It has been a very sad August when we allow the media to affect us. Thousands of people dying unnecessarily, in war and conflict, in protests and on the streets, from Missouri to Gaza, from Kurdistan to Damascus, from Donetsk to Santiago, armies, states, police, brutally slaughter their perceived enemies. In Syria the latest count of deaths since the uprising begun has reached 170,000 people and with the ISIS the numbers are climbing. In Gaza 2,100 is the last count in a few weeks. In Ukraine it is questionable what the numbers are but lately different sides refer to 2,000. In Africa the numbers are never so important to the western media to report, until the Ebola epidemic came and the media took an interest as far as this epidemic may cause a threat elsewhere. Yet there is one constant statistic that not many are reporting in the mass media. Over 60,000 people a day, nearly half being children, are dying from the simple cause of the lack of nutrients and clean water. Meanwhile if one is to divide the annual world production of corn (alone) by the population one will find the corn produced alone can prevent death from hunger. An enormous amount of food is produced worldwide, maybe "too much" according to economists who are waged by corporations that benefit from the rise of the price of commodities.
Showing posts with label farming. Show all posts
Showing posts with label farming. Show all posts
Apr 13, 2014
Agriculturists or People Without Land
Agriculturists Without Land
The following is a critique of the content of the above article and aims to open a discussion on the issue of social movements being incorporated within the system when they can not be defeated by physical (violent repression) means. Comments related to the subject are welcome and will be published as soon as possible.
MST is a 30 year old movement in Brazil. It has both class and social characteristics. It is a movement for people without land by the people without land. Brazil is the country with the largest percentage of the population having no access to land. Very counter-intuitive if you consider the vast area of jungle and unexplored forests created by the Amazon. This means that a very small group of people have converted all land to private status. This was done with a mechanism called IMF when the country first started going bankrupt 40 years ago.
This article nevertheless calls the MST movement agriculturists without land, which apart from being poorly written reveals a specific political value. What we can conclude from it is that land is perceived as means of production which utilizes specialized workers to produce for others. Something that as far as we can find about MST it is not. What is odd about the article and drew our attention is the term agriculturists, meaning agricultural workers, which if searched through the net it has not been used before in reference to MST.
Mar 2, 2014
Basmati planting and the art of growing rice
Basmati Farming Practices at a Glance
- Farmers procure seeds from the trusted sources – government agencies, agricultural universities and Research centers
- Seed required for 1 acre of the cultivation is 5-8kg approximately
Treatment of Seed
- 1kg salt is diluted in 10 litres of water to prepare solution for treatment of the seed
- After this 8 to 10 kg of seeds poured in this solution, in this way quality seeds are drowned within the solution and seeds which float on the upper surface are thrown as waste
- The left seeds are washed with the water for 3 to 4 times so that the salt is completely washed out
- The seeds, then are kept in the solution of 10 litres of water, 5 grams Emison and 2.5 grams of Agromycin or 1 gram of streptomycin for 24 hours
- After this the seeds are spread in a small area with wet sacks on the seeds to germinate and sacks are continuously watered or regular intervals
Feb 22, 2014
Call-out for actions and manifestations on the 22 February 2014 !
Resistance and Sabotage !
This call-out is motivated by:
=> the call-out of the NoTAV movement at Val di Susa in Italy calling for a national day (22 02 2014) of mobilisation and action, each one in their area, city, environment.
=> the call-out of the ZAD movement at Notre-dame-des-Landes in France calling for a national manifestation in Nantes, France
This is a call-out for actions and manifestations on the 22 February 2014 !
- A day of action and sabotage to abolish all those megalomaniacs, devastating projects with the illusions of a durable development, green capitalism, geo-engeenering !
- A day of action and sabotage to regain our freedom and rights to take decisions about our own lives, our environment, our planet,( in a emancipated manner), instead of those in position of global decision-making, who are using the flag of democracy to impose their society of totalitarian power.
- A day of action and sabotage to bring to a halt the destructions and exploitation of entire species, the waste of tons of raw materials and natural resources everyday, justified by the term ’public interest’, while behind it there’s only money, profit and capital.
- A day of action and in solidarity with all those who fight, and for all those that lost their freedom and especially all those that are oppressed or imprisoned as "terrorists" or as simple delinquents.
- A day of action and convergence with all those struggles heading for a different world, where life and common values are worth more than money, competition and dominance.
No border ! No Nation ! No Pasaran ! No more BULLSHIT !
From the ZAD to Val Susa !
From Hambacher Forst to Square Taksim ?
From Calais to Lampedusa
Hambourg to Exarchia
From Heathrow to Atenco
From Valogne to Wendland
From Niscemi to Mayo
Monte Belo to Khimki
Fukushima to Tshernobyle
From prison to prison
Resistance et Sabotage !
Jan 28, 2014
ZAD, France: This is not a camp
Jan 27 2014
 |
| it’s a pirate look-out |
Following various
announcements for a possible start of construction of the Notre Dame des
Landes airport, a series of articles were released in the press that
pretty much regurgitated copy-pasted clichés. One of these articles
caught our attention notably. In almost all the articles that would
preach the possible eviction and the final catastrophe of ZAD we read
“200 people, alter-globalists, continue to camp in ZAD.” The figure
might seem rough. The term “alter-globalists” is not a term that the
people who chose to fight against the airport and the world of
“development” would embrace. But we don’t give a damn about that! For
now we will hang on to the bad joke that describes what’s happening here
as “camping”.
A good thing to grow on sunny dry warmer climates
Of
all the grain crops, amaranth has to be the easiest to turn into
something that you can eat. If you have ever wondered how to add a
cereal crop to your garden, consider amaranth. This versatile,
beautiful, and easy to grow plant can add another dimension to
gardening. Unlike wheat or oats, where you need to cut the stalks,
thresh the grain and then grind it into flour, amaranth literally falls
from the seed heads ready to eat.
I started this experiment last year with a small test crop just to get an idea of what to expect. Andrew Still of the Seed Ambassadors
spoke highly of amaranth and gave me a few seeds of Copperhead, an
ornamental yet grain producing variety. There are two or three species
of grain amaranth, Amaranthus caudatus, and Amaranthus cruentus
(Copperhead is this species) being the most important, each of which
encompasses many varieties. Most of the amaranth varieties have purple
or red hues in the plant stalks and leaves as well as brilliantly
colored flowers. Copperhead is an exception with rust and copper tones
in the stems and flowers. The common commercial variety called
Plainsman is a hybrid of two other species, Amaranthus hypochondriacus, from Mexico and Amaranthus hybridus,
from Pakistan.
Jan 4, 2014
Why Free? And why this manifesto may be of interest
We will refrain from an endless analysis and discussion of why this book, among zillions, may be of interest to us, but we have highlighted some key phrases that drew our attention. It may be easy to bash the book or to praise it and we may do both in the future, but it may have to be done together with all of you who may have read it. What's the value of us providing with a reason not to read it but remain confident that its criticism is as good as reading it yourselves?
Both myself and my courageous publishers, Permanent
Publications, have decided to publish a free online version of this
book, and the normal paperback version under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-
First, the ideas and practical tools contained within it should be
free to whoever may find them useful, and not made falsely scarce by the
mechanisms of the monetary economy.
Second, just as actions display our beliefs more honestly than our
words, the ways in which ideas and practical tools are shared are at
least as important as the words themselves. I wanted the medium to be
fully aligned with the message.
Third, I wanted to release it under a Creative Commons licence
because it felt fraudulent to have my name on the front of this book. As
I said in the acknowledgements page of my last book, what are my words
but “an accumulation of all that has come
Dec 9, 2013
The Monster is Right on Top of Us
Argentine Protesters vs Monsanto:
-
The people of this working-class suburb of Córdoba in Argentina’s
central farming belt stoically put up with the spraying of the
weed-killer glyphosate on the fields surrounding their neighbourhood.
But the last straw was when U.S. biotech giant Monsanto showed up to
build a seed plant.
The creator of glyphosate, whose
trademark is Roundup, and one of the world’s leading producers of
genetically modified seeds, Monsanto is building one of its biggest
plants to process transgenic corn seed in Malvinas Argentinas, this poor
community of 15,000 people 17 km east of the capital of the province of
Córdoba.
Oct 27, 2013
Principles of Water Management for People and the Environment
Michael Acreman, Freshwater Management Adviser to the
IUCN, Institute of Hydrology, United Kingdom
Water, the Environment, and Population
Water is the lifeblood of our planet. It is fundamental to
the biochemistry of all living organisms. The planet's ecosystems are
linked and maintained by water, and it drives plant growth, provides a
permanent habitat for many species (such as 8,500 species of fish), and
is a breeding ground or temporary home for others, including most of the
worlds 4,200 species of amphibians and reptiles described so far. Water
is also a universal solvent and provides the major pathway for the flow
of sediment, nutrients and pollutants. Through erosion, transportation
and deposition by rivers, glaciers, and icesheets, water shapes the
landscape and through evaporation it drives the energy exchange between
land and the atmosphere, thus controlling the Earth's climate.
Apart from a few minor chemical processes, water is neither created nor
destroyed, it only moves from place to place and changes in quality. The
total amount of water on Earth is 1.4 billion cubic kilometers
(km3), but only around 41,000 km3 circulates
through the hydrological cycle, the remaining being stored for long
periods in the oceans, ice caps and aquifers. Furthermore, the renewal
rate provided by rainfall varies around the world. In the Atacama desert
in southern Peru it almost never rains, whilst 6,000 millimeters (mm) of
rain per year is not uncommon in parts of New Zealand. In any one place
rainfall also varies from year to year.
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