25 Jul 2005 @ 17:22, by Raymond Powers
This is an important and formative article. I've put an excerpt here yet I encourage you to read it in its' entirety at Rebuilding of Iraq's Agriculture?
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Why would corporate agribusiness be salivating??? Some history here. It is thought that agriculture started 13,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent - in the area now called Iraq - where the Tigress and the Euphrates rivers
intersect. The Iraqi ancestral farmers and this fertile land brought us major crops such as wheat, barley, dates and pulses (see Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies"). The area is hugely important in world history. Given they are considered the initiators, for thousands of years the contributions of the Iraqi farmers to the world's agriculture production system have been unquestionably profound.
It is also likely that women were the initiators of agriculture. Women were the gatherers in hunting and gathering pre-agricultural societies. As women were the ones gathering nuts and roots for their communities, they would have been the observers of seeds and their growth patterns. This is likely why the majority of the African farmers today are women and throughout our human history the world's farmers have largely been women.
Now comes the corporate connection. Food is something everyone needs. There is no question about this and no need for a survey - the market is a given. Huge profits are in the offing. Controlling all aspects of food ? its production, packaging, distribution and commodity markets - is the dream world of corporate agribusiness.
The major impediment to corporate agribusiness controlling all aspects of food and then reaping all of the profits, however, is competition from the independent family farmer in the US and throughout the world.
Throughout our history, the family farmer's controlling interest has been protected by two of the most important components of agriculture ? the two "s'" ? soil and seeds.
Soil is not monolithic. It is amazingly and thankfully diverse. It's components and minerals differ everywhere and farmers historically have always adjusted to this through crop rotations that will add or remove certain nutrients to the soil, and/or farmers will let the soil rest and lay fallow for a specified time. Traditional farmers will also use natural nutrients like compost and manure to replenish the soil. In this way the soil remains "alive" with organic nutrients, earthworms and the like. Seeds and plants are also selected for the type of soil and farmers themselves have performed, and still perform, this selection since the beginning of agriculture.
Seeds are also not monolithic, of course, even within the same plant family. They are amazingly diverse and the diversity of seeds is our
lifeblood. Like humans, plants are vulnerable to disease. The more diverse our plants, the safer we humans are. The more diverse our plants, the less vulnerable they will be to an all-encompassing disease that could and has wiped out some crops within days or less. Without diversity there is virtually no resistance to disease. The great Irish potato famine in 1845, for example, resulted from a uniform potato production that had no resistance to the potato blight.
How have farmers maintained this diversity and therefore protected our food supply? As mentioned, they have always adjusted seeds to the type of soil in their area by selecting and saving the seeds of successful plants. This is a very "local" process. By doing so, for thousands of years, farmers have thankfully maintained the diversity of our food chain. As Martin Teitel and Kimberly Wilson note in their excellent book "Genetically
Engineered Food: Changing the Nature of Nature" (1999):
"Appreciation of the importance of biodiversity dates back a hundred centuries to the beginning of the agriculture process.Farmers remained powerless, however, when it came to the interaction between crops and their environments. No one could predict whether a season would be wet or dry. Consequently, farmers quickly learned the importance of diversity: maintenance of various crops that thrived under a variety of conditions to avoid entire crop failures and starvation."
Also, farmers have always historically saved seeds for next year's crop. Most farmers in the world don't go to the store and supply warehouse to buy seeds. The seeds are their on their farm and their grandparents, great-grandparents and great-great grandparents likely grew versions of the same seed stock.
The mission of farmers historically and around the world has always been to grow food for family and community sustenance, and not competition against each other - a mission that is much to the ire of western capitalists. Invariably, farmers will also share their seeds with their neighboring farmers. This collective and cooperative spirit of the farming community is legendary.
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