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Postcard From...Copenhagen
Last weekend, women farmers from Africa and Latin America gave President Obama a message that he can't afford to ignore. In a letter delivered to the president and U.S. negotiators in Copenhagen, the women argued that the poorest, most disenfranchised people in the world hold the key to resolving the biggest global challenge of our time.
For those of us accustomed to thinking of climate change as a purely scientific or economic matter, it may seem strange to consider that someone like Amal Mahmoud has a crucial role to play in stabilizing the climate. Amal never went to school. Like many young women in rural Sudan, she married at the age of 15 and now ekes out a living on a small plot of land that she does not own. Thanks to her grueling hours of farm work, Amal's family is poor, but not starving.
So what does Amal's humble life have to do with fixing the climate? For one thing, her farming practices avoid the deforestation, the fossil-fuel-based pesticides and fertilizers, the monoculture plantations, and the worldwide food transport and storage system that account for a whopping half of all carbon emissions. We've known for a while that industrial agriculture is a major culprit in climate change. Now, evidence is mounting that sustainable agriculture—the type practiced by Amal and millions of other smallholder farmers—actually cools the planet by attracting carbon from the atmosphere back into the soil.
The vast majority of the world's smallholder farmers — 80 percent — are women. The specialized knowledge these sustainable farmers have developed over generations — about preserving biodiversity, collecting water, breeding and exchanging seeds, and enhancing soil — are the very practices we must now adapt and replicate in order to confront climate change.
These aren't the high-tech solutions put forward by the U.S. delegation in Copenhagen, to the delight of Big Farming. And they're not the esoteric carbon trading schemes that the United States and other wealthy governments prefer over actually reducing emissions.
In fact, the women farmers argue that these commercial fixes are just more of the same profit-above-all mentality that brought us the climate crisis in the first place. Instead, they're calling on Obama, who leads the country with the world's highest per-capita emissions, to support sustainable agriculture and smallholder women farmers as our best hope to stabilize the climate and feed a growing world population.
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6 Comments so far
Show AllMost smallholder farmers (need a definition) are female? Wow, I didn't know that. But regardless, we must all, growers or not, defend small farmers because Monsanto et al will continue to pollute and oppress both at home and abroad. We can make a difference by merely trying to buy more locally-grown foods, by growing something ourselves, and by eating less beef.
from the article:
"The vast majority of the world's smallholder farmers — 80 percent — are women. The specialized knowledge these sustainable farmers have developed over generations — about preserving biodiversity, collecting water, breeding and exchanging seeds, and enhancing soil — are the very practices we must now adapt and replicate in order to confront climate change."
there it is...everything we need in a single sentence...nothing about income, or a mortgage...
biodiversity, water, seeds and soil...free...
if it weren't for that guy with the machine gun...
The trouble with the power equation here is that 0bama's sponsors do not put the climate crisis or pollution in general at priority. They will continue to concern themselves with maintaining the system by which they intend to buy their ways out of the catastrophes they create.
They assume that the poor will suffer most for the sins of the rich, and they are almost certainly correct in this observation, if no others.
Since the power of the rich derives from the work of the poor, sustainable independent economies can disable their wealth. The trouble, of course, is that the wealthy pay armies to force the poor to remain within economic orbit.
We appear to enter a period in which a central truth shall become clearer: wellbeing depends on cooperation and disobedience.
bardamu says:
"The trouble, of course, is that the wealthy pay armies to force the poor to remain within economic orbit."
yes...the wealthy, via these armies, control the planetary resources necessary for life, and sell it back...
they force you to buy your own life, and to do so at the planet's peril...your peril...their peril, too...insanity...
"our best hope to stabilize the climate and feed a growing world population"
...is to lower the population in the first place.
I question whether 80% of smallholder farmers are female. I think it's been more like the reverse historically. This sounds like a politicized statement to me. There's a lot of politically correct gender stuff in development circles now . . . though it's dangerous to address this.
And even if 80% were women and not men, no need to make be about gender.
Women and men working together hold the key. It's small farms we all want and need. Corporate economy is the problem.