The challenge of globalization in rural farm communities. by: Khalil Tian Shahyd
For the past decade movements for liberation and alternatives to globalization have been supported by communities and social movements throughout the world. In this process, rural, land based and Indigenous movements have begun to take center stage as sources of inspiration and creative solutions to the problems of trade liberalization. Led by such widely recognized movements as the EZLN of Chiapas, Mexico, and the MST of southern Brazil, rural and Indigenous communities are dismantling generations of left-wing dogma which believed that change must come through the efforts of an industrialized working class positioned at or near the seats of political power in urban areas. More importantly, these new movements are challenging the development theories of modernization, both capitalist and Marxist which privilege the centralization of political authority and control of resources towards an industrialized economy void of ecological considerations. Mainstream economics are driven by the need to infinitely increase the resource and commodity consumption levels of urban society. Rural and traditional communities have more often been seen as barriers to development, or places lacking development due to their isolation from, or outright rejection of mainstream cultures of consumption. The increasing sophistication of information technology, media, and travel are quickly erasing these barriers. Today rural and Indigenous communities face the increasing threat of physical and cultural destruction. Their lands are being occupied by corporate industry for resource extraction and mechanized agricultural factories. Ancient and folk cultures the world over are dying along with the Elders, as youth are being influenced by the corporate marketing industry of an urban materialistic American pop culture driven largely by hip-hop. While many international development forums have criticized the growing gap in global GDP's and per capita income levels between the so-called 1st and 3rd worlds, few have acknowledged the obscenity of the fact that 65% of the world's depletable resources are consumed by the urban centers of North America and Western Europe, with the U.S. accounting for the consumption of 50% of the world's refined oil, with only 6% of it's population. The average American consumer consumes about as much natural resources as 16 Chinese citizens. Globally, 'developed' country consumers, who make up only 16% of the world's population, spent 81% of the money used for private consumption . In the wake of the destruction of localized land bases and economies, people are being driven by economic necessity into already over crowed urban regions. The U.N. estimates that the world's urban population will reach 4.9billion by 2030, an increase of 72%. Causing greater stresses on waste disposal methods and already over consumed resources to satisfy market created lifestyles. Suburban sprawl, a result of both increased population and the decline of urban population densities, is encroaching on valuable farm land, transforming the rural landscape, and the cultures it created. Every hour in the U.S., 50 acres of farmland are lost to sprawl and 'development', 80% of it for housing alone. Adding only 4 new homes to a suburban area, increases water demand by 227,760 gallons a year, with 16,000 lbs of additional solid waste. It is in this light that rural and traditional communities are coming to the forefront of the movements for alternatives to globalization. However, rural America, perhaps the first zone of forced experimentation with neo-liberal economic policies has been left out of the discussion. Development policy in the U.S. is dominated by market and industrial fundamentalist, partly because progressive activist and radical social thinkers are concentrated in America's urban centers, but also, because the progressive movement in America has neglected development focused activity in favor of issue oriented, protest activism, also centralized in the largest urban markets. Behind all of this, is an unspoken arrogance in urban areas towards, the 'backward-country' folk of rural areas. Urban radicals, "Isolated" beneath the shadows of urban skyscrapers, are pre-occupied by urban warfare against militarized policing, gentrification and other specifically urban ills. So much of our time is taken up in the glamour of organizing larger and larger urban protest to globalization, we are neglecting opportunities to build larger, stronger constituencies by developing our own alternatives. What we are missing beyond the skylines, are infinite possibilities for creating a new direction for social and economic development through rural communities. Further, Black progressives and radicals lack the ideological motivation, tools and experience to analyze issues of sustainable development, biological diversity, ecological sustainability, and cultural diversity among many others. Black radical thought is largely confined to an analysis of injustice and oppression based on race and ethnicity. Only very recently, and with much friction has gender and class analysis begun to take hold in the Black Liberation Movement ideology, beyond the Black Panther Party, and other smaller Black-Marxist organizations. This lack of ideological development in over 40 years has largely been facilitated by a deep patriarchy and ethnocentrism within the Black Liberation struggle, that views it's only real cause to be the liberation of the ethnic group, led by men, by whatever means, with little regard paid to simultaneous movements or the larger issues of development; cultural, ecological nor economic. The ideology of the reparations movement has further supported this trend by removing African-american radicals from the wider conversation on globalization, sustainable development and the like, entrenching the Black movement into a revolving discussion of our history of oppression and suffering. Reparations ideology coupled with a mis-understood notion of Afro-centrism, has kept Black radicals seeking to revive or "repair" the past, forsaking any program for the future. African-american radicals by and large have no relationship to the global movement, best articulated in the World Social Forum and the slogan, "Another World is Possible". The greatest example of this can be seen in the lack of any organized response on the part of Black radical organizations to the plight of Africans in the face of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. These realizations lead me in August of last year to take a job with the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund.(FSC) I came to Alabama in order to learn more about the problems and possibilities of rural development as an alternative to capitalist globalization. It occurred to me that any alternative to capitalism would have to be based in agricultural communities, not in industrial wage laborers as Marxist dogmatist would have us believe. The creation of a new society any society must be based in the agriculture that feeds it. It is through access to land and resources that we will break the back of monopoly capital; and that access will not occur from urban bases, but through rural land and resource redistribution. Post Independence African governments have learned this the hard way. Most neglected meaningful land reform and community based agricultural development in favor of an industrialized model , and have suffered. Whether they were market or state economies they did this. The FSC is an agricultural and rural development organization that was founded in 1967. Its main center of operations, where I worked is in Epes, Alabama, a rural town of 200 people in west Alabama. Working with Black farmers through the organization I learned to appreciate the extent of rural people's traditional and local knowledge about farming and the history of the Black land struggle in America, beyond the famous 40 acres and a mule story. For instance, since 1917, when African-americans claimed over 17million acres of farm land, more than 98% of it has been lost to date, and during the same period the number of African-american farmers has dropped from, 925,710 in 1920 to less than 18,000 today. Again a loss of over 98%. Much of this through white land grabs, and bank repossessions, but unfortunately a lot of it was land abandoned by the children of farmers, who vacated for urban opportunities. Still, white farmers have also been hit by domestic economic policies geared towards industrial factory farming and export markets, their numbers have declined by 70% over the same period. That being said it is easy to see that neo-liberal globalization policies that are driving rural people and Indigenous communities off their lands in throughout the Global South, got their start here in rural America. This problem has been accelerated in the last decade by the liberalization of American agriculture, leading to a decline in crop prices for American farmers. It is this decline in prices which made the subsidy system of American agriculture so important. In the 90's the Clinton administration's 1996 farm bill completed the trends which lead to the decline in agricultural prices due to the dismantling of "price support systems" which kept prices high, and "acreage set aside" programs which kept farmers from over production of primary crops. Once these policies were removed, and coupled with the increase in the use of high yield GMO crops, agricultural production increased which also lead to price declines. Together these policies destroyed family farming and gave incentives to agribusiness corporations to continue to increase production well over demand. This over production backed by guaranteed farm subsidies has resulted in the flooding of global agriculture markets with American farm products at well below, even Global South price levels. Subsidies are now so high where the average Swedish cow, receives over $1200 a year in farm subsidies, and US and EU dairy cows earn an average of $2.00 per day while half the population of Africa, where upwards of 70% earn their livelihoods through agriculture, lives on less than a dollar. Likewise in the US, roughly 70% of African-american farmers are forced to work second and third jobs off the farm in order to sustain themselves. Left out of subsidy programs in which 80% of the monies granted are given to the wealthiest 20% of producers, Black farmers are struggling to find markets for their produce. Much of it can be seen spoiling in the fields. Each year farmers are lost as their crops go un-sold, and they are unable to make the ballooning mortgage payments on their land. Still many farms are lost as the farmers get older, and the younger generation leaves the farm in search of wage salaries in urban centers. The average age of Black farmers today is 60 years old. In a decade or so, there could well be less than 5,000 left. One of the projects I was assigned to work on with the FSC was as the "Community Land Specialist" with the "Center for Minority Land and Community Security", which is based out of Tuskegee University. As the Community Land Specialist my responsibilities were various, however, my main function was to organize two annual people of color "Land Summits". One for Adults which took place in late March of 2003 and another for youth which was scheduled for July of this year but was postponed due to funding issues. The aim of the land summits was to bring rural and Indigenous activist and land-holders together to discuss issues of land based development, land retention acquisition, activism and justice. To learn from each other's histories, experiences and ideas, in order to promote greater coordination and support. Having participated in the first youth land summit, and the following adult summit, I noticed coming into the job that the discussions on land, although supposed to be representing the views of each community, were usually dealt with from the perspective of western property rights. The conferences' only discussion of land was as a resource input for production. In organizing this conference I wanted to be sure to have the perspective of Indigenous and Indio-Chicano/Hispano people represented. LaNada Boyer, of the Shoshone-Bannock nation out of Ft. Hall Idaho, spoke as well as others representing the Native American community, and I was fortunate to have Ruben Gonzales present, who I became familiar with through his writings on Bioregionalism and land ethnics in the book edited by Devon Pena called "Chicano Culture, Ecology, Politics: Subversive Kin". A must read for anyone concerned with the history of land based Chicano communities of the southwest. Dr. Gonzales' presentation was for me the highlight, because he was able to say what for years I'd been trying to put into words, but couldn't. African-americans are the most assimilated of any of the non-white minority groups in the country. Due largely to the dependent nature of Black leadership historically, our community has been lead into a non-critical acceptance of the economic and land tenure priorities of the white capitalist population. For years civil rights leadership under the NAACP and others, trained us to accept the philosophical values of this system in order to prove ourselves worthy. This sped our forced assimilation, of values effecting economics and land tenure. One feature of this now is our lack of a group or community land ethic. Land ethics is basically an ideal of extending social ethics to include the surrounding biodiversity of a given community. It creates boundaries of ethical and unethical behavior in the relationship between humanity and the natural world. Land Ethics, reminds us that we are not extraneous much less dominant over nature, but part of a natural community of life. Since then much of my personal research has been on finding clues towards the creation of an African-american land ethic toward a universal land ethic. African-americans having not had the benefit of being isolated from the aggression of the larger white society, has been forced to assimilate and adapt more completely to the norms of white society. This includes the adoption of euro-american values as it concerns land and the environment. A value of apathy towards land unless there is a potential for wealth extraction from it. Still, within rural traditions and African-american folk-lore, we can find the ideas and underpinnings of a land ethic. I remember an Elder in New Orleans told me a story once about the large Oak trees in the parks around the city whose branches have dropped to the ground. She said the trees, feeling the pain of our persecution, and the guilt of having their limbs used as hanging branches, begun lowering them to the ground in an act of defiance against the systematic lynching of African people throughout the south. It is within these local traditions I feel a land ethic can be created. So far, the Afro-centric movement has not understood the concept of "place based identity" within the larger Black community. They've attempted to impose on us an identity based on a place(Africa) across the ocean, neglecting the identities, we've established through interaction with this land. In search of "authentic" African identities and culture, they misunderstood what makes a culture 'African' and how cultures are tied to particular land bases and environments. In the market economy, our cultures are dependent less on traditions, and absent on connections to land and nature, but on what and how we can purchase commodities, and the labor we use to purchase them. The result of this neglect has been that rural African-american culture is being wiped aside by the homogenizing effects of popular culture, driven by urban hip-hop. Black cultural identity is increasingly defined by the mass media, not by our connections to our traditions and local bioregions. African-american radicals must begin to utilize an analysis of bioregional development, in order to fully understand the forces rallied against us. As Devon Pena states: "bio-regionalist emphasize the connections b/t ecological and cultural diversity to explain the emergence of a sense of place." That bioregionalism must be… " a movement for strengthening and re-establishing the diversity of human cultures and their interconnections with their bioregion… the boundaries of human cultures, before industrialization, were often the same as bioregional boundaries." At the same time however, he is sure to critique mainstream conservationist and deep ecologist for failing to see the connection between rural and Indigenous cultures struggling to survive in the present against the industrialist marketing machine and it's effect of homogenizing culture and the biodiversity they claim to fight for. They instead focus on "re-establishing" lost cultural and biological diversity, as opposed to protecting the diversity that still exist. This has created a lot of romanticizing of ecological value of ancient peoples. Afro-centric radicals are also guilty of this romanticization of African culture, neglecting the cultures we have here. Delta Blues, New Orleans Brass Band, Central Louisiana Zydeco cultures are all in danger of extinction. My personal goal, through studying agricultural economics and later, development economics is to build on the bioregional model in applying it appropiately to our communities throughout the south east. The intrusion of capitalist economics into traditional and land based communities has destroyed local productive capacity and diversity. The export driven economy has lead to a loss not only in bio and cultural diversity, but also in a homogenizing of what is produced and by whom. As farmers are driven off their land, the average acreage in agricultural production is increasing with corporate farming taking over, centralizing production in the hands of a few large corporations. In fact, 11 Fortune 500 companies received over $1billion last year in subsidies, an average of over, $136million each. Local producers, skilled carpenters and artisans are forced into factories where their skills are replaced by the standardizing monotony of the machine. Crop diversity is lost to mono-crop agri-factories producing for export markets. Bioregional development, bioregional inter-communalism, can serve as an alternative to the centralizing forces of capitalism which centralizes resources, land and productive capacities into the hands of the largest and wealthiest producers, it would also be an ideological alternative to traditional Marxism which would centralize these just the same only within the hands of the state. Both propagandize that they will serve the interest of local communities better than we could ourselves. Both are inherently wrong. One way to foster this type of localized development in an agricultural setting is through the use of Community Supported Agriculture. A CSA creates a direct relationship between farmers and local communities for whom they produce, by having a farmer or group of farmers coordinate their production to the crop needs of a specific community. The community then has direct access to the produce they consume, and the farmers they support. Another suggestion called, "site here to consume here" basically means that in manufacturing sites within a community must produce first for the needs of that community. The North American radical and progressive movement must take up the task of becoming more "development" focused. This will allow us to gain the experience we need in managing our own communities', economies, social affairs and natural resources. At the same time win us long standing support through direct relationships with the development needs and desires of our people. Our priorities must be shifted from simple activism and protest to gaining the needed skills, technical knowledge and experience that will be necessary to be actual leaders first in particular fields, and second in the minds of our people. I'm not advocating a migration of people from urban to rural areas, but there must be greater focus on the nexus between urban and rural possibilities. A rural land redistribution movement must be a priority connected with Indigneous land soverignty issues, and the land grant struggle still being waged throughout the traditional Chicano and Pueblo communities in the southwest. We can't sit and wait for the arrival of "revolution" to begin advocating and implementing the changes we know need to happen. A new mantra must be spoken… "Social change is not after the revolution, social change IS the revolution". -Ella Baker- Khalil Tian Shahyd is a graduate student of Agricultural Economics at Tuskegee University. And can be contacted at: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Bibliography: 1. Chicano Culture, Ecology, Politics: Subversive Kin; by: Devon Pena 2. "Rethinking US Agricultural Policy: Changing Course to Secure Farmer Livelihoods Worldwide"; by: Agricultural Policy Analysis Center, The University of Tennessee 3. "Returning African-american Farmers to the Land: Recent Trends and a Policy Rationale"; by: Spencer Woods 4. "Black Farmers in America: 1865-2000"; by: USDA 5. "How Much do We Consume"; by: Gregory Mock; World Resources Institute 6.) Alternatives to Economic Globalization; by: International Forum on Globalization 7.) "Farm Subsidy Database"; by: Environmental Working Group; www.ewg.org 8.) Blacks in Rural America; edited by: James B. Stewart 9.) Just Sustainabilities: Development in an Unequal World; edited by: Julian Agyeman 10.) "How Much Do We Consume? by: Gregory Mock World Resources Institute 11.) Post-Colonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India; by: Akhil Gupta __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? New Yahoo! Photos - easier uploading and sharing. http://photos.yahoo.com/ [IMPORTANT NOTE: The views and opinions expressed on this list are solely those of the authors and/or publications, and do not necessarily represent or reflect the official political positions of the Black Radical Congress (BRC). Official BRC statements, position papers, press releases, action alerts, and announcements are distributed exclusively via the BRC-PRESS list. As a subscriber to this list, you have been added to the BRC-PRESS list automatically.] [Articles on BRC-NEWS may be forwarded and posted on other mailing lists, as long as the wording/attribution is not altered in any way. In particular, if there is a reference to a web site where an article was originally located, do *not* remove that. 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