The Peasant Farmers were Right All Along

2018 ◽  
pp. 84-97
Author(s):  
Judith Blau
Keyword(s):  
2021 ◽  
pp. 251484862110224
Author(s):  
Leila Rezvani

Using Donna Haraway’s notion of “response-ability”, or the cultivation of the capacity for response, this paper seeks to understand seed saving and plant breeding as politically and ethically charged modes of interspecies communication. In Brittany, France, a region known for its industrial-scale fresh vegetable production, peasant farmers and organic plant breeders question the modernist plant breeding and agro-industrial paradigm, cross-pollinating ideas to produce new understandings of genotype-environment interaction, biodiversity and heredity. Plant liveliness is understood as politically transformative, constitutive of an agriculture that supports peasant farmer and crop plant creativity and self-determination. In contrast to F1 hybrids, open-pollinated semences paysannes (peasant seed) retain the ability to respond to environmental changes, adapt and evolve over (human and plant) generations. Farmers must in turn engage specific modes of attention, interpreting plant expressions and shaping future generations through rouging and crossing, selecting and saving, watching and learning from their crops. Mutual response is the foundation of interdependence, in which nonconspecific partners adjust to one another’s ways of being and doing in order to labor together. In remaining response-able, farmers reckon with the liveliness and agential capacities of plants, qualities that work against their subsumption into factory-like methods of cultivation. These communicative practices hint at the radical potential for interspecies resistance to monoculture within plant breeding and cultivation, practices that are so often molded by the interests of agro-industrial capital.


2021 ◽  
Vol 07 (02) ◽  
pp. 36-42
Author(s):  
Ləman Faiq qızı Verdiyeva ◽  

In the current situation, if the characteristic feature of livestock development is, on the one hand, related to the diversification of agriculture, on the other hand it is also associated with the production of various forms of ownership in the country, large farms and small private farms. At present, interrelated financial, technological, social and natural factors remain in our country as factors limiting the development of small-scale livestock farms. However, it should be noted that despite the lack of opportunities and material and technical support, small farms, peasant farmers and households currently produce more than 80% of meat and milk in our country.


Author(s):  
A. Regassa

Information on the traditional tick control methods used in Keffa, Illubabor and Wellega Provinces in western Ethiopia was obtained from 86 veterinary clinics and 865 peasant farmers through a questionnaire survey. Latexes of Euphorbia obovalifolia and Ficus brachypoda, juice of crushed leaves of Phytolaca dodecandra and Vernonia amygdalina, fruit juice of Solanum incanum, crushed seeds of Lepidium sativum mixed with fresh cattle faeces, juice of crushed leaves and bark of Calpurnea aurea and commercially available spice of Capsicum spp. mixed with butter, were used by peasant farmers to control ticks. Preliminary in vitro efficacy tests of these plant preparations were performed on engorged female Boophilus decoloratus. Preparations of Capsicum spp., E. obovalifolia, S. incanum and F. brachypoda were found to have 30-100 % killing effects. Subsequently, in vivo treatment trials of these preparations were conducted using indigenous Bos indicus cattle naturally infested with ticks. Results indicate that treatments at the rate of once per day for 5 consecutive days with the latexes of E. obovalifolia and F. brachypoda can reduce tick burdens by up to 70 % on cattle.


1992 ◽  
Vol 12 (7) ◽  
pp. 801-813 ◽  
Author(s):  
Betty O. George ◽  
Olufunmike Alalade-Ajayi

2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-77 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jerry K. Jacka

This article examines the social and environmental costs of living in the mineral age, wherein contemporary global livelihoods depend almost completely on the extraction of mineral resources. Owing to the logic of extractivism—the rapid and widespread removal of resources for exchange in global capitalist markets—both developed and developing countries are inextricably entangled in pursuing resource extraction as a means of sustaining current lifestyles as well as a key mechanism for promoting socioeconomic development. The past 15 years has seen a massive expansion of mineral resource extraction as many developing countries liberalized their mining sectors, allowing foreign capital and mining companies onto the lands of peasant farmers and indigenous people. This mining expansion has also facilitated the rise of artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM). Transformations in livelihoods and corporate practices as well as the environmental impacts and social conflicts wrought by mining are the central foci of this article.


2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 401-406
Author(s):  
A. Saleh ◽  
M.L. Suleiman

Weed control is one of the major problems in crop and vegetable production in Nigeria. Most of the peasant farmers use manual weeders in their cultivation, a process that is costly, labour intensive and time consuming. The process does not also give the farmer adequate returns to enable him breakeven. It is, therefore, necessary to design a weeding equipment which minimize the human effort and provide efficient work output for the peasant farmer. This study focus on designing, construction and evaluation of a hand-pushed weed control machine that would eliminate the challenges being faced by the farmer in weeding. Materials selected to suit the construction of the weeder are durable and locally available, easily replaced if damaged and at affordable cost. They include mild steel (3mm, 5mm), 30 mm circular (hollow) pipes, 10 mm diameter steel rod, and 40 cm pneumatic tyre. The developed weeding machine was evaluated in the experimental farm of IAR with impressive results. It works well in sandy loam soil of about 25.65% moisture content and requires less labour force compared to the manual hoe. It has about 84.7% weeding efficiency, 0.0129ha/hr effectivefield capacity, 0.019ha/hr theoretical field capacity and 68% field efficiency. The average cost of the weeding is N21, 000:00. Keywords: Manual weeding, hand-pushed weeder, weeding efficiency, field efficiency


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 364
Author(s):  
Lyudmila Pronko ◽  
Irina Furman ◽  
Anatolii Kucher ◽  
Yaroslav Gontaruk

In our paper we researched the state regulation in agriculture of Ukraine, as well as world experience in this field. The distribution of state financing for support of agricultural production is analyzed. We singled out the direction of state support to the agrarian sector of Ukraine. The directions of organizational reforming of households in the market conditions are investigated. The variants of integration of households of the population into more consolidated economic forms are offered. The priority of the development of cooperatives in agriculture has been argued. The positive experience of state support of servicing cooperation is considered on the example of «The Benefits of the Development of Personal Peasant, Farmers, Cooperative Movement in the Village and Advice Service for 2016-2020» of the Vinnytsia Region. The prospects of creation of cooperatives for the provision of oilseeds processing services for the energy needs of agribusinesses and provision of livestock feed with forages are argued. The prospects for realization of the program of development of agricultural servicing cooperatives within the boundaries of Ukraine are outlined.  Keywords: agrarian policy, agribusiness development program, agricultural servicing cooperative agriculture, cooperation, food safety, energy security, enterprise-agro producer, integration of farms, state support of agrarian sector


Author(s):  
Susan Brewer-Osorio

Coca is deeply interwoven into the political, economic, and social history of Bolivia from the Inca Empire to the 21st-century rise of President Evo Morales Ayma. As such, generations of Bolivians, from powerful hacendados to peasant farmers, have resisted efforts to destroy the coca leaf. Coca is a mild herbal stimulant cultivated and consumed by indigenous Andeans for centuries, and the primary material for making the potent drug cocaine. During the 16th and 17th centuries, Spanish colonizers promoted coca production on large haciendas to supply mining towns, giving rise to a powerful class of coca hacendados that formed part of Bolivia’s ruling oligarchy after independence. In the early 20th century, the coca hacendados shielded coca from international drug control. Following the 1952 Revolution, agrarian unions replaced hacendados as guardians of the coca leaf. The unions formed a powerful social movement led by Evo Morales Ayma, an indigenous leader and coca farmer, against US-led efforts to forcibly eradicate coca. During the 1990s, Morales and his allies created a political party called the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS). In late 2005, Morales was elected president of Bolivia and his new government deployed state power to protect the coca leaf.


2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 543-566
Author(s):  
Dario Gaggio

In the aftermath of World War II, Italy’s centrist leaders saw in the emerging US empire an opportunity to implement emigration schemes that had been in circulation for decades. Hundreds of thousands of Italian peasant farmers could perhaps be able to settle on Latin American and African land thanks to the contribution of US capital. This article examines the Italian elites’ obsession with rural colonization abroad as the product of their desire to valorize the legacy of Italy's settler colonialism in Libya and thereby reinvent Italy's place in the world in the aftermath of military defeat and decolonization. Despite the deep ambivalence of US officials, Italy received Marshall Plan funds to carry out experimental settlements in several Latin American countries. These visions of rural settlement also built on the nascent discourses about the ‘development’ of non-western areas. Despite the limited size and success of the Italian rural ‘colonies’ in Latin America, these projects afford a window into the politics of decolonization, the character of US hegemony at the height of the Cold War, and the evolving attitude of Latin American governments towards immigration and rural development. They also reveal the contradictory relationships between Italy's leaders and the country's rural masses, viewed as redundant and yet precious elements to be deployed in a global geopolitical game.


Author(s):  
Tracy Chisanga ◽  
Jameson Mbale

The radio was the most and only reliable media capable of disseminating remedial information for methods of curing and preventing the outbreak of animal and crop diseases. However, this mode of media faced the challenges of majority of peasant farmers not owning radios, and as a result, they did not access such services. In addition, the distance among the peasant farmers hindered people sharing such resources. Nevertheless, the mushrooming owning of mobile phones by the majority of peasant farmers made information sharing possible. It was in view of that that the integration of ICTs on radio programs, in this work abbreviated as II-RP, was envisaged to disseminate remedial information to peasant farmers in remote areas of Zambia. The II-RP, a mobile built system, allowed farmers and agriculture officers to share the awareness information and sensitization of methods of farming.


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