genetic uniformity presents opportunities for fairly narrowly-designed agents to attack modern monocultures' genomic sameness.
 
This is an argument in favor of biodiversity, of a return to biologically-resilient land race varieties of corn. But this obviously cannot unfold within the extant regime that stubbornly continues to privilege links among biotechnology corporations, university-based scientists, and the USDA into a huge block of bureaucratic inertia that will fight and resist to the end any mention of a paradigm shift from biotechnology to agroecology. Yet, agroecological diversity, including the down-sizing and re-localization of farming systems, is probably our best sustainable defense against bioweapons designed to target the weakest links in the oppressive global agrifood system.
 
Diversity is the source of resilience. It may also be the source of environmental security. Now, if only we can earn the right to become a secure nation by opening our institutions to the task of creating a more just world and developing more thorough and strict controls on the scientific community that is always unaccountably busy inventing new means of mass and selective destruction in the service of the fetishism of the commodity.

GUEST BLOG: Libby Navarro on Zapatista Corn

Zapatista Corn at the World Beat Center, San Diego is Attacked

By Schools for Chiapas

A beautiful GMO-free corn field planted on Earth Day 2010 in solidarity with the Zapatista movement of Chiapas, Mexico has been destroyed by vandals in San Diego, CA, USA.  

The corn seed for this planting was donated by Mayan farming families to publicize their resistance to genetically modified (GMO) corn and to seek sanctuary for their heritage corn seed which is now threatened with GMO contamination. The now destroyed, but symbolic “Zapatista Milpa” is located near the World Beat Center in the center of Balboa Park, San Diego, CA., Planet Mother Earth.

We believe this attack to be a hate crime motivated by the same anti-immigrant and anti-Mexico hysteria which is sweeping the country. You can see photos of the destroyed “Zapatista Milpa” in Balboa Park, San Diego, CA., Planet Mother Earth on Facebook at:

http://www.facebook.com/pedrocafe#!/album.php?aid=226041&id=574805864&ref=mf

As a symbol of hope and life, this tiny GMO-free corn field must be replanted to provide continued sanctuary to corn from Chiapas, Mexico. Please join us to replant on Sunday, June 27, 2010 from 2pm to 4pm at “The Zapatista Milpa” on Park Avenue near the World Beat Center, Balboa Park, San Diego, CA., Planet Mother Earth.

We want to make this replanting a joyful and celebratory event so bring shovels and musical instruments; bring food and drink to share; bring seeds and poems to swap, but mostly bring your hearts and your friends. If you live nearby, it will be wonderful if you can join us in the flesh. If you are far away – join us in your heart by sending love and hope.

We hope those who stomped and uprooted the living garden of Mayan corn in Balboa Park can find a way to heal. Specifically we invite them to join us at the replanting celebration on June 27. Everyone who believes the Mayan people of Chiapas have a right to save their GMO-free, heritage corn - those who work in community or school gardens, those who work on organic farms or backyard gardens – please consider a solidarity planting of Zapatista “Mother Seeds in Resistance”.

For additional information about the Zapatista resistance to GMO-contamination in the birthplace of corn, click here: http://www.schoolsforchiapas.org/

To obtain Zapatista corn seed for planting or to learn more about the “Zapatista Milpa” in Balboa Park, San Diego, CA., Planet Mother Earth, or for more general information about “Mother Seeds in Resistance”, please contact:

Libby Navarro
619-232-2841
Libby@SchoolsforChiapas.org

Seed Sovereignty Documents: I - New Mexico

 

Moderator's Note: Recent farmers' protests in places as diverse as Haiti, Mexico, Brazil, and the USA have focused attention on the growing movement for "seed sovereignty." We have over the years tried to keep up with these important grassroots campaigns through postings to this blog. We continue to trace the vein of activism of groups like the Council for Responsible Genetics and the Indigenous Peoples Council on Biocolonialism, among those organizations  that co-launched the "No Patents on Life" and "Safe Seed" campaigns in the mid to late 1990s. The current wave of activism, however, is more community-based and grassroots-oriented than the path-making work of activist NGOs in previous decades. Wherever traditional place-based farmers have engaged in acts of civil disobedience like burning donated seeds from Monsanto, we have sought to report on these events. However, we thought it important to re-post the "Declaration of Seed Sovereignty" developed by the Traditional Native American Farmers (TNAF) and the New Mexico Acequia Association (NMAA) in 2006. This declaration is one of the most significant statements on the autonomy and spirituality of seed-saving that we have ever encountered. This is the first in a series of "declaratory statements" on seed sovereignty that we will be posting in the coming months. The original declaration re-posted here is available at the NMAA.

A Declaration of Seed Sovereignty: A living document for New Mexico

March 11, 2006

1. Whereas, our ability to grow food is the culmination of countless generations of sowing and harvesting seeds and those seeds are the continuation of an unbroken line from our ancestors to us and to our children and grandchildren.
2. Whereas, our ancestors developed a relationship with plants that allowed their cultivation for food and medicine and this has been a central element of our culture and our survival for millennia in regions throughout the world.
3. Whereas, the concurrent development of cultures of Eurasia, Africa, and the Americas resulted in a plethora of food and crop types including grains such as maize and wheat; legumes such as beans and lentils; fruits such as squash and chile; vegetables such as spinach and those of the cabbage family; and roots such as potatoes and turnips.
4. Whereas these foods and crops, though developed independently of each other, came together in New Mexico with the meeting of Spanish, Mexican, and Native American cultures to create a unique and diverse indigenous agricultural system and land-based culture.
5. Whereas, just as our families are attached to our homes, our seeds learn to thrive in their place of cultivation by developing a relationship with the soil, water, agricultural practices, ceremonies, and prayers; thereby giving seeds a sacred place in our families and communities.
6. Whereas, the way in which seeds become attached to a place makes them native seeds, also known as landraces, also makes them an important element of the generational memory of our communities.
7. Whereas the continued nurturing of native seeds or landraces has provided the basis for the community coming together for communal work such as cleaning acequias and preparing fields as well as in ceremony, prayers, and blessings; thereby binding our communities, traditions, and cultures together.
8. Whereas the practices embodied in working the land and water and caring for seeds provides the basis for our respectful connection to the Earth and with each other.
9. Whereas, our practices in caring for native seeds (landraces) and growing crops provide for much of our traditional diet and results in our ability to feed ourselves with healthy food that is culturally and spiritually significant.
10. Whereas clean air, soil, water, and landscapes have been essential elements in the development and nurturing of seeds as well as the harvesting of wild plants; and that these elements of air, land, and water have been contaminated to certain degrees.
11. Whereas corporate seed industries have created a technology that takes the genetic material from a foreign species and inserts it into a landrace and is known as Genetically Engineered (GE) or transgenic crops.
12. Whereas seed corporations patent the seeds, genetics, and/or the processes used in the manipulation of landraces, and have gone so far as to patent other wild plants or the properties contained in the plants.
13. Whereas GE crops have escaped into the environment with maize in Oaxaca, Mexico and canola in Canada and crossed into native seeds and wild plants.
14. Whereas organic farmers have been sued by seed corporations when these patented genetic strains have been identified in the farmers’ crops, even though the farmers were unable to see or stop pollen from genetically engineered crops from blowing over the landscape and into their fields, thus contaminating the farmers’ crops.
15. Whereas the effect of this technology on the environment or human health when consumed is not fully understood.
16. Whereas the seed industry refuses to label GE seeds and food products containing GE ingredients.
17. Whereas the pervasiveness of GE crops in our area cannot then be fully known due to the lack of labeling and therefore carries the potential for genetic pollution on our landraces.
18. Whereas countries such as Japan, England, and countries in Africa have refused genetically modified foods and prohibit the introduction of GE crops on their lands because of their unknown health effects.
19. Whereas indigenous cultures around the world are the originators, developers, and owners of the original genetic material used in the genetic engineering of crops by corporations today.
20. Whereas this declaration must be a living, adaptable document that can be amended as needed in response to rapidly changing GE technology that brings about other potential assaults to seeds and our culture.
21. Be it resolved by the traditional farmers of Indo-Hispano and Native American ancestry of current-day northern New Mexico collectively and intentionally seek to continue the seed-saving traditions of our ancestors and maintain the landraces that are indigenous to the region of northern New Mexico.
22. Be it further resolved that we seek to engage youth in the continuation of the traditions of growing traditional foods, sharing scarce water resources, sharing seeds, and celebrating our harvests.
23. Be it further resolved that we reject the validity of corporations’ ownership claims to crops and wild plants that belong to our cultural history and identity.
24. Be it further resolved that we believe corporate ownership claims of landrace crop genomes and patent law represent a legal framework for the justification of the possession and destruction of stolen cultural property.
25. Be it further resolved that we object to the seed industry’s refusal to label seeds or products containing GE technology and ingredients and demand all genetically modified seeds and foods containing GE ingredients in the State of New Mexico to be labeled as such.
26. Be it further resolved that we consider genetic modification and the potential contamination of our landraces by GE technology a continuation of genocide upon indigenous people and as malicious and sacrilegious acts toward our ancestry, culture, and future generations.
27. Be it further resolved that we object to the cultivation of GE seeds in general but especially within range of our traditional agricultural systems that can lead to the contamination of our seeds, wild plants, traditional foods, and cultural property.
28. Be it further resolved that we will work with each other, local, tribal, and state governments to create zones that will be free of genetically engineered and transgenic organisms.
29. Be it further resolved that we will also work together to address other environmental abuses that contaminate our air, soil, and water quality that certainly affects our health, the health of our seeds and agriculture, and the health of future generations.
30. Be it further resolved that the undersigned traditional farmers representing various acequia, Pueblo, tribal, and surrounding communities will create, support, and collaborate toward projects and programs focused on revitalization of food traditions, agriculture, and seed saving and sharing.

Drafted by the Traditional Native American Farmers’ Association (TNAFA) and the New Mexico Acequia Association (NMAA) in January, February, and March 2006.

GUEST BLOG: Alvaro Huerta on 'Toxic Twins' - 1070 and BP Catastrophes

Arizona Meet BP

By ALVARO HUERTA

What does the State of Arizona have in common with BP, the British global energy corporation?  Well, let me count the ways….

First, both have been spewing toxins into America’s environment since late April.  In the case of Arizona, on April 23rd, Governor Jan Brewer signed into law an unconstitutional and racist measure (SB 1070), whereby criminalizing undocumented workers and legalizing racial profiling against Latinos.  As for BP, on April 20th, this corporate mammoth, in the spirit of the “drill-baby-drill” chorus, caused the largest oil leak disaster since the infamous Exxon Valdez oil spill over two decades ago.

Secondly, both have been grossly inaccurate regarding their data to rationalize their claims.  The supporters of Arizona’s immigration law, for example, argue that since undocumented workers account for the “rise of crime” in this state, the state government had no choice but to pass a law aimed at curtailing these so-called criminals.  Yet, recent reports show that crime has actually declined in the desert state and the cheerleaders of this draconian law have yet to produce any legitimate data correlating recent immigrants with crime.

On the contrary, recent research shows that undocumented immigrants on average commit less crime than native-born Americans, especially once we take into account for age, gender and other factors to make valid comparisons.  We need to compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges. For example, if we know that recent immigrants are younger (and most likely male) compared to Americans, then we can’t compare these two groups equally when it comes to crime, especially since we know that young people are more likely to commit a crime than older folks.

Writing for the American Conservative magazine in a recently published essay, Ron Unz does an excellent job of examining the complex nature of Latinos (and other groups) vis-à-vis crime rates where he analyzes hard data to debunk myths perpetuated by Republicans and others in this country about the so-called Latino immigrant menace.  Despite being a leading force against bilingual education in California in the 1990s, Unz actually puts his Harvard and Stanford educational background to some good use by closely examining the complex relationships between ethnic groups (whites included) and crime in this country.

As for BP, when the corporation first estimated the magnitude of the oil leak, corporate officials dramatically underreported the amount of oil being released daily in the ocean and, consequently, U.S. states in the Gulf of Mexico.  For instance, corporate officials, according to news agencies, originally calculated the leak 5,000 barrels (210,000 gallons) per day, while U.S. Government officials estimated it at 12,000-19,000 barrels (504,000 to 798,000 gallons) per day.  Other scientists, based on video evidence, have estimated it at 70,000 to 100,000 per day.

Thirdly, the actions of both the Arizona government and BP corporate leaders have caused more economic hardship for the residents of the already economically depressed regions.  In the case of Arizona, the growing national boycotts against this financially struggling state have resulted in the loss of revenue (both current and future) that will further damage the fragile economy caused by the housing crises, loss of jobs, credit crises and, overall, current recession.

This includes major cities (and counties) like Los Angeles and other municipalities officially joining the economic boycott against this racist state, in addition to countless individuals, trade groups, unions and others that have already canceled reservations and vacation trips.  These collective actions represent a major blow to a state that depends heavily on out-of-state business and tourists to support the local economies, especially in tourism where hotels, spa resorts, restaurants and gift shops depend on outsiders to spend money and consume goods.

In the case of BP, the massive oil leak, which apparently will continue to spew oil until late this summer, has resulted in another financial blow to Louisiana’s local economy, not to mention other Southern states like Alabama.  Still recovering from the hurricane Katrina disaster, Louisiana and its residents in particular now face the ecological and financial consequences of this ongoing oil leak.  For instance, for those who depend on revenue from the fishing industry for commercial and recreational purposes, this uncontrollable oil leak amounts to financial hardship for decades to come.

Lastly, in both cases, the Obama Administration has failed to act swiftly and decisively to resolve these human-made disasters.  In the case of Arizona, President Obama has used mild words to condemn this racist law. When a racist cop arrested Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.—a renowned African American scholar—at his home last year, Obama originally used the word “stupidly” in describing this incident, yet in the case of the racist immigrant law in Arizona, he used the word “misguided.”

As a former constitutional law professor and, now, the most powerful person in the world, Obama should deliver a legal viewpoint and moral condemnation of a law that goes back to the dark days of Jim Crow during the mid-20th century with legalized racism.  Apart from shunning Governor Jan Brewer—the modern day version of the late Alabama Governor George C. Wallace who strongly defended segregation—Obama should take a bold position against this rogue state government and its disregard for the humane treatment of immigrants and racial equality.  This immigration law not only violates federal law, for example, since the federal government ultimately overseas immigration enforcement, but also creates a new round of civil rights violations in this country against a particular racial group: Latinos.

As for BP, the Obama Administration has also been too slow regarding the out of control oil leak.  From the start, Obama should’ve been on the ground to put pressure on BP and, by a particular juncture, should’ve taken full control of the operations to fix the leak (and corporate assets) since the London-based corporation doesn’t appear to be capable of stopping it anytime soon and may renege on paying for all economical and environmental incurred costs.  This is the same corporation that didn’t have an adequate back-up plan in place to either prevent or quickly stop this type of leak.  This is the same corporation that took the risk in the first place to extract oil at an unprecedented 5,000 feet under water. This is the same corporation that hasn’t been fully transparent about the magnitude of this leak and long term dangers to the impacted ecosystem.

To be fair to Obama, however, this type of offshore drilling comes from the pro-big energy, Bush-Cheney Administration.  Not only have Republicans (and now more conservative Democrats) been more than willing to explore for offshore oil at any cost, but the regulatory agencies responsible for preventing or minimizing disasters of this scale in the first place have been too cozy and in cahoots with mega-oil corporations like BP and others.

In short, in order to stop racist laws and disastrous oil leaks from occurring in this country, the federal government, in conjunction with the public, needs to take more proactive and aggressive measures to prevent state governments and corporate officials from spewing pollutants into our environment, resulting in both short and long term disastrous costs.

Moderator's Note: We gratefully acknowledge the original source of this entry as Counterpunch. Alvaro Huerta is a doctoral student at UC Berkeley. He can be reached at: ahuerta@berkeley.edu

GEO WATCH: Haitian farmers burn Monsanto seeds

Shoreline, WA.  Structural violence in agrifood systems does not necessarily involve the spread of genetically-engineered organisms (GEOs). Instead, agricultural "bioinvasions" continue to involve a wide range of "hybrid" varieties with equally dangerous qualities and impacts. According to a May 17 report from Food Freedom, a grassroots organization of Haitian small farmers has rejected more than 60,000 pounds of hybrid corn and tomato seeds donated by Monsanto.

The entry of the Monsanto seeds is seen as “a very strong attack on small agriculture, on farmers, on biodiversity, on Creole seeds…, and on what is left [of] our environment in Haiti,” the report quotes Chavannes Jean-Baptiste, the Executive Director of MPP (Peasant Movement of Papay) and the spokesperson for the National Peasant Movement of the Congress of Papay (MPNKP). 

According to the report, the non-GEO hybrid corn seeds Monsanto donated to Haiti are treated with the fungicide Maxim XO and the calypso tomato seeds are treated with thiram. According to the EPA (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency),  thiram belongs to a highly toxic class of chemicals called ethylene bisdithiocarbamates (EBDCs). Results of tests of EBDCs on mice and rats caused sufficient concern that the EPA ordered a special review that determined EBDC-treated plants are so dangerous to agricultural workers that they must wear special protective clothing when handling them. 

In a classic protest action, the Haitian farmers burned the seeds in an act of defiance against the global seed monopolist.  These actions come in the midst of a deep enduring crisis that Haitians have been subjected to by means of a relentless series of foreign interventions, the use of martial law, military coups, and dictatorships imposed on the people by the USA and other empires.

In April 2008, Haitians mobilized six straight days of "foot rioting" to resist the structural violence that has oppressed this island nation-state ever since a heroic "slave revolt" propelled the Western Hemisphere's second anti-colonialist revolution (1791); second, that is, to the American Revolution (1776). Haiti may be the second oldest independent nation in the hemisphere but it is also the poorest. More than 80 percent of the population lives on less than $2/day. According to UN data, cited in a 2008 UK Guardian report, the typical adult diet consists of just 1,640 calories - 640 less than the average adult requirement. Haitians have grown tired of subsisting on what has become the common "starvation" diet: clay, salt, and vegetable shortening.

Marginality as Inventive Force

Fast-growing plants and used tires in a demonstration garden of the Peasant Movement of Papay. Haiti's movement of small farmer advocates ecological agriculture as well as policies which protect both the environment and local production. Photo: Roberto (Bear) Guerra

It may seem odd, then, to the casual outside observer, that the Haitian farmers are rejecting "free seed." However, the Haitian farmers know better: They understand that seed sovereignty - the ability for the farmer and plant breeder to save seeds and adapt their native crops over generations to changing local ecological conditions - is an essential factor in the struggle for food justice and agricultural resilience.

Haitians have learned through direct lived experience that they cannot rely on humanitarian aid to meet their food and nutritional needs.  In April 2008, after the food riots, the World Food Programme (WFP) made an emergency appeal for donations for Haiti. Weeks later, the UN aid agency had received only 13 percent of the $96m (£48m) necessary for its Haitian program. Indeed, much of Haitian activism has focused on the restoration of the island's local agrifood systems that are often undermined by the very humanitarian aid that seeks to ameliorate suffering. 

Among the more fascinating responses of the Haitian people has been the resurgence of efforts to restore the ecological agriculture that peasants constructed in the shadow of the French colonial sugar plantations. In a recent report on this resurgent agroecology, blogger Beverly Bell of the WIP project summarizes the approach of the Haitian peasant farmers movement:

The farmers maximize the productivity of small pieces of land in ways which sustain, rather than exhaust, it. They use all natural resources efficiently in bio-loops. They germinate seedlings inside of discarded tires and use other inventive gardening methodology. They are growing fast-growing plants which yield harvests in six weeks, in addition to other organic vegetables and medicinal plants. Their goats, rabbits, and chickens consume kitchen and garden waste and, from it, produce manure which is then used as fertilizer. Compost serves as additional fertilizer. The operation also involves draining gray water from kitchens and showers, and running it through several ponds filled with sand, gravel, and charcoal; with the cleaned water that emerges, they breed fish and irrigate gardens. MPP also employs cisterns, gravity-fed irrigation, and other catchment and watering systems to conserve and maximize water during dry season.

The inspiring resurgence of place-based agroecological practices in Haiti has never seemed more important or timely.  In the aftermath of the 12 January 2010 earthquake, much of the country's infrastructure, including an agrifood system that was already in a frail dilapidated state, was destroyed or badly damaged. This presents an opportunity to remake the local agrifood system on the basis of a more just, equitable, and ecologically resilient path. 

It is our hope and expectation that the Haitians will successfully deploy the full force of their creativity and heritage as independent small-holder farmers to restore their agrifood system and reach their goals of autonomy and environmental justice. The lessons for the two-thirds world will be significant and represent an alternative to continued dependence on ecologically and culturally inappropriate imported technologies like Monsanto's "free seeds" or stingy humanitarian aid that does little to resolve problems rooted in structural violence and intergenerational historical trauma.