GUEST BLOG: Estevan Arellano on Cabañuelas

Cabañuelas:  Jewish and Mayan Meteorology Traditions Combined

Juan Estevan Arellano

Before there was TV or radio, people used to rely on nature, the stars, sun and other natural phenomena to better understand when to plant or how much seed to commit to the soil. Part of that knowledge is embedded in the system known to New Mexicans as “reading” the cabañuelas.

For the early settlers that braved the “Jornada del Muerto,” or Journey of the Dead, from Mexico to northern New Mexico in 1598, it wasn’t simply a matter of finding good soil and water to plant in order to survive, it also meant learning to understand nature and its environs and applying the knowledge they brought with them to a new site. After all the sun, the moon, the stars were all the same and the arid landscape was similar to that of Mexico, Spain and the Middle East.

This knowledge of place, or querencia, ran through their blood, they also had this empirical knowledge of the weather, a knowledge that is basically oral.

“January has the secret of all twelve months,” or so says an old proverb in Spanish. Or it could be that the month is August, depending on what part of the Spanish-speaking world one lives in. For here the dicho is referring to the reading of the cabañuelas, which people still “read” to predict the weather for the coming year.

But they were also pragmatic, that is, they had to rely on the cabañuelas from someone who was a real farmer, not simply an arm chair observer, for they say hombre lunero no llena granero (men who spend too much time observing the moon, don’t fill up the granery), o labrador con mucha astronomía en eso se pasa el día (or farm laborer who spends his time in astronomy, in the meantime the day goes by). Before there was TV or radio people used to rely on nature, the stars, sun and other natural phenomena to better understand when to plant or how much seed to commit to the soil.

And though a lot of the refranes, sayings, are part of our Arab past, most have now become Christianized, that is, most now refer to the Christian calendar, though the knowledge was embedded in the Calendario de Córdoba, Calendario anónoimo andalusí, and the Tratado de los meses of Ibn Asimor and other calendars such as those from Yemen. For example, garlic is usually planted by San Martín, or the 11th of November, fabas usually by San Lucas, 18th of October, and the winter vegetables should be transplanted by Santiago, July 25th.

January comes from the pagan god, Janus, which signifies “door,” from the separation of space and time (eones, from the Greek aion). It usually has two faces, the past and the future, sometimes a face of a man and that of a woman, or the duality of nature. Farmers would look to the moon, when it was a quarter moon, to look for answers and to whether it would rain or not.

If the quarter moon would be on its belly it meant it would be dry but if the moon was tipped towards the bottom it meant it would rain. Or in the winter if there was a flock of crows hovering real close to the ground, and crowing, it meant a snow storm was on its way. Then people were very observant of nature because understanding nature could mean the difference between  a good harvest or a lean winter.

At the beginning of the New Year there was usually some individual in the village who could “read” what is known as cabañuelas, or predicting the weather for the whole year. In general the cabañuelistas don’t want rain at the beginning of the year for it’s a bad omen, for they say that the cabañuela “se vacia,” o “se revienta,” that is, that the cabañuela “empties,” or “bursts.”

Before people would be very observant of their surrounding, they would take into account the color of the sky when the sun was going down in the west. If the color of the sky was light pink, a pale yellow or grayish, it usually signified a change in the weather. But if the sky is an intense blue, it signifies heavy winds in the upper atmosphere.

Outdoors, if the goats are eating and moving rapidly it means an impending storm is coming and if the cows lie down to eat, it means a rain storm is on its way. If the cat is washing his face or if the frogs croak louder than usual, that usually means rain. In the summer if the roses smell more intense, it means there is a low pressure but if the smoke spirals straight up in winter it signifies atmospheric stability.

Changes in the weather are usually observed by paying attention to the barn animals; if the rooster sings at midday,  or the barn animals are very tranquil, or people have pain in the joints changes in the weather are coming; and when the cats are running and jumping all of a sudden expect wind.

And when we delve into how the weather was predicted in the past, the cabañuelas, we have to reach back into our Sephardic past, since they are Jewish in origin. Cabañuelas is a festival of Jews in Toledo celebrated in August in memory of the 40 days they spent in the desert known as the feast of the Tabernacles or of the cabañuelas. But here in the Americas the Cabañuelas became Americanized; that is, they were influenced by the Mayas.  Cabañuelas seems to be exclusive to the Spanish speaking world, from Spain, the Canary Islands to northern New Mexico to Mexico, and Cuba, they observe this tradition. Generally, a great variety of climate is observed at the beginning of the year and people have adopted a way of prognosticating the weather.

In parts of Spain, including the Canary Islands, the cabañuelas are still observed in the month of August, with the first of the month known as, “llave del año,” or the “key to the year.” Agriculturalists think that the first of January, or August, depending when the cabañuelas are read, give a glimpse as to what the weather will be for the upcoming year. Then the cabañuelas are started on the second of  January or August, with that date representing January, the third February, the fourth March until the 13th represents December.

To “read” the Cabañuelas copious notes are needed, if not written mental ones should be taken, during the month of January, or August (how they were done originally). The first day of the month then represents January the “key to the year,” the second is January, and so on until you get to the 13th, which represents December. Then you start counting backyards, that is, the 14th represents December, the 15th November, until you get to the 25th, which is January.

Then the 26th represents January and February, 12 hours for each day. The 27th  March and April, and so on, until the 31th represented November and December. But if the first is not observed as “llave del año,” then the 31st is broken into two hours to represent each month.

Now let’s look at a sample cabañuelas:

         “Llave del año,” key to the year, Jan. 1st. Since the wind blew all day from the north, this cabañuela is considered very negative; therefore a bad year.

         January: Second of January, windy, moisture in the morning, represents a very dry cabañuela.

         February: 3rd of January, swift wind, towards noon wind shifted north, normal month. There’s a saying that reads, “febrero loco, marzo poco,” February is very unpredictable and March is sort of the same.”

         March: 4th of January, bad weather, north wind, very dry.

         April: 5th of January, same as before, windy and dry, not much of a chance for rain.

         May: 6th of January, uncertain cabañuela, bad sign.

         June: 7th of January, easterly wind most of the day, good omen.

         July: 8th of January, another bad day, windy and dry, not much hope of rain.

         August: 9th of January, another bad month, same as the previous day.

         September: 10th of January, regular, morning not much wind.

         October: 11th of January, good but no rain.

         November: 12th of January, dry, bad cabañuela, sunny all day.

         December: 13th of January, same as the day before.

If the first of January is not observed as “llave del año,” or “key to the year,” then the cabañuelas can start on the first of the year. But in order to understand the cabañuelas, or to “read” them properly the person has to know where the wind is coming from. During cabañuelas if the rastrojo or stubble on the fields is “correoso” flexible or leathery in the morning, it means clouds; if the grapes are moist, it signifies cold.

The cabañuelas are a system of predicting the weather for the forth coming year of an experimental basis, based on observation, nothing scientific, but usually very accurate. They can also be said to be a ritual of creation and regeneration for they are based on the vast amount of knowledge that the agriculturalist has about his space, especially his individual micro climate, his querencia. Example, the cabañuelas for Taos will not be the same as those for Santa Fe or Albuquerque, much less Las Cruces. Cabañuelas apply only to the micro climate where the individual agriculturalist is reading them and it takes years and generations passed on orally to acquire this knowledge.

But it was not only the Jews, the Muslims or Christians who kept track of the cabañuelas, as noted earlier the Muslims had their “almanaques,” or calendars, while the Christians followed the Jewish tradition of the cabañuelas only they substituted Saints days.

Meanwhile the Mayans call the Cabañuelas Chac-chac, and they are observed in the same manner. The months from January to December is known as Xoc-kin, and from December to January Ualak-xoe. The Cabañuelas are kept to predict how the weather will be, and that way the farmers will know when it will rain or be dry, when it will be hot or cold. It is believed that in prehispanic Mexico the Aztecs adopted this knowledge from the Mayas, which was later adopted into the Christian calendar. This was based on an oral tradition; example, if the 9th of January reads as it being cloudy, temperate, showers, someone will probably say, “we are in the cabañuela of September.” Then the following day might be windy, kind of cold, someone will then explain, “we are in the cabañuela of October.”

The system is kind of complicated. Let’s take for example the month of June; we know that the month is represented by the 6th and 19th of January; the afternoon and night of the 27th and the hours of 12 noon to 1:59 in the afternoon of the 31st. This way we will be able to know when it will rain, which months will be the hottest, when it will be cold, when it will freeze.

It must be kept in mind that the cabañuelas do not fail us, it’s us who do not fully understand them in order to interpret them. The word cabañuelas comes from “cabin,” since the Jews were in search of the Promised Land for after 40 years in the desert they became very observant of which years the cows were lean and when they were fat. In some parts of the Spanish speaking world there are the Cabañuelas de Santa Lucía, observed from the 13th of December to the 6th of January.

For the urban folk, talking about cabañuelas is something exotic which they can’t relate to, while those in smaller cities might have heard of the term, but for sure those in rural areas are familiar at least with the word if nothing else. For no one knows exactly where the term came from, but it is believed it came from Zamuc, or “Fiesta de las Suertes,” the feast of luck, from the Babylonian calendar, which in Jewish translates to the “Fiesta of the Tabernacle.”

GEO Watch: 'Climate-Ready' Transgenics

Moderator's note: We are sharing an important October 25, 2010 press release from the incomparable ETC (Erosion, Technology, Conservation) Group, formerly known as RAFI (Rural Advancement Foundation International).  The ETC Group is one of the most important organizations dedicated to comprehensive global monitoring of legal and technological developments in the commercial agricultural biotechnology sector (transgenics). We will be posting their press releases and summarize some of their reports as a recurring feature of our GEO Watch series.

ETC Group
Embargo 25 October 2010 3:00 am (EST)
www.etcgroup.org


Surge in Corporate Patents on “Climate-Ready” Crops
Threatens Biodiversity and Signals Grab on Land and Biomass

   
Nagoya, Japan.   Under the guise of developing “climate-ready” crops, the world’s largest seed and agrochemical corporations are filing hundreds of sweeping, multi-genome patents in a bid to control the world’s plant biomass, according to a report released by ETC Group today.

A handful of multinational corporations are pressuring governments to allow what could become the broadest and most dangerous patent claims in history, warns the group at the United Nations’ Convention on Biodiversity in Nagoya, Japan (18-29 October 2010).

“The Gene Giants are stockpiling patents that threaten to put a choke-hold on the world’s biomass and our future food supply,” warns Silvia Ribeiro of ETC Group. “The breadth of many patent claims on climate ready crop genes is staggering. In many cases, a single patent or patent application claims ownership of engineered gene sequences that could be deployed in virtually all major crops – as well as the processed food and feed products derived from them,” explains Ribeiro.

ETC Group identifies over 262 patent families, subsuming 1663 patent documents published worldwide (both applications and issued patents) that make specific claims on environmental stress tolerance in plants (such as drought, heat, flood, cold, salt tolerance). DuPont, Monsanto, BASF, Bayer, Syngenta and their biotech partners account for three-quarters (77%) of the patent families identified. Just three companies – DuPont, BASF, Monsanto – account for over two-thirds of the total. Public sector researchers hold only 10%.

“In a desperate bid for moral legitimacy and to try to ease public acceptance of genetically modified crops, the Gene Giants have donated a few proprietary crop genes to poor farmers in Africa,” explains Ribeiro.

“The quid pro quo is that South governments must facilitate market access for genetically modified crops and embrace biotech-friendly patent laws. It’s an unacceptable trade-off.  In exchange for untested technologies, South governments are being pressured to surrender national sovereignty over intellectual property, biomass, and food,” she warned.

“These patents are the latest form of biopiracy,” notes Vandana Shiva, Director of India’s Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology. “Farmers have bred seeds for drought, flood and salt tolerance over millennia. Climate resilience ultimately depends on farmers’ innovation, biodiversity and agro-ecological processes staying in the hands of farming communities,” said Shiva.

“Governments meeting at the UN Biodiversity Convention in Nagoya, Japan must put a stop to the patent grab, yet another false solution to climate change. They should instruct their patent offices to reject or rescind all of these patents,” said ETC Group’s Neth Daño, who is attending the meeting. “A fundamental review of all intellectual property claims in agriculture should be jointly undertaken by the CBD and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). These patents also clearly violate the FAO Seed Treaty and its governing body must investigate and take action.”

ETC Group’s report Gene Giants Stockpile Patents on “Climate-Ready” Crops in Bid to Become Biomassters will be released and discussed at a side event in Nagoya, Japan on 25 October (4:30 pm, Room 236, Bldg 2, 3rd floor).


Contact information for ETC Group (NOTE DIFFERENT TIME ZONES)
At the CBD in Nagoya, Japan:

Pat Mooney: mooney@etcgroup.org (Mobile +1-613-240-0045)
Silvia Ribeiro: silvia@etcgroup.org (Mobile (local): + 81 90 5036 4659)
Neth Dano: neth@etcgroup.org (Mobile: + 63-917-532-9369)
In Montreal, Canada:
Diana Bronson: diana@etcgroup.org (Mobile: +1-514-629-9236)
Jim Thomas: jim@etcgroup.org (Mobile: +1 514-516-5759)
In San Francisco, USA
Jeff Conant: jefeconant@gmail.com (Mobile: +1 575 770 2829)

TURTLE ISLAND FIRST FOODS - I: tuwaduq

Heritage foods celebrated at Skokomish 

Moderator’s Note: Two weekends ago, Elaine and I attended "First Foods Ceremony" at tuwaduqhL sidakW (Great Salt Water of the tuwaduq, the People), the village at the southern end of "Hood Canal" on the Skokomish Reservation in Washington's Olympic Peninsula. We were guests of Skokomish elder, sm3tcoom, (a.k.a. Delbert Miller) and his beautiful extended family, kin and all relations, and friends. I hope this narrative, based on my memory of the event tempered by wise counsel from sm3tcoom, respectfully conveys the spiritual, cultural, political, and ecological significance on a day of shared conviviality, wholeness, and wellness. sm3tcoom graciously granted permission to post this blog entry as the first in a series envisioned on "Turtle Island First Foods."

Longhouse echoes story of Burnt Hill

tuwaduqhL sidakW.  Winona brought me to my place at the table. Four generations seated together. The ceremony was held inside the "Beautiful Woman" Longhouse. We had a wonderful warm and sunny day for the entire event. The Skokomish First Foods Ceremony is held every year to pay respect to the autonomous and deep foodways of Native peoples of the Pacific Northwest and especially the Coast Salish cultures of the Puget Sound Bioregion.

The ceremony began with sm3tcoom sharing a story. He calls this story "Burnt Hill." "Burnt Hill."  He recited this in his mother tongue and then English. These are a few of the phrases he spoke that cling to me like a strong relative hugging me with sacred memories of place:

This is the story of Burnt Hill...Burnt Hill...You might imagine that this Burnt Hill is a place of devastation and sadness. But it is place of rebirth and renewal. Before you know it, the medicine plants return. On bare burnt ground you soon notice the berry vines crawling across the land. The alder trees return.

For me, this is a story of resistance and renewal. I feel hope for resurgence in the aftermath of devastation and destruction. It is a story of new beginnings and the power of life to return to shattered places. It is a quintessentially Native American story of resilience and continuity. We are not ghosts of the primitive accumulation. Here is the life source. You cannot destroy that which is older than human memory. That is the deep truth of this sacred ceremony. 

I thought of the University of Washington campus, that citadel of advanced knowledge and learning on the hill. The UW is also a Burnt Hill and the campus was constructed after seven longhouses were burned down as part of "Indian Removal" policies to make way for the forceful and violent occupiers. We are still waiting for a longhouse to be rebuilt at UW. We work toward the return of the longhouses and First Foods Ceremony convened for and by Native peoples.

Through the sharing of the six sacred foods, we connected to the entire world around us, all organisms and beings, woven into webs of mutual reliance and recognition. I learned that each of the First Foods we shared at the tables may be accompanied by a song that celebrates the presentation and sharing of each elemental part of the meal.

We opened with Water, the most sacred of all First Foods. Each of us sitting at the two long tables, and those gathered around benches set along the walls, had a drink of water. This was glacial melt and spring water from Olympic Mountain streams carried by water bearers to the coastal village down below. I drink and think of the threats of acid mine drainage; The dams with their lethal sediments, warmer temperatures, and brutal obstinate posture before the natural migrations of the salmon; The pollution from urban run-off, corporate agriculture, white-flight suburban sprawl, abandoned factories and their unrelenting brown fields. 

I think of how these abuses and insane behaviors have not destroyed the people’s commitment to the defense of the source of this life-giving liquid. I think also of the new threats posed by climate change, induced by the same crazy capitalist habit of never-ending “economic growth” always accompanied by the destruction of biological and cultural diversity, the Earth and its care-giving inhabitants.

Second was Salmon. We ate the sweet buttery flesh of alderwood-smoked salmon caught by tribal fishers in rivers and bays. I think of the Boldt decision, Frank’s Landing, and the never-ending struggle to protect the environment since this is one way to exercise the sovereign treaty rights of First Nations to the means of their ancestral livelihoods and cultural survival. This is part of the struggle to protect and restore salmon habitat so they can preserve this First Food without endangering their health. 

The third was Elk. The meat was smoky, moist, and caramelized sweetness, its wildness unadulterated by chemicals and most certainly blessed by the hunters' prayers and gentle kiss of alderwood planks. I thought of the struggle to maintain hunting rights across North America and beyond. I thought of the enclosure of ancestral tribal lands, the tragedy of the commoner displaced from her ancestral homeland. 

Camas was the fourth of the First Foods presented at ceremony. The camas bulb has its family of gatherers and they know the best places to go for this sacred “survivor food.” They learned from the great grandmothers generations before. The bulbs were boiled soft and the thumb-sized root was sweet and pasty. I thought of my youthful years eating mesquite pods in South Texas from the old tree in my grandmother’s backyard kitchen garden. That was our survivor food before the mesquite became the fetish wood of barbeque chefs and their acolytes across the world, endangering the oldest trees in our brush country. 

Geoduck was the next First Food, our fifth, to be presented and shared. Specific families gather this shellfish in traditional marshlands of the Great Salt Water. The "gooey" ducks were tender and tasted of sea salt and seaweed. For some reason I thought of el torito de la virgen, the “Little Bull of the Virgin [of Guadalupe].” This is an endangered native reptile of South Texas brush country. As kids we would catch these critters and flip them on their back. We'd tickle them and their shape looked like the oval profile of the Virgin!  The presence of the horned toad in our backyard landscape was for my Grandmother a sure sign that things were good and everything in balance. Like the torito del la virgen, the geoduck is an “indicator species,” as ecologists like to put it. The abundant and uncontaminated presence of this shellfish is an indicator of overall ecosystem health. I quietly wonder: El torito and the geoduck, are they safe?

The sixth First Food was the Huckleberry. The wild berries were gathered from unceded autonomous lands. They were presented fresh and naturally sweet, after cooling down from a slow tender boil. I thought of the Trail of Broken Treaties. Native rights to huckleberry harvests in Washington State have been constantly threatened and interrupted by conflict and intrusion by non-Native and commercial harvesters. Forest Service policies have disrupted traditional resource management practices. I think of critics who argue that federal land management policies have favored the economics of exploitation and allowed new interloping actors to degrade huckleberry habitat while reducing Native peoples' roles in ecological "stewardship."  

Native people assert that Original Instructions are more a matter of mutual obligations that bind people to place than any human-directed form of "scientific management." This has been the case with the obligations that First Nations have for the huckleberry patches on enclosed ancestral lands that are for now in the federal public domain. This includes national forests and national parks. Federal Indian Law [sic] establishes that Native peoples have traditional resource rights to sustain their own autonomous livelihoods through access to "public" lands; First Nations did not cede these rights just because the invaders relied on unscrupulous enclosures of ancestral home lands and the legal codification of these violent acts of primitive accumulation.

The deep sources of tuwaduq food sovereignty 

Water, Salmon, Elk, Camas, Geoduck, Huckleberry. This collection of First Foods is what I mean to describe when I use the phrase, "Local, slow, and deep."

Each of these First Foods is recognized as a gift of the Creator. Each has a "deep history" and a Native "deep ecology" (ethics) that emerges from this specific place-based history.  Each has recognized and valued spiritual and medicinal qualities. In the ecosystem, food is already medicine. We do not need to have our plant and animal medicine presented to us as transgenic pharmfood or nutriceuticals.

Each First Food is gathered, collected, fished, or hunted by particular families. These families have inherited across countless generations a full range of skills and practices required for a living relationship with these original foods. One would be in error to call this a "division of labor." Nothing is divided. All these are deeply rooted and interwoven working practices of communal responsibility in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

What struck me the most about tuwaduq First Food Ceremony is something hard to put into English. It is something that comes fairly close to "democratic," but that does not quite get at the depth of social webs and authority relations that weave everyone together across generations in place. Conviviality? Perhaps, but only in the sense of a free association of living beings sharing a common purpose defined by Original Instructions (rules for ecosystem resilience) that have come with living lightly and rightly in Home Place for such a long time.

To say there is an abiding sense of respect for elders is not enough either. This is more than an abiding sense of respect for elders. Anyone can respect her grandmother. This is more. When your grandmother was stolen and taken away to a boarding school to be raped and beaten, and she survived by singing ever louder inside her head the songs of her people in the ancestral tongue, what you feel for grandma is something more than just "respect."

I cannot name this because my grandmother did not face such extreme tribulations. I have met and known Native Americans who have had to confront and sublate the genealogy of structural violence and inter-generational historical trauma. They invariably accomplish this through the resurgence of a quietly enduring urge to embody respectful consideration of the knowledge and needs of past, present and future generations. "Seventh generation sense" is what Native people call this deeply moral sentiment.

These ceremonies are important as events for inter-generational self-organization and the community's collective exercise of "tribal" sovereignty here and now and not in some still-to-be adjudicated distant future (mis)defined by courts while the servants of capitalist hegemons mediate the unending disputes over treaty violations. Living autonomy. Scares the living daylights out of most hegemons. Think persecution of the Ghost Dancers.

Ceremonies are significant for reasons other than those having to do with "symbolic politics" or "healing rituals." These are important facets. But ceremony is already the autonomous practice of an alterNative rationality. It is already the "alternative" for the continuation of a multigenerational way of life that takes the community "back to the future" and beyond death-trap consumption of toxic mass-produced foods proffered by a Super-Sized social food order and its global commodity chains that bring violence against environmental space to every place.

Ceremony is the daily lived practice of the Skokomish people as enduring constituents of their own power in the exercise of their sovereignty. First Foods are the constitutive force that nurtures this sovereignty because the sacred six are rooted in deep histories of cultural practices that are much, much older than any European barley fields. They directly connect people to the ecological sources of right livelihoods. 

While some anthropologists may celebrate the Skokomish way of the First Foods as evidence of biocultural complexity and resilience, wrong-headed critics may allege that these ceremonies at best represent a hapless, destructive relapse into a sullen wave of frenzied ineffective nostalgia and a delusional fetish for a disappeared way of life that is perhaps best delegated to the dust-bin of history by the presumed post-humanist brave new world of transgenics, nanotechnology, and artificial life.

But it is the post-humanist dream of a transcended mortality through transgenics and nanotech that is unstable and fractured; it lacks resilience. Recent research by molecular biologists confirms that the fractured genomes of transgenic plants are highly unstable. While this could mean that the instability of transgenes might limit their persistence in the environment or host genomes,  it also means that the farmer on the rDNA treadmill will never become independent of the Monsantos of the world that profit by keeping farmers and seeds prisoners inside the endless R&D pipeline that cranks out these genetically-engineered little monsters like so many product innovations.

Food is Life. It is Ceremony. It should be Local, Slow, and Deep. It should be respected and not subject to imprisonment in the wooden-headed commodity form that the money-making, life-destroying, and soul-impoverishing machine tries to fabricate from forced labor (human, plant, animal) and speculative thin air (patents). We must rebuke the profit-making pathology of necrophiliac capitalist desire as it pertains to the commodification of food.

If someone is guilty of misplaced nostalgia it is more rational to point at the biotechnologists or "gene engineers" themselves. They remain perhaps unconsciously wed to the oldest of all Judeo-Christian religious traditions and seem to believe, or at least perpetuate, the myth that the Promised Land lays just ahead of all the damned and violent craziness. 

Only in this version it is not some mythic angry sky God but the latest mythic "technological fix" that we are asked to believe will deliver us from evil, hunger, poverty, climate change, and every thing else that confronts us with extinction and degraded lives. This belief forgets that the dilemmas facing Earth are results of the long march of history of a vain and greedy search for technical solutions to challenges that actually have to be understood, and respected, as embodying an appeal to biocultural complexity, and this is something one cannot genetically engineer.

For tuwaduq families at the place of Great Salt Water, the Promised Land is here now. It is already grounded in far millenniums and brought forth through the enduring Native memories of place. The promised land is not a technological utopia waiting to happen, if only scientists can get their ethics straight before the mighty and seductive power of capitalist greed. It is here and now in the local ecosystems that provide sustenance and habitat for the plants and animals that are the enduring sacred sources of First Foods. It is here and now in the tuwaduq Ceremony that commits a people to the path of resistance to fulfill the human obligations of the Original Instructions: Take Care of Your Mother.

La virgen de la abundancia

Spirituality, Heritage Cuisine, and Cultural Survival

Seattle, WA.  I do not often wax spiritual. On food matters, the most I am usually ready to concede are two interrelated ideas: (1) For wiser cultures, food is not just material or biophysical nourishment. (2) The cultural meaning and significance of food is as important to our health, nutrition, and well-being as the inherited and evolving practices of our cuisine that make it possible for us to benefit from the phytochemical, protein, fat, and caloric properties of what we eat.

Artists are often much more creative and effective at conveying these two ideas. There are plenty of nutritional scientists who have conducted innumerable studies that confirm these two assertions but their work is largely inaccessible and as a discourse is also highly disconnected from the cultural dimensions of food and nutrition.

I count chefs and cooks among these artists, and the best cookbooks do more than list recipes and explain techniques. The best cookbooks provide historical context and pay due respect to the cultural practices that give rise to specific cooking techniques.  With Native cuisine we have a long way to go to find many books that accomplish this. The early work of Gary Paul Nabhan, Gathering the Desert, comes to mind, but so too the classic work of Diane Kennedy including the recent iteration, My Mexico: A Culinary Odyssey with More than 320 Recipes.

Not "strictly" a "cookbook," although it is in more ways than the happenstance recipes, there is also the recent book by Carmen Tafolla and Ellen Riojas Clark, Tamales, Comadres and The Meaning of Civilization. Here is a delicious quote that captures the gist of this connection we make between culture and food:

So what do tamales and comadres have to do with civilization? Everything! Unwrap a delicious, steaming tamal from its corn shucks and you are unwrapping one of the keys to the survival of humans for the last 7,000 years in the Americas. Tamales have outlasted nations, flags, even languages. Our history and our stories are wrapped in those shucks.

I would like to see a cookbook that answers questions like this one: Why is "Indian Fry Bread" considered a Native food even if wheat flour, a key ingredient, was introduced by means of conquest and colonization? Or, why was amaranth banned by the Iberian colonizers but persists today in the form of wild relatives cooked during Lenten, the quelites of contemporary mestiza/o proletarian cuisine in New Mexico or Colorado?

I won't even attempt to begin to answer such complex questions here today. The existence of such foods, and their identification with both the roots of Native resistance and the menacing threats posed by obesity and diabetes, points to the significance of food as contradictory cultural signifier and historical force of change underlying the practical matters of human social organization and its attendant conflicts. This includes organizing the way we hunt, collect, or grow food; the way we prepare it for consumption (including for many Native peoples prayers of thanksgiving); and the way we eat and share it.

In the Pacific Northwest, Coast Salish people have "First Food" ceremonies that focus on: Water, Salmon, Elk, Deer, Camus, Geoduck, and Huckleberry. Each of these sacred foods, including water, the most sacred of all, has a song and prayer and becomes part of the ancestral iconography of the longhouses and smokehouses.

I wish to share an image by a collective of painters in Arizona. These artists work with canvas to bring out the mythological connections to heritage cuisines that people of Native origins continue to respect and abide by. It also represents a political statement against cultural extermination. The image below incorporates many of the foods - fruits and vegetables - gifted by Native peoples of the Americas to the rest of the world. The contemporary tragedy is that many Native people do not and cannot eat these food themselves. In this depiction of la virgencita, the struggle for food sovereignty is thereby incorporated into the struggle for spiritual autonomy.

The image of this beautiful painting speaks a thousand words on the connection between food and spirituality.  It is a collective work from "Artists Against Arizona 1070." I present, La Virgen de la Abundancia:

Making tamales, I suspect, is a lot like the expression of collective art and artwork. These are acts of conviviality and cultural survival. As Tafolla and Riojas Clark explain in describing their new book:

This book can best be described as a collaborative labor of love, which, just like a tamalada, requires laughter, tears, chisme, an intense amount of work, and a sense of wanting to feed a whole pueblo hungry to read about their culinary and historical hojas. It is a symbol of the giving our mothers and grandmothers did to feed us physically and spiritually. And if you wonder how this book came about, it was, very fittingly, out of that same sense of crazy comadrazgo and caring for the comunidad.

GUEST BLOG: Estevan Arellano on Chimayó Chile

Is Chimayó Chile unique?

Juan Estevan Arellano

Embudo, New Mexico. Lately, much has been written, discussed on radio programs, or featured in video documentaries about the controversy of GE (genetically-engineered) or GEO chile.  Sometimes instead of clarifying the issue, this discussion simply clouds it more. First, people don’t plant a different seed for green chile and red chile. Green chile is simply the unripened fruit of the chile plant, while red chile is when the pod is ripe.

I’ve also heard people say that they are planting chicos or growing posole. For me chicos and posole refer to a process for saving corn for use later in the season. Both, if you want to be traditional, come from the maíz Concho. Chicos are made when the corn is still tender, in the jilote or xilote stage, while posole is made from the same corn once it matures. A mature ear of corn is known as an elote. And one that has had all the kernels removed is simply an olote. 

But returning to the chile, I’ve heard experts (I am not one of them) say that there is a notable difference between the chile grown in Chimayó, from that grown in Embudo, or Velarde, Alcalde or Medanales. My opinion is different, I say that the majority of the chile grown in Chimayó, Embudo, Velarde, El Guique, Chamita, La Mesilla, what is known as the Española Valley, is all the same. All these people who say it is different, if they were to participate in a chile tasting, with each community represented, none would be able to tell the difference. I guess the name Española Valley chile is a better name.

When preparing chile, a lot has to do with the cook, especially the red chile, which can be prepared as chile caribe and can be made from chile en greña or pods, from chile molido (ground), or a combination - pods and ground. Then it also depends on whether one adds cumino, garlic or any other herb. So the cook definitely has a lot to do with how the chile turns out.

To grow chile, we first need watershed seed banks 

But let’s start with the seed, first there is not enough local, land race, open pollinated seed if someone wanted to plant 50 acres or 25 acres of “chile nativo.” Last year Loretta Sandoval and myself met with some people from the Santa Fe Alliance at the Embudo Community Center to talk about economic development, using the native crops as a starting point. But almost immediately we realized that we were putting the horse in front of the cart because there is not enough native chile and corn seed to supply all the farmers who want to grow these crops commercially.

So first, before we start talking about growing chile or maíz Concho commercially we have to grow enough seed. What we need are watershed seed banks. People in the past were cognizant of where their seeds came from, and they were usually talked about in terms of watersheds, or “aguas.” 

My mom, who grew chile until she died in her 80s, always saved her own seed but she was  always looking for ways to improve the crop and that entailed getting seeds “de los diferentes ríos,” from different rivers, or watersheds. She would say that at least every five years she had to infuse new seeds, from different waters, to those she grew in order to strengthen and grow better chile.

Since early in the season she would identify the pods that were growing bigger, were straight instead of all twisted, and she would mark the plant with a stick so no one would pick that pod. That pod would in essence be babied until it was harvested sometime before the first frost came. And if for some reason it wasn’t growing how she thought it should grow then she would harvest it green.

This philosophy that my mother had, and not only her but almost everyone that I remember goes against what some people say, that they have been growing the same seeds in the same piece of land for the past 400 years or 200 years. For me such statements are not factual and are misleading historically and probably also in terms of genetics.

Those who have raised animals know that you don’t keep the same bull, boar, or ram with the same cow, sow or ewe or else instead of getting healthy offspring, you will end with nothing but runts. The same with seeds, if you keep the same seeds without new genes, after five years the fruit or vegetables won’t be worth saving.

If the same chile seed would be used year after year for fifty years, the chile pods would be so tiny as to be worthless. That’s why I can’t understand when people say, “This seed has been in my family for 200 years and it has been planted in the same spot for 200 years."

That makes me wonder whether that person knows anything about history or thinks one is so dumb as to believe them. Recently I read, “This Chimayó chile has been grown for four hundred years in the same place.” 

First, there was no Chimayó, as we know it today 400 years ago. The only settlement, besides the Native American Pueblos, was at San Gabriel near present day Ohkay Owingeh (San Juan Pueblo). Santa Fe was barely getting started in 1610 as a Spanish government villa and the orders given to Peralta were to plant vineyards and olive groves, both Mediterranean crops that would not grow in such a harsh, cold environment. 

So a lot of today’s seed savers are inventing history to fit their illusions or dreams. More than likely, chile didn’t reach present day Chimayó until the mid 1700s (Plaza del Cerro was established in 1740) and there is no way of proving chile was planted immediately. Unless someone has written records that show an exact date when chile was planted, we have to be careful in giving a historical date to that which cannot be proven as fact.

I am of the opinion that all the chile planted in the Española Valley is related and more than likely a descendant of the first chile seeds brought by Obregón in 1580; but more than likely those brought by Oñate and the settlers that came with him. And since there were more Mexican Indians, Tlaxcaltecas, than Spaniards or Mestizos, who came in 1598, the chile seeds might have come with the Tlaxcaltecas since they were the agriculturalists.

But let’s not make claims that certain seeds have been growing in the same spot for hundreds of years because we know over the years they have been crossed with improved varieties. As early as the 1930s a grower from Dixon said his dad had brought chile seeds from California where he worked as a migrant to mix with his native chile because it was bigger.

Also, people have always practiced crop rotation, meaning that they would usually open up an alfalfa patch, and the first year or at most two years plant chile, then they would plant corn when the land had lost some of its strength. Why? Because if they were to plant corn immediately, all the energy would go into the stalks growing very tall but they would produce no corn. In Spanish they say, “se le fue en crecer.”

So they never used the same piece of land to plant one specific crop year after year, because as the late Cleofes Vigil would say, “la flor de la tierra se perdía,” the fertility of the soil would erode.

All I am saying is be skeptical of people who claim that their particular chile or corn variety has been grown in the same place for hundreds of years because that is not true. Also, it’s not true that a person, if one was to line up different chile specimens from the different villages, that they could tell which is Chimayó, versus Embudo, or Velarde, Alcalde or any other village.

For example, Chimayó and Embudo are both at around 6,000 ft. elevation, both have same type of sandy loam soil, both get their water from the west face of the Sangre de Cristo; there are a lot of similarities in terms of growing conditions in both communities, so the produce will be very similar.

But of course there are differences, that is, every farmer has in a sense a different seed since some have mixed their seed with Española Improved, others with Anaheim, or some other seed, farmers are always trying to improve their produce. They want bigger pods, they want those that don’t get wilt, so of course every farmer’s seeds are going to be somewhat different, but overall the chile grown in the Española Valley is all related.

What I’ve noticed in the farmers markets is that a lot of today’s growers don’t know when to harvest the green chile.  For green chile to be ready for roasting, it has to be “macizo, relumbroso, duro,” solid (gorgeous), hard, shinny; when roasted the seeds have to remain white instead of turning black.

Enjoy your chile, whether red or green, as long as it’s not genetically engineered and save your seeds.

                                                                   

GEO Watch: Interview with Devon Peña on Transgenics, New Mexico Chile, and the Solidarity Economy

Moderator's Note: I am presenting a link to an interview I did with Anya Sebastian and Kate Manchester for the "Kitchen Sync" radio program/podcast as part of the work they do for Edible Communities.

Click below for Episode 54:

Episode 54 Kitchen Sync - Devon Peña

Friday, 08 October 2010 16:52 Edible Radio 

 

 
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Edible Radio host and publisher of Edible Santa Fe, Kate Manchester, talks to Anya Sebastian, a journalist who has recently written a piece on GMO chile and its impact on the crop and community in the fall edition of Edible Santa Fe, and Dr. Devon G. Peña.

Kate Manchester: Today on Kitchen Sync we’re going to be having a conversation about GEO’s, genetically engineered organisms and what’s happening in agriculture – a big conversation to be sure and difficult to cover all the facets that need looking at when having a conversation of this magnitude...

Watching AGRA: Interview with Phil Bereano

Moderator's Note: I have known Phil Bereano since he invited me to UW in 1991 to work on a curriculum transformation project related to race/ethnic, class, and gender differences for the University's engineering programs. I had the joy of working with Phil for more than a decade after he recruited me to join the Board of Directors of the Council for Responsible Genetics (CRG) in 1991. Phil is one of the world's most effective and significant activists working on science and technology policy in the global agrofood system. It is a joy and privilege to bring his brilliant analysis and decades of direct experience to the ejfood community.

We are re-posting this from the September 28, 2010 "AGRA Watch" posts on the home page of the Community Coalition for Global Justice and thank our colleagues for permission to present this interview with Dr. Phil Bereano.

 

Interview with AGRA Watch member, Phil Bereano

by Matt Styslinger

Philip Bereano is Professor Emeritus in the field of Technology and Public Policy at the University of Washington in Seattle. He has been an active and outspoken proponent of democratic social ethics in technology for decades. He is on the roster of experts for the Cartagena Biosafety Protocol, a participant in the UN’s Codex Alimentarius processes, and co-founder of the Council for Responsible Genetics, the Washington Biotechnology Action Council, and the 49th Parallel Biotechnology Consortium.  Phil is also a co-founder of Community Alliance for Global Justice, and active member of CAGJ’s campaign focused on the Gates Foundation, AGRA Watch.


Why does a technology like genetic engineering (GE) need an active and outspoken proponent of ethics like yourself?

I deal with social ethics: issues of equity, justice, fairness, and democracy. Frankly, GE fails when measured against most of these values. GE, like all high-techs, is inherently anti-democratic. Computers, for example, can be democratic in their usage because anybody can buy into it in a consumer society. But they’re not democratic in terms of development, which is under the control of a very small number of people. Similarly, GE is under the control of small numbers of highly educated people and incredibly wealthy organizations.

While most people believe that GE is too complicated for them to understand, the ethical and social issues that come up in a democratic society have little to do with the technical stuff; the basis of these issues can be easily understood. However, the technological elite hasn’t felt any obligation to present materials in a way that invites public participation, and regulatory agencies have often been opposed to transparency or are captives of the industries they are supposedly overseeing—this is certainly true of the FDA, USDA/APHIS, and, perhaps to a lesser extent, EPA.

What ethical issues are associated with GE in agriculture?

GE has been presented in a way that attempts to gain public acceptance for it, but none of the GE technologies have, in any sustained fashion, increased food production or decreased world hunger. However, they’ve certainly increased funding for the biotechnology scientists and the profits for the Monsantos of the world.

“Golden Rice”—with enhanced levels of vitamin A—while touted by GE proponents as an example of GE benefits, has not reduced blindness at all in the Third World and, in fact, is highly unlikely to do so because of the huge quantities of Golden Rice a kid would have to eat. And he or she still may not be getting a balanced diet with the other nutrients needed to make use of the vitamin A.

There’s a major ethical issue in the very simplistic reductionist model this technology is based on. The central dogma of GE is this image of the genome as a Lego set, where you can take out the green one and put in a red one. In reality, however, the genome is highly fluid and the parts interact. The Lego model is quite wrong, yet it’s used constantly in public discourse, regulatory submissions, and legislative testimony. Biologists know how the genome actually works, but advancement in the profession rules out of play such subjects of discourse because they would challenge the positions taken by industry funders. Scientists who wish to break that boundary, either by scientific experimentation or by public writings, have largely been isolated and marginalized by the wealthy and the powerful within the academic-industrial complex—for example the experiences of Dr. Arpad Pusztai, Dr. Ignacio Chapela, and Dr. Terje Traavik [Editor’s Note: These are leading international scientists who were criticized by biotechnology companies and other scientists for raising health and environmental concerns about genetically modified crops.] I think these examples indicate a profound set of ethical issues surrounding the professional functioning of geneticists and academic and industry biologists.

You have argued that this technology poses risks to the world’s smallholder farmers. Why?

It was quite unprecedented when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the patentability of microbial gene products. The Patent Office ran away with the decision and allowed the patentability of plants and mammals as well. The creation of intellectual property monopolies in agricultural germplasm by large transnational corporations certainly presents a set of ethical issues, and works to the disadvantage of smallholder farms and sustainable agriculture. “Sustainability” doesn’t just mean profitability forever. Sustainability has qualitative dimensions, like justice and distributional considerations—otherwise, a totalitarian society could be called sustainable! So we are having this tremendous transfer of knowledge, power, and control from smallholder farmers to multinational corporations.

Back to the example of Golden Rice. Vandana Shiva found that in one village in India, there were 350 plants growing nearby that had been routinely eaten and that provided vitamin A or its precursors. Under industrial agricultural models, however, these were defined as “weeds,” and farmers were encouraged to plow them under and plant cotton instead. Locals no longer have access to the foods that used to provide them with vitamin A, and blindness increased. Instead of understanding that agro-ecological approaches could minimize blindness by preserving access to indigenous diets, Golden Rice has been offered as a “high-tech miracle” way to overcome this situation; the high-tech mindset tries to solve problems brought on largely by technologies through the application of more technologies of higher complexity.

Suddenly, we have a system of consolidation where one dominant multinational corporation, Monsanto, is seeking to obtain majority control of the world’s agricultural plant germplasm, rather than sustaining the resilient, decentralized system for germplasm protection and utilization in rural and indigenous communities that has fed us well for millennia.

In your opinion, what sorts of agricultural innovations should major donors be funding to eradicate hunger and improve food security in both developing and developed countries?

Donors should be funding agro-ecological approaches. The Gates Foundation’s grants are usually quite large: over $100,000 [Grand Challenges in Global Health Program award size]. This is too much for small village cooperatives in Africa that could utilize $5,000 really well. I know people who teach at agricultural schools in Tanzania or work with ag cooperatives in Kenya, and they can’t get adequate funding. Big donors are undermining huge numbers of local initiatives to increase food security and protect biodiversity when they exclude small-scale projects in favor of industrial ones that actually have consequences counter to such goals.

How does the promotion of GMO crops affect global food security and public health in developing countries?

The World Bank and UN agencies did a major study called the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD). The report concluded that high-tech approaches aren’t likely to answer the food needs of the future. Other, lower-cost, approaches—in particular what’s becoming known as “agro-ecological” approaches—are far more promising. The reason is simple: Third World farmers can’t afford an industrial-ag approach to farming—family farms in the U.S. often can’t! This is why the first Green Revolution didn’t reduce world hunger. There is more than enough food being produced in the world today to adequately feed every man, woman, and child and have leftovers. People go hungry because they can’t afford food, not because we can’t produce enough. And this will be true for decades in the future.

Our AGRA Watch group put out a press release recently criticizing the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for its investments in Monsanto. The high-tech approach is not the right way to move toward food security and sustainability, but it is the approach the Gates Foundation is favoring. The Foundation has indicated that it thinks there are too many small farmers in Africa, and knows that its policies will lead to many farmers having to leave their land—euphemistically referred to as “land mobility.”


But people have been leaving the land in Africa and around the world for a long time. What’s different today?

Well, this is what happened during the first Green Revolution. The larger farmers can afford the mechanization, and the smaller ones get wiped out. Cities are growing exponentially in developing countries, and becoming ungovernable hotbeds of unemployment and crime. Nairobi doesn’t need more people coming in from the countryside looking for jobs. This poses a threat to public health, while the monoculture of the farms is a threat to food security.

You are closely involved with the international negotiations to govern genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Can you tell us the current status of those talks?

We have the Cartagena Biosafety Protocol, now with 160 member countries—which doesn’t include the U.S., Canada, or Australia, the major producers of GMOs, because they don’t like the fact that we were able to get language about international regulation of this technology into the Protocol. Member countries are having their fifth Meeting of the Parties (MOP5) in Nagoya, Japan, in October. Biosafety legislation has been passed in various countries, which is helping developing countries build capacity to deal with the oversight and regulation of this technology. But, if it is weak, it may be providing an entrance for GE [genetically engineered] crops.

As one example, I’ve been working over the past six years as an NGO delegate to Protocol meetings, trying to craft an international regime of legal liability for damages caused by GMOs. Hundreds of incidents of damage have already occurred and been documented. There should be a finished liability regime presented for consideration at the Protocol meeting this Fall.

I’ve also been involved in a UN Agency called the Codex Alimentarius, a collaboration of the UN’s World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization, which deals with international food laws and regulations. There’s been a 15-year struggle to get international guidelines for GE food labeling, which has been rigorously opposed by the U.S. and some of its allies. I’ll be in attendance at a working group meeting in Brussels in November that will try to resolve some of the issues in the current document, and there will be an annual meeting of the Codex Labeling Committee in May in Quebec City. There’s a decent chance that the negotiations will be resolved by the meeting in May, and some final international guidelines on labeling GE foods will be able to be adopted.

Since the U.S. is the largest producer of GMOs, do you think these decisions will affect domestic trends?

I don’t know how long the U.S. can stay isolated from these world trends. It’s encouraging that in two or three legal cases recently, U.S. courts have required the government and the industry to do actual environmental impact assessments of GE crops, and other court decisions have imposed monetary damages for GE contamination of fields of conventional crops. But there’s no independent regulatory oversight in the U.S. whatsoever; the agencies merely accept the industry’s conclusions that there are no problems with the GE crop variety.

The Codex Alimentarius unanimously—including the U.S. and Canada delegations—adopted a set of principles for doing risk assessments for GE foods. The problem is that they’re just guidelines, and no country has to adopt them, so we don’t know whether they are having an impact. Codex no longer asks governments to inform it of adoptions, since countries never did so when the organization had such a rule. Certainly the U.S. has not adopted assessment procedures such as those urged by the Codex.

How does the UN’s Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety address the potential risks associated with GMOs?

This treaty provides for countries to impose a requirement of “advanced informed agreement (AIA)” before receiving imports of GMOs, and it outlines general principles and methodology for doing a risk assessment on them for the country to decide whether or not to agree. Every sovereign country has the right to control what crosses its borders. But we need the Protocol because countries that have joined the World Trade Organization have given up the right to control imports in certain circumstances. The Protocol says despite that, it’s okay for governments to have some regulation without it being deemed a “barrier to trade.”

The WTO is not an organ of the UN. How WTO rules and regulations, the UN’s Codex, and the Cartagena Protocol mesh with each other is not clear. The only linkage between them is that in 1995, the WTO decided that the rules of a few specifically named international agencies would be reference points for trade disputes, and one of them was the Codex. So in theory, the Codex guidelines on risk assessments for GE foods or on their labeling would protect countries against being “sued” in the dispute mechanisms of the WTO. The problem is that the Codex only covers foods, and a lot of GMOs are not foods, like cotton. So that’s why we need the Cartagena Protocol, legally speaking. Also, weaker countries need something that they can refer to when they’re under pressure from Monsanto, U.S. trade representatives, U.S. ambassadors, and others to accept GMOs. Wealthy developed countries such as Switzerland and Norway have these rules in place, and perhaps don’t really need the Protocol as much. But most countries in the world are not as powerful, and they do need the strength of numbers provided by the Protocol.

How effective has the Protocol been?

The Cartagena Protocol is an unprecedented treaty on a new technology. It’s one of the first international environmental treaties and is an outcome of the signing of the Convention on Biological Diversity at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. What you have is a treaty that falls within the environmental ministry in most countries. The problem is that sometimes the other ministries in a government don’t see eye-to-eye—the trade ministry might be pushing to adopt GMOs, or the Agricultural Minister might have learned all about GE while studying at a land grant university in the U.S. and has accepted what she or he was told there, that GE is a great idea. So it’s very hard to predict what’s going to come out. It’s dependent on a lot of political factors that may have nothing to do with the substance of the matter. Civil society around the world is mobilizing around these issues—the only way toward a democratic and equitable future.

Matt Styslinger is a research intern with the Nourishing the Planet project.

GRAPHIC EVIDENCE - II: Monsanto's Transgenics Pipeline is a Treadmill

One of the most widely circulated of all the criticisms of the Green Revolution is backed by decades of research. This research demonstrates that "improved" hybrids require a high input regime that places the farmer on the "fertilizer and pesticide treadmill." 

Once the "modernizing" farmer gets on the agro-industrial chemical treadmill, the entire agroecosystem begins to behave like a drug addict. Eventually, the effectiveness of this chemical addiction unravels and the entire land organism falls apart in frenzied bouts of entropy. 

Have you ever seen a field that was abandoned to blowing winds, rocks,  sand, and weeds after four decades of monoculture chemical farming? It looks like a desert: Worst, since deserts have bountiful life in their nooks and crannies. The wasted fields of the Green Revolution that I have seen are barren stretches of lifeless Earth marked by salt leach piles and exposed plow pans.

Now, here is graphic evidence of the same contradiction in the transgenic crops of the "Gene Revolution."  If you visit Monsanto's "Products" page, you can browse through the products in the current R&D pipeline.

The transgenic corn products listed below are not on the market yet. What strikes me as especially revealing about the list is the "Phase" and "Generation" designations that follow each of the named releases: Wow! Phase IV for Generation III! I wonder if the bioserfs that grow this stuff can hardly wait for Phases IX through X for Generation V, ad nauseum?

Here is Monsanto's take on its:

Corn R&D Biotechnology Pipeline

•  Dicamba- & Glufosinate-tolerant corn (Phase II)

• FOPS Tolerance (Phase I)

• Genuity™ SmartStax™ Refuge-in-a-Bag (Phase IV)

• Roundup Hybridization System (RHS) for Corn (Phase III)

• Corn Borer III (Phase II)

• 1st Generation Drought-Tolerant Corn (Phase IV)

• 2nd Generation Drought-Tolerant Corn (Phase II)

• Higher Yield Corn (Phase II)

• Rootworm III (Phase II)

• Nitrogen Utilization Corn (Phase I)

• Next-Generation Herbicide-Tolerant Corn (Phase I) 

The transgenic treadmill is served as "product innovation" to bioserfs on a yearly basis through endless Monsanto iterations, the reiterative "Phases" and "Generations" of their transgenic product lines. These pacts are surely accompanied by the appropriate precision farming contracts to guide the bioserfs on the treadmill.

Oh woe, the Frankencrops that just cannot get past the old quelites, flourishing in transgenic corn and cotton fields. What an iron cage they forge as farmers become captives inside the prison of transgenics and the legal flourish of biopower.